Page:American Historical Review, Volume 12.djvu/616

 6o6 Reviews of Books ing cursive writing with a reed pen in sepia ink ; so that S. Reinach infers the possibility of whole Minoan libraries — manuscripts written on palm-leaves, papyrus, parchment, and like perishable materials. Mr. Lang holds that, in an age when people could write and write freely, they did write down the epics; and that the epic texts existed in the Aegean script till Greece adapted to her own tongue the " Phcenician letters " as she did not later than the ninth or eighth century. In the body of the book Mr. Lang deals first with " Loose Feudalism and the Over-Lord ", finding a clear consistency in the character and position of Agamemnon throughout ; next with the archaeology of the poems (Cremation, Armour, Bronze and Iron, the Homeric House), in all of which he holds that Homer " gives us an harmonious picture of a single and peculiar age." Yet he has to own that " the whole argu- ment has no archaeological support. We may find Mycenaean corselets and greaves but they are not in cremation burials. No Homeric cairn with Homeric contents has ever been discovered; and, if we did find Homeric cairns, it appears from the poems that they would very seldom contain the arms of the dead." Of the desultory chapters that follow perhaps the most notable is " The ' Doloneia ' ", in which a very fair case is made out for the much-maligned Tenth Iliad. Altogether, from frontispiece (Algonquin Braves under Mycenaean Shields) to finis, the book is one for which every Homeric student may well be grateful. J. Irving Manatt. Books of Medieval and Modern European History Geschichte der Kriegskunst im Rahmen der poHtischen Geschichte. Von Hans Delbruck. Dritter Teil: Das Mittelalter. (Ber- lin : Verlag von Georg Stilke. 1907. Pp. vi, 700.) The bulky volume in which Professor Delbruck carries his subject through the Middle Ages is printed in large, clear type, and is indexed and furnished with numerous sketch-maps. The author's " framework " of political history is so generous as to make the book of interest to the general reader as well as to the critical scholar. He begins at once with Charles the Great and makes many interesting comparisons between the empire of 800 A. D. and of the Roman era, e. g., the number of warriors, the method of service and of summons, equipment, maintenance, etc. The warrior under Charles must furnish an equip- ment equivalent in value to forty-five cows (a cow is reckoned at a solidus) or fifteen mares — the stock valuation of an entire village. The chapter on the conquest of the Saxons furnishes an interesting com- parison with the Roman disaster in the Teutoberg Forest during the reign of Augustus. The author holds that the Roman frontier was, as it were, projected at one point, by Varus, into the wild German terri- tory, leaving the Roman forces isolated. The opposite was true under Charles the Great, and his task was correspondingly less difficult. Thirty pages of the first book are given to Carolingian " Wehrpflichts- Capitularien ".