were much used upon the stage, and often danced in Caesar's shows for the amusement of the people. Female players from Asia often played at Roman banquets upon the cithera and sambuca, and acted as pantomimists. Our conclusion, then, is that these Asiatics, apart from being used in large numbers as ministers to luxury and amusement, were very extensively employed in the hardest and most menial public and private services. Among them were to be found great extremes: the most valuable and skilled-the flos Asiae of Juvenal — and the cheapest and most ignorant of all the slaves acquired by the Romans.

IX. (b) Syria and Cappadocia. The following passages will be sufficient to show the magnitude of the slave traffic between Rome and this section: Cicero, post red. in sen. 6, 14; de oratore, II. 66, 265; in Pisonem, 1; Verres, II. 5, 25; Horace, Epist. I. 6. 39; Sat. I. 2. 1; Strabo, XIV. 5. 2; Livy, XXXV. 49; Propert. II. 23. 21; Persius, VI. 77; Martial, VI. 77. 4, X. 23, 9, 76; Juvenal, III. 62, VI. 351, VII. 15, VIII. 159; Suetonius, Aug. 83, Nero 27, Gr. 8. The term Syrian is quite general and includes the people on the coast from Egypt to Silicia and far inland. Slave dealing was the chief reason for the fact that the Mediterranean Sea was so infested with pirates. The profits were immense, and slaves could be acquired with great facility. The imbecility of the kings of Syria and Cilicia made easy the constant marauding enterprises directed against their subjects. The Rhodians, Cyprians, and Egyptians, who were enemies of the Syrians, did what was in their power to direct the attacks of the pirates against Syria. The Syrians were immoral. They were extensively used as ministers to luxury. Many were employed as carriers of sedans, some as tavern keepers, others as grammarians. Numbers of them became successful traders and business men. Many of the artisans in Verres' shop in Sicily were acquired from pirates. And since the pirates largely obtained their slaves from Syria, we may infer that in Rome great numbers of these slaves were engaged in the mechanical arts.

Professor Clement L. Smith then reported as Chairman of the Committee on Time and Place of Meeting in 1897. The Committee recommended that the next annual meeting be held at Bryn Mawr College, beginning July 6, 1897. The report was adopted.

The meeting adjourned at 4.50 P.M., in order to enable the members to attend the reception at the residence of Professor and Mrs. Albert Harkness.

EVENING SESSION.

The Association met shortly after 8 P.M.

19. Age at Marriage in the Roman Empire, by Professor Albert Granger Harkness, of Brown University.

This paper appears in the Transactions, in conjunction with Nos. 2 and 20.

20. Remarks on C. I. L. VI. 29149, by Professor Albert Granger Harkness, of Brown University.

Remarks were made by Professor Smyth.

21. The Form of Philosophical Discussion before Sokrates, by Dr. Arthur Fairbanks, of Yale University.

To understand the art of Plato it is necessary to consider the earlier efforts to express philosophical reasoning. Down to the time of Sokrates I find three forms of philosophical expression: (1) the "saying" or proverb, (2) the didactic poem, and (3) prose exposition.

We can affirm nothing confidently as to the form of discussion in the early Ionic school. Apparently Thales left nothing in writing. His successor, Anaximander, wrote a work from which Theophrastos quotes the saying that all things return to the first principle "of necessity, for they suffer punishment and pay the penalty to each other for their injustice." The fragment confirms the statement of Theophrastos that his phraseology is rather poetical. Of Anaximenes' writings we know almost nothing beyond the statement of Diogenes that he wrote simple, plain Ionic.

Something resembling the style of Anaximander reappears in the writings of his noted successor in Asia Minor, Herakleitos. His play on words (66: "The bow ẞiós is called life Bios, but its work is death"), his irony (127: "If it were not to Dionysos that they made the procession and sang the phallic hymn, they would be acting most shamelessly "), and his pregnant statements (51 a: "Oxen are happy when they find bitter vetches to eat "), all contribute to make his writings obscure. He chose the pithy saying, the aphorism, as the form to express his views, but his purpose in doing so does not seem to have been to give currency to his thought. Rather he supremely disregards the attitude of others; he goes his own way, criticizing alike those who think and those who do not think; and the form of his writings is admirably adapted to the man and the thoughts he would express. Single deep glances into the reality of things, and single cuts across the views of others, constitute his philosophy. He has no complete rounded system, and I find no proof that he wrote any complete book. 22: "All things are exchanged for fire, and fire for all things; as wares are exchanged for gold, and gold for wares." 36: "God is day and night, winter and summer, war and peace . . .; he assumes different forms as incense does; everyone gives him the name he likes." 41: "You could not step twice in the same rivers; for other and yet other waters are ever flowing on." In such pointed statements did Herakleitos express his belief that fire is the first principle of things, that opposites are one, that change is universal. In the same manner he criticizes others. 16: "Varied learning does not teach any man wisdom; else it would have taught Hesiod and Pythagoras, and again Xenophanes and Hekataios." While of Pythagoras he went on to say, 17: "Prosecuting investigations more than any other man, he made a wisdom of his own, much learning and bad art." The proverb has always been a favorite form for the expression of popular philosophy; Herakleitos used it to express an abstruse philosophy, and that primarily for himself rather than for others.

