Year: 2011

Porphyry, Ad Gaurum

Posted on by Roger Pearse

In my last post I mentioned some works by Porphyry which have not been translated into English.  One of these was the Ad Gaurum, on how the soul enters the unborn child.  The text was edited: K. Kalbfleisch, Abhandlungen der königlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin; Philosophische-historische Klasse, 1895 p. 33-62.  That is one of those infuriating German series which have both a scientific and a scholarly sub-class.  Even in paper form, it tends to be hard to find the right volume!  Inter-Library Loans get it wrong.  And so forth.

Since it was published in 1895, it should be out of copyright.  But I cannot find it online.  (UPDATE: It’s here)  But I then found this page from the IRHT in France.  Apparently the text is preserved in a single manuscript, Cod. Supp. gr. 635, Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale.  And there have been three translations, one in French and two in German:

  • À Gauros. « Sur la manière dont l’embryon reçoit l’âme », par A. J. Festugière, La Révélation d’Hermès Trismégiste, t. III, Les doctrines de l’âme, Paris, 1953, Appendice II, p. 265-302.
  • Porphyrios, Die Beseelung der Embryonen, par K. Limburg, Diss. Köln, 1975.
  • Grundfragen der Embryonalentwicklung aus der Sicht eines Neuplatonikers : Übersetzung und Bearbeitung der Schrift des Porphyrios « Über die Beseelung der Embryonen », par U. Jurisch, Diss. med. Erlangen-Nürnberg 1991.

The German translations were both in dissertations.  I’m not sure how to access continental dissertations, I must say.

The page refers to the need to examine the manuscript under ultra-violet light because of water damage.  It all seems to be notes for a forthcoming text and translation, directed by Luc Brisson, which will be more extensive than the Festugière translation (which they refer to as excellent).

Apparently Porphyry makes use of material from Genesis in the book.  If so, it is really remarkable that the work has escaped attention.

UPDATE: The Festugiere book is still for sale.  Three volumes, $150.  Now that’s what I call a barrier to learning!

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

So much literature remains inaccessible.

Last night I was thinking about the works of Porphyry.  He is a well-known figure, the arch-enemy of the Christian writers of the early 4th century, and the hero of those moderns who share his animosities.  Most of his output is undoubtedly lost. 

Yet more survives than we might suppose.  One reason we tend to think only of a handful of texts — the Letter to Marcella, the 4 books On Abstinence, the fragments of Against the Christians, the Life of Plotinus, the Life of Pythagoras, the Isagoge — is that these are what exists in English.

The other night I became aware that his Introduction to Ptolemy’s Tetrabiblos existed, and had even been printed, in the Catalogus Codicum Astrologorum Graecorum V.4.  I quickly found that no English translation existed.  Last night I set out to explore what existed in other modern languages.

A German text and translation of his commentary on Ptolemy’s Harmonics does exist.  How interesting a work on ancient musical theory might be I do not know — although we might guess!  But in the process I came across a page on my own site, which I had long forgotten — Kenneth Sylvan Guthrie’s list of Porphyry’s works.

The list is not  much good — no bibliography — except that it does give a good idea of what did exist and what does.  The extant works are marked with an asterisk.  But what about all these extant works? —

  • Question and Answer to the Aristotelian Categories.
  • To Gauros Concerning the Way in which foetuses are Animated.
  • Concerning Prosody (modulation in pitch).
  • On the Harmonics of Ptolemy.
  • An Introduction to The Astronomy of Ptolemy — the CCAG text

The list gives no indication as to where the texts might be found, nor whether any translations existed.  Two of the works are plainly about music, and so probably of limited interest.

I wondered whether there was anything online at Remacle.org, that marvellous collection of French translations.  They did indeed have quite a few French translations of “Porphyre“.  But it seemed to be much the same selection as I have.

Even the fragments of the books Against the Christians are not really online.  My own attempt at this was never completed.

