The only English piece in this collection is Galit Naga-Banas's thesis that the depiction of Sukkoth at S. Costanza remained unique in Rome because the city was resolved to supplant Jerusalem as a destination for pilgrims. The rest are in German. Boris Dunsch's laboured corrective to over-laboured theories about Paul's knowledge of the dramatists ignores Bruce Winter's attempt to weave the lost Thais of Menander into the argument of 1 Corinthians. The longest contribution is Christian Hornung's assiduous comparison of the language of papal letters and decrees in late antiquity with that of Roman secular legislation. Jan Stenger maintains that Chorikios's exposition of the pagan motifs in the church of St Stephen in Gaza is not primarily an exercise in syncretism, or even in flattering a patron, but the ‘individuelles Bildungskonzept’ of a man who reads the iconography of the pagan world through a Christian prism. Walberga Gersske traces the development of the chlamys from a soldier's garment to a dignified item of civic apparel, on which artists depicting Christ or the Apostles were free to improvise; Marie Schoefer appends a description of a physical chlamys. Gerhard Steigerwald, examining a mosaic from S. Maria Maggiore, concludes that Pharaoh's daughter is attired both as an empress and as a virgin, and must therefore be a cipher for Pulcheria, the virgin empress of the early fifth century. Pascal Weisman identifies Julian the Apostate in an Alexandrian diptych preserved in London, thus advancing equally sanguine claims for the legibility of Christian art.