Year: 2011

Finding Cumont’s “Textes et Monuments” online

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve been looking at another story about Mithras originating with Franz Cumont.  In the process, I find that the PDF’s I have of his master-work, Textes et monuments figurés relatifs aux mystères de Mithra, 2 vols, 1899- are not that good where the pictures are concerned.

A Google Books search reveals nothing.  But I suspect this is the well-known problem that results returned are different, depending on whether you are in the US or in the Outer Darkness.

On Archive.org, there is only volume 2, in a copy with rather poor images — the one I already have.  Where I got the similarly poor volume 1 I don’t know.  Both look as if they came from the Microsoft-digitised books donated to Archive.org when they decided not to go down that route after all.

In Europeana a search for “Cumont” brings up various letters to Cumont, but none of his works.

In the end, by a circuitous route, I get these links to volumes scanned at the University of Michigan in 2010:

Volume 1: http://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Textes_et_monuments_figur%C3%A9s_relatifs_au.html?id=dYnXAAAAMAAJ&redir_esc=y

Volume 2: http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=jUAKAQAAMAAJ&pg=PP5

Both are better than the images that I was trying to use on Saturday.

I’ve also been looking at his Les mystères de Mithra, whose English translation has been so fruitful in creating urban legends.  This book was a separate publication of the “conclusions” which appeared in volume 1 of Textes et Monuments.  This appeared in 1900.  But I wasn’t aware that Cumont revised this material several times.  A second edition appeared in 1902, which was translated into English by T. McCormack in 1903, and a third edition appeared in 1913.

2nd: http://books.google.com/books?id=O0LwEqKXgxsC

3rd: http://www.archive.org/details/lesmystresdemi00cumo

I suspect that consulting the various editions may prove profitable.

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How do we know that Mithras’ sidekicks were called “Cautes” and “Cautopates”?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Every temple of Mithras had a bas-relief at one end depicting Mithras killing the bull.  On either side stand two figures carrying torches, one with the flame pointing up, the other with it pointing down.  Every textbook refers to these as “Cautes” and “Cautopates”, although no literary text mentions either.

So how do we know that these were their names?  And which is which?

In Cumont’s Textes et Monumentes, vol. 1, p.207 we find the following statement about the torch-bearers or dadophores.  (The reader should bear in mind that in vol. 2, for some curious reason, Cumont gave the inscriptions first, with numerals; and then the monuments, with fresh numbers; and that a relief or statue with an inscription would be listed twice).

By a happy accident we know the barbarous names that the two dadophores bore in Mithraic ritual.  Two pairs of statues accompanied with inscriptions have recently come to light, and demonstrate that the being with the raised torch is named Cautes and the one with the lowered torch is named Cautopates.[5]  Elsewhere the statues themselves have not been preserved, but the pedestals on which they stood have survived, grouped in pairs, and on one is engraved the dedication Caute or Cauti and on the other Cautipati. [6]

The footnotes:

5) Monument 248 c, discovered in 1851, which bears the inscription D. I. M. Cautopati, was supposed at this period by Dieffenbach and by Ring to indicate that the dadophor with the lowered torch was called Cautopates, but that Cautes and Cautopates were synonymous.  New discoveries permit us to rectify this mistake.  Cautes and Cautopates are the two dadophores at Sarmizegetusa: mon. 140 (inscr. 259); at Heddernheim: mon. 253 i, 2, 4 (inscr. 441 b, c).

6) Aquileia: inscr. 165 a, b; Aquincum: mon. 213 d, inscr. 329, 330 — Similarly in the temple recently discovered at Pettau by Gurlitt, an altar has been brought to light with the dedication Cauti, another with Cautopati. — Were there two dedications to Caute at Heddernheim?  Cf. Lehner, Korrespondbl. Westd. Zeitsch., XVII, no. 89, p.129 — The complete list of inscriptions mentioning these deities is given in vol. 2, p. 533, col. a. — The only forms that are encountered are Caute or Cauti or Cautopati or Kautopati.  The dative Cauto and therefore the nominative Cautus does not exist (inscr. 165 a, note). — The abbreviation C. P. for Cautopati, does not prove that we should decompose this name into two words.  Rather it serves to distinguish it from Caute, for which the abbreviation is a simple C. (inscr. 371, 434).

That is a lot of material packed into a couple of lines and a couple of footnotes; but Cumont was a great man, which is why his work in some respects has yet to be superceded, 110 years later.  Let’s look at some of these references.

