Thoughts on Antiquity, Patristics, putting things online, freedom of speech, information access, and more
A virus has left me stuck at home, and I am therefore in need of the less taxing kind of literature to pass the time. I have fallen back on Cicero’s Letters to his friends, in the two volume Penguin edition from 1978, translated by D. R. Shackleton Bailey. Letters are a strange form of [...]
I have been reading the Saturnalia of Macrobius, that curious store of Latin learning from the very end of the empire. Book 2 contains a collection of witticisms. Here are a few. [ 1] But I am surprised, continued Symmachus, that none of you have said anything of Cicero’s jests, for here, as in everything [...]
I wonder how many people know that 10 papyrus fragments of Cicero exist from Oxyrhynchus, etc, the earliest dating from the start of the 1st century AD and the latest from the 6th? I certainly didn’t! I owe this knowledge to CEDOPAL, the online database of 7,000 papyri. A look at the drop-down list of [...]