ments of the Republican Age (Livy 4.44; 8.15), with which there seems to have been some sympathy even in the days of Seneca (Controversiae 1.2; 6.8)5. Asa matter of fact, Brinnaria's murderous disposition (237) is less in accord with her love of babies (157), her tenderness towards the poor, and her scandalous rescue of a cur from the cruelty of gamins than with our author's general thesis that the Romans were "a ferocious and sanguinary stock" (232) and "had been professional killers for a thousand years" (67 ff.). Some of us will concede the 'sweet inconsistency of women' more readily than we shall Mr. White this severe arraignment of her compatriots of the second century. On the other hand, this novel contains none of that exaggeration of the luxury and lubricity of Roman life to which sensational writers and painters have resorted in making their low appeals. Brinnaria's pudicity is matched by her lover's continence (139-140) until, at any rate, the harem of twelve wives was incumbent upon him at Nemi (228). Every lover of numismatics will be glad that Mr. White pictures Faustina more nearly true to the face on her coins than to the portrait that the poet Swinburne gives us and too many of her prose biographers also. There is excellent evidence adducible for this pleasanter characterization. We judge that our author does not subscribe to the conventional theory of a triple division of the Vestal's trentennial service into ten years of learning, ten of practice, and ten of teaching, although it has notable ancient attestation (93). He has on his side common sense and mathematics. On the other hand, he overemphasizes, perhaps, the spiritual fatherhood (BouchéLeclercq, Les Pontifes, 294) of the Pontifex (49, 74). As the bridal coiffure and various ceremonies show (308), the Vestal was really religiously his wife and not his daughter. Again, it is hard to see why the Pontifex should not have made up his normal list of twenty for the drawing of lots instead of finding just one girl of noble rank (31) in town (41) upon whom to force the Vestalships. Furthermore, while possibly an Emperor as Pontifex Maximus might have to appoint a temporary promagister to perform the duties of that priestly office during any long absence from Rome, I know of no evidence to justify Mr. White's conception of a permanent Pontifex Vestae (see especially page 74). Under Aurelian this term occurs, but merely to differentiate the long established pontifices from the new priests who cared for the worship This latter reference is sufficiently pertinent to Brinnaria to deserve quotation: Virgo vestalis scripsit hunc versum: nuptae! moriar nisi nubere dulce est". Rea est incesti. "Felices Compare what she could herself do to a pet monkey (77), to her horses and to her litter-bearers (211). There is fascinating reading on this topic in e.g. Fehrle, Die Kultische Keuschheit im Altertum, 216-217: Dragendorff, Rheinisches Museum, 1896, 299-302; and Santinelli, La Condizione Giuridica delle Vestali, Rivista di Filologia, 1904, 63-82, but especially 78. Augustus had already made daughters of freedmen eligible. Rome had at least a million inhabitants. of the Sun, pontifices Solis. In any case, could anybody but the Pontifex Maximus himself punish the Vestals (121)? I am in doubt10. The three stories which the writer attributes to the Atrium Vestae contained, we surmise, nothing like a total of two hundred rooms, even if the external shops should be included, nor would even the five stories that some would assign to the building justify that estimate; for the upper ones were probably only partial. Furthermore, the walls of the imperial palace could not have "towered nearly three hundred feet above it". Vivid and excellent as Mr. White's description of the Atrium is for the most part, it is only by what we may call a novelistic license that Brinnaria can be allowed her crowning achievement. Some of the pignora imperii may possibly have been kept in room H of the plan (302), but she could not have reached them through the Atrium11, from which the only communication is a modern door12. The penus Vestae in which the Palladium was kept was neither that room H, nor, as some archaeologists have suggested13, the 'octagonal shrine' in the Atrium, but precisely where the ancients specifically locate it, in the Temple of Vesta itself, a recess screened from view by tegetes (Festus 250, etc.). From there not an individual Vestal but αἱ τῆς ̔Εστίας ἱέρειαι παρθένοι rescued it during the fire of 191 A. D. The reviewer, having walked over the Via Appia the whole distance from Rome to the site of Bovillae, queries the possibility of going astray on a branch from its straight road-bed (222) in any