Month: September 2024

Many thanks indeed to Diego and Matthieu Cassin who both contributed a lot of useful information in response to my last post.  Let me summarise their comments.

It seems that the K. Hadjioannos (1975) edition of Philo of Carpasia’s Letter to Eucarpios is a straight reprint of a text printed by A. Papadopoulos-Kerameus’ in Analekta Hierosolymitikes Stachyologias, vol. 1 (1891), item 16, 393-399, minus the apparatus and biblical references. His text was taken from MS St Sabbas 408 (9-10th c.), folios 34-40.   Interestingly the manuscript leads off with two works by a certain John Carpathius.

The Analekta volume is a collection of texts printed from the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate in Jerusalem and its churches in the surrounding area.  Papadopoulos-Kerameus in fact made a detailed catalogue of the manuscripts at the Patriarchate, which includes manuscripts from the monastery of St Sabbas (or Mar Saba as it is often known).  The Mar Saba manuscript appears in this catalogue in vol. 2 (1894) p.536, entry 3 (online here), although I learn from Pinakes that more up-to-date catalogues also exist.  Apparently microfilms of around half the manuscripts at the patriarchate were made in 1950 by an American expedition.

The marvellous Pinakes database also lists another manuscript of the Letter to Eucarpios here.  It is in Greece, on Mount Athos, in the Iviron monastery.  It is Iviron 673 (numbered 4793 in the Lambros catalogue), and dated to the 14th century.  Here the Letter follows two works by Chrysostom, so clearly the Mar Saba manuscript is not just a straight copy of the Iviron manuscript.

I’ve begun to scan the modern Greek translation of the Letter to Eucarpios.  I don’t know a word of modern Greek, but I thought it possible that Google Translate or ChatGPT might be able to do something with it.  Google Translate certainly attempted it, but the results were not very good.  ChatGPT on the other hand has given a very fluent translation of the whole thing, which I will post once I have tinkered with the output a bit.  At one point in particular the thought is obvious but the raw output obscures it.

The letter is written to a monk who is just starting out on the ascetic life and is despairing, and wondering, “what’s the point?”  The response is more interesting than you might imagine.

Last week I heard the name of Philo of Carpasia for the first time.  This Philo was ordained bishop of Carpasia in Cyprus by our old friend Epiphanius of Salamis, in the late 4th century.  He is the author of a Commentary on the Song of Songs, CPG 3810.  This is preserved in 10 Greek manuscripts, the earliest 12th and 13th centiry, and half of them 17th century.  There is also an ancient Latin translation of it, made at the order of Cassiodorus in the 6th century, and preserved in a single Vatican manuscript (Vat. lat. 5704) also of the 6th century.  Comparison of the two reveals that the surviving Greek text has been abbreviated a bit.  There’s a text in PG40, 27-154.  The ancient Latin version of this Commentary on the Song of Songs has been edited critically with an Italian translation.

A second work attributed to Philo of Carpasia exists… somewhere.  It’s a Letter to Eucarpios.  It’s not listed in the CPG.  But both the Commentary and the Letter to Eucarpios have been printed with a modern Greek translation in a set of volumes produced in Cyprus: K. Hadjioannos Ἡ ἀρχαία Κύπρος εἰς τὰς Ἑλληνικὰς πήγας / Hē archaia Kypros eis tas Hellēnikas pēgas, vol. 3, Leucosia: Ekd. Hieras Archiepiskopēs Kyprou (1975), where they form an appendix.  The Letter is p..534-545.  The Commentary is just the PG text, I believe.

Fortunately a well-stocked research library lies relatively near.  I spent some of yesterday renewing a reader’s card, and this morning I drove up there to collect it, and to look at the Philo of Carpasia material.  But disaster – the library has a super-duper photocopying/scanning system, all run from a central server, and this was out of action.  The server itself was inaccessible, and although the machines made scanning/copying noises, nothing came out.  Apparently a security fix had been deployed hastily a few months ago, and had caused continual problems over the summer.

This configuration is not at all uncommon in libraries today.  In the IT world we would call it “single point of failure” – one thing going down takes down everything.  I began to wish that the library still had its coin-operated photocopiers!  Less high-tech, but infinitely more resilient.  Sadly the trend in modern society is to introduce ever more technology, whether necessary or not, and in the process make everything very brittle.

What made things worse was that the library staff, although very helpful, thought that things were working, or might be working.   But I think that in reality they knew that they were not working, purely because they were getting a steady stream of people asking for assistance.  It took me quite some time and frustration before I realised that my plans for the day were well and truly frustrated.  Had they been upfront about the problems, then I might have deferred my visit!

Of course I had my smartphone with me.  So, despite all the problems, I could still take photographs.  It wasn’t ideal, because the pages come out curved.  You need to place the book face-down on a plate.  But still I was, with some labour, able to photograph the pages of the Letter to Eucarpios.  But I abandoned any hope of doing more.  Plainly the Fates had taken my thread of life in their fingers and introduced a knot!

Tomorrow I shall look at these photographs and see what can be made out of them.  I sat in the canteen and stared at the proemium, and it looks as if Hadjioannos was reprinting from somewhere else, which he unhelpfully alluded to only vaguely.  We shall see.

Thankfully he prefaced these Greek-only volumes with a page in English: