If an apology for renewed textual study of a familiar, fairly well preserved and not extraordinarily difficult book (from the textual point of view) be called for, the writer hopes the following will suffice. It seems evident that we are still a good many years away from a definitive edition of that part of the Septuagint which includes the Book of Wisdom (‘Wisdom of Solomon‘). Yet for no book which has not been published with an exhaustive apparatus do we have a more comprehensive supply of text-critical material than we have for Wisdom;1 and none gives less scope for an expectation that future collations will in any way transform our knowledge or appreciation of the text. It seems, therefore, a suitable time for stock-taking; and the writer has been impelled to submit his results partly because they go somewhat beyond the data currently offered by editors and commentators, and partly as the appropriate foundation for a revised rendering soon to be published.

Plato's Cratylus has been studied so thoroughly and by such competent scholars that a reexamination might appear an enterprise as superfluous as it is daring. It seems to me, however, that previous treatises failed to bring out the precise linguistic value of the ideas expounded in this dialogue and to determine its precise place in the development of the theory of language. This holds even for those scholars who attempted an appraisal of Plato's work from a linguistic standpoint. Steinthal saw the decisive facts, but did not see their theoretical importance, since he like most investigators was exclusively or, at least, chiefly interested in what Plato thought about the epistemological value of language.

Greece, once the mother at whose feet European civilization sat and learnt, has ever quickened to the inspiration of her own past. When at intervals her learning and literature have languished and all but died out, her steadfast awareness of her ancient glory has always stirred in her a new impulse and a new life. How like her, then, on the morrow of her emancipation from the Turk, to look back to the period of her greatness for an answer to the problem confronting her! Reborn Greece needed desperately a common tongue. She had at her disposal only local patois, and possessed neither a national literature nor a national language. It had been preeminently the strong sense of a history, the reawakening of the age-old urge to vie with antiquity, that had kindled her to revolt against her overlord. To revive the idiom of classic Athens, to make it the symbol and bond of a resurgent Hellas appealed irresistibly to the enthusiastic patriotism of the victors. Others with equal ardor espoused the cause of the vernacular. Thus arcse the strife over the katharevousa and the demotike, an ever-recurrent conflict of never reconciled elements in the nation's psychology, the tug of the past over against the insistence of the present.

Diocletian imposed on the whole Roman Empire two new taxes, the iugatio, to be exacted from the cultivated land, and the capitatio, to be exacted from the agricultural population. The reform was effected in Egypt, and presumably in the whole Roman Empire, in the year 297 A.D., as shown by an Edict of Aristides Optatus, prefect of Egypt.

It is commonly known that in the canonical sources of ancient and early medieval times many bishops, priests and deacons throughout the Latin Church were called cardinales, long before that term came to be used exclusively, or even primarily, for a specific group of dignitaries in the Church of Rome. Historians do not agree, however, as to the original meaning of the word in the language of the ancient Church. Nor do they, as a rule, explain with sufficient clearness in what sense it was first applied to those members of the Roman clergy—the priests of the ancient tituli or quasi-parishes; the deacons both of the papal palace and the city's diaconiae; and seven bishops of the metropolitan province—who eventually rose to the unique position of becoming the ‘senators’ and sole electors of the Pope.

The custom of medieval commentators on classical authors of prefixing to their works a schema generally called an accessus has long been known. In such a prefatory note they treated of items such as the following: vita auctoris, titulus operis, intentio scribentis, materia operis, utilitas, and cui parti philosophiae supponatur In different works the number of these items might be curtailed or expanded, but the common purpose of providing an introductory summary to the work in question, is present in all forms of the accessus.

An essoniatus de malo lecti is dispensed from appearing in court for a certain time, to wit, for a year. How is this time to be computed, if in its course there occurs the additional day of a leap-year? If e.g. the year, given to an essoinee, began on January 20th of a leap year, does the year end on the next 20th of January (so that the essoinee has a time of 366 days) or on the next 19th of January (so that the essoinee has a time of 365 days, as in a normal year)? Bracton discussed this question, on which there was a lively dispute among English lawyers of his time, in a long chapter of his treatise (fol. 359–360). Everybody who attempted to read this text unprepared, would soon push it aside in despair of finding any sense in this abstruse discussion. In fact Bracton's text has been spoilt by numerous ruthless interpolations which have rendered it entirely unintelligible. Such a text is of eminent value for everybody who is interested in the problem of the Bractonian text, for the process of deterioration is here more evident than elsewhere. Nevertheless nobody has hitherto tried to disentangle the ravelled skein and to reconstruct what Bracton actually wrote. The latest editor of the treatise, Professor Woodbine, has, according to his principle, abstained from emending what he believed to be the best text of our manuscripts. The inevitable result of this conservatism is, that the chapter is in his edition entirely unreadable just as in the older editions. At first sight it may seem hopeless to find a way through the jungle, but a minute and patient examination shows that the genuine Bractonian text may still be traced. We are fortunate enough to possess an unusually rich store of material for our inquiry, and by methodically using it we may confidently hope to reach our goal.

