A.D. 68; he does not commit himself to an identification with one or other of the false Neros; but he does look for Nero's resurrection from the abyss as a final manifestation of the anti-Christian spirit of the empire, ushering in its final overthrow.

How exactly St. John's system of the 'seven kings' is to be explained we do not pretend to decide. No doubt it is at first sight more easily interpreted if the Apostle is writing in A.D. 69 than twenty or twenty-five years later. Yet Victorinus felt no difficulty in reckoning back from Domitian as the sixth, through Titus, Vespasian, Vitellius, and Otho, to Galba as the first. This calculation has the drawback that it does not really include Nero among the seven, and we prefer to suppose that St. John omits one of the three ephemeral emperors as not fully recognized in the East, and makes Nero both the first and the eighth. In commencing the seven heads of the anti-Christian power with Nero rather than with Julius or Augustus the Apostle is faithful to historical accuracy. Augustus was dead before the Christian Church was founded. His immediate successors can in no sense be said to have finally declared themselves against Christianity, and their position as heads of the Beast who makes war on the saints and overcomes them would be at least ambiguous. It is with Nero that the empire first ranges itself with Antichrist; it will be in the second Nero that the identification will be complete.1

One more element in the Apocalyptic conception of the powers banded against the Church is introduced in the seventeenth chapter, the rider of the Beast, the Harlot with whom the kings of the earth committed fornication. The seer himself receives the explanation that this is the great city which has dominion over the world, seated on her seven hills like the harlot on the seven-headed beast. As the whore was drunk in the vision with the blood of saints and martyrs of Jesus, so in the mystical Babylon was found the blood of prophets and saints and all them that were slain on the earth. This pre-eminence is not to be understood simply of the Neronian persecution, nor of such martyrs as belonged to the church of the City under the Flavian emperors: it includes also Christians condemned in the eastern provinces, and sent to

1 of the Number of the Beast we will only say that the triple six is intended as a triple, that is, a complete, failure to reach the perfect number seven: corruptio optimi pessima. For the rest, Irenæus's remark is the most sensible-that if it had been needful that the name should be proclaimed openly in his own day it would already have been proclaimed long ago by the seer himself and one of the solutions he mentions, Aareivós, perhaps the most probable of any.

Rome, like St. Ignatius, to suffer in the amphitheatre ;1 indeed, if the hypothesis of St. John's having been in Rome himself be rejected, it must be these martyrs from his own churches who are chiefly in his thoughts. So direct is the responsibility of Rome for the persecution of the Church, that the first foretaste of the execution of God's judgments is the desolation of the 'great city,' when the ten kings who are the horns of the Beast-the various kingdoms out of which the Roman Empire grew shall turn to hatred of the harlot whose sin they have shared, and shall abandon her to desolation and shame. The city will be burnt with fire, the ruins will be the haunt only of unclean animals and of demons; in one single day her sins and cruelty find an overflowing recompense. Only at a point later still does the vengeance on the Beast himself find its accomplishment. The armies of heaven under their leader overthrow the combined forces of the kings and of the Beast; the Beast and his minister, the False Prophet, are cast alive into the lake of fire; Satan is bound for a period, and the thousand years' reign of the martyrs and saints who had not joined in the worship of the Beast in his time of power is ushered in. Here, then, the career of the Roman Empire as Satan's great instrument on earth is brought to a close; in the resuscitation of the forces of evil which precedes the final consummation it is not mentioned and takes no part.

In summing up at this point the historical position indicated by this strange yet powerful imagery, the one clear result is, that a condition of things is contemplated where the State is pitted in a hand-to-hand struggle with the Christian Church, in which the life of one combatant could only be purchased at the price of the death of the other. No one sudden outbreak of fury is an adequate explanation; it is a relation which has become normal, and has lasted so continuously that no modification or relaxation of it is anticipated even as a possibility. St. John is the exponent of the indignant hatred which has been burnt into the conscience of the Christian community by the ruthless cruelty of a generation: the Apocalypse is unintelligible unless the savagery of Nero has become the settled policy of the Flavian house. Domitian, as he was the worst of his family, so he was the fiercest persecutor; but his general attitude to the Church was not invented but inherited. By the gradual processes which pass unnoticed by historians, the ministers of government passed from accusations of crime to the accusation of Christianity. The confession of the Name, the refusal to participate

1 Mommsen, R. P. ii. 197 n.

in the worship of the Emperor, was enough. The period from Vespasian to Trajan was a true reign of terror for the Church, and the strain and stress have left their visible marks on all the Christian literature of the period; on the Epistles of St. Clement and St. Ignatius; on the Shepherd of Hermas; but most of all on the Apocalypse.

The recognition and inculcation of this truth is perhaps the greatest of the many merits of Professor Ramsay's book. Without it, the sequence of events loses all coherence; admit it, and the rescript of Trajan brings itself into line with the history that leads up to it, not as the formulation of a new policy of proscription, but as the regulation and amelioration of a continuous tradition of repression. Each reader of the Church and the Roman Empire is bound to reserve for himself the right to differ in details—for instance, the dating of the First Epistle of St. Peter at about A.D. 75 is a view which would need careful weighing before it could be accepted--but none will fail to recognize that we have in the writer of the book the potentialities of a master of history.

