every demand for advances in wages and shortening of hours with a condition precedent of increased production. Only by telling the people the naked and unpleasant truth will they be persuaded to take their proper share in the hard and grinding struggle for existence the nation has still to face.

Recently Germany has set about a capital levy. Will the effort be a useful precedent for us? She tried a modified form of capital levy before the war and voted it by no means a success. As no specific details of the new scheme have yet been published useful criticism is at present impossible. It is, however, of interest to note that the German Government evidently fears the bad effect on trade and industry of abstracting masses of capital, since the proposals provide for payment over a term of years, and in effect are simply an income tax based on capital values. Italy also contemplated a capital levy and her Finance Minister, when introducing the Bill, stated that payment would be spread over a number of years, 'in order not to disturb the economic life of the country, nor to create crises in property or other values.' Very short consideration led to the Bill being dropped. In its place is promised a compulsory loan at a low rate of interest. But it must not be forgotten that England's position is unique; the whole of her prosperity depends on her export trade. Can she afford to risk a gigantic new financial experiment, with all the unsettlement of industry and the contraction of credit it must entail, just at a moment when America in the West and Japan in the East, bursting with their war-accumulated wealth, are making a supreme effort to supplant her in the markets of the world?

R. GEOFFREY ELLIS.

BLUESTOCKING:

Art. 4, A BYZANTINE

COMNENA,

ΑΝΝΑ

1. Nicephori Bryennii Commentarii. Bonn: Weber, 1836. 2. Michaelis Attaliota Historia. Bonn: Weber, 1853. 3. Annæ Comnena Porphyrogenitæ Alexias. Two vols. Leipzig: Teubner, 1884.

4. Princesses

Byzantines. Par Paul Adam. Paris:

Firmin-Didot, 1893.

5. Figures Byzantines. Par Charles Diehl. Deuxième Série. Paris: Armand Colin, 1908.

ONE of the differences between classical and modern literature is the rarity of female writers in the former and their frequency in the latter. While we have lady historians and poets in considerable numbers, while the fair sex has greatly distinguished itself in fiction, including that branch of it which is called modern journalism, ancient Greek letters contain the names of few celebrated women except Sappho, Myrtis and Corinna, the competitors of Pindar; Erinna, whose poetic fancy her mother strove to restrain by chaining her to her neglected spinning-wheel; and Elephantis, whose poetry was considered too realistic for display upon drawing-room tables. Novels were in those days chiefly written by bishops—a class of men not now usually associated with light literature. In Latin literature, although Juvenal has drawn a picture of the learned lady weighing in the critical balance the respective claims of Homer and Virgil, the poem attributed to Sulpicia is almost the sole surviving example of female composition. It has been reserved for Byzantine literature to present us with the rare phenomenon of a first-class lady historian-firstclass, that is to say, according to the standards of that day-in the person of the Imperial Princess, Anna Comnena, a writer better known to the general public than are most Byzantine authors owing to the fact that Sir Walter Scott introduced her as one of the characters in 'Count Robert of Paris,' and based one of the chief episodes of that novel upon a historical event recorded in her life of her father.

Since Scott's time, novelists and dramatists have done something to popularise Byzantine history. Neale, in his

Theodora Phranza,' daughter of the last Byzantine historian, has described the capture of Constantinople by the Turks; Sardou produced on the stage a far more famous Theodora, the consort of Justinian, whom Prokopios so virulently besmirched in his 'Secret History.' Mr Frederic Harrison has portrayed in Theophano' the ambitious and unscrupulous wife and widow of the Emperors Romanos II and Nikephoros Phokas. Jean Lombard in 'Byzance' depicted, with immense erudition, the games and ceremonial of the Imperial city and court in the time of the Iconoclast Emperor, Constantine V Copronymus, and endeavoured to solve the Balkan question by marrying and placing on the throne the Slav Oupravda and the Greek Eustokkia; while Marion Crawford gave us in Arethusa' a story from a much later period, the year 1376, based upon the struggle at the Court of John V between the Venetian adventurer, Carlo Zeno, and the Genoese, for the possession of the isle of Tenedos, the key of the Dardanelles.

