Author: Roger Pearse

Some excerpts from Festus, De significatione verborum

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I have been idly looking through the section of Festus for the letter ‘M’ — the first book preserved in the damaged manuscript.  Here are a few extracts.  Perhaps others will find these interesting also.

MINOR DELOS.  This name is given to Puzzuoli, because at one time Delos was the greatest commercial centre in the whole world.  It was then replaced by Puzzuoli, previously known in Greek as Δικαιαρχία.  From this Lucilius has said: Inde Dicaearcheum populos, Delumque minorem (Whence the peoples of Dicaearchia and the little Delos).

 MIRACULA.  This word, which we apply today to things deserving of admiration, was only given by the ancients to hideous things. [1]

MISCELLIONES.  Those who have no certain opinions, but are of varied and mixed judgements.

MIRACIDION. First adolescence.

MEDDIX is the title of a magistrate among the Oscans.  Ennius says, Summus ibi capitur meddix, occiditur alter.[2]

MEDITRINALIA.  This is the origin of this word.  It was the custom among the Latin peoples that, on the day when one sampled the new wine for the first time, to say: Vetus novum vinum bibo, veteri novo morbo medeor.[3]  From the same words is formed the name of the goddess Meditrina, whose celebrations were called Meditrinalia.

MEDITERREA.  Sisenna considers this form as preferable to mediterranea. 

MELO, alternative name for the Nile.

MEGALESIA.  Games in honour of the Great Goddess. 

I will look some more at this later on.

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  1. [1]i.e. monstrosities, prodigies, rather than marvels.↩
  2. [2]The senior magistrate (Meddix) was captured there, the other was killed.↩
  3. [3]Old, I drink the new wine; from the old wine I would acquire a new illness.↩

More on the manuscript of Festus’ Lexicon

Posted on by Roger Pearse

An early editor, Antonio Agustin, in his preface to his edition of 1559, describes the transmission as follows:

In these twenty books, which he entitled de verborum significatione, or priscorum verborum cum exemplis, Sextus Pompeius Festus abridged the books of Verrius Flaccus on the same subject. For he omitted the words which were, in Verrius’ own words, ‘too old, and dead and buried and were of no use and authority’. He dealt with the same words [that Verrius had discussed] more clearly and more briefly, setting out the original words in a smaller space. He also provided a critical treatment of examples found in other sources. He often corrected Verrius’ errors, and he always explained most learnedly why he did so.

Now this book had the misfortune to suffer harm of several kinds very long ago. For we could not find out either who this Festus was, or when he wrote this work. Only one or two references to it are to be found here and there in Charisius and Macrobius.

While the whole book was still extant in the time of Charlemagne, one Paulus thought it would be useful if he made a sort of epitome of the parts he liked best. Ignorant men liked his book so much that it took Festus’ place in every library.

One codex survived the slaughter. But that was like a soldier whose comrades have been defeated and massacred, and who creeps along at random with his legs broken, his nose mutilated, one eye gouged out, and one arm broken. This book supposedly came from Illyria. According to Pio and Poliziano, Pomponio Leto had some pages of it; Manilius Rallus had the greater part. Angelo Poliziano received the book from them, went over it, and copied it, and he tried to use it in his Miscellanea to emend a verse of Catullus. Using this same copy by Poliziano, Pier Vettori has begun, with his customary learning, to emend the vulgate text of Festus at various points in his Variae lectiones.

The remains of the codex passed to Aldo Manuzio, who tried to combine them with the epitome of Paulus, thus making one body from two sets of parts. But so much was omitted [or] changed in publication that it was still necessary for other critics to intervene. Achille Maffei, the brother of Cardinal Bernardino, has another copy, similarly confIated from both texts; it is fuller than the Aldine. Thus there have been three recensions of the same text, all imperfect. There is the old MS of half of Festus; of this, nothing remains before the letter M, and from that letter to the end barely half of what there used to be. The second text is Paulus’s epitome. As we show in this edition, even the most ignorant can see from a comparison of the texts how carelessly that was put together. The third text is that conflated from the other two, like those of Aldo and Maffei, and our own.

