The appearance of a new volume of Dio Chrysostom in the Loeb Classical Library seems to be an appropriate occasion to discuss a curious problem in the first oration addressed to the people of Tarsus. It has puzzled the translator, Professor H. Lamar Crosby, and there was little to help him in the work done by earlier students of Dio. The passages that bear most directly upon the point are not to be found in the books and articles that deal with the orator, and it is only because the demands of other studies have led me to explore a number of patristic texts that I am able to go somewhat beyond previous writers in explaining an odd and unrefreshing phenomenon of ancient manners.

In The Gospel according to St. Luke the late Professor Creed accepted the view of Welhausen and Meyer that the original version of Mark was intended to close with the words ἐϕοβοῦντο γάρ. The view avoids the difficulty of explaining the fact that neither Matthew nor Luke knows any other ending; it is certainly hard to see how a document could have gained so wide a circulation that the authors of these two Gospels knew it, and yet had at some previous date been so little known that the only surviving copy had lost its original ending.

It is my intention to discuss one question only, and not all the problems which are connected with the group of documents published as ‘The Adler Papyri’ by Mr. E. N. Adler together with his collaborators, the late Professor F. Ll. Griffith, Dr. F. M. Heichelheim and Mr. J. G. Tait in 1939. This question is: Are there any traces of Jewish religious influence to be found in the Adler Archive, as has been suggested by the editors?

Nineteenth century students strongly tended to study mythology apart from associated rituals (and indeed apart from the life of the people generally). Myths were held to be symbolic descriptions of phenomena of nature. One prominent school, in fact, tried to find an astral basis for all mythic tales. Others, among whom Andrew Lang was prominent, saw in the myth a kind of primitive scientific theory. Mythology answered the insistent human How? and Why? How and why was the world made? How and why were living creatures brought into being? Why, if there was life must there be death? To early psychoanalysts such as Abraham and Rank myths were “group phantasies,” wish-fulfillments for a society strictly analogous to the dream and day-dream of individuals. Mythology for these psychoanalysts was also a symbolic structure par excellence, but the symbolism which required interpretation was primarily a sex symbolism which was postulated as universal and all-pervasive. Reik recognized a connection between rite and myth, and he, with Freud, verbally agreed to Robertson Smith's proposition that mythology was mainly a description of ritual. To the psychoanalysts, however, mythology was essentially (so far as what they did with it is concerned) societal phantasy material which reflected impulse repression. There was no attempt to discover the practical function of mythology in the daily behaviors of the members of a society nor to demonstrate specific interactions of mythology and ceremonials.

In this Journal, Vol. XXXIV, 1941, page 79, Mr. Welles published with a scholarly commentary the interesting epitaph of the tribune Terentius from Dura. The place in which it was found, in a private house, presents difficulties to him. He supposes that the stone was set into the epistyle and smashed when falling down from it and takes great pains to prove that Terentius was not buried in the house. This is evident. I think the solution is very simple. Only the first seven lines and the first half of the eighth are incised, from the word θεαί the letters are painted in red. It is a well-known ancient custom to paint the letters in order to guide the stone-cutter in his work.

In an article entitled “The Role of Loki in Germanic Mythology” published in this Review, the late F. Stanton Cawley, acting upon a suggestion made in a Harvard dissertation of 1938 by Dean Gilbert T. Hoag of Kenyon College, attempted to show that þjazi, the name of the giant who in an Old Norse myth carries off Iðunn and her apples, could be etymologically connected with Tvaṣṭṛ, the name of one of the chief Vedic gods. The philological reasoning which led him to this conclusion he published also in slightly more extended form, and for a rather larger public, in Paul & Braune's Beiträge under the heading of “Loki und , ein bisher unbekannter indogermanischer Gott.” The conclusion of these studies was stated as follows: “An Indo-European myth of the theft of the divine drink by the god , of the culture-hero type, was transmitted in India and in Germanic territory to the literary period.