Investigation of the Agora area at Dura was begun in 1931, and continued in the following seasons of work. It is now possible to trace in some detail the history of the site, which developed from an open square only partly enclosed by simple market buildings into a complex of public and private structures. From one of the latter, a private house built in the late second century in the northwest part of the area (G5 H), came the inscription which is the subject of the present paper.

There is a passage in Xenophon's pamphlet on the Constitution of Sparta which has given rise to puzzlement and consequent bad criticism. An obscure German dissertation talks of its corruption and Marchant brackets it in his edition. I hope to show that it is perfectly explicable and that light is thrown upon it by a strange story in Herodotos.

Every diligent reader of ancient literature has encountered, sooner or later, evidences of belief in teleology, the doctrine of the deliberate adaptation of the phenomena of organic life (and even of those of the inorganic celestial system) to some definite end or purpose, as opposed, on the one hand, to the effects of blind chance, and, on the other, to those of a merely automatic survival of the fittest and the elimination of the unfit. Further, from reflection upon phenomena susceptible of teleological explanation, thinkers, both classical and oriental, alike ancient and modern, have not unnaturally passed to a belief that the existence of orderly or purposeful creations necessarily demands the existence of an ordering and purposing Creator.

During the last twenty or thirty years evidence has been rapidly accumulating to prove that the codex was in general use for books at a much earlier time than was formerly supposed. The definite testimony of Martial and others on the subject could be misinterpreted, discounted, or overlooked so long as there was no clear corroborating archaeological evidence. Papyrus and the roll had taken firm hold upon the classicistic imaginations of modern students of ancient literatures, especially after the nineteenth-century discoveries of papyri in Egypt, and no one dreamed that the New Testament documents could have been written originally on anything but papyrus sheets and papyrus rolls.

‘The foundation in the thirteenth century of the two great orders of Franciscans and Dominicans, the latter par excellence the ordo praedicatorum, gave an enormous impulse to preaching.’ It was largely responsible for the abundant production of sermons and arts of sermon-making in the centuries that follow. More than two hundred manuscripts of the period from 1200 to 1500 contain arts of preaching, artes praedicandi. Some have been traditionally associated with the names of certain great Churchmen and Schoolmen, St. Bonaventure, St. Thomas, Albert the Great; we have the names of nineteen authors in the thirteenth century, thirty-six in the fourteenth, twenty-seven in the fifteenth, and as many more manuscripts are anonymous. A glance at Professor Caplan's list of authors on pages 38, 39, of his Hand-List will show that the great majority of known authors were members of an Order.

Fifteen years ago when some two million Americans of Norwegian ancestry were celebrating the centennial of the first migration from Norway to America I published in these pages an account of the Quaker antecedents of the famous voyage of the sloop Restaurationen. From English, Norwegian and American sources it was possible to recount the story of a group of Norwegian prisoners of war in prison ships on the Thames who were befriended and converted by English Quakers and returned home in 1814 to Stavanger and elsewhere to establish Quaker meetings. One of these men, Lars Larsen, with men of like independence, such as Cleng Peersen who preceded him and Knud Andersen Slogvig who followed, organized an escape from the clerical oppressions in Norway, purchased a small ship, and landing in New York in October 1825, proceeded inland to found in western New York the first of many Norwegian settlements in the United States. The following scattered data are now collected to indicate some earlier contacts between the English Quakers and Norway.

This invocation of the ‘soul gods’ or ‘divine souls’ to receive Terentius, and the material which Welles has collected in illustration of it, may have a bearing on the ordo commendationis animae. The form of the Rituale Romanum, reprinted in each volume of the Breviary, includes one prayer with these words

Suscipiat eum sanctus Michael Archangelus Dei … Veniant illi obviam sancti Angeli Dei et perducant eum in civitatem caelestem Jerusalem. Suscipiat eum beatus Petrus Apostolus, cui a Deo claves regni caelestis traditae sunt. Adjuvet eum sanctus Paulus Apostolus.…

It is now nearly forty years ago that two scholars independently drew attention to Ambrosiaster's attacks on the paganism of his age. Cumont in a brilliant article, La polémique de l'Ambrosiaster contre les paiens, analyzed and discussed Quaestio CXIIII, Adversus paganos, and Quaestio CXV, De fato, of the writer whose identity must still be regarded as uncertain. The purpose of Souter's admirable monograph, A study of Ambrosiaster, was quite different. Primarily he was concerned to prove once and for all that the pseudo-Augustinian Quaestiones veteris et novi testamenti CXXVII were composed by the same author as the highly individual commentary on the thirteen epistles of St. Paul included among the works of Ambrose. The common authorship of the two works is now universally accepted. Souter's book was also a preliminary study for his definitive edition of the Quaestiones which appeared some years later in the Vienna Corpus.

