seems to have been made quite clear by Dr. Semeka: the cases brought before administrative officials lack the chief characteristic of arbitration the previous agreement of the parties. The procedure before the orgaτnyós or the riotátηg is initiated by one side, and the other side commonly tries to evade it by nonappearance in court. That is why Mitteis prefers to speak of procedure in pacification" (friedensrichterlich) and not in arbitration" (schiedsrichterlich). Semeka lays stress on the διάλυσις a judicial compromise effected under the pressure of administrative authority. I am inclined to go a step further, and to admit that we have to deal with actual litigation before officials who assume the position and the rights of judges, although submission to their jurisdiction and execution of their judgments seem to have been safeguarded in a very unsatisfactory manner. The decrees of these magistrates, though worded somewhat differently from the decisions of actual judges, are couched in imperative form 1). They award restitution of estates, provide for actual execution"). In the Hermias case, the plaintiff set out with the specific object of inducing the judges to eject the defendants, and even to inflict punishment on them for an alleged transgression of the laws governing places of burial. The last imputation is evidently not justified by the facts, but the attempts made by Hermias certainly do not aim at a pacific solution of the dispute"). The constant recurrence of such attempts points to the privileged position of veterans, who were able to harass peaceful citizens by repeated complaints to the administrative authorities in spite of the fact that one decision after the other had gone against them). Altogether, the constant interference of officials in litigation seems to suggest that there was a certain competition between regular courts and extraordinary jurisdictions of an administrative character. The confusion and pettifogging devices produced by such interference are easy to explain in a country where centralised bureaucracy and military rule played such a leading part. In a sense, the practices described prepare the way for the patrocinia which are so bitterly complained of in the fourth and fifth centuries A. D. But what was considered to be an unmitigated abuse in the Roman Empire seems to have been used as an instrument of government in Hellenistic monarchies.

The section of Mitteis' book dealing with conveyances (Urkunden) is particularly copious and valuable: starting from the material of the papyri, it proceeds, as it were, on inductive lines, by noting characteristic features and grouping them into classes according to observed differences. At the very outset,

1) P.Tor. I (Mitteis, Chrest. 31, Col. X): γράμμα εἴπαμεν τῶι μὲν Ἑρμίαι μη εἰσβιάζεσθαι, τοῖς δὲ περὶ τὸν ὡρον κρατεῖν καθῶς καὶ ἀπὸ τῆς ἀρχῆς διακατείχον. 2) P. Par. Col. I. 11. 23–25 (Brunet de Presle, Notices et Extraits, XVIII 2, 219): Ομοίως δὲ καὶ ἐν τῷ ΜΘ 1 μεσορή, τοῦ Ἑρμίου ἐπιβαλόντος εἰς τὴν Διόσπολιν καὶ περὶ τῶν αὐτῶν ἐντυχόντος μου, ἐκτοπισάντων αὐτῶν συνέταξεν Ἑρμογένει τῷ τότε ἀρχιφυλακίτῃ παραδοῦναί μοι τὴν οἰκίαν.

3) P. Tor. I (Mitteis, Chrest. 31, Col. III): ovvarayzaa966 tygwqeiv in the οἰκίας, καὶ ὁμόλογοι κατασταθέντες νεκροὺς ἀπηρεισμένοι ἐν τῆι σημαινομένηι οἰκίαι ἐξαποσταλῶσι πρός σε, ὅπως τύχωσι τῆς ἁρμοζούσης ἐπιπλήξεως.

4) Cf. Jouguet-Lefebvre on the Magdola Papyrus, Bulletin de Correspondence Hellénique, XXVI, 128: La compétence juridique du stratège nous paraît donc restreinte. Il ne faut pas oublier cependant que, chargé de préparer l'instance et de faire office de magistrat instructeur (cf. no. XIV) dans les affaires mêmes qui ne ressortissent pas à son tribunal, il peut avoir une action sur les débats, car il arrive parfois que son subordonné, le basilogrammate, est appelé à siéger avec la cour des chrématistes.

an interesting perspective is opened in „parol agreements", as to the use of which there is some evidence in documents (pp. 48, 49), although, naturally enough, the papyri reflect chiefly transactions formulated in writing. Mitteis calls attention to the fact, however, that both in ancient Egyptian and Greek law agreements by word of mouth were valid when sufficiently attested. It may be remarked in this connection that the lively business intercourse of Ptolemaic Egypt was bound to produce a great number of informal credit transactions, which must have taken the shape of agreements by word of mouth, and that the prevalence of written contracts in our material cannot in any way be considered as indicating the actual proportion in practice between the two classes of transactions.

