In a major study, “The Roman Army and the Roman Religious Year,” recently published in this journal (XLV [1952] 187–252), Professor Nock has presented a new interpretation of the character and purpose of the Feriale Duranum. It is hardly necessary at this short interval to repeat his conclusions, which seem to me quite convincing, but as a postscript to Nock's study, I should like to do three things. The first is to discuss the purpose of the military Feriale when it was established, as it probably was, by Augustus. The second is to consider the distribution of the occasions in the Feriale and hence to some extent their value as breaks in the soldier's routine. Finally, I shall examine three sections of the text which for one reason or another deserve close study.

In a study entitled Letter and Spirit in Jewish and Roman Law I suggested that the antithesis γράμμα καὶ πνεῦμα (Letter and Spirit) coined by Paul was the equivalent to the Greek antithesis ῥητὸν καὶ διάνοια, which was a commonplace in ancient Greek rhetoric. After this article was printed, I discovered a passage in Origen which confirms beyond all doubt the correctness of my conjecture. This statement is found in his refutations of an argument advanced by Celsus. This pagan philosopher charged that there were many contradictions between the Law and the New Dispensation, which demanded an explanation. For instance, “Why did he give them laws by Moses that they were to become rich and powerful… Yet his son, the man of Nazareth, gives contradictory laws, saying that a man cannot come forward to the Father if he is rich or loves power.”

The study of Isidore falls roughly into three periods, mediaeval, when the text was used principally for catenae and florilegia, sixteenth-and-seventeenth-century, when it was published and a rudimentary historical account of Isidore worked out from it and from the better-known testimonia, and modern. Of the modern period the outstanding works have been H. Niemeyer's account of Isidore's life and writings, Capo's, Turner's and Lake's studies establishing the relationships of the major western MSS, and the recent work of Dom Andreas Schmid, Die Christologie Isidors von Pelusium, which, by its account of the history of the text, marks a new period in the study. Besides these works, the past fifty years have seen considerable collection of parallels between Isidore's letters and passages in classical or early Christian authors, as well as several detailed discussions of the content of the letters. These discussions have uniformly been undistinguished expositions of the obvious, and the largest collection of parallels, that of L. Bayer, merited the crushing review it was given by K. Fuhr and has since been considerably supplemented by articles which individually, however, are minor.