Porphyry is very popular with the sort of writer who doesn’t like Christianity.  But I could wish that these writers praised him less, and translated him more.  It is rather absurd, after all, that the best collection of his works is held on a site dedicated to patristics!   I’m sure Eusebius and the others who wrote Contra Porphyrium would be amused, and gratified to see their enemy embalmed amongst the footnotes of the church.  Porphyry himself, I suspect, might utter a phoenician curse!

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A new apocryphal gospel in Coptic

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve just discovered a blog by Alin Siciu which will be of interest to those interested in papyrology and early Christian texts.  One post caught me eye in particular:

An Unknown “Apocryphal” Text From the White Monastery

I recently edited together with Einar Thomassen a parchment folio owned by the Norwegian collector Martin Schøyen. The Schøyen leaf (MS 1991) was immediately followed in the codex by another dismembered fragment which ended up in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. They seem to belong to an unknown apocryphal writing.

Excerpts from A. Suciu & E. Thomassen, “An Unknown “Apocryphal” Text From the White Monastery,” in P. Buzi & A. Camplani (eds.), Christianity in Egypt: Literary Production and Intellectual Trends in Late Antiquity (Studia Ephemeridis Augustinianum) forthcoming 2011.

suciu-thomassen

The link is to a PDF, which  gives a translation of at least part of it.  I wish the whole article was there! 

If one leaf of the codex is in the Schoyen collection, and another in the BNF, then we are dealing with a find of a codex in Egypt which has passed through the tender hands of the antiquities trade, and been cut up for maximum profit in the process.  One wonders whether any other leaves are out there.

This sort of thing tends to make me annoyed.  A book survives for centuries, only to be ripped apart by greedy men to make a buck.  This sort of thing leads people Paul Barford to demand that the trade is banned.  Barford, indeed, is so vehement on the issue that he sounds rather demented to normal people.  Much of what he says is plainly wrong.  But the sentiment is genuine enough, and arises from a real desire that we don’t destroy our heritage in order to enrich sleazy Swiss or Arab middle-men (no names, no libel actions).

On the other hand, I sometimes reflect, we don’t ever seem to get papyrus discoveries from countries like Morocco and Algeria any more, not since the French handed over these countries to their traditional oppressors.  We do get them from Egypt, a country in which the most ignorant peasant knows that antiquities mean MONEY, and where Cairo dealers keep agents in rural areas.  We get them because only a fool would destroy such a find.  We get them precisely BECAUSE they are worth money to the peasants who find them.

And then we get them cut into pieces, because the middle-men who buy them find that they can get twice the price for two separate leaves, than for one item of two leaves.  We get the awful destruction visited upon the papyrus manuscripts (including the ps.gospel of Judas) left in a moist bank box for twenty years by a Coptic emigre because scholars wouldn’t meet his price.

It’s not at all clear what to do about this.  Stuff that is worth money will be sold.  Stuff that is not worth money will be thrown away or burned.  That’s the way of the world.  That’s human nature. 

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Is there any point in translating ancient texts

Posted on by Roger Pearse

All of us know that the internet has revolutionised our access to ancient texts. 

First sites like CCEL came into being, back in the mid-90’s.  This made the Ante-Nicene, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers accessible to us all.  Indeed I remember, long ago, seeing a bound set in 38 volumes of that collection, in Mowbrays Bookshop in Kings Parade in Cambridge.  I was interested in the Fathers even then, but such a thing was far beyond my slender financial means.  But with the internet came CCEL, and suddenly we took it for granted. 

Google books came along a few years ago.  I don’t even remember when it arrived, so much do I take it for granted, but after 2005, certainly.  That gave us access to vast amounts of older literature, of scholarly series such as the PL, PG, the Bonn series of Byzantine texts and much, much more.  All this was given freely, and with the generous aid of American universities like Harvard.  European publishers poisoned the gift, and by their bleating for money made it largely inaccessible; but Google meant us all to have it.

Manuscripts are coming online as well, despite much resistance.

Now we have Google translate.  This improves constantly.  For French it is now very good indeed, and doubtless other languages will improve over time.  Latin has been added already.  All this would have been unimaginable as recently as 2005.

