Page:American Historical Review, Volume 12.djvu/425

 Minor Notices 415 (Chicago, The University of Chicago Press: London. T. Fisher Unwin, 1906. pp. vii. 482. ) The preface begins as follows : " This book is intended to replace my Greek World under Roman Sicay, now out of print, in a maturer and better form, and with m'uch new material superadded." Chapter iii., "Hellenism in Upper Egypt", pp. 40-58, is entirely new, and is based on the remarkable finds of papyri at Oxyrhynchus and in the Fayyum during the last fifteen years, in the publication of which Professor Mahaffy took such an honorable part, and with which the names of Messrs. Grenfell and Hunt are so gratefully associated by scholars. Other new pages are 142-143. based on Theodore Reinach's monograph, Mithradates Eupator; 288-294. based on or due to the Oxyrhynchus papyri and Bevan's House of Seleucus; and 401- 402, based on or called forth by Dill's Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius. Otherwise the book is much the same as in its earlier form (1890). A few sentences have been inserted at p. 70, attempting, unsuccessfully, to defend the assignment of the Pseudo-Callisthenic Life of Alexander to a period immediately following the death of Alexander. A brief note has been added here, or suppressed there ; a sentence added to the text here, or removed from it there; a phrase or single word changed here and there. Pompeii, for instance, is now " gay and charm- ing " (p. 248), instead of "gay and lively", where the earlier epithet seems, on the whole, better. Heberdey's name has been added (p. 266) to the list of explorers of Asia Minor, etc., etc. But the general character of the book remains the same in 1906 as it was in 1890. We were grateful for it then, and we are grateful for it now, in spite of its journalistic tone, its parade of independence, its bold raps at great fames and the consensus of scholarly opinion, and its persistence, increased if anything, in drawing the deadly modern parallel. " Parallels in our own day and the British Empire start up unbidden, however angrily the pedant may threaten us. however loftily he may warn us against illustrating a remote age of civilisation by the clear analogies of modern life." Still, one does tire of having ancient Egypt illustrated by modern Ireland, and one refuses to believe that " the curiosity of Roman tourists, who' were both wealthy and ignorant, and who crowded into Greece and Asia Minor, gave the same peculiar scope to enterprising cicerones that the influx of Americans to Europe has given in our day ". We were not asked to believe this in the earlier edition. However, one can pardon much after enjoying such a chapter as " The Hellenism of Cicero and His Friends ", or such pictures of Greece under the early emperors as are drawn for us with the aid of Dio Chrysostomus. And, after all, it is the only book of its kind. Nowhere else can one get a connected survey of what the Greeks were doing and thinking and saying under the dominance of that empire whose social life has been depicted in such a scholarly and yet fascinating manner by Professor Dill. And when we contrast the paucity of evidence at