Thoughts on Antiquity, Patristics, putting things online, information access, and more
Great news – Behn’s Das Mithrasheiligtum zu Dieberg, De Gruyter (1928) has arrived. Here’s an image of the title page as proof! The discovery of the Mithraeum at Dieberg was something of a watershed. I don’t know if there were monographs dedicated to individual Mithraea before then, but it set a pattern for such monographs […]
I’ve never actually owned a printed copy of Manfred Clauss’ The Roman cult of Mithras, which is the standard introduction to the subject. I’ve made photocopies of bits of it. Latterly I found online somewhere a PDF of the whole thing. But I’ve never had a copy. Well, last week I cracked and bought one. […]
I’ve started to look at the material on the earliest Mithraic monuments. This is frustrating, because of what I know is online and cannot see! Thus I cannot see pp.34-35 of Beck on Mithraism, even though I know it is online. If you can, and feel like sending me some screen grabs, I would be […]
I apologise to my non-techie readers. But this issue cost me a couple of hours of my life, and I can’t find anything about it on the web. So I feel morally obliged to write something. Yesterday a kind reader drew my attention to some mysterious behaviour in the new Mithras pages. Lines that contained […]
I’ve just added a page to my new Mithras site for CIMRM 1083. This monument is perhaps the most complicated and well-preserved example of a carving of Mithras killing the bull. It shows all sorts of events from his (unknown) mythology in side panels. In other words, it’s a gem. Vermaseren states that just about […]
I’ve continued to work on the new site about the Roman cult of Mithras. I’ve added some more monuments to the page of selected monuments. Butr today I went through the section on the main page about initiation into the mysteries, and looked up all the material and checked it. The results were not that […]
For the last week or so, I have been adding extra material to the new Mithras site from inscriptions and monuments. I’ve been concentrating on the section on British monuments in Vermaseren’s CIMRM (collection of Mithraic monuments). It’s been really quite interesting, ferretting around in Google Books trying to find this article or that book, […]
I spent some time yesterday hunting for volume 4 of Archaeologia Aeliana, published in 1846. This may contain an account of the discovery of the Rudchester Mithraeum, and so I wanted to read it. Sadly Google Books is really bad at handling series. Archive.org generally is better, but I couldn’t find that specific volume. Rather […]
I’ve been lying on the sofa, reading Aelian’s Varia Historia. I’ve just read the anecdote in which Lais boasts to Socrates that she could lure away all of Socrates’ followers if she wished, while Socrates could not possibly induce any of Lais’ admirers to behave philosophically. Socrates acknowledged the truth of this, and replied that this was […]
It seems that I have access to L’annee epigraphique through JSTOR. This is convenient, although searching 50 years of issues for material about Mithras may take some time. Rather less convenient is that each issue is divided into a bunch of separate PDF’s. This makes searching quite a bit harder, if I have to download […]