Thoughts on Antiquity, Patristics, putting things online, freedom of speech, information access, and more
I’ve been looking at some of the entries for Syria in the CIMRM, the collection of all Mithraic monuments and inscriptions. In particular the two altars at Sia have drawn my attention. One is easy enough to deal with — I have a photo from the original publication, plus another from the web. But the [...]
Few of us will be aware that there are good quality images of past sale objects on the website of Christie’s, the fine art dealers. But an accident took me there this evening, and I found half a dozen objects relating to Mithras, which had been sold over the last 20 years. There were photographs [...]
I did a little more on the Mithras pages. I was able to identify one of the images that I found online and create a CIMRM page for it. The section in CIMRM on material from Alba Iulia is not very easy to work with, and I was reduced to looking through the limited number [...]
Last Saturday I was in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, browsing idly the Roman exhibits. Suddenly I realised that I was looking at a set of small finds, all of Empire-period deities; and I started looking much more closely to see if there was a representation of Mithras. And so there was! Sadly I had no [...]
I spent some time this evening writing a page on the Mithraeum discovered at Lugo (ancient “Lucus Augusti” in Spain) in 2003. Found a few images online, mostly of the dig, but also of a rather splendid granite altar, about 3 feet tall. It was slightly frustrated to discover that the publication of the find [...]
Last night I spent hunched over a hot scanner, transforming a text book from paper into a PDF. My first reason for doing so is that it is simply more accessible in that format. The library charges $8 to borrow it, and lends it to me for a fortnight. That isn’t long enough to do [...]
The Pater Patratus was the title of one of the priests known as fetiales, whose duties concerned treaties with other cities. Nonius Marcellus quotes a passage from Varro, De vita populi Romana, book 3, concerning the fetiales. FAETIALES apud veteres Romanos erant, qui sancto legatorum officio ab his, qui adversum populum Romanum vi aut rapinis [...]
At the moment I am looking at a mysterious Roman title, the Pater Patratus, of uncertain meaning. Yesterday I looked at the passage in Livy which gives us most information about it. Today I decided to look at inscriptional evidence. A search of the Clauss-Slaby database reveals only three inscriptions which use the title of “Pater Patratus”, [...]
Yesterday I noted that the title pater patratus appears in some inscriptions connected with the cult of Mithras. All these inscriptions fall between 100-400 A.D. But the title is an ancient one, and we read of it as the title of the spokesman of a group of priests who acted rather like medieval heralds, but [...]
Among the nonsense that circulates on the web is an interesting claim, which may be found in the old online Catholic Encyclopedia, and spread into atheist literature via the medium of Joseph Wheless’ Forgery in Christianity.. It is perhaps most accessible today by means of the Christ Conspiracy by a certain Acharya S., a poor woman [...]