Page:Englishhistorica36londuoft.djvu/150

 1 42 January Short Notices The readers of Ferrero's Grandezza e Decadenza di Roma will know what to expect when they open the volumes of A Short History of Rome : vol. i, The Monarchy and the Republic ; vol. ii, The Empire (New York : Putnams, 1918, 1919), which appear with his name and that of Signor Conrado Barbagallo ; or rather, they will know that it is the unexpected which is likely to meet their eye. And in this they will not be mistaken, since outside the period covered by the earlier work Ferrero is far from lavish of the brilliant paradoxes which always arrested (and sometimes repelled) his readers. He is on the whole conservative in this treatment of the earlier period. Polybius' date for the first treaty between Eome and Carthage is accepted ; the agrarian law of Licinius and Sextius is maintained to be genuine : above all, the timocratic constitution of Servius Tullius and the scale of assessments are assigned to the traditional date. Only now and again do we rub our eyes, as when we read (p. 66) that in the fifth century B.C. ' the courts of the Etruscan houses expanded into Greek peristyles whose walls glowed with the many-hued marble incrustation which in the future was to face the interior of the buildings of the Hellenistic East '. Otherwise the narrative presents few points for comment beyond occasional omissions ; for instance, there seems to be no reference to the end of Hannibal. When we come to the period which Ferrero has already treated on a larger scale, we naturally find his well- known views reproduced : yet here again condensation has sometimes been carried rather too far, e. g. the Lex agraria in part preserved to us is not mentioned in the telescopic version of the legislation by which the reforms of the Gracchi were rendered nugatory ; while it might be inferred from a statement on p. 270 that the proposer of the Lex Acilia de Repetundis acted quite independently of Gaius Gracchus (the correct view is stated in the larger work). After the ■ Augustan republic ' has been treated on Ferrero's well-known lines, the story of the empire is somewhat baldly recounted ; and it can hardly be said that justice is done to the research of the last quarter of a century. Pfitzner's Kaiser- legionen, a discredited work, and Otto Hirschfeld's Untersuchungen of 1876 (completely superseded by his Kaiserliche Verwaltungsbeamlen of 1905) are amongst the authorities cited. The offices of the a libellis, ab epistulis, and a rationibus are not, as we might expect, mentioned in the account of Claudius, but must wait for Hadrian. The invention of the titles vir egregius and vir perfectissimus is ascribed to Septimius Severus ; this is certainly wrong in the first case and doubtful in the second. The same emperor, we are told, was ' the first. . . who set up a system of