Thoughts on Antiquity, Patristics, putting things online, freedom of speech, information access, and more
I’ve asked a colleague to translate for us Leontius of Byzantium, Adversus fraudes Apollinistarum (Against the forgeries of the Apollinarists) (CPG 6817, PG 86, col. 1948-1976). This is fourteen and a half columns of Migne, and may well be interesting. The circulation of banned works under other names was an inevitable consequence of the intolerance [...]
I’m off to Rome for a few days in a couple weeks. Just a long weekend – boy are those hotels expensive! — but nice all the same. I’m travelling independently with a friend who hasn’t been to Rome before. I’d rather like to spend some time in museums; my friend, however, is not an ancient [...]
I apologise for the outage yesterday. My website provider was having difficulties. There was also an unusual amount of comment spam which naturally had to be manually deleted.
A day that I have long dreaded has arrived – the day on which I have to work out just what it cost to make the translation of Eusebius of Caesarea’s, Gospel Problems and Solutions. Why now? Well, it’s the end of the financial year. The company has been selling copies of the book for [...]
I’m afraid the sickliness of the current season has interfered quite a bit with my ability to do anything other than work and sneeze! But I still have several projects going forward. Eusebius’ Commentary on Luke is progressing – a third chunk arrived this week and I reviewed it yesterday. Likewise the translation of a [...]
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 collecting images of Mithraic monuments from the web and identifying them, and adding them to my Mithras site. It’s fun; and there are more to do. I’ve also written a short section in the site on Mithras and the Taurobolium. Did the cultists of Mithras perform the taurobolium, a ceremony of being [...]
Last week and this I have been staying in two different hotels in neither of which it is easy to sleep. How great the noise is, in our society! It does make it difficult to do anything else. Last night there were a couple of comments on the post in which I ask whether there is any [...]
I spent some time this evening writing a page on the Mithraeum discovered at Lugo (ancient “Lucus Augusti” in Spain) in 2003. Found a few images online, mostly of the dig, but also of a rather splendid granite altar, about 3 feet tall. It was slightly frustrated to discover that the publication of the find [...]
Last night I spent hunched over a hot scanner, transforming a text book from paper into a PDF. My first reason for doing so is that it is simply more accessible in that format. The library charges $8 to borrow it, and lends it to me for a fortnight. That isn’t long enough to do [...]