Sarmizegetusa

In vol. 2, p.283-4, under monument 140 we find these images of statues of the two figures, taken from the Mithraeum at Sarmizegetusa (see.p.280 f.) or Varhély (Gréditchjé) in Hungary in 1881-3.  Happily for us, they have inscriptions on the base.

These are described as follows:

Mithraic dadophores, in the usual costume and pose.  They carry in their right hands, one a lowered torch, the other a raised torch, but both are broken … in the left hand the first carries a scorpion, the second the head of a bull.  On the bases are inscriptions 259.

The inscriptions 259 can be found on p.135 of the same volume, where they are listed as CIL III 7922.

a) Cautopati sac(rum) | Synethus adiu[t(or)] | tabul(arii)  | v(otum) s(olvit) l(ibens) m(erito)

b) . . . . v(otum) s(olvit) l(ibens) m(erito)

That identifies “Cautopates” as the object of the votive offering on the first statue-altar.

Heddernheim

Monument 253 is in vol. 2, p.372, and covers the third Mithraeum found at Heddernheim, in 1887.  There is a mistake in Cumont’s note in vol. 1; it should be item j, not i, that is referenced.  This is the stela, carved on three sides.  Cumont gives fig. 298, 290 and 291, from photographs:

Inscription 441 is vol. 2, p.155-6, transcribing the above.  On the front:

D(eo) inv(icto) Mit(hrae) | Senilius Car|antinus | c(ivis) Mediom(atricus) | v(otum) s(olvit) l(ibens) l(aetus) m(erito) | Sive Cracissius.

Under a representation of Mithras born from a rock are the words:

Petram g[e]ne[t]ricem.

On the right-hand side, under the torchbearer holding a torch up:

Caute.

Under the person on an urn:

Oceanus.

On the left-hand side, under the torchbearer holding a torch pointing down:

Caut(o)p(ati).

Under the eagle on a sphere:

Celum.

That seems fairly final: we have the image, and a label underneath.

An afterthought: inscription 442, Friedberg, (mon. 248) reads “D(eo) I(nvicto) M(ithrae) | Cautopati” which would seem to suggest that Cautopates (and therefore Cautes also) was an aspect of Mithras himself.

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An inscription dedicated to “Sol Serapis”

Posted on by Roger Pearse

You can learn quite a lot from looking at non-English versions of Wikipedia.

For instance the German Mithras article is quite a bit superior to the English one in several respects, handling the Mithra-Mithras dichotomy well.  It lacks the heavy referencing that I added to the English one; but since all that work did not save the article from deliberate poisoning by a troll, it has to be asked whether it was a good idea anyway.

Looking around these articles, I am struck by the number of images of tauroctonies which are language-specific.  There were some quite useful images of various sorts.

But quite accidentally, I came across something else.  We’re all familiar with “Soli Invicto Mithrae” in inscriptions — “to the unconquered sun Mithras”.  But did anyone know that Serapis is also treated as a sun-god?  This image says so:

 

Apparently (for this is Wikipedia, remember — the encyclopedia edited by anybody) this is CIL XIII, 8246.  The text is:

SOLI SERAPI
CVM SVA CLINE
IN H(onorem) D(omus) D(ivinae)
DEXTRINIA IUSTA
L(uci) DEXTRINI IUSTI
FILIA AGGRIPP(inensis) D(ono) D(edit)

To Sol Serapis
And his  throne
In honour of the imperial house,
Dextrina Justa,
Daughter of L. Dextrinus Justus, from Colonia Agrippinensis (Cologne), gives (this) as a gift.

It indicates how “sol” as a descriptive term has very little distinguishing power, between one deity and another.

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London Mithraeum to be reconstructed on original site

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A truly interesting article at Past Horizons:

Temple of Mithras to be restored to its original location.

Plans to dismantle and move the  reconstructed Roman Temple of Mithras to temporary storage, ahead of a more  faithful reconstruction, will begin on the 21 November 2011 by Museum of London Archaeology.

The temple, which is located at Walbrook Square, was discovered by chance in  1952 by archaeologist WF Grimes as the site was being prepared for  redevelopment.

On the final day of excavation – September 18th 1954 – the marble head  of  the god of Mithras was unearthed.  Several more amazing artefacts,  including  some sculptures, were later found – these are now on display  in the Museum of  London’s Roman gallery.

The temple was dismantled at that time and the Roman building material put  into storage.  In 1962 the temple was reconstructed on a podium adjacent to  Queen Victoria Street, 90 metres from its original site, nine metres above its  original level and set in modern cement mortar.