Stirring stuff!  Anthony Grafton, who translated the Latin [1] rightly remarks, “by no one has [the story] ever been told in livelier terms”.

Grafton corrects the picture slightly.  Various editions of the epitome by Paul the Deacon started to appear in print from 1471 onwards.  The solitary codex to survive the Middle Ages is Naples, Bibliotheca Nazionale IV.A.3, written in the second half of the eleventh century, probably at Rome.  It originally contained sixteen gatherings, the first seven of which had already been lost by the time that it reappeared in the fifteenth century.  He continues:

The nine that remained had also been damaged by fire, so that some leaves were missing, and on many leaves most or all of the outer column of the text was also lost. Manilius Rallus, a Greek from Sparta who became a successful Roman Catholic churchman and Neo-Latin poet, brought it to Italy at some time before 1477. He is said to have found it in Dalmatia.

Rallus lent this codex to Pomponio Leto, who found it most helpful for his pioneering research into Roman antiquities. He drew on the new codex for his university lectures on Varro and other authors. Unfortunately, he treated the codex with his usual lack of scruple – he kept the eighth, tenth, and sixteenth gatherings, which have subsequently disappeared, and must be reconstructed from a number of surviving transcripts. 

These statements about the ms. Grafton references to the edition of W. M. Lindsay (1913), p.iii-xi (the statements about Leto are from elsewhere).

However Fay Glinister disagrees on one important point:

When the manuscript surfaced, some time before the death of the humanist and philosopher Lorenzo Valla (1406-1457), it was already incomplete.[6]

[6] For the date, see Lorenzo Valla, Le postille al”Institutio oratoria’ di Quintiliano, eds. L. Cesarini Martinelli and A. Perosa (Padua 1996). There had previously been a claim that the MS was found in Dalmatia in the 1470s, by the Greek Manilius Rhallus; it is now evident that this was a mistake.

I presume from this hasty reference that there is evidence that Valla referred to Festus (and not to the epitome of Paul the Deacon), but without access to the Valla text, it is not clear what the argument is. 

Lindsay on the other hand tells us:

In Illyrico codicem repertum fama erat, sed non satis certa.

It is supposed that the codex was found in Illyria, but this is not quite certain.

No reference is given for this statement.  Rhallus’ claim to discovery is based on his edition of the epitome by Paul the Deacon in 1471, in which he refers in the preface:

Nuper cum legissem Pompei Festi mutilatos libros qui priscorum verborum inscribuntur, vehementer dolui quod tantum opus integrum non remansit.

Recently when I read the mutilated books of Pompeius Festus which are inscribed priscorum verborum, I greatly regretted that such a work should not be preserved complete.

But whether this refers to the manuscript, or to the epitome is not clear.

The Illyria story seems to derive from the preface of the editio princeps, 1500, at Milan, from Io. Angelus Seinzenzeler, which contained Nonius, Festus with Paul the Deacon, and Varro.  The editor was Io. Baptista Pius.  In his preface he writes:

His quae nobis venerunt ex codice pervetusto et ob hoc fidelissimo, qui ex Illyrico Pomponio Laeto fuerat oblatus, …

These things, which came to us from a very old and therefore very reliable codex, which was brought from Illyria by Pomponio Leto, …

There are no other references to a find in Illyria in Lindsay.  It would be good to clarify precisely what is, and is not, known about the circumstances of the rediscovery.

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  1. [1]Anthony Grafton, Joseph Scaliger: A study in the history of classical scholarship, Clarendon, 1983, p.134.↩

From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve commissioned translations of Ephraim the Syrian, Hymns against heresies 23 and 24, to be done by Christmas.  Looking forward to those!  Together with hymn 22, they form a group against Marcionism.

I’ve now received by ILL To Mega Biblion, on the presence of end titles and the like in ancient papyri of Homer.  It catalogues nearly 60 examples.  It’s going to take some careful reading.  But one interesting snippet, if I remember it correctly, is that end-titles as such seem to appear only from the 1st century B.C. onwards.