conceivable Roman fog or being blocked on that highway by the closed gates of the town in the manner described (230). The book contains one startling statement that could occasion much argument. Concerning the pestilence of 166 A. D. the author declares (109; compare 107): no man ever again made a great speech, wrote a great book or play or poem, painted a good picture, carved a good statue, or contrived a good campaign or battle. The brains of the Roman world died that year; the originality of the whole nation was killed at once, the tradition broke off. a The names in the story aroused my curiosity as to where Mr. White found them. Over forty, I believe, contain doubled consonants, so that their choice seems almost mannerism. Schulze, Zur Geschichte Lateinischer Eigennamen, shakes my faith in some of them, although we must keep Meffia any way, since her mephitic effluvium likens her to a Mephitis Mephitica. Brinniarius is the form that Schulze offers. Most stories of ancient life do not deserve from a professional classicist more than cursory attention, but this has more importance than many a technical work. The author, we happen to know, has had The Unwilling Vestal on his mind for some thirty years and writes out of a fulness of knowledge that may well lead him to dissent from some of the reviewer's conclusions. Our final suggestion may be unacceptable to Mr. White after writing so charmingly and without the slightest taint of pedantry a book intended primarily to entertain: The Unwilling Vestal could profitably be assigned to young Latinists to review for class-room purposes, or to a Classical Club of undergraduates for an evening of discussion, or to an advanced class in Private Life or Roman Religion for serious analysis and verification upon the basis of our ancient authorities. We plan to commit several of these sins ourselves. UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA. Preuner, Hestia-Vesta, 317, Notes 7-8; Wissowa, Religion und Kultus, 522. 10 Compare Marquardt, Staatsrecht 22, 54. "Presumably we should read on page 94: 'the three small rooms at its western end'. 12Dr. Van Deman, The Atrium Vestae 26, especially Note 6. 13 Thédenat, Le Forum Romain et les Forums Impériaux, 149; Lanciani, Ancient Rome in the Light of Recent Discoveries, 148. WALTON BROOKS MCDANIEL. Essais d' Etymologie et de Critique Verbale Latines; Recueil de Travaux Publiés par la Faculté des Lettres de l' Université de Neuchâtel, Septième Fascicule. Par Max Niedermann. Paris and Neuchâtel: Attinger Frères (1918). Pp. 119. At the close of his Preface, dated July 31, 1918, Professor Niedermann thanks his faculty and La Société Académique de Neuchâtel for having made possible the publication of his book "en dépit des difficultés de 1' heure actuelle". Honor to the Swiss University which carried on the cause of scholarship even in dark days! These pages contain a miscellany of etymologies and elucidations of difficult passages in certain epigraphic and Vulgar Latin texts. The whole book is tied together by a single method-a method as sound as it is uncommon. In matters of etymology Niedermann is particularly concerned to gather all possible light from the resources of Latin itself and from a painstaking study of the semantic problems involved. In textual matters he calls in the help of scientific grammar. In short, Niedermann has given us a brief demonstration of the interdependence of the study of Latin texts and the study of the Latin language. Possibly the most interesting of the etymological articles is that on parma (pages 36-45). After examining and rejecting the previously suggested etymologies, not one of which really has anything in its favor except phonetic possibility, and some not even that, our author suggests that palma, in its original sense of 'hand' (Greek παλάμη), formed a diminutive palmula, which was changed by dissimulation to parmula. Many examples are cited from various languages of 'diminutives' in form but not in sense; e.g. armilla, 'bracelet', from armus, 'arm', and manicula, 'handle of the plough', from manus, 'hand'; in a similar fashion parmula came to mean 'shield'. Professor Petersen's monograph on Greek Diminutives in -ιον, particularly 98 ff., might have suggested that parmula was not a true diminutive at all, but contained some earlier meaning of the suffix; at any rate, the meaning of the derivative seems to be parallel with that of armilla and manicula. Parma, then, is a retrograde derivative of parmula, just as pugna cones from pugnare, which is itself a derivative of pugnus, 'fist'. On pages 55 f. there is a discussion of an epigraphical dedication to Priapus, C. I. L. 5. 