I am much inclined to agree with Professor Campbell Bonner that ῥητολογἰας in Tatian, adu. Graec. 40, is a ghost-word, and think his emendation, ἀρεταλογίας, a plausible one.

The Pueblo Indians are a group of native American tribes living on the dry mesas of New Mexico and Arizona. They have had a long residence in the same area, perhaps fifteen hundred years, during which time their culture has taken on its characteristic features. Under the pressure of raids by neighboring nomadic tribes who were doubtless attracted by the promise of a rich booty in harvested grain and other foods, the Pueblos developed the form of dwelling which is still typical of them. The present structures, built from one to five stories high, terraced from front to back, should be thought of rather as reminders of habits learned in the distant past when protection from such enemy attack was the chief desideratum in village-building than simply as the survival of a cliff-dwelling stage. There was no single and exclusively cliff-dwelling period.

In the extant writings of certain of the Church Fathers there are some interesting references to a man named Thallus. At the present time, beyond what can be inferred from these early Christian references, nothing is certainly known about him. In recent years, however, attempts have been made to fix the identity of this Thallus. Because of its potential significance for the early history of the gospel tradition, one of these attempts has become rather popular. Much of the acclaim over this suggested identification would seem to be based on a confusion between what has recently been said about Thallus and what is actually known about him from the early Christian references. Consequently, numerous errors of fact and fancy have arisen. It is the purpose of this paper to investigate, first, what is actually known about the Thallus referred to by the Church Fathers, and second, the validity of the identification currently proposed.

The town of Northampton was settled in 1654, by pioneers coming up the valley from Connecticut. The physical tasks of the first years kept them from forming a church, but in 1659 they called Eleazar Mather to be their parson, who came with his bride Esther, daughter of the Reverend John Warham of Windsor. Mathers were either long or very short lived; Eleazar died on July 24, 1669, leaving Esther a widow of twenty-five, with three children and an estate of £524, of which £60 were in books, and Northampton went in search of a new pastor. In the forthright New England of the seventeenth century there was a method in such situations so frequently observed that it might almost be called a custom. When a minister died, after a town had invested in him to the extent of land and a house, and the widow was of marriageable age, they summoned a young bachelor to the pulpit. A few months after Eleazar's death, Solomon Stoddard, eight years out of Harvard, came by invitation to exhibit a sample of his preaching; on March 18, 1670, he married Esther Mather. She bore him twelve children and in her old age, though very “lame of the Sciatica,” she still was spinning “at the Linen-wheel”; she outlived her husband by seven years and died in 1736 at the age of ninety-two.

A seafaring people gifted with a lively imagination will not fail to enrich its language with figures suggested by the moods of the sea and by the hardships and dangers of the sailor's calling. Hence it is a commonplace to say that the literature of Greece abounds in brilliant and memorable similes and metaphors drawn from this inexhaustible source, as also in well-worn expressions whose marine origin is only dimly felt. Because of a religious coloring that it gradually acquired, one of these figures may be appropriately discussed here; the more so because as we examine its history, it may be possible to correct a certain tendency to derive this religious tone from proximate rather than ultimate sources.

Since the work of Zielinski and Gothein in the early years of this century, it has been clear that the medieval and modern Catholic teaching of the seven cardinal sins, sometimes called the deadly sins, had a Hellenistic astrological origin. The details of that provenance, however, are still vague, and it is my purpose to add some further information tending to clarify the complex problems of origins. The material here presented will strengthen what must be a nebulous, though very probable, hypothesis. The problem, however, is not so much to show the exact origin of the concept, as it is to refute certain misleading orthodox theories of origin.

The article in the April, 1941 number of the REVIEW on The Epitaph of Julius Terentius by C. B. Welles, and the following Postscript by A. D. Nock, are of great interest for their presentation of Graeco-Roman thought on the state of departed souls. The writer would note some scanty correspondences from the Oriental field.

The peculiarities of the Exultet in the South-Italian Church have often been the subject of scholarly investigation. Quite recently, several new studies have been devoted to this famous and indeed very beautiful liturgical prose hymn which was sung on the Saturday of Holy Week. Among these peculiarities, the practice, for example, of writing the hymn on a long scroll and of embellishing the text with illuminations was observed nowhere but in Southern Italy. This scroll, as is well known, was intended to fall more and more over the ambo so that, as the archdeacon sang the text, the congregation could at the same time gaze at the illustrations to the respective parts of the prayer. Word and illustration thus supported each other in a singular way.

In 1538 Melchior Sessa published at Venice an edition of the New Testament in Greek. It was printed by Ioannes Antonius de Sabio, and it consists of two volumes. About twelve years ago Dr. J. Rendel Harris of Birmingham gave the present writer the first volume of this work. He bought it of a dealer in old books, but he did not remember when or where he had acquired it. After many vain attempts to find Volume II I saw it listed in the catalogue of Bernhard Liebisch of Leipzig in the summer of 1939. I ordered it at once and received it before the outbreak of the war.