This evening I had intended to translate another chunk of the Life of Mar Aba.  But … I can’t find the .rtf file with the source!  Maybe another night.

On a different note, I read a rather sensible blog article at The Gospel Coalition on the appointment of a new Archbishop of Canterbury. 

Much more exciting, tho, was an article over at the British Library manuscripts blog (whose evil comment system erased an enthusiastic comment that I left). Julian Harrison has an interesting piece on the 12th century catalogue of the books of Reading Abbey, found in Ms. B.L. Egerton 3031:

The book has a remarkable history. It was discovered in 1790 in a bricked-up chamber by a workman who was demolishing part of a wall at Shinfield House, near Reading, home to Lord Fingall (whose family sold the manuscript to the British Museum).

How the cartulary came to be there remains a mystery — was the hiding place at Shinfield used by a Reading monk when Henry VIII’s followers ransacked the monastery, or was it buried in the chamber at another time?

The item then was:

…. purchased by the British Museum in 1921 using funds bequeathed by Francis Henry Egerton, 8th Earl of Bridgewater (d. 1829). …

The library catalogue only takes up four pages, but it lists about 300 books according to subject with the heading in red ink, Hii sunt libri qui continentur in Radingensi ecclesia (These are the books contained in the church of Reading). It begins with four Bibles, each comprising three or four volumes. Next were glossed books of the Bible, one of which is probably British Library, Additional MS 54230, a copy of the book of Judges with other texts. One of the largest categories contains the works of the Church Fathers, particularly St Augustine, for whom 18 volumes are listed. Following these are a small collection of classical texts and, lastly, liturgical books, such as breviaries, missals and antiphoners for use in the daily devotions.

There is an image of folio 8v (although not nearly large enough: the full size item is here), which is the beginning of the catalogue.  I wish that the other three pages were also online!!  Only the last three entries are by Augustine: the first two on Psalms and Canticles; the other de unitate dei in uno volumine.

I wonder what else Reading held?  How I wish these things were online!  It is fascinating to dig through the remains of medieval libraries.  Which patristic texts were there?  Which classical texts?

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve written to a couple of people who have done translations for me, offering them a better rate.  It would be good to get some projects in progress again.

My local library has received an ILL request for the English translation of the Saturnalia of Macrobius, made by P. V. Davies in the 60’s.  I need to consult this for information on Festus.  They wrote back to tell me that a book that I had ordered, on colophons in ancient papyri of poetic works, is in.  I shall get hold of that tomorrow.

I’ve also written to Fay Glinister, who was responsible for the Festus Lexicon Project, enquiring about the status of that project.  In particular there was talk of an English translation.  Festus should exist in English, and it would be nice to see if that could be made to happen.

A kind correspondent has placed a copy of Festus as edited by W. Lindsay (1913) in my hands.  Since this is the standard critical edition, it may well be helpful in getting a translation made.  I’ve also been able to glance at Glinister’s book, Verrius, Festus and Paul (2007), containing papers of a conference on these people.  It’s excellent stuff:

It was compiled during the Roman imperial period, but about Festus himself we know virtually nothing. Mainly on the basis of references to Lucan and Martial in Paul the Deacon’s epitome of the Lexicon, Festus is thought to have lived in the second century AD; his work certainly fits well with the literary climate of that era.[2] A fourth-century grammarian, Charisius, provides a terminus ante quem when he cites Porphyrio, in the early third century, as having used Festus.[3] A connection with Narbo in Gaul has long been posited, but is highly tenuous.[4]  The Lexicon is Festus’ only extant text, although another work is advertised in one of the entries (242.19F poriciam).