2803=Carmina Epigraphica 861: Villicus aerari quondam, nunc cultor agelli, haec tibi perspectus templa Priape dico. Perspectus, in the sense of probatus, is to be taken with Priape. There are many Latin examples of the vocative in -us, as Audi tu, populus Albanus (Livy 1.24.7); but for exact parallels to our passage Niedermann goes to φίλος ὦ Μενέλαε (11. 4.189), οὖλος ὄνειρε (sic, Il. 2.8), and the Lithuanian adjectives, which differ from the nouns in having lost the vocative form. Of particular interest to grammarians is a footnote on pages 31 f., concerning Indo-European dh. The new hypothesis has the advantage of making the second consonant of medius from *medhios and of ruber from *rudhros a voiced sound from the earliest times, instead of assuming an interval of voicelessness in the Italic period. Volume XXIX of Harvard Studies in Classical Philology contains three papers: Plato's View of Poetry, 1-75, by William Chase Greene; Collations of the Manuscripts of Aristophanes' Aves, by John Williams White and Earnest Cary, 77-131; Joseph Scaliger's Estimates of Greek and Latin Authors, by George W. Robinson (133-176). A page in the volume is dedicated to a brief record of Professor White's service at Harvard. Mr. Greene's essay is a revision of his doctoral dissertation, Quid de Poetis Plato Censuerit, presented to Harvard University in 1917. The study is carefully documented, by references to Plato and other Greek writers, and to modern scholars who have written about Plato. He sums up on pages 73-75. We must not hope, he says, to find in Plato's writings a definite formula that shall represent Plato's views. Mr. Robinson regards Joseph Scaliger as "the greatest scholar of modern times-if not indeed of all times", and feels that, therefore, a peculiar value attaches to his estimates of the classical writers. A few of these estimates had been collected and arranged in Sir Thomas Blount's Censura Celebriorum Authorum (1690), but most of them had been uncollected, till Mr. Robinson himself read through the huge bulk of Scaliger's writings, and presented the results in the present paper. Mr. Robinson has also included the Scaligerana, memoranda of Scaliger's informal conversations jotted down, for the years 1574-1593, by Franciscus Vertunianus, and for the years 1603-1606 by the brothers Vassan. They contain, says Mr. Robinson, much that is of value, a value that is, at times, increased by their very informality. The arrangement of the Estimates is alphabetical, usually by authors, occasionally by groups of authors (in the latter case the necessary cross-references are inserted.) The actual citations from Scaliger cover pages 137-176. Though the footnotes, which give references to the place in which Scaliger expressed the particular judgment, take up a certain amount of every page, the actual bulk of these citations is very great, and the range of authors of whom Scaliger speaks is enormous. The major part of the authors, Greek and Latin both, lie far outside the reading, I should say, of most classical scholars. Comments on the more familiar authors-e.g. Aristophanes, Plautus, Horace, Terence, take up little space. The Appendix Vergiliana receives much more attention than the unquestioned works of Vergil. Many of the comments are brief, of the sort that one might make even without any careful, first-hand knowledge of the authors, but it is abundantly clear, after all, that Scaliger knew the authors, Greek and Latin, as few men have known them. One cannot help thinking, as he turns over Mr. Robinson's pages, of the wonderful knowledge of orators, Greek and Roman, Cicero displays in his Brutus. In both cases, Scaliger's and Cicero's, the knowledge is of the sort that the Germans once were fond of characterizing by the word 'Autopsie'. C. K. THE PHILADELPHIA SOCIETY FOR THE The Philadelphia Society for the Promotion of Liberal Studies held its Sixth Annual Meeting in Houston Hall, of the University of Pennsylvania, on Saturday, March 22. The following officers were elected: President, Professor George Depue Hadzsits, University of Pennsylvania; Vice-Presidents, Mr. Harvey Watts, of the Public Ledger, and Dr. Laura Carnell, of Temple University; Secretary, Miss Bessie R. Burchett, South Philadelphia High Philadelphia School for Girls; Treasurer, Mr. Fred. J. Doolittle, The Episcopal Academy. Miss Florence A. Fonda, of the West Chester High School, presented a paper on Vitality versus Mortality in High School Latin. Miss Fonda described plays, games, etc., by means of which she stimulates interest in Latin. The figures which she gave show the success of her methods, for almost half of the pupils in the School elect Latin. Dr. Mary C. Burchinal, of the West Philadelphia High School for