In chapter III there is given an excellent description of the activities and business organizations of the Equites in their capacities both as public contractors (pp. 65-80) and as private business men (pp. 80-94), which throws much light on the sources of wealth and the financial methods of this class. The following chapter, on the governing aristocracy, attempts to classify the various types of the nobility and to illustrate each by a brief sketch of some one of its members. The attitude of the old and new nobility towards each other, the effects for good and for evil of the Greek culture on the various classes, and the frivolity and absence of the sense of responsibility among the younger public men are well brought out. The lively description of Cœlius, the talented, but scatter-brained, young friend and pupil of Cicero (pp. 127-33), is one of the most interesting passages of the book. After thus taking up the different classes of the Roman population, the author proceeds to discuss the more general aspects of the life of the day under such headings as “Marriage and the Roman Lady,” “Education of the Upper Classes,” “The Slave Population,” “The House of the Rich Man in Town and Country,” “Daily Life of the Well-to-do,” “Holidays and Public Amusements and Religion.” The treatment throughout is fresh and vivid, except in the chapter on public amusements, which is rather uninteresting. Under the subject of marriage, after a discussion of the decay of that institution and the increase of divorce and immorality, we are especially grateful for the story of the long and beautiful wedded life, as found in the so-called “Laudatio Turiæ,” and now told in full in English for the first time (pp. 158-67). There must have been many similar cases of domestic devotion and happiness, but they naturally pass unmentioned in the writings of the time, as they largely do in the literature of our own day. The discussion of Roman education is valuable because it explains the weak points of the system and the way in which these produced many of the moral shortcomings in the men of the day. The question of slavery is viewed from an unprejudiced standpoint. Its influence on the depopulation of the provinces is clearly brought out (pp. 206-10), but it is also shown that its economic effects in Italy were not altogether evil, and that slave labor by no means drove free labor from the market (pp. 213-22). The author holds with Wallon[8] and Seeck[9] that the unrestricted manumission of slaves had on the whole an injurious effect on Roman life and character. The Roman idea of religion, so puzzling to the average student, is nowhere more clearly explained than in the last chapter, and here as elsewhere the treatment is so simple and plain as well as scholarly, that no better book can be placed in the hands of a class. [“Social Life at Rome in the Age of Cicero.” W. Ward Fowler. The Macmillan Co. 1909. Pp. xiii, 362.] FOOTNOTES: [8] Histoire de l’Esclavage.