Thoughts on Antiquity, Patristics, putting things online, information access, and more
I’m off to Rome for a few days in a couple weeks. Just a long weekend — boy are those hotels expensive! — but nice all the same.
I’m travelling independently with a friend who hasn’t been to Rome before. I’d rather like to spend some time in museums; my friend, however, is not an ancient history buff.
What should we go and look at, do you think?
I discovered today that there is online a thesis containing an English translation of Jerome’s Commentary on Jonah. It was made by Timothy Michael Hegedus in 1991. It’s here. I am OCR’ing the PDF as I write!
I learned about this via AWOL. There is a website Open Access Theses and Dissertations. This is a portal to other online sites of dissertations. A query on “Eusebius” quickly brought up the item.
Magic!
Dr Anthony Alcock has been at it again. Fresh from translating the late Coptic poem, the Triadon, he has attacked another late Coptic text. Today I received a PDF with the first part (out of five) of an English translation of a 14th century work, The Mysteries of the Greek Alphabet. It is here:
What is this text? Well, it’s one of those texts that finds significance in all sorts of ways, such as in the number of letters in the alphabet:
In the name of the Father, the Son and Holy Spirit, one God. A discourse uttered by Apa Seba, the presbyter and anchorite, concerning the mystery of God that is in the letters of the alphabet, which none of the ancient philosophers was able to reveal. …
So, it has become clear that the twenty-two works in the economy of Christ and the twenty-two works of God in the creation are the model of each other, like the twenty-two letters of the alphabet, as we have already said. …
The text is extant in a manuscript in the Bodleian library in Oxford, Ms. Huntingdon 393, written in 1393 A.D.
There is also an Arabic version, although I don’t know where this might be found.
The Coptic text was published with French translation in Le Muséon, vols. 19 and 20 in 1900-1901 by Adolphe Hebbelynck. US readers may find vol. 19 here (non-US readers should curse the malign publishers of their land who induced Google to block their access). (Update: also here, at Archive.org). Vol. 20 is here, and accessible to all (so far).
Dr. Alcock has stated his intention to translate the other four sections. This is admirable, and I look forward to reading them!
UPDATE: The excellent Alin Suciu also has the story here, but in addition posts a monochrome image of a couple of pages of the manuscript! This is in Coptic, with a marginal Arabic translation. So that’s where the Arabic version may be found!
UPDATE: A kind correspondent has emailed a link to vol. 19 at Archive.org, accessible to all.
A day that I have long dreaded has arrived – the day on which I have to work out just what it cost to make the translation of Eusebius of Caesarea’s, Gospel Problems and Solutions.
Why now? Well, it’s the end of the financial year. The company has been selling copies of the book for the last two years and, unless I want to pay tax on non-existent profits, I need to book the costs incurred in making the thing in the first place.
Trouble is, the payments went out in small lumps. There was twenty pounds here, and fifty pounds there, over quite a long period. I did keep track of a lot of it, initially, in a spreadsheet. But then I succumbed and stopped being so meticulous. Which meant, of course, that today I had to go back through emails looking for the ones where I said, “the cheque is on the way” and things like that.
Realistically I cannot hope to have covered them all. I know that there are more costs that I have been unable to find. But everything I have billed is certainly a real expenditure.
There are also costs connected with the Origen, Homilies on Ezekiel book, which still languishes unpublished but still cost a lot (I need to hire a typesetter and get it out there). These I have included, since they are part of the expense. But even so, I spent quite a bit more than I thought.
The bill for translating and reviewing and editing and transcribing is a little more than five thousand two hundred pounds; around $8,000 dollars. That, to put it mildly, is quite a sum. Revenues from sales, which exclude the physical cost of manufacture, have been only around 60% of that. The cost of manufacture and postage drives that revenue figure down further – I have not calculated quite how, since I charged for those costs separately. So it looks as if I will end up with a loss of around $4,000 on the project, assuming I don’t sell many more copies (which is likely).