Anna Comnena was born in 1083 at an interesting moment in the history not only of the Greek Empire, but of Christendom. It was the time when the Mediæval West and the Medieval East first met; when the Normans, after their recent conquest of England and Southern Italy, first crossed the Adriatic and Ionian seas to attack the Greek Empire, soon to be followed by the hosts of the First Crusade. Just as, with the accession of William the Conqueror fifteen years earlier, a new order of things had begun in Northern Europe, so with the accession of her father, the Emperor Alexios Į Comnenus, in 1081, two years before her birth, a new era, and practically a new dynasty-though Alexios was not the first of the family to seize the throne-had begun at Byzantium. From 1025, the end of the long and glorious reign of Basil II, whom the Greeks of to-day still admire as the 'Bulgar-slayer,' the destroyer of the first Bulgarian Empire on those selfsame battlefields of Macedonia where ex-King Constantine defeated the Bulgarians in the second Balkan war of 1913, the Byzantine throne had been occupied by no less than twelve sovereigns, whose consecutive reigns filled a period scarcely longer than that embraced by the single reign

of the great Basil. After the death of his brother and successor, Constantine VIII, there began a period of palace intrigues and female influence, for Constantine's two mature daughters, Zoé and Theodora, assigned the throne to whomsoever they chose; and the successive marriages of the elderly Zoé furnished Psellos with a chronique scandaleuse of the Imperial Court and boudoir, and MM. Schlumberger and Diehl with their brilliant modern paraphrases of the contemporary writer. When, with the death of Theodora, the Macedonian dynasty came to an end in the person of its last representative, revolution succeeded revolution. Every general of aristocratic birth was justified in believing that he carried in his baggage the red boots which were the peculiar mark of the Imperial dignity; and a female regency enabled the Empress Eudokia to bestow the Empire with her hand. At last, the ablest and astutest of the Byzantine commanders, Alexios Comnenus, deposed the feeble old voluptuary, Nikephoros Botaneiates, whose Slavonic ministers had discredited his authority by their barbarous' pronunciation and foreign origin, and placed himself and his descendants upon the throne for one hundred years.

.

These internal dissensions had naturally injured the external prestige of the Empire and contracted its frontiers. It was then that there came the final separation between the Eastern and the Western Churches; it was then, too, that, by the loss of Bari, Brindisi, and Otranto, the Byzantine Empire forfeited its last Italian possessions. Meanwhile, the advance of the Seljuk Turks in Asia Minor had pushed back the Greek frontier in a second continent close to the capital; and Anna Comnena declares that, on her father's accession, 'the Bosphorus was the eastern, and Adrianople the western, limit of the Greek sceptre.' Alexios, she proudly adds, 'widened the circle of the Empire, and made the Adriatic its western, the Euphrates and the Tigris its eastern, border' ('Alexias, i, 214-215).

Yet, as she truly says, her father had to contend all the time against enormous difficulties, alike domestic and foreign. At the outset of his reign, his throne was surrounded with possible pretenders. Both his immediate predecessors were alive, although the one was a bishop,

the other in a monastery, besides four sons of dethroned Emperors who had received the Imperial title during their fathers' reigns, and several persons who had endeavoured unsuccessfully to seize and keep the crown. There were constant conspiracies against Alexios so long as he sat on the throne, while the eternal theological questions, which were the favourite mental distraction of Byzantium, caused him constant anxiety; for there, as in the Balkans to-day, theology and politics were inextricably mingled. From abroad there came, too, the menace of invasion on all sides- from the wild tribes of the Patzinaks and Cumans on the north, from the Normans on the west, from the Turks on the east. And, worse than all, the unhappy Alexios was suddenly called upon to cope with the hurricane of the First Crusade, and to find his Empire overrun by swarms of fierce warriors, whose motives he suspected and whose intentions he judged from their acts to be predatory.

Alexios owed his crown to a successful insurrection; but he was no vulgar upstart. He belonged to a rich family of Paphlagonia, where the Comneni held property at Kastamon, the modern Kastamouni, the place known in contemporary history as the exile for nearly thirty years of the late Mirdite Prince, Prenk Bib Doda. The Comneni had first come into prominence about a century earlier under Basil II; and one of the clan, the distinguished general, Isaac Comnenus, had occupied the throne from 1057 to 1059. Anna's father was this man's nephew, and, in spite of his uncle's brief reign, the real founder of the dynasty. For the Emperor Isaac, in a a moment of discouragement and disillusionment, not only abdicated but failed to induce his brother John, the father of Alexios, to accept the heavy burden of the crown. It was not, however, to his timorous and unambitious father, but to his energetic mother, Anna Dalassene, that Alexios owed his success. She was resolved that her son should be Emperor, and during four intervening reigns, she was waiting and intriguing for the diadem which her husband had allowed to go out of his family. A great lady herself, the daughter of an eminent official and soldier, whose skill in never failing to kill his man had earned him the nickname of Charon,' she belonged, like the Comneni, to a powerful Vol. 233.-No. 462.

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