Thoughts on Antiquity, Patristics, putting things online, freedom of speech, information access, and more
Roger Beck’s collection of essays, Beck on Mithraism, has arrived at my local library and I have taken possession of it. It will be interesting to look at, although I find that it is difficult to concentrate on any project while I am working at full pressure in my day-job. I’m still working through Manfred [...]
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. [...]
The events at Timbuktoo have been on my mind in the last week, and probably those of anyone interested in manuscripts. As we all now know, the colonial territory now called Mali is divided on race lines between Arabs in the north, plus some Touareg in the desert, and negros in the south. When the Americans forced the colonial [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Just busy working on the Roman cult of Mithras pages. Adding comments using Discus is easy. Adding “like” buttons for Facebook or Google+, etc, is much harder than you might think! I spent a little time today on Picasa, the online photo sharing site. I searched for “Mithras” and added a comment with the CIMRM [...]