I find that book 6 has an interesting bit on the bruma and the solstice; quoted in this post of mine. I’d like to see a professional translation.
UPDATE: There are two volumes in Loeb, and they’re on Archive.org: Vol. 1 and Vol. 2
Roger Pearse
Thoughts on Antiquity, Patristics, putting things online, information access, and more
You’re like a dog with a bone. That’s high praise, btw. 😉
forgot the notify.
Roger, thought you’d like to know, Hippolytus is the first to reference December 25th as the birthday of Christ. I blogged about it here.
http://www.chronicon.net/blog/hippolytus/hippolytus-and-december-25th-the-birthday-of-christ/
Thanks people. But it’s only by tracking down the references that we get from vague assertions to some kind of certain knowledge.
See the other post with Censorinus and Varro sources: bruma = novus sol.
Uhm… not Varro, I meant Ovid of course. 😉
Thanks! I’m going through all the sources and we’ll get all of them in Latin and English so we can see what they all say and what it all adds up to.
Just fyi:
The information in Hippolytus can only produce Wednesday, 25 December 3 BC (see my comments at Tom’s blog; note that my original count from 43 BC was wrong). According to Wikipedia there is also the chronograph of AD 354, which is not only the source for our Sol Invictus festival, but also another source for 25 December as the acquired birthdate of Christ. In that chronograph, Christ is actually said to have been born on the day of Venus, i.e. Friday:
http://www.tertullian.org/fathers/chronography_of_354_08_fasti.htm
Friday, 25 December was in the year AD 5, which does not correspond to Hippolytus’ chronology (3 BC), which is a bit tighter, because he supports it by stating that it was the 42nd year of Augustus.
Varro’s LL is on my To-Do List, all the more so that I have the RR up. But he’s typographically a bit worse than other Latin texts, so I’ve been dragging my feet….
I need to spend some time actually reading some of these authors, myself, rather than just hunting through them for stuff.
This is why I’ve been rekeying stuff to put it online. I have a large room next to this one, completely lined with books: by now I’ve read a lot of them; I had not before. Even though I’d get at least one sort-of reading if I were to scan rather than rekey, since I do proofread, by actually typing stuff I am quite forced to read it: ‘s done wonders for my Latin and Greek. (The real reason I type, actually, is that it’s faster than scanning, once I take corrections into account. I type very fast — around 140 wpm — and this speed is then nearly doubled, and my accuracy much increased, by my use of abbreviations and expansion software: I ran tests, and scanning was something like 40% the speed if that.) So lucky me, I’ve now read Paulinus Pellaeus; I’m surely much the better for it, ha-ha.
I suspect you’re right. It must be more rewarding, and the quality was certainly far better in the early days than I got from OCR.
The problem with buying books is where to put them!