The fragment which is the subject of the present article contains Romans 4:23 ([ἐγ]ράϕη) — 5:3 (θλίψις) on the recto side and 5:8 ([ἡ)]μῶν) — 13 (ἁμαρ[τία]2) on the verso side of the leaf. It is the property of Dr. Leland C. Wyman of Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, who bought it in Cairo on July 3, 1950. The dealer from whom it was purchased said that the fragment was brought to him by some Arabs; and that it was found at Fusṭâṭ, which lay a little to the northeast of the modern Old Cairo (Maṣr el-Qadîmeh).

I recently became aware that I had for a long time entertained certain preconceptions about the way in which Presocratic thinkers saw the world, without ever having seriously considered the evidence on which my belief was based. This I have now tried to do, with the results which are set forth in this paper. Since in any case it will deal, in a fairly general way, with problems concerning the interaction of philosophical and religious thought in early Greece, I hope it will have a certain interest, whether or not its readers agree with the thesis put forward. The perennial fascination of that topic has been enhanced in recent years by the discussion provoked by Werner Jaeger's book on The Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers, from which I take this sentence as a kind of text for my own reflections: “Though philosophy means death to the old gods, it is itself religion.”

The Homeric Hymn to Demeter is the earliest and, for us, the single most important literary record of the Eleusinian Mysteries. These Mysteries were for a thousand years one of the crowning glories of Athens, the pride of her statesmen, poets, and orators, a focal point of piety which though intimately civic was at the same time panhellenic. The constant references to the cult in both prose and poetry attest its popularity and singular importance. Yet it remains a curious fact that in all Athenian literature, at least until Hellenistic times, there is no direct mention of the Homeric Hymn and scarcely anything which can reasonably be identified even as a reminiscence or echo of it. Apparently the Hymn was allowed to fall into almost total oblivion. Why this should have happened is a question that seems to merit some consideration. By the very nature of the problem the evidence is inadequate to assure definite conclusions, but it is hoped that the solution proposed, though necessarily tentative, may add somewhat to our understanding of an obscure but interesting period in the religious history of Athens.

On two previous occasions I tried to show how neither Plato nor Aristotle held that God was unknowable, ineffable, and unnameable, how the tentative objections against the unknowability of the ideas raised in the Parmenides and Sophist are answered by Aristotle, how in the extant literature of Greek philosophy prior to Philo there is no conception of a God who is unknowable and unnameable and ineffable, how Philo arrived at the conception of an unknowable, ineffable, and unnameable God, how he may have meant it to be either an interpretation of Plato or something in opposition to him, and how the description of God as ineffable found in Albinus and Plotinus may have been due to the influence of Philo. We may add here that, though Plotinus attributes his conception of a hierarchy of three hypostases to Parmenides as reported by Plato and though it is also to that Parmenides that he may refer by the pronoun “he” in his statement, “he says that it (the One) cannot be spoken (ῥητòν) or described (γραπτóν),” neither the views which he attributes to Plato nor the language which he quotes from him are those of Plato. They are rather those of older interpreters of Plato, and among them Philo is to be included.

Diocletian, as we all know, included religion in his schemes for the regeneration of the Roman State and put forward a new formulation of paganism, by which he placed himself under the special protection of Jupiter, while his fellow Augustus, Maximian, stood under the protection of Hercules, and the Caesars, Galerius and Constantius Chlorus, appointed in A.D. 293, owned as patrons Mars and Sol respectively. Several aspects of the new religious policy have already been sufficiently emphasized. It was definitely conservative, in that Diocletian did not, like AureKan, claim for the Eastern Sun-God the ‘dominatus imperii Romani,’ but went back to the traditional chief god of Rome — Jupiter, ‘the Best and Greatest.’ It was in accordance with the spirit of an age, which was learning more and more to conceive of the divine powers as companions and preservers (‘conservatores’ and ‘comites’) of the rulers. It took account of the new configuration of the Empire under the Tetrarchy of Diocletian and his colleagues. The divine sphere was to be rounded off, to represent the earthly. And we may add, in all probability, that account was taken of the very Roman conception of the Genius, the spirit of life in the individual, and that Diocletian and Maximian, when they took the titles of Jovius and Herculius, meant to suggest that, though they were not actually identified with Jupiter and Hercules, they bore in themselves the spirit of the two gods. It is tempting to suppose that the ‘Iovi Augg.’ of the coins was intended to suggest just this. The idea would be helped out by the fact that the spirit of the individual woman was actually called ‘Juno.’ I want, in this little paper, to suggest yet another consideration, not quite so obvious and not quite so well observed, that may have entered into the calculations of Diocletian.