2) These authors are mentioned only in Paul’s epitome, however, and may not have been included in the corresponding entry of Festus; Paul, however, takes his quotations straight from Festus and seldom if ever adds them himself.
3)  Charisius, Gramm., 285.12, ed. C. Barwick (Leipzig 1944), cites: Porphyrio ex Verrio et Festo. Cf. R. Helm, s.v. Pomponius Porphyrio’, RE 42 (1952), coll. 2412-16.
4) A catalogue from the monastery at Cluny (no. 328, c. 1158-1160) contains amongst other works a liber Festi Pompeii. The dedication is ad Arcorium Rufum, corrected by M. Manitius, ‘Zu Pompeius Festus’, Hermes 27 (1892) 318-20 to Artorium, and identified as a descendant of the grammarian C. Artorius Proculus, mentioned by Festus. Inscriptions from Narbo (CIL XII 4412, 5066) connect the families of the Pompeii with the Artorii, providing a possible, if very speculative context for the author of the Lexicon.[1]

A lot of solid information, there, in a few lines.  Excellent stuff!  The reference to the catalogue of Cluny, online here is interesting:

328. Volumen in quo continentur vite sanctorum Sylvestri, Antonii, Maxentii, Syri Ticinensis, Dyonisii Mediolanensis, Eucherii atque Consortie, Justi Lugdunensis, Maximi episcopi, Euvertii, Lanteni et Jacobi Darendariensis, atque passio Leodegarii, Cantici, Canticiani et Canticianille, et liber Festi Pompeii ad Arcorium Rufum, habens in capite Augustinum de [decem] cordis et quandam collectionem versuum de psalmis, abbreviationem in Cantica canticorum.

An odd volume, mostly hagiographical but with Festus at the back.  And this volume must either be the sole surviving copy, when it was more complete; or else another manuscript.

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  1. [1]Glinister, Verrius, Festus and Paul, p.1.↩

Paying more for translations

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Over the last few years I have commissioned various kind people to make translations for us of ancient texts.  But in that time prices have not remained static; yet I have tended to offer the same money.  I only realised this last night.

Inflation is a curse, because it creeps up on you.  “Quantitative easing” is the current weasel-phrase for printing money, which makes every coin in circulation suddenly worth less.  The official inflation statistics continue to give ridiculously low figures, which tells me only that they are being fixed.

What is the real rate of inflation?  It’s much higher.  In the last few years prices have increased quite a bit.  But it’s hard to know how much, other than by feel.  This is why the dishonest inflation rates are such a curse.

But I do know that petrol in 2007 was 87p a litre in the UK on average; in 2012 it is now 134p a litre, an increase of 65%!   That feels much more like the real change in prices in my weekly grocery bill.  In the UK, admittedly, the government taxes this essential heavily; but an overall increase of 50% seems reasonable.  I only wish my income had increased by a similar amount!

I think, therefore, that I will apply a 50% increase to the money that I pay for translation.  That’s only fair to the translators.

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Some notes on the lexicon of Festus

Posted on by Roger Pearse

There is a manuscript in the Farnese collection, in the Biblioteca Nazionale in Naples (shelfmark Bibl. Naz. IV.A.3), known as the Farnesianus or F, because it once formed part of the library of Cardinal Ranuccio Farnese.  This contains a text consisting of words and definitions, entitled De significatione verborum, On the meaning of words.  The manuscript tells us that the author is an otherwise unknown Sextus Pompeius Festus.[1]  The manuscript itself is 11th or 12th century.

The manuscript consists of 41 folios of parchment, written on both sides in two columns, giving us 164 columns of text.

The manuscript has suffered damage.  More than a few of the columns show signs of burning on their exterior margin, and most of the folios show evident traces of fire.  However, for some folios, the burned portion has been cut away, and on folio 19, this means that the outer column is completely gone.  The first eight folios are often nearly illegible.  The parchment itself is often pierced here and there by small holes or cuts.

From the ninth folio, the writing is very neat and clear, but heavily abbreviated.  Each entry is begun with majuscule letters, used only for this purpose.

The manuscript seems to have been discovered in Illyria at the start of the 16th century, and brought to Italy.[2]

A good bibliography may be found in the Festus Lexicon Project, which points out that the French translation is at Remacle.org here.  I was unable to locate a copy of the W. M. Lindsay edition of 1913 online, unfortunately.

