Thoughts on Antiquity, Patristics, putting things online, information access, and more
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 […]
Back at work after two weeks illness, and I find myself suffering from the tiredness that goes with being less than fully fit after illness. But I’m still busy with this and that. I’ve been reading a little red hardback Loeb edition of Horace, and enjoying it more than I thought that I might. I’ve […]
From time to time I find myself in uncharted waters. The waters are always German, one finds; and the shouts that drift over the waters tend to things like “Hande hoch!” and “Internet Schwein!” and “Give us your money now, pig-dog”. These melancholy reflections were brought on by my discovery that the artefacts of the […]
Antiochus of Commagene built a strange, syncretistic temple on the hill at Nemrud Dag, in which he depicted various Greek and Persian gods as identical. Since one of the latter was Mithra, the monument appears in Vermaseren’s corpus of Mithraic monuments, under the impression that Persian Mithra is the same as Roman Mithras (which it […]
The Mithraeum at Sidon is lost. Indeed it was never discovered. Our knowledge of it rests on two things; a small collection of exquisite statuettes in Parian marble, now in the Louvre; and a letter by their finder, a certain Edmond Durighello. Durighello’s letter was published in the obscure journal, le Bosphorus egyptien. A year […]
I’m still working on the Roman cult of Mithras site. The what’s new page indicates roughly what I’ve been doing. The list of artefacts – monuments and inscriptions -(with photographs) is growing ever longer. The various scripts that I use to manage the site are getting more stable, and adding extra tweaks is getting easier too. The […]