A little while ago I mentioned that I had abandoned my project to make a translation of the letters of the sixth century sophist, Procopius of Gaza. I found that I had started a project too large for me, which required more time, effort and knowledge of Greek than I possess.
When I started to work on Procopius, the first thing I did was to make a working tool to orient myself, to find my way around the text before I started into the Greek, but using an existing translation. The one chosen was the 2010 Italian translation by Federica Ciccolella, which I ran through Google Translate, and came to think was rather impressive. I don’t suppose the result of the machine translation is very accurate. But skimming through it does give a very nice idea of the size and shape of the letters, and allows you to find your way around the Italian.
I also did the same to the notes, using DeepSeek AI (I can’t recall why I used that). I stuck a selection of these into the same file, as endnotes to each letter, so I could understand what I was dealing with. The notes in the Italian are magnificent, vast, detailed and some of them amount to short essays on the subjects in question. These must have taken years to compile. But I just grabbed enough to make sense of the meaning.
The project is dead, but I thought that the file with the working materials might be useful to anyone else who feels an interest in the letters of Procopius of Gaza. Obviously if you know Italian well, you’d use the original, but I find that many people don’t. And the letters of Procopius, which are superficially mundane, are in fact wonderful if you want to get a feel for the early sixth century in the Eastern Roman Empire.
Anyway I thought that I would share the working file with you. Here it is:
- Procopius of Gaza – Letters – English output (Word .docx file)
- Procopius of Gaza – Letters – English output (PDF of the same)
The files are also on Archive.org here.
The contents have no scholarly value, obviously, so don’t quote it – for that go to the source volume!1 But if you’re curious… well, it might help you!
- Eugenio Amato, Rose di Gaza: gli scritti retorico-sofistici e le Epistole di Procopio di Gaza. Series: Hellenica 35. Alexandria: Edizioni dell’Orso (2010). ISBN 9788862742337. The letters are on pp.290-437; notes on 438-503.[↩]