I don’t complain, mind you! The costs came in, little by little, so I hardly noticed them. I can afford the loss, spread over four years as it was. And, heck, it’s not a huge sum, really! A foreign holiday would often cost more, and leave nothing behind.
The great positive is that the job is done! For a small sum, as most people count these things, a translation of this highly interesting work now exists. Once sales cease — there is still a trickle of these — I shall place the translation on the web, just as I promised. We shall all be the better for it.
And I will bring out the Origen book too. All the main costs are already paid, so why not?
Anthony Alcock has continued translating the Triadon, the 14th century poem which happens to be the last literary text composed in Coptic. He has kindly made this accessible to us all. A PDF of the second part is here:
Thank you very much, Dr Alcock!
A correspondent yesterday enquired whether the edition of Chrysostom prepared by Sir Henry Savile in the 17th century mentioned a Sir Henry Neville. The latter, he said, was a student of Savile’s and contributed largely to the cost of the edition.
As you can see from the title page, above, only Savile’s name appears. But it would be interesting to learn more. The story of how some famous books appears is one that I would gladly read, and I doubt that I am alone in this.
UPDATE: The story of Sir Henry Neville’s involvement looks rather dubious, as I look into it. The source for it appears to be a letter written in 1615 by George Lord Carew to Sir Thomas Roe, then a foreign ambassador. The letter was published by the Camden Society in 1860, and is online here (p.14). The footnote contains the statement, “He published an edition of Chrysostom 1614, at great cost.” This is repeated in various subsequent compendia. But this is probably just a confusion of the Camden Society editor with Sir Henry Savile, and even the year is wrong — it should be 1611-1613. Most likely this is just a modern myth.
The 6th century Saint’s life of the Nestorian Patriarch, Mar Aba, is an interesting document in that it contains real insights into the political maneouverings at the court of the later Sassanid kings. The Nestorian patriarch now had a very substantial following in Persia. Earlier Patriarchs were merely seen as the head of an unpopular sect suspected of treacherous preference for the Byzantine emperor. But the hostility of the latter towards the Nestorians had removed this problem, and the King of Kings was beginning to see him instead as a possible counter-balance to the sometimes maleficent power of the Zoroastrian clergy. Keeping the latter busy with theological issues distracted them from plotting.
In chapter 35 we saw that the Magians had induced the King of Kings to imprison the Catholicos again.
36. The Catholicos boldly raised his voice and said, “Once the King of Kings has made such a decision about me, because of the whisperings of my enemies, (further) words are unnecessary. He orders my immediate death, and with great joy do I accept death for the truth of Christ. The Magians persecuted me, an innocent, and imprisoned me for seven years in the power of my persecutors, and sent a renegade to murder me. But God in his invincible power rescued me, after I came to the court of his Majesty the King of Kings, and they did violence on me and the people of God, although they fettered me hand and foot and neck as a malefactor, and God the almighty knows that I was dragged away by them by force. The King of Kings said that he would release me from the fetters, and after he retracted this, and they slandered me before his sublime Majesty, and he finally decided against me, so let him now demand my immediate execution.”
The PSNIK’ went and reported these words to the king. Then the King of Kings left the Saint alone and said to him in a friendly way, “Go and write letters to the Christians of each province, that, if the insurgents do not settle down peaceably, the sword, bow and arrows will be drawn against them, they will be attacked, and any found fighting will be killed, be they Magian, Jew or Christian.” After the PSNIK’ brought the message, he undertook to write it.
After this was done, God worked on the King of Kings, and it was suggested to him that he should release the Saint. And when the King of Kings went into (winter) quarters near the (two) cities, the Saint went with him.
The Magians must have wondered why on earth the monarch kept dithering.
Severian of Gabala, the enemy of John Chrysostom, has left around 60 homilies to us, some in Greek, preserved under his enemy’s name, and others in Armenian or other languages. Much of this material is unpublished, and nearly all of it is untranslated. Being rather obscure, it can be hard to get a handle on the material.
