Page:English Historical Review Volume 37.djvu/298

 290 REVIEWS OF BOOKS April on p. 134 Bucbon's transcription with its obvious errors : IIIOY for AFIOY in the second line and AYTA for AYTEI (corn;) in the eighth. The inscrip- tion is not altogether easy reading, and it would have been better to give a fresh reading of it in ordinary minuscules, rather than a version which perpetuates Buchon's errors without clearing up the difficulties. With regard to Buchon's AYTA the facsimile is clearly correct, as 11. 7 and 8 are in the metre into which the iambic trimeter developed in Byzantine hands, dodecasyllabic lines which must have an accent on the penultimate syllable, and therefore at the end of such a verse the avnt] of the facsimile scans, whilst Buchon's AYTA (avrd) does not. Codespotce was the title, the author tells as on p. 302, familiarly given to the Chian officials known as rettori. But when he explains it as ' joint-lords ' he must surely be wrong. The derivation is to be sought in Ducange's entry : oiKoSeorroTT/s, pater- familias, rather than in co SCOTTOT^S. In the passage on pp. 368, 369 on the Stradioti, which has already appeared in The Latins in the Levant, p. 482, we are told that ' a whole literature of their poems has been published, mostly written in a peculiar dialect resembling that now spoken in Calabria, where many Greek songs are still sung by the descendants of the numerous Epeirote families settled there after the Turkish conquest '. This can hardly be taken to mean anything else but that the published poems of the Stradioti are written in the Greek dialect now spoken in a few villages in Calabria, and that the Greek songs still sung there were brought with the people from their homes in Greece. We do not know any other published poems of the Stradioti except those in the volumes of Sathas' Mv^/ma (vii-ix) referred to by the author, and these are in Italian interspersed with a few, and only a few, Greek words and phrases. The modern Calabrian folk-songs, though written in genuine Greek, are, so far as they have been published by Morosi, shaped upon Italian models and entirely different in form and content from the folk-songs of any part of Greece, and must therefore have been composed after the people came to Calabria. The runic inscription carved on the marble lion now outside the Arsenal at Venice, whither it was brought in 1688 from the Piraeus by Morosini, is mentioned three times, and at least on pp. 64, 396, the writer adopts the old view that the inscription contains the name of Harald Hardrada. This error began with Rafn in 1856, and from him passed into Hopf'& Geschichte Griechenlands, and has thus gained currency. But Sophus Bugge in 1875 wrote that this reading is purely fanciful ; that the most that can be said is that the inscription is a variety of runic, and written by a Varangian of the eleventh century. Bugge's view is adopted and Rafn's rejected by Vilhelm Thomsen x and by Gregorovius, 2 and the point has been fully worked out by Lampros in a note to his Greek translation of Gregorovius. 3 It is a matter for congratulation that it has been found possible to reissue these chapters, and that so much interesting and important work has not been left half-buried in the old files of various periodicals and reviews. The book is a worthy successor to The Latins in the Levant. R. M. DAWKINS. 1 The Relations between ancient Russia and Scandinavia, 1877, p. 109. 2 Geschichte der Stadt Athen im Mittelalter (3rd ed., i. 170). * Ibid. p. 23V.