In December 2010, Bloomberg LP, purchased the Walbrook Square site to build  its new European headquarters building. Listed building consent was granted for  the dismantling of the current Temple of Mithras reconstruction and expert stone  masons have been commissioned by Bloomberg to carefully extract the Roman stone  and tile from the 1960s cement mortar. The temple is due to be carefully  packaged up and moved to storage for the second time.

Bloomberg LP will restore the temple to its original Roman location and in a  more historically accurate guise. Upon completion of Bloomberg’s new  development, the new reconstruction of the Temple of Mithras will be housed in a  purpose-built and publicly accessible interpretation space within their new  building.

There are two rather splendid pictures too — one of the original excavation, and the other is an aerial shot of the rather forlorn looking current site.

The Museum of London Archaeology site has the same article here.   The MOLA (terrible acronym, sets your teeth on edge) site is well designed and looks like a good one with which to keep abreast of excavations in London.

The Museum of London site is rather less good, largely aimed at school-children, although I did find this reasonably useful article on the Mithraeum here, and one showing some of the finds here.  (On the other hand a bad article on Mithras is here, mistakenly supposing  that Mithras was the same as Mithra).  There is an image of a Tauroctony from the site here.

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Still plodding on with Ibn Abi Usaibia

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The process of OCR’ing Ibn Abi Usaibia’s History of Physicians is continuing, and the proofing has reached page 600.  This is something of a milestone, in that this leaves only one more “chunk” — the portion from 601-946, which the translators thought of as “book 4” (although they did not divide the first 600 pages into books).

I’ve been noticing changes in the way the text is translated.  In the last few pages, the translator has started to reference the authors named with a footnote linking to Brockelmann’s Geschichte der arabischen Litteratur.  This is welcome in a way, but of course indicates a change in approach.

A much less welcome change is that, from Ibn Sina onwards, the translator is not bothering to translate the names of many of the works written by the authors listed, leaving them in a transliteration of the Arabic.  This is a really serious defect, and one that may require attention.  It will be annoying if, in order to make this useful to the rest of us, I have to hire an Arabist to translate these bits of text.

Likewise there are embedded chunks of verse, mostly omitted by the translator.  I feel less compunction here — it is unlikely that most of  these will give us anything.

Kopf, the translator, must have been under a rather strange brief when making the translation.  He has represented all the long vowels and the sub-linear dots, albeit doing so with his typewriter must have been painful, and he doesn’t always catch every one.  But for whom would it be useful to write “Allāh” rather than “Allah”?  Only, surely, to those who could read Arabic anyway?  I can’t help feeling that he shouldn’t have indicated either.  In English we don’t use these things.

My own approach in my transcription is to represent the long vowels, but not the sub-linear dots.  In many cases the characters with the latter are simply not present in the common fonts anyway, as I have found while proofing.  I’d like to have them, of course; but I’m not sure it’s worth the effort.

I hope that all these long vowels won’t mean that searches in Google and Bing don’t find important matches, tho.

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The lost preface to Suetonius’ “Lives of the 12 Caesars”

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Many will remember the BBC series I, Claudius, which was based on Robert Graves novel of the same name.  The series drew heavily on his translation of the Vita Caesarum of Suetonius Tranquillus.  This was composed under Hadrian in the early 2nd century and published in 120 AD.

Suetonius covered the lives of twelve Caesars, from Julius Caesar down to the murder of Domitian in 93 AD.  His gossipy, colourful work, has always been popular.

Few perhaps are aware that it has reached us only in an incomplete form.  The opening pages of the work are missing in all the handwritten copies that we now have.  It seems that only a single copy from ancient times, now lost, made it into the 9th century — not an unusual pattern for a classical text — but that this copy had lost the opening quaternion.  This means that we do not have the prologue, nor the opening for the Life of Julius Caesar.

I learn from L. D. Roberts’ excellent work on the transmission of Latin literature[1] that as late as the sixth century, John the Lydian had seen a copy which was complete, and included a prologue with a dedication to Septicius Clarus.   This interesting statement is referenced to p.ix-x of the 1858 edition of K. Roth, which is described as the standard critical edition.  I thought it would be interesting to look and see precisely what is said.

Fortunately the Roth edition is easily accessible on Google books.  Here is p.ix, where the facts are laid out in the rather less than straightforward form popular with certain editions of the period.

On p.286 is the text of the extract from John the Lydian concerning the prologue:

Τράγκυλλος τοὺς τῶν Καισάρων βίους ἐν γράμμασιν ἀποτίνων Σεπτικιῳ, ὃς ἦν ὕπαρχος τῶν πραιτωριανῶν σπειρῶν ἐκ̕ αὐτοῦ, πραίφεκτον αὐτὸν τῶν πραιτωριανων ταγμάτων καὶ φαλάγγων ἡγεμόνα τυγχάνειν ἐδήλωσεν.

