Nowadays there are few periodicals like the Jahrbuch, in which four different languages are employed on a heterogeneous range of subjects. Benedikt Eckhardt's topic, the relation between initiation and feasting in the mystery cults, is familiar enough, but his conclusion that they may have had more in common with the eucharist is both new and cogently argued. Geert Roskam demonstrates that the garrulous martyr Apollonius, unhistorically supposed to have died under Commodus, would have been a deft interlocutor in a sophistic debate of the period, though his wit will have touched the pagans only through its ‘paraenetic’ effect on Christians. Oscar Dominquez learnedly reconstructs the original of a Christian epitaph which took the (not unusual) form of a Homeric cento; Klaus Rosen offers a comprehensive survey of the role of miracles in the Life of Martin and the exploitation of Frankish credulity by his hagiographers. The longest piece is Marco Aimone's inventory of the monuments of Pope Sixtus iii, who seems to him to have shown more originality than has been recognised by those who speak generically of a fifth-century renaissance in architecture. Rotraut Wisskirchen argues that early Byzantine mosaics in which carnivores live peaceably with their natural prey are representations of paradise, not of the Church, as early commentaries on Isaiah might suggest. Ioanna Spiliopoulou completes the volume with a study of the fusion of pagan and Christian motifs in gilded glassware dedicated to the martyred soldier Gereon. A fine hardback, but for how long will libraries bear the cost?