As promised, yesterday I scanned the text of the ancient Latin translation of the first homily of Eusebius of Emesa (fl. ca. 330), “De arbitrio, voluntate Pauli and domini passione”, “On freewill, the will of Paul, and the passion of the Lord”. This work has the reference number CPG 3525. In fact I learn from the CPG that this is one of the few homilies by Eusebius of Emesa where the original Greek is preserved; printed in PG 86: 536-545.
Here’s the scan, in MS Word .docx format, of the edition by E. M. Buytaert, Eusebe d’ Emese. Discours conserves en latin, vol. I; series: Spicilegium sacrum Louaniense 26, Louvain (1953):
- Eusebius of Emesa – Homily 1 – Latin (Word .docx)
I’ve not been through this, so there are certainly OCR errors in it. Indeed I just spotted one while reading over the first sentences: “Stephanus” had been read as “Stephaniis” (!) which certainly confused the machine translator. You can only get clean scans if you manually type the thing yourself. Alternatively you get much better texts if you work with each word and sentence, as you do when translating.
The only manuscript source for the homily is MS Troyes 523 (12th century), otherwise known as the Codex Trecensis 523. A microfilm of this can be accessed here. I’ve posted this picture before, but here is the picture of the opening:
And here is the corresponding page from E. Buytaert’s edition:
I.e.
EUSEBIUS EMESENUS: DE ARBITRIO, VOLUNTATE PAULI ET DOMINI PASSIONE.
[I] Paulus lapidabatur ob Dominum Iesum. Qui properabat et laetabatur ut Stephanus lapidaretur et qui persequebatur et interficiebat Stephanum ut non praedicaret Christum ante, invenitur post agnitionem Christi haec pro Christo pati, quae adversum Christum ante gerebat. Antequam enim lumen videret, putabat palpans invenire se viam; viso autem lumine, agnovit et viam.
The heading given by Buytaert is taken from the coloured list of sermons – De Filio is the second – at the start. What a pity that no coloured images of this are available. But full credit to the French for getting the microfilms online.
It’s also interesting to see the punctuation; that Buytaert starts a new sentence with “Qui” where no capital appears in the manuscript, and does not where “Et” is marked in the manuscript.
Should we attend to medieval punctuation? Is it even ancient? Or the product of some monastic copyist? I must confess that I do not know the answer. It would be interesting to know if there is a handbook or paper on how to convert what we find in the manuscripts into a modern punctuation scheme. I slightly suspect that each editor makes it up as he goes along. But surely there should be rules?
But is the homily interesting? Is it worth our time? Well, I’ve uploaded this file into Deepseek, as a way to get a quick no-guarantees output in English. On the face of it? Not very. But maybe it will reveal more as I work with it. More soon.
Ancient punctuation, that doesn’t exist before the Hellenistic. Aristophanes of Byzantium who live in the 3rd century BC invented it, so all works before him (e.g. Herodotus, Homer) don’t have it natively, it was added by later copiers. I remember reading an edition of Herodotus saying that while by now the text is certain, punctuation is an open question since it didn’t exist at his time.
Interesting – thank you.