 This is apparently from On the Roman magistrates, 2. 6, and may be found on p.171 of the Bonn edition.  It tells us that “Tragkullos” — i.e. Tranquillus — in the “letter” or prologue dedicated the lives of the Caesars to Septicius, who was prefect of the Praetorian cohort. (I can’t quite make sense of the titles given above).  I think it is a reasonable inference from this statement that John had seen a copy with such a preface.

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  1. [1]L. D. Reynolds (ed.), Texts and Transmissions: A Survey of the Latin Classics. Oxford: Clarendon, 1983, p.399, at the start of the article on Suetonius written by Michael Winterbottom.↩

Methodius in Russian to go online

Posted on by Roger Pearse

As I remarked a while back, the works of Methodius were published in Russian  by Evgraf I. Loviagin (d. 1909).  The second edition appeared in 1905, and although very rare, a copy does exist at the University of Chicago.  So I wrote to them and asked for a copy, but heard nothing.

Today I’ve had an email back:

We can digitize this book here and the fee would be $20.00 US. The book is in poor condition and we will put it online with the other books we scan locally. We would send you a pdf file or point you to a url for it. Would you like us to proceed?

I’ve said ‘yes’, of course.  It’s 289 pages, so that’s not really very much.  Quite how I send a piddling sum like that I don’t know — maybe stick a 20 dollar bill inside a card! — but I’ll manage it somehow.

Good news, all the same; and making it generally available is also a good thing.  Let’s hope the results will OCR OK.

Well done, the University of Chicago.

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Where do we find a primer on Christian history?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

An email, evidently from someone fairly young, reached me today.

I don’t find many who might give me some deeper information about the historic document of the Christian faith.

I am interested in learning more about the NT cannonization process.  I understand the Ethiopians, Orthodox, Protestants and Catholics have differences between their Cannons.   Which one do you believe is correct?

I wish there was a good book that I could recommend on this; solid, soundly referenced, and accurate.  I don’t know of one.

I’ve scribbled some notes in a response, but I also asked what sort of things people want to know.  Someone ought to produce such a book, I feel.

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No more typewriters (Greek or otherwise)

Posted on by Roger Pearse

In March this year I asked whether anyone knew where a mechanical typewriter fitted up to produce Greek characters might be found.  As might be expected, the answers suggested that they were few and far between.

Today I read in the Daily Mail that the last typewriter factory in the world is to close.

Godrej and Boyce – the last company left in the world that was still manufacturing typewriters – has shut down its production plant in Mumbai, India with just a few hundred machines left in stock.

Although typewriters became obsolete years ago in the west, they were still common in India  – until recently.  Demand for the machines has sunk in the last ten years as consumers switch to computers.

The company’s general manager, Milind Dukle, told India’s Business Standard newspaper: ‘We are not getting many orders now. … ‘Till 2009, we used to produce 10,000 to 12,000 machines a year. …

The company is now down to its last  200 machines – the majority of which are Arabic language models.

The firm began production in the 1950s – when Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru  described the typewriter as a symbol of India’s emerging independence and  industrialisation. It was still selling 50,000 models annually in the early 1990s, but last year it sold less than 800 machines.

Treasure your typewriter.  It will not be easy to replace.

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Modern scholarship on the origins of Mithras

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A correspondent drew my attention to this interesting statement in a current handbook.  He also added some glosses (in square brackets) to make it generally comprehensible:

Cumont’s [late-19th- and early-20th-century] reconstruction suffered a mortal blow at the first conference of Mithraic studies, held in Manchester in 1971 (GORDON, 1975), and has not been revived since.  The past twenty-five years have instead given rise to many—mutually exclusive—theories on the origin and nature of the Mithraic mysteries, which virtually all share a stress on the absence of [clear] links between [Iranian] Zoroastrianism and [largely post-Christian Greco-Roman] Mithraism.[1].

That seems to hit the nail on the head.

The Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible is not a handbook that I have encountered before.  But the material on Mithra/Mithras — present in this volume because of the names Mithredath (Ezra 1:8) and Mithradates (1 Esdras 2:12) — seems interesting.  It is a digest of secondary literature, naturally enough, and I found that it was particularly useful for Mitra, the Persian deity, and nicely drew together the various seemingly contradictory elements that make up the aspects of this god.

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  1. [1]H. J. W. Drijvers & A. F. de Jong, “Mithras,” Dictionary of deities and demons in the Bible (Eerdmans/Brill, 1999), p. 579↩