WILLIAM RIDGEWAY.*

THIS is a pleasant book for the critic to read, but bard to review. Its only unity is the catholic sympathies of the scholar to

whom it does honour. Is it possible, we ask, gasping, that the sympathies of this Cambridge Professor extend from "The Mandible of Man" to the "Order of the Platonic Dialogues," from " Ovidius de Mirabilibus Mundi to " O'Conor's House at Cloonfree " ? Perhaps it is "O'Conor's House" that gives the clue. Professor Ridgeway hails from the Emerald Isle, and the Emerald Isle has always stood for something more genial than a narrow specialism. Her learned men leap lightly from horse to horse in the academic arena in a way that puzzles our slower Saxon brains. The Professor of Greek one day is Professor of Modern History the next, and both chairs are the gainers.

Genial the book is in both senses, German and English. It opens with an admirable portrait and delightful verses by Mr. A. D. Godley on the vagaries of the latter-day polymath :—

" Far from the Greek our modern scholars roam : They trace the shy Pelasgian to his home : With names of fear the startled world resounds: Pre-Hittite pots and post-Minoan mounds."

It closes with the menu of the birthday dinner—the only dull page in the book. "Good wine needs no bush," but surely with all those wits at work a spark or two might have been struck over the wording. Was it worth printing S'aumon, Sauce Mousseline and Peches a la Melba ? But perhaps the College cook forbade foolish jesting on serious matters.

Choice is difficult, but since Professor Ridgeway is first and foremost an archaeologist we begin with archaeology. Mr.

A. B. Cook's Nephelokokkygia is an admirable instance of how the minute study of a minor art—that of vase-painting—may throw vivid light on a masterpiece of ancient literature, and even illuminate the political situation that prompted it. We have all of us rejoiced in the rollicking fun of the closing scene of the Birds of Aristophanes, where, in the splendid exodus, Peisthetairos, claiming to be the equal of Zeus him- self, leads off his bride Basileia. Some of us have even felt it to be solemn rather than merely jovial, and half divined that behind the sheer comedy of the thing stood masked some ancient ritual komos. But no one made out precisely what that ritual was—namely, the sacred marriage of Zeus and Hera Basileia, actually enacted at Argos. The Birds was brought out in 414 n.c., but, as Mr. B. B. Rogers has shown, it had been "long in incubation." After the Peace of Nikias all eyes had turned towards Argos. It was the Hera of Argos who would spring to all men's minds at the mention of Basileia. And—delightful point—Hera Basileia in the ancient myth of Argos was a bird, and, moreover, a. cuckoo. Zeus to win her took on the form of a cuckoo and wooed her on Mount Sokkygion. On the red-figured lekythos republished by Mr. Cook we have an echo of the Hera of Polycleitos and on her sceptre is perched a cuckoo. Now at last we under- stand how fast and furious must have been the fun as the bird-bridegroom and his bird-bride took their flight to Cloud- cuckoo-town. We congratulate the Cambridge Reader in Archaeology on his brilliant contribution to the understanding

of comedy.

Not less illuminating is Mr. F. M. Cornford's paper on the " and the Eleusinian Mysteries," and it gains a

timely significance from the recent discovery of the mundus on the Palatine at Rome. The arapvii are always explained as " firstfruits," offerings to the gods at harvest time to pro- pitiate their favour and remove the taboo on the new grain and fruit. But the word arepxat means, not " firstfruits," but starting-points ; they are not primarily thankofferings for the harvest ended, they are" starting-points" for the beginning of next year's crop; in a word, they are the grain selected, reserved for sowing. The Eleusinian Mysteries were primarily not a harvest festival but a sowing festival. The date of the • Essays and Studies Presented to William Ridgetoay on his Sirtieth Eirthday, 6th August, 1913. Edited by E. C. QuIggin. Cambridge; at the University Press. [25s. net.] Elet' tsinia has always been a difficulty. Wheat in lowland Qreece is reaped in May ; why wait to offer the firstfruits

till the end of September? As Dr. Frazer long ago con- ,jectured, 'the offering of firstfruits was prompted not so much by gratitude for past favours as by a shrewd eye to favours to come." September is too late to give thanks for harvest, but it is just in time to pray for prosperity in sowing, to offer the seed-born which is to be the starting-point of next year's crop.

But that is not all. The mundus of Rome, which with its circular pit and its favissae Professor Both has just brought to light; was, as Dr. Wards Fowler has shown, not only a store- house for the city's food, a.penus, but a place above all things where the seed-corn was stored. It was opened three times yearly, once to deposit the seed-corn, twice to take it out for the earlier and later autumn sowings. The deposition of the seed is the Going Down, the Kathodos of Kore ; her Anodos is

the taking up of the seed-corn from the underground chamber, the mundus. The corn-maiden, in a word, is not a vague corn- spirit ; she is in human form the actual sheaf or sheaves saved over from the harvest for next year's seed-corn. Hence the extraordinary sanctity of the sheaf. Kore is but the counter- part of Attis, of whom Firmicus Maternus says : "His death and resurrection was interpreted as the ripe grain wounded by the reaper buried in the granary, and coming to life again when it is sown in the ground." It is the seed-corn of the autumn, not the flowers of spring, that is to primitive man the great sanctity. Mr. Cornford has solved the long-stand- ing problem of the "belated Harvest Festival." But we have space only for airapxat of a paper rich in religious suggestion and sure to bring forth future fruit.

Mr. E. H. W. Tillyard has penetrated to the long-closed Hope collection of antiquities at Deepdene, of which he is preparing a catalogue. The "Attic lekythos" he reproduces has long been known, but only through an inadequate drawing. It should interest all fishermen. Poseidon, Heraklee, Hennes, are seated each on a rock and each of them fishing after his kind: Poseidon spearing with his trident after the somewhat barbarous fashion still in use for tunny and other large fish, Herakles with a line, and Hermes, Mr. Tillyard conjectures, with a wed. Oppian has left us an account of weel-fishing in his Halieutika, but the vase in question would predate him by some six centuries. The shape of Poseidon's trident is inter- esting as giving us a fish-spear of the most primitive type ; it consists of a short curved stick lashed to a long straight one, thus forming three spikes. In the development of Poseidon's trident we have embodied the history of the god, or rather of his worshippers ; from fishermen they became Thalassocrats, so the fish-fork turns into a sceptre.

1/4 Musicians should not miss Dr. C. S. Myers on "The Beginnings of Music." Dr. Myers has heard in Murray Island (and has sung to some of us at Cambridge) tunes so sacred that "no woman or child might bear them and live." Even at the time of his visit, he tells us, ill-luck was feared by the advanced Freethinkers who ventured to sing them to the uninitiated. On the primitive relations between speech and music and the functions of each, speech for cognition experience, music for affection, be has interesting things to -say. Dr. Rivers on "The Contact of Peoples" is, as always, profound and. original. He leaves here, as elsewhere, the 'impression of a man thinking hard and solidly at first hand. But his articlecaunot, beyond the barest outline,be summarized in a paragraph. Superiority of material culture will enable, he thinks, a few immigrants to exert great influence on those among whom they settle. This principle. be applies to two 'vexed ethnological questions with, we think, illuminating -results. They are : (1) Is Australian culture simple or complex ? '(2) Do megalithic monuments belong to a single culture ?

The studies we have noted would make any book notable, and -there are forty-eight of them, few of which fall below the general 'standard of a tribute of which any scholar might be proud.