As to the formulae used in contracts, Mitteis observes that stipulation became usual after the Constitutio Antonina of 212 A. D., while it is all but absent before that time. This is certainly very suggestive as regards the nature of this famous measure and its effect on the Roman world. As Mitteis remarks, the phrase lowτŋdelę wμoλóynoa (P. 76) becomes a common form, which stood, at the utmost, as evidence of the fact that the contracting party was aware of the contents of the document confirmed by it. Now the absence of stipulation in agreements between Roman citizens and foreigners made before 212 A. D., in spite of the fact that stipulation was admitted by the ius gentium, shows conclusively that the actual reception of rules of the ius gentium depended not so much on the opinion of leading lawyers in Rome as on the course of innumerable transactions in practice: if the Egyptian and Libyan business men had a strong preference for Demotic or Greek patterns, and the Roman citizens themselves found this form of document convenient, Demotic and Hellenic types developed and grew, while the standard Roman types dwindled to insignificance. The extension of Roman citizenship among the provincial populations did make a change, but this difference was not so sweeping as might be supposed at first sight. The formula of the stipulation invaded the papyri, but altered its meaning in the process: instead of constituting the principal element of corroboration in the contract, it was reduced to a detail of conveyancing, the presence or absence of which was not regarded as essential to the act in law. This is a good illustration of the process of legal growth which went on after the passing of the Constitution by Caracalla, as well as before it. Mitteis emphasises at the close of the volume (pp. 288, 289) the fact that although a large margin of dediticii (possibly ὁμόλογοι π capite censi) was left outside the operation of the edict, it is not the status of this lower class of peregrini which can account for the active development of vernacular law after the widening of the range of citizenship. Evidently the sudden increase of the number of citizens led quite as much to the modification of Roman law as to its outward expansion. It is at this very period that a significant deformation of Roman principle under the influence of Hellenism and Orientalism becomes more and more apparent. The altered condition of conveyancing after Diocletian's administrative reforms, giving rise to the transfer of the practice from public institutions to the hands of private notaries, must have contributed largely to this result. (Cf. p. 87.)

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The statements as to the doctrine and forms of sale are very characteristic of Mitteis' method. They do not start, as in Gradenwitz's introduction to the law of the papyri, from an intensive dogmatic comparison between Roman and Greek forms of sale, but from a gradual grouping of observations on the 33*

terminology used in documents and the probable meaning of their clauses: the inductive side of investigation is far more prominent than the deductive. It may be doubted whether Mitteis does not go too far in this direction of selfimposed precautions. It seems, for instance, that he is hardly justified in refusing to follow Wilcken's view that, as a rule, Ptolemaic sale of land is constituted by the correspondence of two transactions a contract to sell (ový) and a cession of possession (aлoorάaior). The fact, acknowledged by Mitteis, that there is not a single known instance during the Ptolemaic period of the conjunction in one deed of sale and cession, can hardly be explained on any other assumption than that of the dualism of the two elements of sale, which certainly corresponds to ancient Egyptian practice, but which does not seem at all to have been restricted in the age of the Ptolemies to intercourse between Egyptians. If in the treatment of such questions, Mitteis perhaps errs to some extent in the direction of cautious self-restraint, the more impressive are his conclusions when he endorses the existence of far-reaching and characteristic peculiarities of Hellenic law. A case in point is presented by the observation that Graeco-Egyptian deeds of sale do not convey property but only better right, a juridical notion derived from possession as protected by the έridizaσia procedure of the classical Greek period, and akin to the Gewere of Germanic and the ius merum of English mediaeval law. The acqɑzóonois of Ptolemaic zatozoi acquires special interest in this connection, because it lays stress not on the transfer of dominium, which the zάroizou could not claim, but on the cession of personal rights from one occupant of the soil to another, with eventual guarantee against third persons. Considered in this light, the incidents of the sale of land in Ptolemaic Egypt come to illustrate the doctrine which was so strikingly expounded by Gradenwitz in his analysis of the sale of goods (Einführung in die Papyruskunde, 52 - 54).