Now let us look into the future; a future that may be no further away than a handful of years.  As translate improves, will there be any purpose in providing hand-made translations?

When I first came on the web, CCEL was all there was.  I sought to help, by scanning more translations and placing them online.  Then Google books came along, and made much of this work redundant.  If you go to Archive.org, or Google books, an OCR of these older translations is generated automatically.  The books are searchable.  Yes, it’s not perfect; but we can always get the text, and often it is very, very good.  So there is now very little purpose in my duplicating this effort, I sometimes feel.

Instead I have been translating stuff, commissioning new translations, and so forth.

But will this go the same way?  Will it too, one day soon, be pointless.

I’m not sure, I admit.  For one thing, digitising texts is still worthwhile.  When I want a text, I rejoice if I find it at Lacus Curtius, accurately typed in and easy to search.  I look there in preference.  Probably other sites like mine are also used in this way.

Will it be the same for man-made as opposed to machine translations? 

Note: I have several interesting emails in my inbox awaiting answers.  Unfortunately I have gone down with the headache bug, so it will be a day or two before I can reply.

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Porphyry on astrology

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve become aware that the 3rd century anti-Christian writer Porphyry of Tyre wrote at least some work on astrology.  This seems to be very obscure, tho, and I’m not quite sure what exists.  Nothing seems to exist in translation.  I did come across a reference to Porphyry, Introduction to Ptolemy’s Tetrabiblos (CCAG vol. 5 part 4, 212); but there may be others.  The CCAG is the Catalogus codicum astrologorum graecorum — a catalogue of astrological manuscripts, in which the editors have helpfully printed excerpts.

Vol. 5 part 4 is online, and the index at the back reveals what looks like a full text — pages 185-229, no less, 44 pages in 55 chapters.  It’s been edited from half a dozen manuscripts, and had been published before back in the renaissance.  5 lines is 43 words = 8.6 words/line, 31 lines a page = 267 words/page, 44 pages = 11,748 words, which at 10c a word comes out at $1,175 to translate … if I knew anyone who was interested and capable in what must require a serious understanding of Greek astrological terminology.

Tempting, tho!

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Eusebius project update

Posted on by Roger Pearse

We’re getting very close.  This morning I sat down with the Latin section in the new proof and checked that the typesetter had applied all of the enormous number of revisions made to this section during the main proof-reading.  Only seven glitches, all tiny, compared to the army of changes, additions and deletions of footnotes (all done correctly).

I’ve decided not to fiddle with the font size of the Syriac.  It seems a little small to me, but then my eyes get very tired and I am not a good guide.  What we will do, when we release the printed book for sale, is make the Syriac text available freely online for download.  Then anyone who finds it small can just print it in whatever size they like.  But the last time I looked, it seemed quite readable to me as is.

There were a couple of tweaks to the Coptic as well.

But we’re getting very close.  The only bit I haven’t seen since proof is the Greek fragments.  The Latin was the bit that took a beating, and it was partly my fault and partly the translator’s fault. 

Originally I only intended to print the translation.  But I was seduced into printing a text.  Since that wasn’t part of the deal with the translator, preparing a text fell on me.   The translator of the Greek and Latin rightly considered that revising the text was no part of what he was paid to do, and since he was busy with another project, I couldn’t pay him to do it either.

So I set out to produce a text, but without realising that I do not have enough time these days to do such a thing properly.  We’re all older than we were!

Now I was fortunate with the Greek, in that I was able to negotiate the use of the Sources Chretiennes text (mainly because they were kind to me, rather than through any skills of my own), and also to obtain an electronic version of the fragments.  I paid the translator of the Syriac to prepare a text as well, at something of a premium, and twisted his arm until he vocalised it as well.  He also did the Arabic text.  The Coptic text I had entered by a contact, but we ended up with a load of grave accents not found in the original, which had to be corrected by myself and the typesetter. 