Today I found two articles by Robert E. Carter in JSTOR, which help quite a lot. The first discusses the chronology of the homilies, and identifies 20 which can be dated to 400 or 401 A.D.[1] This gives an overview of Severian’s life, and also a useful bibliography. The reader is referred by Dr. Carter to an article by Sever Voicu for details of Severian’s life and works, and I wish it were accessible to me.[2]
But it also refers back to an earlier article, which sets out an index of scriptural references in Severian’s sermons.[3] This also gives a list of Severian’s homilies on p.324-6, which is more up-to-date than the CPG list. Some of the unpublished items listed in the CPG now seem to have appeared.
I’m not sure who without JSTOR access would find this list of raw texts useful, but perhaps a list of Severian’s works, modified for a more general readership, ought to appear online.
A correspondent draws my attention to Tesseract, a Google-hosted project to do Optical Character Recognition. The Tesseract website is here. Tesseract is a command-line tool, but there are front-ends available.
I am a long-term fan of Abbyy Finereader, and, let’s face it, have probably OCR’d more text than most. So I thought that I would give Tesseract 3.02.02 a go.
First, getting the bits. I work on Windows 7, so I downloaded:
I double-clicked on the tesseract installer. This went smoothly. It gave me the option to download and install extra languages (English is the default); among others I chose ancient Greek, and German, and German (fraktur). The latter is the “gothic” style characters fashionable in Germany until 1945. Curiously the list of languages is not in alphabetical order; French following German.
Next I clicked on the GImageReader installer. This ran quickly, and warned that you need a copy of Tesseract installed. It did not create a desktop icon; you have to locate the program in the Start menu. This would throw some users, I suspect.
I then started GImageReader. It started with an error; that it was missing the “spellcheck dictionary for Dansk(Frak)”. Why it looks for this I cannot imagine. Not a good start, I fear. I suspect that it expects Tesseract to be installed with all possible languages.
Next I browsed to a tif file containing part of the English translation of Cyril of Alexandria on John. The file explorer is clunky and non-Windows standard. The page displayed OK, although if you swap back to another window and then back again it seems to re-render the image.
At the top of the page is the recognition language – set by default to the mysterious Dansk (Frak). I changed this to English. I then hit “Recognize all”. The recognition was quick.
So far, so good, then. While unpolished, the interface is usable without a lot of stress.
The result of the OCR was not bad. A window pops open on the right, with ASCII text in it. It didn’t cope very well with layout issues, nor with small text. But the basic recognition quality seemed good.
My next choice was a PDF with the text of Severian of Gabala, De pace, in Greek and Latin. This opened fine! (rather to my surprise). I held the cursor over the page, and it turned into a cross. Holding down the left mouse button drew a rectangle around the text I wanted to recognise. A quick language change to Ellenika and I hit “Recognise selection”.
The result was not bad at all. Polytonic accents were recognised (although it did not like the two g’s in a)/ggeloi).
There were some UI issues here. I could zoom the window being read – great! But annoyingly I could not zoom the text window, nor copy and paste from it to Notepad. But I could and did save it to a Unicode text file. The result was this:
1. Οἱ ἄηε).οι τὸν οὐρἀνιον χο-
ρὸ·· συστησἀμενοι εὺηγγελίζοντο
τοῖς ποιμἑσι λἑγοντες· «εὐαγγε-
λιζόμεθα ὑμῖν σήμερον χαρὰ· με-
γάλην, ήτις ἔσται παντὶ τῷ λαῷ».
Παρ’ αὐτῶν τοίνυν τῶν ὰγίων ἐκεί-
νων ὰηέλων καὶ ῆμεῖς δανεισἀ-
μενοι φωνὴν οὐαηελιζόμεθα ὑμῖν
σήμερον, ὅτι σήμερον τὰ τῆς
ὲκπλησίας ἐν γαλή~›η καὶ τὰ τῶν
αἰρετικῶν ἐν ζάλη. Σἡμερον τὸ
οπιάφος τῆς ἑκκλησίας ἐν γαλήνη
Conclusions? I’ve used worse in the past. I think it looks pretty good. I suspect that, to use it, one would need to train it a bit more, but you can’t complain about the price!
Well done, those who created the training dictionary.