Another conclusive observation of Mitteis bears on the curious evolution of types in the history of deeds of sale in the time of the Romans: there is a kind of struggle for existence between the Roman form of mancipatio and Greek types of literal contract, and the latter survive as the fittest in the circumstances of the case. Even before the grant of citizenship by Caracalla, the Romans established in Egypt begin to avail themselves of Greek forms of sale in their dealings with representatives of the native population, and after the Constitutio Antonina these Greek forms remain in possession of the field in spite of the apparent triumph of the Roman political idea. Mitteis expresses the result in figurative language: the Roman elements, as he puts it, have paled by this time: they have not the strength to leave their impression on the transactions of the age. This means, at bottom, that the population included within the sphere of Roman citizenship followed the grooves of established custom and continued to transact business in the Hellenistic way instead of adapting itself to new juridical expedients.

In his discussion of the contract of sale, as well as in his treatment of registration, Mitteis has to touch on the perplexing problems of private property in land in Ptolemaic Egypt. The references to yn idriz are so rare in the documents of the period that Wilcken and Rostowzew have come to the conclusion that private property in land in the sense known to us and to the Romans was exceptional in its origin and diffusion, and that the real owner of the soil was the Pharaoh, who held the land either directly as Crown estate (rī Basilizh), or through the hands of hereditary tenants (zározo). Mitteis

does not concede so much to his more adventurous fellow-workers, but a great deal of what he does admit points the same way, and we are bound to recognize the distribution and types of property as different in any case from the wellknown forms it assumed in Greece, in Rome, or in the modern world (cf. p. 172). The tenant right of the zározot especially was certainly conditioned by very substantial claims on the part of the Crown, and the admission that it was not a dominium optimo iure shows that parallels to it have to be sought in the ius agri vectigalis rather than in the category of property.

The section dealing with leases is short and insufficient. Mitteis justifies such a treatment by the remark that the evidence of papyri in this respect is more important from an economic than from a juridical point of view; but this consideration does not seem adequate in the case in question. Even on the strength of the monograph of Waszynski one might gather a good deal of additional information on legal points: and we are permitted to suppose that Mitteis does not care to treat of these matters at length, because so much would have to be a repetition of what the above-named authors, as well as Wilcken, Grenfell, Hunt, de Zulueta and others have already said. I may mention as points left on one side, in spite of their importance, the contrast between the juridical treatment of public land and of private plots, the solidarity between neighbours in regard to the payment of taxes, the problems arising in the case of leases complicated by loans of stock, the relation of the contract of lease to that of sale, the repartition of risks in case of unforeseen losses1).

The sections bearing on the law of families, marriage and succession, suffer from a different drawback, namely from the tendency to neutralise, as it were, the sharp outlines ascribed by other investigators to peculiar Egyptian institutions. Révillout has sketched with a bold hand the „unwritten" marriage practised in Egypt according to ancient vernacular custom, and its reception by the Greeks in the time of the Ptolemies. Spiegelberg and others had treated of this form of union as forming a „marriage on trial". Mitteis does not deny the existence of a marriage of lesser kind („Minderche“), but denies that it was juridically a tentative experiment, destined to pave the way towards a permanent union. He sees the essence of the contract in the alimentation guaranteed by the husband to his consort, and does not attach importance to the pointed contrast between γάμος ἔγγραφος and γάμος ἄγραφος. I cannot help thinking that de Ruggiero's outspoken opposition to such a treatment of a very characteristic institution is by no means futile: on the contrary, it carries conviction in so far, at any rate, as the presence or absence of a written marriage contract implies a wide difference in the juridical conception of the two forms of union. The fact that the yapos aypapos is sometimes noticed in papyri does not imply that the conclusion of the marriage was effected by written contract: whatever circumstances may be touched upon in such cases, the marriage itself is devoid of corroboration by a written contract, and this cannot fail to produce legal consequences. In the same way, the treatment of the zipios question in connection with the position of Egyptian women, as well as of the remarkably advantageous position of the latter in regard to property and divorce, seems curiously slight and casual. Quite apart from wide problems of mother-right, the matter certainly required a more attentive and detailed treatment.