But the Latin text I created myself.  I used my scanner as a basis, and then proofed it.  It was a great strain to do.  It took forever because I have no spare time, I find, and I was stealing an hour here or there in the evenings.  Of course a man tired from work does not proof very well!  So the result was bad, frankly, and that was my fault.  The translator then rescued me, at the proof stage, by correcting all my errors and licking it into shape.  We also switched Latin texts in this process, from Mai’s Latin over to Schenkl’s CSEL text, which didn’t help.

But we’re there.  The Latin is now done, definitely; the Syriac and Arabic likewise, and the Coptic also.  I suspect the Greek is also in shape.  Can a release be far away?!

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A couple of interesting posts have caught my eye, which I thought I would share.

From AWOL:

Open Access ProQuest Dissertations & Theses (PQDT Open)

PQDT Open provides the full text of open access dissertations and theses free of charge.You can quickly and easily locate dissertations and theses  relevant to your discipline, and view the complete text in PDF format.  The authors of these dissertations and theses have opted to publish as open access. Open Access Publishing  is a new service offered by ProQuest’s UMI Dissertation Publishing. ProQuest expects to have many more open access dissertations and theses over  time.

The database includes hundreds of theses and dissertations related to antiquity from American academic  institutions.

For other aggregations of open access dissertations see also:

I have a question, tho.  ProQuest has made money by selling access to dissertations.  So what is the open source idea?  How does this work?  I think we have only part of the story here.

Another couple of items from the same source:

Johnson, Scott Fitzgerald, editor, Greek Literature in Late Antiquity: Dynamism, Didacticism, Classicism. Originally published in 2006 by Ashgate Books. Published online by permission of the editor.

Now that looks interesting!  I must get that.  And well done the editor for making it available now.

Next the Ehrman Project, mentioned at ETC and Evangelion.  The latter comments:

Michael Gorman draws attention to the launch of a website dedicated to engaging/refuting the various works of Prof. Bart D. Ehrman. It is called the Ehrman Project and it was actually begun by Miles O’Neil who works for UNC Chapel Hill where Ehrman is a Professor. Ehrman has written a number of works about textual criticism, the historical Jesus, the early church, God and Evil, etc. and ordinarily with the aim of debunking Christianity and promoting unbelief.

I respect Ehrman’s works greatly, esp. his early TC stuff. But I confess that I simply find it astounding that Ehrman will argue in one book that the biblical manuscripts are unreliable and corrupted and then in the next book he’ll use these corrupted manuscripts to reconstruct the historical figure of Jesus, Paul, Peter, Mary Magdalene, the whole early church. It is kinda like announcing that the emperor has no clothes in one book and in the next book criticizing what the emperor wore to the royal tea party. It’s one or the other!

Indeed it is.  Ehrman is doing great harm to all studies of ancient literature by convincing people that books cannot be transmitted from antiquity.  For instance today I also came across this announcement at PaleoJudaica, of a speech at the University of Tennesse:

Ehrman’s lecture is titled “Does The New Testament Contain Forgeries? The Surprising Claims of Modern Scholars” and is presented by UT’s Department of Religious Studies.

Why go to the Bible belt and introduce the claims of “modern scholars” by insulting their religion?  If I wanted to talk about scholarship, I wouldn’t start by trying to insult my chosen audience’s religion.  That would guarantee that they would not listen.  On the other hand, if I wanted to insult their religion, as my primary aim, of course I wouldn’t care about scholarship except as a means to an end.   I can’t help feeling that this is what is happening here.

I do wish I knew what Ehrman’s actual scholarly contribution was, tho.  Being outside NT studies, I don’t know.

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

An evening of uploading.  I’ve added a few more volumes of the RealEncyclopadie (all pre-1923, of course) to Archive.org, which will doubtless appear in the search in a few days.   There are now the first 16 volumes accessible there. 

