The Cestoi of the Christian scholar Julius Africanus, portions of which can be recovered from quotations in Byzantine sources, seem at first sight to be a promiscuous collation of military counsels, incantations, pharmacological recipes and culinary lore. Burkhard Muller surmises in the first article of this ponderous collection that poisoning and sorcery would have been as much in demand as martial stratagems in wars against the Sassanids of the third century, shrewdly adding that rhetoric and medicine were both agonistic practices in this epoch. Martin Wallraff opines that in the age of heterogeneous theologies it might not have been thought incongruous for a Christian to commend the use of magic; at the same time he admits that internal evidence would not lead us to attribute the Cestoi and the Chronica of Africanus to the same writer, and his comparison with Clement of Alexandria only throws into relief the sharp line that Clement drew between Christian and pagan usages. Commenting on a supposititious fragment of the Odyssey, Jurgen Hammerstadt concludes that his allusion to the baths of Severus Alexander does not reveal the provenance of the counterfeit lines but hints at a complimentary analogy between the baths and the literary edifice that the author has dedicated to his sovereign. Umberto Roberto, one of three contributors writing in English, introduces a series of articles on the transmission of the Cestoi by considering one specimen of late Byzantine florilegia, the Excerpta historica constantiniana. Laura Mecella devotes a long and erudite survey to the transmission of military matter from Africanus in four Byzantine collections; Carlo Scardino studies Anatolius, an author of the fourth century known in part from Arabic sources, as the first tradent of advice on husbandry from Africanus; Robert Rodgers furnishes an annotated list of excerpts from Africanus in the Constantinian Geoponica. Christophe Guignard, making a table of parallels between agricultural precepts in Africanus and in later witnesses, proves that he is by no means the only source of such material in Anatolius or in his imitator Cassianus Bassus. In a second piece he undertakes to prove at length that the Eclogues of Cassianus, published for the first time in the sixth century, were augmented by further extracts from Anatolius, then revised by an editor who had little to add and did not know Anatolius and redacted again to create the encyclopaedic Geoponica, in which all traces of the original authorship were erased. The final essay, by Anne McCabe, observes that in his instructions to horse-doctors Africanus does not eschew the technical vocabulary of hippiatric literature, though he is more ornate in his literary style. This is philology in the old high manner, not to be found nowadays except under the imprints of De Gruyter and Mohr Siebeck, for whose security in the present cataclysm all theologians are bound to pray.