1) Some fifteen lines only are devoted to this important subject in the Grundzüge (p. 198).

In spite of occasional protests and strictures, against which works planned on such a grand scale as the Grundzüge are, of course, least safeguarded, the book which we have been discussing is sure to hold the field for many years as the principal Vade Mecum of all those who wish to obtain a survey of the ground reclaimed by the indefatigable labours of modern papyrus explorers. Paul Vinograd off.

Note on Ηρώδου περὶ πολιτείας.

I regret that in my recent note in Klio on Herodes Atticus (?) nɛgì nodırɛiaç I made in error the statement that the comparison of otάois and rólɛμos and slońrn (§ 11) seems to be original and answered in Aristides I, 830. It is of course borrowed from Herodotus VIII, 3, whence it was taken by Herodes and Aristides. It was also taken by Choricius p. 30 Boissonade whence I first found my mistake. The parallels are not noted by the commentators on the authors concerned: except that from Choricius by the commentators on Herodotus. It does not alter my opinion of the merits of the work. May I add that the title is in part perhaps, explained by Demosthenes Olynth. I, 5 (compare Choricius p. 207, 235), and that the raides of § 33 should be the tyrant's sons as Reiske thought, since these figure so largely in the declamations (cf. Choric. p. 205 sqq.). A. D. Knox.

Zur Epigraphik.

1. Eine neue Zeitschrift.

Seit dem 1. Januar 1913 erscheint als Erbin der im Januar 1878 von Auguste Allmer gegründeten Revue épigraphique du Midi de la France unter der bewährten Leitung von Émile Espérandieu und Adolphe Reinach. eine Revue épigraphique (Paris, E. Leroux). Die neue Zeitschrift steckt ihre Ziele viel weiter als die alte, die der Lokalepigraphik von Gallien gewidmet war. Sie will die gesamte griechische und lateinische Epigraphik des Altertums in den Bereich ihrer Tätigkeit ziehen und auch umfassende jährliche Berichte über Neufunde und neue Publikationen bringen. A. Reinach beginnt in der ersten Lieferung mit einem Bulletin annual d'épigraphie grecque (1910-1912), wie er sie seither in der Revue des études grecques gegeben hatte. Die Redaktion sucht ähnlich wie Klio ihre Mitarbeiter auch außerhalb des eigenen Landes. Wir begleiten das neue Unternehmen mit den besten Wünschen.

2. Neue Hilfsmittel für den epigraphischen Unterricht. Das Jahr 1912 hat zwei Werke gebracht, die dem akademischen Unterricht in der Epigraphik zu dienen bestimmt sind. E. Diehls, Inscriptiones latinae (= Tabulae in usum scholarum editae sub cura Johannis Lietzmann 4), Bonn, Marcus und Weber stehen leider, was sowohl die Zusammenstellung wie die Reproduktionen und den begleitenden Text des Herausgebers betrifft, nicht auf der Höhe. Dagegen besitzen wir seit kurzem in den Simulacra zu Bruns, Fontes iuris Romanis, 7. Aufl. (Additamentum II hrsgeg. von Otto Gradenwitz), Tübingen, F. C. B. Mohr, 1912, ein ganz hervorragendes Hilfsmittel für den epigraphischen Seminarbetrieb. Hier ist für den billigen Preis von nur 6 M. etwas Mustergültiges geschaffen, das weiteste Verbreitung auch unter unseren Studenten verdient. E. K.