‘All heresies issue out of your midst,’ said Liutprand to the emperor and his court at Constantinople, and the statement was essentially correct. But he went too far in implying that they flourished without interference by the orthodox regime, so that it was left to the Latins to exterminate them in the course of their westward spread. One could draw up a fairly long catalogue of sects which are known to have existed on Byzantine soil for a time, only to succumb to official persecution or to become extinct in some unrecorded manner. Practically all of these have passed on leaving no tangible trace of their peculiar beliefs or practices, yet a study of any one of them offers the opportunity of filling in to some extent the picture of life in the variegated Eastern Empire. The subject of this study is the latest of the several sects which arose in Phrygia, and despite a brief and limited history, did not disappear without having an emperor credited to it, nor without perpetuating its name in the variants whereunder the gypsies are known in Europe to the present day.

During the first two centuries of the Roman Empire, as the Principate slowly developed, certain qualities and attributes of the emperor tend to become personified or regarded as permanent elements in the character of the ruler: it may be Clementia, or Indulgentia, or Munificentia, it may be the Greek Philanthropia or Euergesia. In this way they tend to acquire a special meaning, or rather a complex of special meanings. Two such words are Providentia and Aeternitas, and the object of the present study is to review some of the evidence (it would be difficult to collect all) and elucidate the significance which the word Providentia or the word Aeternitas might convey to a citizen of the Empire in the second century.

In the manuscripts and versions of the New Testament, in lists of books accepted as canonical, and in the works of ecclesiastical writers the Epistle to the Hebrews occupies three different positions: (I) Among the epistles addressed to churches, i.e. after Romans, after 2 Corinthians, and very rarely after Galatians, Ephesians, Colossians, and Titus. (II) After 2 Thessalonians, i.e. after the epistles written to churches. (III) After Philemon, i.e. at the end of the Pauline canon. Each of these positions represents the usage of some particular section, or sections, of the Church; and each is significant for the history of the canon of the New Testament. No other epistle ascribed to the Apostle Paul has been so variously placed in the canon as Hebrews.