The possible and the actual

of motifs from pagan healing cults by the Christians, and it is good to have a further archaeological demonstration of the same point. This rivalry may go some way to explain the total destruction at Pergamum of all artistic representations of Asclepius of Pergamum, for which we have to rely on statues and coins from Thrace and the Black Sea region and on the late testimony of an Arabic scholar who knew his Galen, see G. Strohmaier, Festschrift Franz Altheim, 1970, pp. 143-153. Dinkler rightly notes the long survival of non-Christian healing shrines into the fifth century: in Britain the shrine of Nodens at Lydney was built in the last third of the fourth century, and its great days extended well into the fifth, long after the adoption of Christianity as the official state religion. Vivian Nutton The Wellcome Institute