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edition only f r o m S t e i n w e n t e r ' s c o m m e n t a r y I.e. Out of t h e rieh contents of t h e collection n o t e w o r t h y is a sea f r i g h t agreement in which t h e freighter promises his p a r t n e r to bring himself and his σκεύη μετά καλοϋ χωρίς θεοϋ βίας t o Antinoupolis (cf. m y Law2
383).
У. M a r t i n , Letter of Recommandation for three Monks (JEA 40 [1954] 74—75).
Neither t h e i d e n t i t y nor t h e s t a t u s of the sender a n d the reci-pient can be fully ascertained. There is no positive a r g u m e n t for N i c o l e ' s view t h a t J o h a n n e s was an official of t h e cursus publicus. On γραμματηφόρος in v . 2 cf. m y Law2 683.
H . Z i l l i a c u s , The Stolen Anchor (ts.tr. f r o m Arctos, Acta Philologica Fennica Nova series vol. I [1954] 199—208).
T h e complaint in this Bodleian d o c u m e n t catalogued as Ms. Gr. Class, c. 42 (P.) is w r i t t í n b y a certain Timotheus acting on be-half of t h e corporation of monks or t h e m o n a s t e r y in A n k y r o n po-lis; he himself being a m m b e r of t h e corporation. T h e subject of the complaint is robberies m a d e b y some soldiers a n d t h e request is w r i t t e n t o a certain Heron, addressed as πάτρων. This m a y a t f i r s t h a n d suggest t h e land-lord of a large estate in which the mo-n a s t e r y was situated amo-nd who guaramo-nteed the m o mo-n k s his protectiomo-n.
T h e complaint concerns two robberies, possibly connected one w i t h a n o t h e r . T h e f i r s t p a r t of the letter (1. Ί — 1 7 ) tells about t h e soldier Paulus having stolen t h e anchor f r o m t h e brothers. H e obviously did it as reprisals for an unsettled debt of t h e deacon H o r u s (acting on behalf·of the m o n a s t e r y ? ) . I t is understood t h a t t h e debt of 24.00 m y r i a d s (of denars) did not correspond to the value of the anchor. In this connection t h e writer refers to an autho-r i t a t i v e p autho-r o n o u n c e m e n t of his supeautho-rioautho-r, t h e p autho-r e s b y t e autho-r Oiantinos, concerning t h e aforesaid debt and he stresses t h a t t h e procurator did not t a k e or lay claim t o more t h a n half t h e s u m .
I n t h e l a t t e r p a r t of t h e letter (1. 17—23) Timotheus gives a re-p o r t on another re-plundering. Soldiers — or re-possibly t h e same one — have robbed t h e wine-boat belonging t o a certain K o m o n o f n o t less t h a n 200 big double- measures of wine, and he presents as witness a b r o t h e r acting as f i s h e r m a n to t h e m o n a s t e r y . I n this connection
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lie quotes a precedent: the same Heron had once before annulled the confiscation of Komons boat when it was detained in Heracle-opolis.
T. C. S k e a t , Two Byzantine Documents (repr. from The British Museum Quarterly X V I I I , No. 3 [September 1953] 71—73).
m
Constantine the Great after the defeat of his last remaining competitor Licinius, at the battle of Chrysopolis at 18 Sept. 324, issued to his newly acquired subjects in the Eastern provinces a lenghty proclamation, restoring to the Christians the losses of property which they had sustained in the persecutions, and enlar-ging upon the moral and material bankrupcy of the pagan system. The text of this extraordinary manifesto has long been familiar from its inclusion in Eusebius' Life of Constantine. Doubts have indeed repeatedly cast upon its authenticity, but the balance of critical opinion has remained in its favour, and the soundness of this verdict has now been confirmed by the brilliant discovery of Prof. A. H. M. J o n e s who, at the Patristic Congress at Oxford in Sept. 1951, announced that he had identified a fragment of a con-temporary copy of the proclamation in a papyrus of the British Museum. By a remarkable coincidence this fragment (Pap. 878 verso) preserves the very passage in which the Emperor speaks with this characteristic tortuous verbosity, of the British origin of what he regarded as his divine mission. Thus an unprepossessing scrap of pap. which has lain for many years unidentified in the Museum's collections, has suddenly proved to be an historic document mar-king a decisive stage in the adoption of Christianity as the official religion of the Boman Empire and the dawn of the Byzantine state. The second document, is written in Greek of a very different character over eleven hundred years later and not on papyrus but on its supplanter, paper. This is the original grant of privileges by Mahomet II, the conqueror of Constantinople, to the Genoese inha-bitants of its suburb Pera.
Ε. B a l o g h — P. E. K a h l e jr., Two Coptic Documents relating to Marriage (Aegyptus X X X I I I (2) [1953] 331—340).
It is surprising that in the large number of Coptic legal docu-ments only five contracts relating to marriage have so far become
