This handsomely printed volume has its origin in the continuation, by a group of editorial collaborators, of H.-G. Opitz's 1934/35 collection of documents ‘Urkunden zur Geschichte des arianischen Streits’. Each member of the group contributes: Hanns Christof Brennecke on Arius' last years, Uta Heil on Marcellus of Ancyra and the Romanum, Annette Von Stockhausen on a couple of Ps-Athanasiana and Angelika Wintjes on the version(s) of the documents of the Council of Serdica. Two essays on Athanasius in ancient translation, Christian Mueller on the Latin and Anahit Avagyan on the Armenian, head the volume, the last section of which consists of a budget of letters from Opitz to Eduard Schwartz. It was an excellent idea to publish these letters which are full of interest from the point of view of technical scholarship and offer a few glimpses of the academic and soldier who died in 1941. Schwartz's side of the correspondence was, alas!, lost in the war. Some notion of Opitz's debt to the senior master is given in these replies: thanks for offprints, notes on previous and plans for future scholarship. All the essays presented here are worth reading. Those of Mueller and Avagyan, by classifying and explaining the translations, break fresh ground (as do Von Stockhausen's also in a different way) while the other three take up moot points in recent research. The first of these concerns the date of Arius' death and whether Schwartz's chronology holds good which basically follows the ancient Church historians and allows for their double rehabilitation of Arius, fixing his death a few months after the second in 335. The editors of the Urkunde had argued, certainly with insufficient discussion, that the imperially, and only once, rehabilitated Arius died not long after the Council of Nicaea. Timothy Barnes countered with a robust defence of Schwartz in an essay in the Journal of Theological Studies in April 2009 and this is Brennecke's response: a detailed apology and reiteration. It makes for an instructive and ongoing tennis match; my money is on Barnes because the witness of the ancient historians is preserved. They may have been wrong but they were in a much better position to know what happened to Arius than any modern historian. The argument largely turns on something that sounds absurd: whether ‘Arius’ circle/Arius' associates' (literally ‘those around Arius’) implies Arius' being alive. Barnes is wrong to say it must, right to say that it is the expected implication. The essay on the Romanum revisits the question extensively considered by Markus Vinzent in his 2006 book Der Ursprung des Apostolikums im Urteil der kritischen Forschung which I reviewed this Journal lviii (2007), 338–9. Uta Heil rightly insists (against Vinzent) that in his affirmation of faith Marcellus was quoting something. Dubiously she suggests that it was a Roman symbol, based on traditional local teaching, formulated at a Roman council in 341 a return in all essentials to Kelly's view that it was the old Roman baptismal creed. Angelika Wintjes convincingly demonstrates that no documents of the Council of Serdica survive in their original Latin. Annette Von Stockhausen describes the Disputatio contra Arium suggesting, most implausibly, Cyril of Alexandria as its author; the Homilia de Semente is given its first modern edition its date lying, so she argues, sometime about the 350s. This is a useful collection of essays and makes a modest contribution to historical study even if little new is broached and no important issues feature. But there is, in truth, little new to say about a hugely researched, indeed hackneyed, controversy.