Page:American Historical Review, Volume 12.djvu/698

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page needs to be proofread.

688 Reviews of Books Robinson believes to have been underrated. Sinope's golden age was from 444 to the peace of Antalcidas, which left the Euxine Greeks at the mercy of Persia. In 370 there was a strong Greek element in the city but a Persian political preponderance. The loyalty of the city to Darius was not resented by Alexander the Great. The citizens were, as usual in frontier communities, rough and ready and fearless. The concluding section of the volume, forty pages, deals with in- scriptions from Sinope. Die romische Timokratie. Von Dr. Francis Smith. (Berlin, Georg Nauck, 1906, pp. 161.) This dissertation combats the traditional view that- Servius, the next to the last of the Roman kings, established a timocratic division of Roman citizens in five classes. Against this tradition and in sharp contradiction to it. Dr. Smith sets the point that there existed at Rome as late as the second century B. C. a dis- tinction between classis and infra classevi; and the timocratic classifi- cation he places comparatively late in Roman history, in the time of Cato and the years following the second Punic War. The general character of the Servian reform Dr. Smith believes to have been mili- tary, not political ; and in military affairs, classes played a role, if at all, only at the levy of the army, not in its organization. To the question when the class principle found entrance into the comitatus maximus, Dr. Smith replies that the word classis is undoubtedly of military origin, denoting, when used in distinction from infra classem, probably an elite body of troops ; and the army having political func- tions, the term classis would acquire a political significance. This po- litical significance is acquired before the relation of the term to the five timocratic grades fixed itself in the public mind. Indeed it was necessary for the old distinction of classis and infra classcin to fall into desuetude before a timocratic classification was possible at all; and the Servian Commentaries are believed by Dr. Smith to be a late forgery designed to popularize the timocratic classification by casting over it a false halo of antiquity. The Clarendon Press has issued, in its Tudor and Stuart Library, the Defence of the Realme by Sir Henry Knyvett, 1596, with an in- troduction by Charles Hughes (London and New York, Henry Frowde, 1906, pp. xxxvi, 75). Sir Henry Knyvett, of Charlton near Malmes- bury in Wiltshire, sprang from a noble family of Norfolk. He Was in favor with Queen Elizabeth, to whom this treatise is addressed. In the early days of her reign Knyvett was wounded at the siege of Leith, and at the time of the Spanish Armada he was active, as a deputy lieutenant for Wiltshire, in the military preparations in the south of England. Knyvett was prompted to write this tract by the capture of Calais from the French by the Spaniards on April 17, 1596, and the consequent fear in England of a Spanish invasion. The tract was written in haste, in fact Knyvett completed it by the end of