Fay Glinister writes at the Festus Lexicon Project:

The text, even in its present mutilated state, is an important source for scholars of Roman history. It is a treasury of historical, grammatical, legal and antiquarian learning, providing sometimes unique evidence for the culture, language, political, social and religious institutions, deities, laws, lost monuments, and topographical traditions of ancient Italy.

Festus is important, too, in terms of his numerous explicit citations of early Roman authors, from Fabius Pictor on. He quoted or used many ancient sources, including authors – poets, grammarians, jurists and antiquarians – whose works do not survive elsewhere.

In the case of Plautus, the quotations that survive in Festus are particularly important, as they antedate the edition from which the archetype derives, and sometimes preserve a true reading not otherwise attested.

We could sometimes wish that Festus included more: in quoting, his practice is typically to complete the line, whether or not the sense of the passage can be understood.

The text of Festus sometimes preserves very early traditions, or readings of other authors. For example, the quotation from the Augustan jurist Antistius Labeo’s work on pontifical law in Festus 474, 476L, apparently from priestly records, may be earlier than Varro’s discussion of the Septimontium in LL 5.41.

Other frequently cited authors include Lucilius, Caecilius, Accius, Afranius, Titinius, the grammarian Cornificius, and of course Varro (directly cited about twenty times; in addition a number of other entries have been attributed to him). Festus also includes many glosses of legal character, and cites jurists such as Mucius Scaevola, Sulpicius Rufus, Ateius Capito and so on.

Festus’ many sources represent a wide range of Republican scholarly antiquity, but it is also worthwhile looking at him in the context of his own time. The choice he made to work on such material is quite an interesting one. Clearly, he was interested in the Roman past, but as the first part of his work is lost, we lack any explicit personal statement of his aims.

Nevertheless, his literary activity can be understood in the general context of the cultural attitudes of the second century. He is concerned with the recovery of Roman antiquities of all kinds, and with early literary works (such as those by Ennius and Cato), which fits in with the arcaising and antiquarian interests of a number of near-contemporary Latin authors such as Probus, Apuleius, and most notably Aulus Gellius, author of the Attic Nights.

Hmm.  Now that sounds interesting, although an English translation would definitely need footnotes.  She also believes he is a writer of the 2nd century, not the 4th.

I’ve had a quick look at a couple of sections of the remacle transcription, and came across one entry that seemed interesting:

SOL.  The sun is so named because it is alone.  It is named sometimes sun, sometimes Apollo: You are Apollo, you are alone (Sol) in the sky / heaven.

In this light, the cult of Sol Invictus in the late empire takes on a new meaning.

Likewise the expression “sub corona”, under the crown, is of interest.  There are versions of this in the extracts by Paul the Deacon, as well as the direct text.

SUB CORONA: Captives are said to be sold “under the crown”, because they are sold with their head decorated with a crown.  Cato says: “Let the people give thanks to the gods for giving them success, rather than see themselves sold, wearing a crown, following a defeat.”

SUB CORONA: We say “sold under the crown” because usually a crown is placed on the head of captives when they are sold, as Cato says in his book On the military art: “Let the people go and give thanks to the gods for a success, wearing a crown, rather than be sold, wearing a crown, following a defeat.” However this sign indicates that nothing is owed by the people, as Plautus also indicates in his Little Garden: “Let the crier be crowned, so that he may be sold for any price.”

I wonder whether the custom may explain the passage in Tertullian’s De corona militis where soldiers who worshipped Mithras refused to wear a crown during the distribution of the donatives from the emperor, on the grounds that “Mithras is my crown”?  The crowns were worn for celebration; but clearly it could have another meaning, of ownership.