Herakleitos founded no school, and he had no successor in this form of literary expression. Zeno came nearer to it than any later philosophic writer, in the riddles by which he sought to confirm the position of his master, Parmenides. Contests in propounding and solving riddles were by no means unknown in Greece and Sicily, and it is truly remarked by Schneidewin that here is to be found the beginnings of the later Eristik. The arguments from Achilles and the tortoise he could not overtake, from the arrow that is at rest in its onward flight, from the pile of grain that makes no noise in its fall because the single grain makes no sound, -show how Zeno used the riddle to enounce and enforce his philosophic position.

The second general form of philosophic expression to take its rise in Greece is the didactic poem. Philosophic speculation as to the origin and interpretation of the world was preceded by mythical and cosmogonic speculations in poetic form. The Theogony of Hesiod, the early speculations of the Orphic school, the cosmogony of Pherekydes, are not philosophy, but they stimulated thought which became philosophic, so that it would not be unnatural for early philosophy to adopt their poetic form. The immediate occasion for the use of poetry in philosophic writing was the poetic genius and spirit of one of the earlier Greek philosophers, — Xenophanes. Parmenides, his successor, adopted the form as well as the doctrine of his master; Empedokles, himself a poet of no mean order, followed the example of Parmenides; and, perhaps fortunately, ancient philosophy had no other poetic expounder with the single exception of Lucretius, the brilliant imitator of Empedokles.

Xenophanes is best known as a lyric poet. His purely literary productions contain a spirited critique of ordinary views, and in this respect they resemble the so-called philosophic fragments; for in these, too, he criticizes popular views of religion and of nature with the freedom and power of a poet. According to Diogenes, Xenophanes made his living in later years by reciting his own compositions at the festivals of different cities, and we can well believe that both the elegiac verses and the hexameters on religion and philosophy might have been composed for such recitation. 5-6: "Mortals suppose that the gods are born, as they themselves are, and that they wear man's clothing, and have human voice and body; . . . but if cattle or lions had hands, so as to paint with their hands and produce works of art as men do, they would paint their gods and give them bodies in form like their own, - horses like horses, cattle like cattle." Such is the poet's statement of the transcendency of God, the poet's criticism of popular anthropomorphic ideas of God; and such verses make it clear that even in his philosophic writing Xenophanes was a poet, aiming to please and interest the people. Poetry became the vehicle of philosophic teaching because this poet used his ordinary means of expression for his scientific and philosophical views, and Eleatic thinkers who accepted his views continued to express them in verse.

With Parmenides the verse form which he inherited is somewhat external, so much so that he is said to have rewritten his views in prose. His poem on the nature of things begins with an elaborate, not to say a labored prooemium, describing his approach to the palace of the goddess in whose mouth are placed his philosophic opinions. Different views have been held as to the poetic merit of the prooemium, but there can be no question that the lines which follow are exceedingly barren. The hopes held out by the goddess to the enquirer are

expressed with some vigor. 133: "Thou shalt know the nature of the heavens and all signs that are in the sky, the hidden toils of the pure bright torch of the sun, and whence they arose, and thou shalt learn the wandering course of the moon and its nature. Thou shalt behold the sky surrounding all, whence it arose, and how necessity directing it chained it so as to serve as a limit to the courses of the stars." The remainder of the poem is as prosaic as is possible even for a scientific treatise.

