In its revised form the book has been divided for the convenience of those who use it into two volumes (which correspond with the two parts in which it was first published). I was urged to take away the notes that stand at the foot of the text and relegate them to a place by themselves in a separate appendix. I found, however, that I could not bring myself to adopt this fashionable modern practice, which so far as I have experience of it in books published in recent years seems to me to be inconvenient and to hinder rather than help that undisturbed appreciation of the text which such an arrangement is intended to serve. Independent readers who in using the book are working out the subject for themselves would certainly not desire the separation of the documentary evidence from the statement of the author's view. The book has also, to my peculiar satisfaction, attracted a large number of readers from outside the immediate circle of professional philologists. Such readers have evidently not been seriously disturbed by the elaborate and perhaps rather pedantic aspect of the mysterious disquisitions at the foot of the page, and have been able to fix their attention upon the clearer language of the text above. I have therefore decided to remove a few only of the notes which had grown to independent dimensions to an appendix at the end of each of the two volumes. ERWIN ROHDE. HEIDELBERG. _November 27th, 1897._ {{xiii}} PRELIMINARY NOTE TO THE SEVENTH AND EIGHTH EDITIONS IN supervising together this reprint of "Psyche" we have found ourselves faced with the question which Schöll and Dieterich had to decide in bringing out the third edition--whether changes or additions would be admissible. It went without saying that the text must remain untouched in the form last given to it by Rohde's own hand. Nor was it possible to make any additions to the notes without seriously disturbing the carefully considered architecture of the whole book. It would have been more possible to add an appendix or supplementary pamphlet recording the literature of the subject which has appeared since 1898 and giving an account of the present state of the questions dealt with by Rohde: as has been done with the "Griechische Roman" by W. Schmid. But on making the attempt we soon found that the problem was a different one in the case of "Psyche" with which (much more than in the other case) all subsequent study of the history of religion as pursued by all nations has had to reckon, and from which such study has in no small degree taken its starting point. We have therefore refrained; and we have also refrained from remodelling the citations to make them correspond with critical editions that have since appeared. This process could not be carried through without, in some places, introducing contradictions with Rohde's interpretation that would have necessitated more detailed discussion. Rohde's own method of citation was only seriously