Raffaele Pettazzoni (1883-1959), Professor of the History of Religions at the University of Rome and one of the leading historians of religions in the twentieth century, maintained a long correspondence with Herbert Jennings Rose (1883-1961), the gifted Canadian scholar who was Professor of Greek at St Andrews and is best known for his work in the field of ancient religion and folklore. These letters, spanning the years 1927 to 1958, bear witness to the close relationship between the two scholars and focus on two of Pettazzoni's books, both translated by Rose: Essays on the History of Religions (1954) and The All-Knowing God (1956). They also shed light on Pettazzoni's initiative to the foundation of the journal NVMEN (1954), and reveal Rose's brilliant personality.

The Egyptian Nonnus of Panopolis (5th century AD), author of both the 'pagan' Dionysiaca, the longest known poem from Antiquity (21,286 lines in 48 books, the same number of books as the Iliad and Odyssey combined), and a 'Christian' hexameter Paraphrase of St John's Gospel (3,660 lines in 21 books), is no doubt the most representative poet of Greek Late Antiquity. Brill's Companion to Nonnus of Panopolis provides a collection of 32 essays by a large international group of scholars, experts in the field of archaic, Hellenistic, Imperial, and Christian poetry, as well as scholars of late antique Egypt, Greek mythology and religion, who explore the various aspects of Nonnus' baroque poetry and its historical, religious and cultural background.