From the Editor

This issue features a stellar line-up of articles whose subject matters span the whole chronological spectrum of Late Antiquity. The first three articles center around Christianity in North Africa. In her compelling study, Sabine Huebner argues that P.Mil.Vogl. 6.287 is the earliest extant transcript of a trial of Christians lacking the hagiographic embellishments that typically adorn martyr acts. Diane Fruchtman performs a novel reading of Commodian’s Instructiones, demonstrating that Commodian makes sophisticated use of the acrostic form in this poetic treatise to convey a series of deeper messages about the individual Christian’s identity and relationship with God. Stanisław Adamiak probes the propagandistic dimensions of the Donatists’ practice of rebaptism and makes the case that they did not rebaptize their converts nearly as often as most modern scholars assume.

The next four articles form their own subdisciplinary cluster in that they focus on epigraphic matters. John Fabiano offers a new edition and re-contextualization of a Latin inscription found at Sant’Omobono in 1937 which, in his persuasive interpretation, documents the reorganization of the collegium fabrum tignariorum between 296 and 312. Ivan Basić and Maja Zeman provide an exhaustive historical-philological commentary on a Greek epitaph from an early Christian sarcophagus, identifying vital information about the deceased and determining that this epitaph is the earliest epigraphic evidence for Dalmatia being part of the western Roman Empire in the fifth century. Anna Sitz analyzes Roman-period inscriptions from the Temple of Aphrodite at Aphrodisias and contends that the architects of the church built over this temple kept these inscriptions on display as reminders to the citizens of Aphrodisias of their shared civic history. In her illuminating study, Helen Foxhall Forbes examines inscriptions of Anglo-Saxon pilgrims’ names on the walls of the shrine of S. Michele at Monte Sant’Angelo sul Gargano and explores the fascinating insights that these graffiti give us into the pilgrims’ personal sense of religious identity.

Kristina Sessa rounds out this issue’s articles with her substantial review article critiquing recent major publications which pin the putative “decline and fall” of the Roman Empire on climate change and a pandemic, and she offers some cogent methodological correctives to this trend as well as concrete suggestions for future inquiry in this exciting field of research.