Another anecdote:

RIDEO, INQUIT GALBA CANTERIO [“I laugh,” said Galba to his horse], is a proverb which Sinnius Capito interprets thus: “If a man falls at the first moment when he begins something.”  Suplicius Galba, setting out for the province that had been assigned to him, saw his horse fall right at the gate of the City.  “I laugh,” he said, “O horse, to see you already tired, with so long a journey to do and so short a distance from the start.”

PRAETORIA COHORS.  The praetorian cohort, so named because it always accompanied the praetor.  Scipio Africanus was the first to select the bravest men from the army, and form a body who would always accompany him during the war, being exempt from all other service and receiving a sixfold wage.

PRAETORIA PORTA.  This name is given to the gate of the camp from which the army goes out to go to fight, because in the beginning the praetors fulfilled the functions assigned today to the consuls, and directed the operations of the war: their tent was likewise called the “praetorium”.

PUNICUM.  A type of cake, the use of which came from the Carthaginians.  Also called probum, because much more delicate than the others.

PECULIUM.  Money belonging to slaves is so called from pecus, just as money belonging to the head of the family is called pecunia.

Other entries of interest that I saw were those on the October Horse and the Ordo Sacerdotum (order of precedence of the priests), but there is much else of interest to the casual reader in this work.  If Aulus Gellius can be read in English, it seems like a pity that Festus cannot be.

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  1. [1]C. O. Muller, p.ii, footnote 2, quoting Politian to this effect.↩
  2. [2]A. Savagner, Sextus Pompeius Festus, De la Signification des mots, vol. 1, 1846, preface.↩

The scientist revolt against academic journal publishing

Posted on by Roger Pearse

It seems that the scientists are getting fed up with the whole system of academic journal publishing.  A correspondent writes, drawing my attention to a rather wonderful story from the Guardian, back in April.  The story is long, and full of interesting detail.

Academic spring: how an angry maths blog sparked a scientific revolution

Alok Jha reports on how a Cambridge mathematician’s protest has led to demands for open access to scientific knowledge

It began with a frustrated blogpost by a distinguished mathematician. Tim Gowers and his colleagues had been grumbling among themselves for several years about the rising costs of academic journals.

They, like many other academics, were upset that the work produced by their peers, and funded largely by taxpayers, sat behind the paywalls of private publishing houses that charged UK universities hundreds of millions of pounds a year for the privilege of access.

There had been talk last year that a major scientific body might come out in public to highlight the problem and rally scientists to speak out against the publishing companies, but nothing was happening fast.

So, in January this year, Gowers wrote an article on his blog declaring that he would henceforth decline to submit to or review papers for any academic journal published by Elsevier, the largest publisher of scientific journals in the world.

He was not expecting what happened next. Thousands of people read the post and hundreds left supportive comments. Within a day, one of his readers had set up a website, The Cost of Knowledge, which allowed academics to register their protest against Elsevier.

The site now has almost 9,000 signatories, all of whom have committed themselves to refuse to either peer review, submit to or undertake editorial work for Elsevier journals. “I wasn’t expecting it to make such a splash,” says Gowers. “At first I was taken aback by how quickly this thing blew up.”

Gowers, a mathematician at Cambridge University and winner of the prestigious Fields Medal, had hit a nerve with academics who were increasingly fed up with the stranglehold that a few publishing companies have gained over the publication and distribution of the world’s scientific research.

The current publishing model for science is broken, argue an ever-increasing number of supporters of open access publishing, a model whereby all scientific research funded by taxpayers would be made available on the web for free.

Expensive paywalls not only waste university funds, they say, but slow down future scientific discovery and put up barriers for interested members of the public, politicians and patients’ groups who need access to primary research in order to exercise their democratic rights.

Stephen Curry, a structural biologist at Imperial College London, says that scientists need to come to a new arrangement with publishers fit for the online age and that “for a long time, we’ve been taken for a ride and it’s got ridiculous”.

…

Academic publishers charge UK universities about £200m a year to access scientific journals, almost a tenth of the £2.2bn distributed to them by the government, via the funding councils, for the basic running costs of university research.