Girls, gave a paper on How to Make the Teaching of the Classics Vital. Dr. Burchinal presented different phases of the vitality of Latin, and read some of the answers to a questionnaire in which her pupils had been asked to tell why they liked Latin. Professor Lane Cooper, of Cornell University, in a paper abounding in interest and wit as well as in learning, to which this short review can not do justice, pleaded the cause of the Classics. He compared the spirit of ancient, medieval, and modern literature, and urged that young people in their formative years should study Latin and Greek authors for the sake of the standard of good taste to be found there. He very forcefully advocated a revision of the classical course, making it include a minimum of syntax, and a great amount of reading. Ovid and Plato are the authors he thinks most fruitful, both because of their influence upon English literature and thought, and because of the ideas to be obtained from these ancient sources. One suggestion of his is both an encouragement and a warning: that both teachers and pupils should read more widely in ancient literature. He says that it is possible for pupils to acquire the habit of reading Latin and Greek rapidly, just as they acquire that of reading modern languages rapidly; but, in order to train their students to this, teachers themselves must read widely, for it is impossible to impart a habit which one does not possess. The President, Dr. W. W. Comfort, President of Haverford College, in his annual report reviewed a prosperous year for the Society. Of the first meeting of the year, held on November 8, a report appeared in THE CLASSICAL WEEKLY 12.62-63. The addresses delivered there have been published in pamphlet form by the University of Pennsylvania (THE CLASSICAL WEEKLY 12.160). The second meeting was held in Witherspoon Hall. The general subject was Liberal Studies and their Relation to Citizenship and Patriotism. The speakers were Mr. Walter George Smith, Miss Agnes Repplier, and Dr. Henry Van Dyke. The third meeting was concerned with Educational Reconstruction. Dr. Francis B. Brandt, Dean William McClellan, Dr. John P. Garber, President Joseph Swain, Professor William I. Hull, Professor Elihu Grant, and Rev. John A. MacCallum took part in this discussion. The Society feels that the fact that so many eminent men and women have spoken in Philadelphia for the value of the Classics can not fail to influence public opinion. In addition to the public meetings, the Society, through Miss Jessie E. Allen, Chairman of the Lectureship Committee, has arranged for free lectures which were delivered in Schools in Philadelphia and the vicinity (THE CLASSICAL WEEKLY 12.128). BESSIE R. BURCHETT, Secretary. QUERY CONCERNING THE TOGA PRAETEXTA Can anyone supply pertinent facts in answer to the question, How did the Romans make the red stripe in the toga? To this question I have had various answers: "They sewed on a piece of ribbon or cloth. There was no seam"; "They wove it in the fabic of the toga"; "Such a stripe cannot be woven in such a whole piece of cloth"; "They cut the toga and sewed in a colored strip". None of these answers seems to me satisfactory; some of them must be wrong. HAVERFORD SCHOOL. FRANKLIN A. DAKIN Musa Americana A collection of twelve Latin songs set to popular melodies by Rev. ANTHONY F. GEYSER, S. J., Professor of Latin Literature at St. Stanislaus Seminary, Florissant, Mo. The author has spared no labor in putting his Latin songs into a simple but spirited style, well adapted for musical rendition. Contains such well-known melodies as The Star-Spangled Banner; Just Before the Battle, Mother; Battle Hymn of the Republic, and others. 15 cents a copy postpaid; six or more copies, 12 cents each, postpaid. LOYOLA UNIVERSITY PRESS 1076 W. 12th St., Chicago, Ill. Reynolds's Latin Reader Complete edition, xxi +349 pages, $1.20 Part I, Reading Selections, only, ix+140 pages, Eighty cents "The best feature of the book is the reading lessons. These are well calculated to be interesting to boys and girls. They begin with short readings in nature study under such topics as earth, sun, moon, stars, winds, seasons, etc. These are followed by short readings on boyhood life in Roman days, including (in school) colors, measures of time and space, numbers and arithmetic, reading and writing, and (out of school) the house, the home life of a boy, and a visit to the city. Then follows the story of Arminius, a Suebian boy, in which we meet Gauls and Germans." PRELIMINARY NOTICE NATIONAL CLASSICAL CONFERENCE A National Classical Conference will be held in connection with the ANDREW F. WEST Chairman of Temporary Executive Committee Princeton University |