In the past couple of decades, scholarship on Graeco–Roman religion has been dominated by an approach which emphasises the social function of religion rather than matters relating to emotion and belief (Part I below). There is much in the new approach which is enlightening, but for various reasons it should not be allowed to supersede the traditional or psychological approach completely (II). In particular I would like to argue in this paper that the phenomenon of cult for mortals in the Graeco-Roman world can only be understood through a combination of the two modern approaches, because the figure of the ideal benefactor, which I take to underlie cult for mortals, presumed both a concern for relationship structuring and an emotional response. Indeed, the ambiguous interface between the social plane and the psychological plane was fundamental to the success and persistence of such cult (III).

Cicero, like most of us, lived his life subject to certain rules of politeness. What he said and how he behaved were subtly shaped by the circumstances and expectations of the society in which he moved. This fact strikes us most forcefully perhaps in his correspondence, where we can discern at first hand the result of these pressures on aristocratic manners. And yet these letters necessarily challenge our interpretative skills. For we bring to them today views of politeness that may well be very different from those of Cicero himself. The potential for cross-cultural misunderstanding yawns wide.

In this article I would like to discuss two letters in particular which seem to me to have fallen victim to cross-cultural confusion: Fam. 5.8 from Cicero to M. Crassus and Fam. 15.5 from M. Cato to Cicero. In both cases, misinterpretation arises primarily, I believe, from the form of linguistic politeness used in them. Modern scholars, it is true, often show an awareness that Roman aristocrats possessed their own peculiar norms of politeness; but few have tried to examine these in detail or consider why they took the precise form that they did.

In this article I begin with an outline of the connection between theological concepts related to the person of the Gnostic Christian Saviour and the ritual practice of Gnostic Christian groups. After setting the scene in this general way, I look specifically at the Gospel of Philip, investigating the connection between the description of the rebirth of the Saviour at the Jordan and the rebirth of the Gnostic in the ritual of the bridal chamber.

The Nag Hammadi corpus, to which the Gospel of Philip belongs, contains many texts which may be identified as Gnostic Christian, partly because of the fact that, in these texts, the key figure of the Saviour or Revealer is identified as Jesus or Christ. The work that Jesus performs in the world for the Gnostics is revelation, for the most part, rather than redemption in the sense in which mainstream Christianity identified his activity. His revelation may involve imparting secret knowledge, especially during that time prior to his final ascent into the heavenly region of light (for those texts which are closely aligned with the mainstream Christian pattern of descent and several stages of ascent for Jesus), but it must be generally categorised as activity designed to awaken the Gnostic to the insight (gnosis) which this person already possesses.

The name of Guyet as an emendator will be known to those who use Professor Clausen's edition of Juvenal, e.g. on 6.65 and 632-3; 7.138; 8.6-8. From Professor Courtney's commentary (p. 62) they will learn that the notes of Guyet were published by M. de Marolles in his edition of 1658. The attentive reader will note also that between the first and the second printing of Clausen's edition the credit for deleting 8.6-8 was transferred from Jachmann to Guyet—a circumstance which in itself suggests that the rediscovery of Guyet's conjectures is of recent date. The serious student of the text of Juvenal may therefore be grateful for the following facts.

The MS L 28 of St John's College, Cambridge, contains a number of critical annotations on Juvenal from the pen of Jeremiah Markland. The existence of these notes has been known at least since the publication of Mayor's edition, in which many of them were published, although the prolixity and disorder characteristic of that edition make it hard to find them. At one time I thought that Ruperti had seen the manuscript, because he was aware of the conjecture aliena sumere vultum a facie (3.105-6), but with the help of Dusaulx I found that it was published in Markland's notes on Lysias (p.330 Reiske). Markland is commonly reckoned the greatest critic of the eighteenth century apart from Bentley, and one would have supposed that editors of Juvenal would have thought that the very dust of his writings was gold. In fact, however, these annotations have never been published in their entirety, and it seems time that they should be. Some of the textual proposals have been made independently by other scholars; some, to the best of my knowledge, have never been made by anyone else and now see the light for the first time. Some, as one would expect, are brilliant and incisive; others are strikingly bad. One must remember that these are the thoughts which passed through his mind as he was reading Juvenal in a very second-rate edition, and no doubt he jotted them down for future consideration. No one will think the less of a critic because his marginalia and anecdota contain material which later reflection would have rejected.