Cultural

Under the far-sighted rule of the Five Good Emperors, writes Anthony Birley, the Roman world enjoyed a period of unexampled prosperity and peace.

Ross Watson introduces Prince Eugene of Savoy; Marlborough’s companion in arms was not only a great soldier but also one of the most important patrons and collectors of his day; a modest man with a deep love of painting and architecture inspired by a strongly individual taste.

Charles Chevenix Trench explains how, from the reign of William the Conqueror until the beginning of the nineteenth century, the poacher was restrained by savage penal laws.

A characteristic product of eighteenth-century liberalism, the twenty-eight volumes of French Encyclopedia are here reviewed and reassessed by John Lough.

Anthony Bryer describes how, from 1453 to 1923 the dream of a recaptured Byzantium and a resurrected Byzantine Empire continued to haunt the Greek imagination.

For nearly four hundred years the “Peaceful and Tranquil City” was the administrative centre of Japan, writes George Woodcock, and for more than a thousand years remained the home of the Japanese Emperors.

Alan Birch visits mid-nineteenth century Sydney, a city formally incorporated in 1842 after fifty-four years of rapid and dramatic development.

G.R. Potter describe show, during the 15th and 16th centuries the scholarship of the humanists and theologians was fused at Basel into something characteristically Swiss.

Possibly some innate realism prevented the Mesopotamians from seeing death other than objectively. But the Epic of Gilgamesh remains an eloquent witness to the poignancy of their interrogation of the meaning of human life and destiny. S.G.F. Brandon.

Much of the history of any English district is recorded in its farmhouses. This, writes W.G. Hoskins, is particularly true of Devon; where, at some places, “farming has been carried out without a break since Romano-British times,” and possibly from the prehistoric period.