ART. X.-MR. ANDREW LANG AND HOMER.

Homer and the Epic. By ANDREW LANG, M.A., Hon. LL.D., St. Andrews, Honorary Fellow of Merton College, Oxford. (London, 1893).

IT is satisfactory to find Mr. Lang, whose sympathies on the Homeric question have often had incidental expression in sonnet, leaderette, and essay, descending definitely into the arena of scholarly controversy, and giving reason for the faith that is in him in a set treatise. What that faith is, in its broad outlines, can hardly need to be stated. In the controversy between the scholars who dissect and the poets (and lovers of literature generally) who worship an undivided Homer, Mr. Lang is on the side of the angels. Were he what his opponents might describe as 'a mere literary man' his testimony would add little to the authority of a side which has already, to cite one champion only, Mr. Matthew Arnold. In answer to such an one Homeric scholars can fairly urge that he has not given the subject that minute study on which their own conclusions are founded. But against Mr. Lang at least that objection cannot lie. Mr. Lang has studied the German commentators and their

English followers with a minuteness which leaves nothing to be desired, and his pages bristle with their names-Wolf and Wilamowitz, Lachmann and Nutzhorn, Benicken and Bäumlein, Holm and Düntzer, Gerlach and Cauer, Köchly, Jacob, Kiene, Giseke, Genz, Bernhardy, Bergk' (p. 157), fortisque Gyas fortisque Cloanthus-as thickly as those of some disciple of the Higher Criticism of the Old or the New Testament. Mr. Lang is indeed in a perilous state; for if he is wrong he certainly sins against light-confusing and bewildering light it may be, but plenty of it. Therefore his book is worth reading, if only from the sporting desire of seeing a free fight. In Mr. Lang's hands one is at least safe against dulness, and one may feel sure of being amused and instructed in many points of miscellaneous learning. His reader is in the same happy state as the casual guest of Praed's vicar,—

'If, when he reached his journey's end

And warmed himself in court or college,
He had not gained an honest friend,
And twenty curious scraps of knowledge;
If he departed as he came,

With no new light on love or liquor,
Good sooth, the traveller was to blame,

And not the vicarage, nor the vicar.'

It would be doing Mr. Lang an injustice, however, to imply that his treatise is of a light and flippant description. His arguments are solid and serious, and if he abounds with illustrations from other works of literature that is by no means to his discredit. The argument from literary analogy is one of the fairest and most legitimate that can be used in this controversy. The question is not merely one of minute research and comparison of one Homeric word or line with another. The discrepancies and inconsistencies, real and imaginary, revealed by this method need to be regarded in the broader light of literary history and literary sense. Few contemporary writers have a wider knowledge of miscellaneous literature than Mr. Lang, and the application of this knowledge to the Homeric controversy is one of the most valuable features of his work, and one which we would willingly have seen extended even further.

The question as to the divided authorship of the Homeric poems has been before the world since the days of the Alexandrian scholars, but its acute stage has not quite attained its century. It was in 1795 that Wolf published his Prolegomena, in which he propounded his view of the

piecemeal composition of the Iliad and of its redaction into a single poem under the auspices of Pisistratus. It is accordingly with a detailed description and examination of Wolf's treatise that Mr. Lang begins his work (pp. 18-78), though the immediate provocation which has moved him to uplift his testimony would appear to be rather the Companion to the Iliad, recently published by his whilom collaborator in translation, Mr. Walter Leaf. The criticism of Wolf is followed by a full analysis of the Iliad, book by book, in the course of which the main arguments of the sceptics are stated and discussed (pp. 79-221). The same method is then applied to the Odyssey (pp. 222-322); and the rest of the book (pp. 323-422) is occupied by some useful chapters on the lost epics of Greece, on Homer and archæology, and on other early epics which may be put into comparison with Homer, notably the Song of Roland and the Kalewala; to which we should have liked to see added equally full examinations of the Nibelungenlied and the Morte d'Arthur. We have, then, here a serious attempt to meet, on grounds of literary criticism and common sense, the arguments of those who see in the Iliad and Odyssey patchwork compositions of many men and many periods.

Wolf's theory contained three principal propositions, of which two embody his view of the nature of the Homeric poems, while the third is the main supposition upon which that view is based. His view is, first, that the poems were originally detached lays, handed down by oral recitation of minstrels at courts and festivals; and, secondly, that Pisistratus was the first to have them committed to writing and brought into that order in which we now possess them. The supposition which lies at the root of this theory is that writing was unknown to the Greeks at the time of the composition of the poems. For each of these propositions there is some evidence to be adduced; and yet it is not too much to say that not one of the three is admitted to be sound by the representatives of advanced criticism to-day. Wolf's theory is, in fact, abandoned by his successors, although the spirit which animated his inquiry animates them also. A few sentences will indicate the position of the controversy on these points at the present time.

With regard to the knowledge of writing, all that can be said is that there is no certain evidence available, but that such additional testimony as has come to light since Wolf's day is not favourable to his view. In the first place, we now have specimens of Greek writing which go back, not indeed