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REVIEWS preters, tend extravagantly to claim finality for their views. The .cult of the complete Elizabethan Shakespeare or nothing) can be carried too far. The loss ·we suffer from ignorance of the contemporary circumstances conditioning his drama can be overstated. Despite the head-shaking of the scholars, the untutored but averagely sensitive modern mind can fairly adequately make the imaginative adjustment to a world other than its own. Moreover, "the matters important in the lives and opinions of the authors" and Hwhat are important to us" do still largely coinFide. As Professor Craig himself says, "Shakespeare's superiority seems in part at least to lie in his truth to life .as subsequent ages have determined it." RENDER UNTO CAESAR* CHARLES N. COCHRANE Interest in the career of Augustus 'Caesar is twofold. As a record of purely personal achievement, it ranks among the most spectacular of success-stories in human history. "Few men," as the author observes, "have entered upon a more apparently hopeless task than Augustus when, in his nineteenth year) he left Apollonia, and few have ever won a more triumphant success." But, with Augustus, the triumph of the man was at the same time the triumph of an idea, in the realization of which the world was t~ find peace, security, and happiness for at least two centuries. And so completely did the Emperor identify himself with this idea as to merit the apotheosis which, ~ccording to notions already acclim~­ tized in Rome by an authority no less respectable than Cicero, is reserved for the rulers and saviours of states; for his spirit was to be enshrined, along with that of the Eternal City itself, in the cult of Augustus and Rome. From this standpoint, his mentality was that of un etre tout ajait pol£tiquc, to study which is to raise, in an acute form, the problem of creative politics. To this problem the autho'r makes a notable contribution in his present book. Considered as an effort of descriptive analysis, the book leaves little to be desired. Certain statements may, indeed, be questioned. It is, for example, doubtful whether the project of moral and *Augustus, by John Buchan, Hodder and Stoughton (Musson), 1937. 261 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY· spiritual reformation is to be attributed to a period as early as that of 36-33 B.C., or whether the right of the Emperor to control the election of' magistrates through his powers of nomination and recommendation is in any way connected with his possession of tribunician power. But) in general) it may be agreed that the author has a wide and accurate knowledge of the available sourcematerial ; and he brings to his task not merely the resources of a finished literary craftsman) but a sense of historical values such as he had previously demonstrated in his Cromwell. The reader may therefore expect a lively and judicious presentation of the evidence·and he will not be disappointed; by this standard, the ·work fulfils every reasonable demand of biography. At the same time, it invites attention as an attempt to explore, at least in part, "the mind of a great man," On this score, the author leaves no doubt as to where he himself stands. "Augustus gave the Empire a sou], and he laboured also to correct the disharmonies of its body." The Augustan constitution remains "one of the major products of the human intelligence." This is to suggest that the achievement of Augustus was 'something more than ",to have saved' the world from disintegration;" it was "to remake and redirect it by a courageous realism and supreme powers of character and mind." The views thus expressed repre~ent a departure from those popularized by Mommsen, who saw n

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