This is a useful compilation of extracts from the early Christian writers relating not to the death of Christ or even his crucifixion, but to the cross itself as an instrument and symbol. It terminates with Lactantius, though it omits his account of Constantine's vision before the Milvian bridge, which, in the light of Hippolytus' superimposition of the cross on the heavenly sign at Matthew xxiv.30 (p. xxix), would surely have offered a more natural culmination. The introduction carries us, with admirable lucidity, through the fanciful iconography of Barnabas, a new efflorescence of images and tropes in the Greek apologists, Tertullian's rejection of secular precedents and Origen's discovery of the cross as the scene of victory over Satan. Some readers will make their first acquaintance with Commodianus, the tract On Sinai and Zion and the pseudo-Hippolytan homily On the Pascha in this anthology. At the same time, it seems to me that, with only a little expense of labour, such readers could have received far more assistance in the perusal of these unfamiliar texts. Prieur rightly observes on p. xv that Peter's death is likened to that of Christ when he hears that he will stretch forth his hands against his will at John xxi.18; had he taken more account of Paul's conflation of crucifixion and hanging at Galatians iii.13, he could have added that the death of Judas at Matthew xxvii.5 is also a parody of his master's. He merely records, but does not explain, the appearance of the cross as a divisor between the fullness of God and the wisdom of the world in the Valentinian myth; his own summary of Origen's gloss on 1 Corinthians i.21–4 (p. xxxi) has put in his hand a key to this allegory, had he cared to apply it. In his annotations on the poem On the Pascha ascribed to Cyprian, he does not observe that the image of the cross as a tree whose branches spread to overshadow the whole world is derived from Daniel iv.12 by way of Mark iv.32, or that the fruit which loads its boughs after Christ's resurrection is a graft from the tree of life at Revelation xxii.2, with further watering from the Valentinian Gospel of truth, where the Saviour on his cross becomes the first fruits of the pleroma. On p. 197 his translation seems to me to disguise the subject of line 2: ‘Quem tulit hoc primo maturo semine lapsum/Concepit tellus’ means ‘him whom this [cross] bore first the earth received, after he had fallen with the ripening of the seed’, not ‘Là, une fois qu'il [sc. le Croix] fut tombé pace que la graine était mÛre, la terre le conçut’. It need hardly be said that accuracy and completeness are the chief virtues to be looked for in any volume of this kind.