Despite the recession, these charges helped academic publishers operate with profit margins of 35% or more , while getting their raw materials and the work of thousands of taxpayer- and charity-funded scientists free.

The big three publishing houses – Elsevier, Springer and Wiley – own most of the world’s more than 20,000 academic journals and account for about 42% of all journal articles published. And, even as library budgets over the past few years in the UK and North America have been flat or declining, journal prices have been rising by 5-7% a year or more.

A standalone subscription to one of Elsevier’s most expensive journals, Biochimica et Biophysica Acta, costs more than €18,000 (£15,000) a year. Most universities buy bundles of journals, however, so they can soon rack up bills of more than £1m each to access the journals their academics request.

…

It is easy for most research scientists to remain oblivious to the high cost of journal subscriptions, because they are not usually the ones having to negotiate with publishers, says Sir Mark Walport, director of the Wellcome Trust.

As an active researcher, he had easy access to all the papers he wanted and only became aware of the costs involved, he says, when he arrived at the trust and tried to read a paper that had been produced as a result of a research grant from the charity, only to be faced with an article charge of £25. “Not surprisingly, I felt somewhat resentful about it,” he says.

This is excellent news.  The emperor has no clothes; and the fact is now becoming public knowledge.  And where the scientists lead, the humanities will follow.

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Some literary sources on the “nundinal days”

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Yesterday I talked about the “nundinal days”, the “8-day week” that the Romans used for market day, in addition to the lunar 7-day week.  I thought that some primary sources might be useful here.  This site lists quite a few, and Lacus Curtius has a good article here.  So let’s look at this.

The Saturnalia of Macrobius is not accessible to me in English, but I understand that book 1, chapters 6, 13 and 16 are all of interest.

Dionysius of Halicarnassus, book 2, ch. 28:

In time of peace he [Romulus] accustomed them to remain at their tasks in the country, except when it was necessary for them to come to market, upon which occasions they were to meet in the city in order to traffic, and to that end he appointed every ninth day for the markets; …

Dionysius of Halicarnassus, book 7, ch. 58:

The Romans had markets then, as now, every eighth day, upon which days the plebeians resorted to the city from the country and exchanged their produce for the goods they bought, settled their grievances in court, and ratified by their votes such matters of public business as either et laws assigned or the senate referred to them for decision; and as the greater part of them were small farmers and poor, they passed in the country the seven days intervening between the markets.

The next item referenced looks like a lexicon: and it turns out that “Festus” is indeed just that, an imperial-era dictionary, De verborum significatu, by Sextus Pompeius Festus, transmitted by a single damaged manuscript and supplemented by extracts made at the end of the 8th century by Paul the Deacon.   There is, remarkably, a Festus Lexicon Project, from which I borrow these details, although it has not been updated since 2009.  There are various editions, some online.[1] A French translation exists[2], facing the Latin text. 

Pompeius Festus, De verborum significatu, “Nundinalem Cocum”; “Nundinas” (p.295 and 296 of vol. 1 of Savagner’s text and translation, p.317 and 318 of the PDF above):

NUNDINAS feriarum diem esse voluerunt, quo mercandi gratia Urbem rustici convenirent.

NUNDINAE: They wanted the day to be a holiday, so that country-folk might gather at the City for trade.

NUNDINALEM COCUM: Plautus dixit in Aulularia: “Cocus ille nundinale est, in nonum diem solet ire coctum;” hic ab alis novendialis appellatur et cocum viliorem significat, quem tenuiores educebant, ut in nonum diem coqueret.

NUNDINALIS COCUS [i.e. The market-day cook]: Plautus said in the Pot of Gold, “He is a holiday coook, accustomed to cook on the ninth day;” this is called by others “novendialis” [i.e. ninth-day cook], and they give this term the meaning of a poor-quality cook, whom the nobodies give praise to in order that he will cook on the ninth day. 

That’s all that I shall look at tonight, but so far so good!

