The revision of the ‘ecloge’ (the collection of selected extracts) of the work is in progress, and it sounds as if it’s thoroughly worthwhile. I’ve also compared the fragments of the full text found in catenae which Angelo Mai published in his first edition to that which he printed in the second. The main difference is that he added a load of material from a Vatican ms. (Vat. gr. 1611) of the catena of Nicetas (a still unpublished text, as far as I know). But he also omitted fragments published in the first edition. I’ve compiled a concordance of the two and sent it to Mr. A. I’ve also found some fragments in Cramer’s catena on Matthew/Mark.
I’ve been looking for a text by Francois Combefis, which seems to contain more fragments. A trip to the Bodleian one Saturday was in vain; apparently they don’t bother to fetch books from the stacks on Saturdays! I also need to try to track down the letter of Latino Latini in which he refers to the full text existing in Sicily; increasingly I get the impression that no-one has consulted this in centuries, and everyone has just reprinted Fabricius via Migne.
Meanwhile I’ve finally fired Mr. C, the Syriac translator. He’s ignored all my emails for two months now. I received no reply to my email of enquiry, so I really had little choice. It’s a little hard to understand why anyone would just fall silent and leave someone hanging. Couldn’t he imagine that it might be very inconvenient for someone to have no idea if he ever intended to do more? Still, he did two fragments which is more than anyone else has done.
Fortunately Dr. E. has agreed to translate more of the Syriac for me. Fragment 3 has arrived today, and is very literal and very good. She hopes to do a fragment a week, which would be ideal. It is curious how difficult I have found it to find Syriac translators.