I had an email from the German wikisource project, working on digitising the RE there.  It contained this very interesting observation:

Another trick question is the copyright status. Over 1100 people (mostly white European males) have been working for the RE from 1891 to 1978 under the seven editors. The copyright (as viewed by German and European jurisdiction) rests in the single authors which we at Wikisource document here: http://de.wikisource.org/wiki/RE/A

Strictly speaking, a volume is, as a whole, in copyright as long as any author who contributed to it is not in the Public Domain. For example in case of vol. I [publ. 1893/1894], the Tübingen Professor Wilhelm Schmid (who died in 1951) was supposedly the last surviving contributer, so this volume won’t be PD (as a whole) before 2022. There are, also, authors who died before they could see their articles published (for example Heinr. Wilh. Schaefer and Leop. Schmidt who died in 1892). As for the more recent authors: The oldest surviving author has to be Emmanuel Kriaras (b. 1906 and still very active in Thessaloniki); the youngest is Herbert Bannert (b. 1950).

Isn’t that absurd?  That a volume published in 1893 is in copyright now, in Germany?  No doubt the Germans set up the EU copyright as well.

Someone also wrote to me to say that volume 1 of Cyril of Alexandria’s commentary on John (English version, 1874, by P.E.Pusey) has vanished from Archive.org.  A quick visit, and it had indeed been withdrawn, for unspecified “issues”.  It can’t be copyright, so this is weird.  I ended up making my own PDF from the image scans I made back in 2005, and uploading it here.    I didn’t crop the pages from the photocopies, since back in 2005 Google Books didn’t exist and I was uploading HTML scans.  So it’s a bit rough, but will do the job.

I’ve been mirroring my Google mail account to my hard disk.  Since I started using it in January 2008, I have sent or received 9,790 emails.  Um.  I wonder how long that took, and what I could have been doing more usefully in the time!  I can’t easily count the number of emails in my main client — must be a frightening number!

I’d hoped to start proof-checking the Latin of Eusebius this evening, but it will have to wait until tomorrow now.

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Article wanted

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Does anyone have a copy of Reeve, Michael D., “The Transmission of Vegetius’s Epitoma rei militaris,” Aevum 74 (2000) 479-99 that they could let me have?  Less important, but also interesting would be Shrader, Charles R., “A Handlist of Extant Manuscripts Containing the De re militari of Flavius Vegetius Renatus,” Scriptorium 33, no. 2 (1979), 280-305.

Many thanks!

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Thinking of Libya

Posted on by Roger Pearse

In the spring a young man’s fancy, lightly turns to thoughts of foreign holidays, as Tennyson might have remarked in Locksley Hall, but, obsessed with his piffling love affair, for some reason did not.  The sun broke through the incessant rain yesterday, giving that bright winter sunshine which always reminds me of the Mediterranean. 

I found myself remembering two trips to Libya, taken with Cox and Kings, who do a very nice Libyan Long Weekend tour.  So I did a Google search, and found myself looking at their Classical Libya tour.  By coincidence the next one is on the 19th February, the day after my current contract at work finishes, so I could take a week then without fear of disappointing my clients. 

On holiday, the hotel is all.  I’ve stayed at the Corinthia in Tripoli, which was truly excellent.  But this tour would also take you to Benghazi, to visit Cyrene and Apollonia, which means two nights over there.

Geographically the country is fundamentally two countries, linked by a narrow strip along the coast.  The area around Cyrene had and has a very different culture to that around Tripoli.  In ancient times the former was Greek, while the latter was Punic or Latin.  Even today, the two populations have local loyalties which outweigh any idea of “Libya” as a whole.

So to visit Cyrene means staying at some rather less good hotel.  The page lists the Al-Manara, which doesn’t get too bad a write up in TripAdvisor, except as being very noisy.  Maybe I should consider it.  I must admit that I have always wanted to go there.

But the instability in Tunisia raises questions.  Will it spread to Libya, one wonders?

Perhaps the answer is to book, and merely ensure one has good cancellation travel insurance.  I admit that I am still irked, a year on, that Voyages Jules Verne, and their partner in crime, europAssistance insurance, helped themselves to $350 of my money under various pretexts when I had to cancel my trip to Syria last year.  I don’t need a repeat performance.

I also looked for their Libyan Long Weekend tour, which I remember so fondly.  I notice the price has dropped quite a bit — a consequence of the recession, no doubt.  But that doesn’t go until April.

Hmm, what to do?  Probably sort out the insurance first, I suspect.

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