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  1. [1]E.g. C.O. Mueller, Sexti Pompei Festi De uerborum significatione quae supersunt cum Pauli Epitome, 1839, online here.↩
  2. [2]A. Savagner, Sextus Pompeius Festus, De la Signification des mots, Paris, 2 vols., 1846.  How reliable this is I do not know.  Online: Vol. 1, Vol.2.↩

The Latium parapegma and the nundinal days

Posted on by Roger Pearse

In the Chronography of 354 A.D., which may be found online here, part 6 consists of a calendar.  The days of the month are listed. I give an extract from January here:

I don’t know what the first column is.  The second column, in Roman numerals, are the days of the week, 1-7.  Each week of 7 days corresponds to one of the 4 phases of the moon, which results in the “lunar month” of 28 days.

But what about the third column?  This shows a “week” of 8 days, numbered 1-8 in Roman numerals?

These are the nundinae, the “nundinal days”.

How do we know this?  Well, we might look at the “Latium parapegma”.  This is a slab of rock with inscriptions on it, with holes against the words.  Here’s a photograph, followed by a proposed restoration.[1]

Note the “nundinae” column on the right hand side.  Note the peg hole, and the list of 8 names.  Most are the names of towns in Latium, except for “in vico”, i.e. in the village, i.e. “here”. 

This is, I am told, all about market days.  Once every eight days, there would be a market and the farmers could buy and sell there.  So there was a cycle of eight days.  It is hypothesised that each town held a market on a different day, and therefore the names above indicate which town was holding a market on that day. 

The word “nundina” is supposed by modern scholars to be derived from novem and dies, i.e. nine and day.  We count 8 days from market day until the next market day; but the Romans counted both market days in that span, making a total of 9, or so I am told.  It would be most interesting to see the data on which all this is based.

A word about peg-calendars (parapegma) is perhaps in order.  I learn from Lehoux that the peg calendar is a farmers’ tool.  It was necessary because the secular calendars did not keep in sync with the seasons. 

We all know how the Julian calendar came into being; because the Roman calendar had drifted so far away from the real months that winter was in summer and so on.  Likewise politicians would muck around with the calendar for political advantage, adding days and so on.

But this caused a real problem for the farmers, who needed to put their crops in the ground and gather the harvest at set times in the year, when the weather was right.

Their solution was to follow the fixed stars, which rise and set regardless of politics.  And they could then keep track of days using a bunch of lists, and move a peg along the list, each day.  If they had a slab with several lists on it, as in the Latium parapegma, this would synchronise all the various markers; days of winter, nundinal days, ordinary week days, and so on.  In this way the farmer could know what time of year it was and when to go to market.

It makes you grateful for modern calendars!

It also raises a question.  If illiteracy was so widespread in antiquity as some assert, why do parapegmas exist?  The answer is perhaps that middle-class illiteracy was by no means https://www.sages.org/ambien-online/ as rare as some might think, and that farm managers would need to be both literate and numerate.

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  1. [1]Both of these in much reduced form from amoxicillin Daryn Lehoux, Astronomy, Weather and Calendars in the ancient world.  Google cialis online books preview here.↩

British MP attacks Charity Commission attempt to tax the Brethren

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Good news.  British MP Douglas Carswell today writes how absurd it is that a modern quango is involving itself in deciding which religious groups are allowed to be charities, and which must be taxed:

Religious freedom means – amongst other things – allowing practitioners of a faith to decide for themselves who is, and who is not, part of their denomination. In other words, they can be as exclusive as they like.

The Charity Commission is imposing a state dogma of uber inclusivity on to a religious group that chooses to be moderately exclusive. Not very Big Society, is it?

Once again, when state officials make a decision on what constitutes public interest or benefit, actual members of the public – such as those Brethren who live in my part of Essex – have no say.  If the Brethren fail to tick all the Charity Commission’s boxes, change the Commission and their boxes.  

Instead of replacing one quango chief with another, we need to overturn the dogma that says it is any business of state officials to be sitting in judgement of faith groups in this way in the first place.

I wrote about this story here.  It is good to see that mainstream conservatives have no desire to engage in this 17th century business.

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