The third Greek thinker to write in poetry, the only one who really succeeded in the difficult task of uniting philosophic thought with true poetic form, was Empedokles. Philosopher and poet, mystic thinker and thaumaturge, priest and statesman, the many-sided life of Empedokles is reflected in the variety of his writings. Tragedies, an epic poem, and hymns to the gods are referred to him by Diogenes Laertius. We possess fragments only of his great philosophic poem and of that on lustral rites. His predecessors had used daktylic hexameter for their poems; Empedokles, I believe, sought to conform much more closely to the pure epic model. From the study of the fragments that remain to us, we find that he keeps in mind the epic standard, in verse, in language, and in style. He uses the hexameter as it was used in the epic, not as a mere form, but as a form bringing out his thought and emphasis better than it could otherwise be expressed. In language one marks the occurrence of purely epic words, of epic forms, and of epic constructions. The use of epithets is clearly influenced by the epic model, - epithets are chosen for picturesque effect rather than for the development of the argument, the same epithets occur with the same nouns, and the epic series of three nouns having a descriptive epithet with the third is not infrequent. It is certainly a bold idea to make an epic out of the scientific description of the origin of nature, but the breadth of plan and the general mode of treatment point to this. I will only quote one of several similes, to illustrate how scientific description is clothed in epic language, 316 ff.: "And as one with a journey in prospect through a stormy night provides himself with a lantern and lights it at the brightshining fire, lanterns that drive back every sort of wind (for they scatter the breath of the winds that blow); and the light darting out, inasmuch as it is finer [than the winds], shines across the threshold with untiring ray; so the elemental fire, shut up in membranes, it entraps in fine coverings as the round pupil; and the coverings protect it against the deep water which flows about it, but the fire darting forth, inasmuch as it is finer . . ."

66

The rise of simple prose exposition is to be more briefly told. I have already called attention to the statement of Diogenes that Anaximenes wrote plain Ionic," presumably prose. Some half a century later we find Melissos, a pupil of Parmenides, using simple prose to state again the doctrines of the Eleatic school. His prose, still in the Ionic dialect, is labored and confused and can claim no literary merit. His effort to introduce a logical form into the discussion of philosophic questions can hardly be called successful. In his attempts to expound scientifically the idealistic views of his school, he only deserves the credit of a bare and crude simplicity.

The prose of Anaxagoras stands on a higher level. His long residence in Athens, his connection with the brilliant circle gathered by Perikles, his alleged influence over Euripides, and finally the forebodings of a new era in thought which appear in his philosophy, interest us in Anaxagoras more than in his

predecessors. His writings seem to have met with much favor, as we may infer both from Plato's reference in the Apology to the price of his works, and from the fact that they were preserved long after the writings of so able and learned a scholar as Democritos were lost. Diogenes informs us that Anaxagoras was one of the philosophers who left but a single work, and this, he says, "was written in a lofty and agreeable style." Allusions to other works seem to be due to misunderstanding or to deliberate forgery. In the fragments of the first book, preserved by Simplicius, he states his philosophic positions in a straightforward way, with only an occasional comment or proof. He is not easy to understand, however, because he is not entirely successful in creating a philosophical vocabulary to meet his needs.

With the Sophists began the new era of philosophic thought, and the development of earlier forms of thought, like the development of the content of philosophic systems, found a partial conclusion in the work of Anaxagoras.

22. Notes on the Function of Modern Languages in Africa, by Professor W. S. Scarborough, of Wilberforce University.

It seems to be a universal law that a conquered people shall forsake its own speech for that of the conquerors, - provided the latter are superior in civilization, culture, and refinement. The Kelts in the time of Cæsar's invasion did so. While, on the other hand, the Germans, who later invaded the same country, forsook their own language for that of the conquered but more civilized race. The French language, like the Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese, is derived from the popular Latin, — like them it is the "product of the slow development of the common Roman speech."

The phonetic changes observed in the development or decadence of a language may be attributed in part to the structure of the vocal organs as well as to the difference in race or climate. All of these have their influence. As examples, we note the Langue d'Oïl and the Langue d'Oc of north and south Gaul respectively. What is true here is true elsewhere. What is true of Europe, of America, is true of Africa under the same or similar conditions. It is the survival of the fittest whether in the realm of linguistics or of animal life. Civilization is the mighty power that shapes the destiny of language. Dialects crumble before it and diversity of tongues drift toward unity. The stronger will swallow up the weaker until the speech of the dominant people prevails; jargon at first, perhaps, extinction later.

From an early period, from the time that African ethnology, African linguistics, African folklore, began to attract the attention of ethnologists and philologists to any considerable extent, a scheme of classification of these African speech forms has been a matter of serious study. But in an unexplored field like this, however, difficulties of an insuperable character are wont to arise, making it impossible to arrive at anything definite. A classification of these on a purely scientific basis seems out of the question. Dialects and sub-dialects, the product of ignorance and environment, are so numerous that philologists are baffled to find a startingpoint.

It is not straining a point to declare that the native African is a linguist of no mean sort - that many of them speak several languages and dialects apart from