In discussing the idea of musical World Harmony we have had occasion to mention the tetrachord and the fourth (interval) in their symbolic or allegoric impact. The number 4 is a constitutive element in Pythagorean cosmology since the speculations on the “well-tempered” state—of the soul, of the body, or of the universe itself—rest on the harmonious combination of four elements.

The problem of the baptism of the Apostles occupied the minds of many early ecclesiastical writers, and seems to have been particularly discussed in the period in which Clement of Alexandria lived. Tertullian presents the difficulty clearly: Since no one can attain salvation without baptism, according to the Lord's prescription: ‘Unless one is born of water, he has not life,’ how is it that the Apostles were saved, for we find none of them baptized in the Lord, except Paul? Therefore, either we must admit the danger of the others who lack the water of Christ, that the prescription may be safeguarded; or we must rescind the prescription, if they who were not baptized also attained salvation.

It is not without reason that Harnack calls St. Gregory the Great ‘Doctor angelorum et diaboli.’ The misery of Gregory's times, occasioned by the incessant attacks of the Lombards, made him convinced that the end of the world was at hand. Thus it is that his thought has a definitely eschatological stamp. The terrors of death and the fierce onslaughts of the devil were popular themes with St. Gregory the Great.

In the second century, A.D. (c. 177), the Christian philosopher and apologist, Athenagoras, inveighing against the pagans for immoralities forbidden by their own codes, incorporated in his harangue an expression which was to have a long and interesting history in Christian literature.1 These are his words:

The metaphor of St. Augustine as a hammer against the heretics occurs twice in the writings of John Capgrave, the learned English Augustinian friar of the fifteenth century. In his Life of St. Augustine which, in substance, is a free translation of Jordan of Saxony's Vita S. Augustini into English, Capgrave devotes chapter 40 in its entirety to the relentless war St. Augustine waged against the Donatists, Manichaeans, and Pelagians, and it is in this connection that he calls the Saint ‘an hard hambyr', euyr knokkyng up-on hem.’ Again, in his Chronicle of England, speaking of the Priscillianists and Pelagians, he says that ‘these heresies were beten and knokked be the myty hambir of God, whech was called Augustine.’

The versicles, Salvum fac servum tuum, etc., which are written by another scribe after the Agnus Dei in Missal W 11 (fol. 12r) of the Walters Art Gallery of Baltimore, are a formula—the shorter and, as I believe, the, older of the two formulae still printed in the Monastic Breviary—for the blessing of the weekly reader prescribed in Chapter xxxviii of St. Benedict's —Regula Monasteriorum. Since St. Benedict directs that the reader is to ask for the blessing on Sunday ‘post Missas et Communionem,’ the insertion of the formula at this point, that is, after the Ordinarium Missae, as we call it to-day, is not surprising. It is found similarly placed in at least one other book, the Sacramentarium Fuldense saeculi X, in which it is preceded by a title, Oratio pro ebdomadario refectorii lectore. Besides this Fulda book and our Walters Missal, the text is found in several customaries and ordinals which will be mentioned below, but for its earliest occurrence we must go to the commentary on the Holy Rule composed before 774 by Paul the Deacon in the monastery on Monte Pedale near Civate in the diocese of Milan. Accordingly, it is found also in the commentary ascribed to Hildemar, an amplified recension of the work of the Lombard monk of the preceding century.

The peculiar piece of late Byzantine legal literature which is known by the strange name of Tipoukeitos, is concerned with the so-called Basilica. It indicates, in a very succinct form, the topics dealt with in the sixty books of Emperor Leo the Philosopher's voluminous codification. It seems that the author of T. used a copy of B. which differed somewhat, particularly in its enumeration of the single texts, from those MSS on which the brothers Heimbach based their edition of B. but, in general, the order of books and titles in T. is the same as in the Heimbachs' edition.