Author: Roger Pearse

Marcionism in Edessa

Posted on by Roger Pearse

When did Marcionism arrive in Edessa, the home city of the Syriac language? What data do we have, concerning Marcionism in these parts?

The Chronicle of Edessa begins thus:

1. In the year 180 kings began to rule in Edessa.
2. In the year 266 Augustus Caesar was made emperor.
3. In the year 309 our Lord was born.
4. In the year 400 Abgar the king built a mausoleum for himself.
5. In the year 449 Marcion forsook the Catholic Church.
6. The year 465, in the month Tammuz, on the eleventh day (i.e., July 11th, 154 A.D.), Bardesanes was born.
7. Lucius Caesar, with his brother, subjugated the Parthians to the Romans in the fifth year of his reign.
8. In the year 513, in the reign of Severus, and in the reign of Abgar the king, son of Maano the king, in the month Tishrin the latter (i. e., November), the fountain of water which proceeds from the great palace of Abgar the great king increased, and it prevailed, and it went up according to its former manner, and overflowed and ran out on all sides, …
…

9. And in the year 517, Abgar built a palace in his own citadel (? town).
10. The year 551 Manes was born.
11. The year 614, were broken down the walls of Edessa the second time in the days of Diocletian the king.
…

Some argue from this that the mention of Marcion indicates a special interest in him in Edessa.[1]  Perhaps so; but no more than Bardesanes and Manes.

Eusebius, HE, book 4, chapter 30, tells us:

1. In the same reign, as heresies were abounding in the region between the rivers, a certain Bardesanes, a most able man and a most skillful disputant in the Syriac tongue, having composed dialogues against Marcion’s followers and against certain others who were authors of various opinions, committed them to writing in his own language, together with many other works. His pupils, of whom he had very many (for he was a powerful defender of the faith), translated these productions from the Syriac into Greek. …

3 He indeed was at first a follower of Valentinus, but afterward, having rejected his teaching and having refuted most of his fictions, he fancied that he had come over to the more correct opinion. Nevertheless he did not entirely wash off the filth of the old heresy.

Did Greek versions of Bardaisan’s Dialogues against Marcion come into the library at Caesarea, one wonders?  Eusebius seems to have had connections with Edessa, as his mention of the story of the letter of Jesus to Abgar shows.

At all events, this places Marcionism in the region of Edessa in the time of Bardaisan, in perhaps the late second or early third century.

A very interesting statement is that the Christians in Edessa were supposedly called Palutians, after an early bishop Palut (192-209).[2]  This information is said to come from Hymns against heresies, 22.5, and is said to tell us that it was the Marcionites who were generalled called “Christians” there.[3] Indeed I am told that Ephraim’s Hymni contra haereses refer extensively to Marcionism, as well as Mani, Bardaisan, paganism and astrology.  I’m not sure how we might access these, however. 

The statement certainly needs to be verified.  I find that J. B. Segal gives a partial quotation:[4]

Their hands have let go of everything.  There are no handles to grasp.  They even called us Palutians, but we have spewed them out and cast away [the name].  May there be a curse on those who are called by the name of Palut, and not by the name of Christ . . . Palut too did not want men to be called by his name.  If he were alive, he would curse with all curses, for he was the disciple of the apostle [Paul] who suffered pain and bitterness over the Corinthians when they abandoned the name of the Messiah and  were called by the names of men.

Segal adds that Jacob of Edessa, in his 12th letter to John the Stylite, cites this passage and  states that the Palutians were not heretics, and that Palut was an orthodox and righteous man.  Again, I’m not sure how to check this.

What other sources do we have for Marcionism at Edessa?  Clearly there are Ephraim’s Prose Refutations.  There is also Yeznik of Kolb’s On God.  And … any others?

UPDATE: The old BKV translation of Ephrem into German includes the Hymns against Heresies here.  And … I am not finding in this a statement that the Christians were commonly called Palutians, and the Marcionites Christians, but rather than the heretics called the Christians “Palutians”.  This is, no doubt, similar to the way in which religious types a century ago, who wanted the name of Christian but not the teaching called themselves “liberal Christians” and the real Christians “evangelicals”; and, when they discovered that ‘Christian’ had lost its savour, then demanded to be called “liberal evangelicals”, and the real believers “conservative evangelicals”.  But if so, this would tend to suggest that the heretics in question, described by Ephrem, did indeed want to be called “Christians”.  I wish that I knew someone who would translate this hymn for us!

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  1. [1]Steven K. Ross, Roman Edessa, 2001, p.121.↩
  2. [2]Ute Possekel, Evidence of Greek philosophical concepts in the writings of Ephrem the Syrian, p.22.  Note 78 gives W. Bauer, Rechtglaubigkeit und Ketzerei im altesten Christentum, Beitrage zur historischen Theologie 10, 2nd ed., ed. G. Strecker, Tubingen, 1964, p.6-48, esp. 29, 33f.↩
  3. [3]Ephrem, Selected Prose works, p.35.↩
  4. [4]J. B. Segal, Edessa: the blessed city, p.81↩

How to give money anonymously to friends

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Quite by accident today I came across a fascinating question.  If you know someone in the UK, who is struggling financially, just how, in practical terms, do you give them money? 

I’m not the first to ask this question.  The recession has kicked in, and some people are really struggling.  Others are doing OK.  And we all know what the bible has to say about giving.  But … how?

If I had a friend and offered him money, he’d almost certainly decline.  He wouldn’t want to be obligated.  If he accepted, it would probably change our relationship forever.  Or if I knew of a stranger who needed something, it would be even worse.

You can’t write a cheque, because your name will be on it.  These days  money-laundering legislation tends to make it impossible to obtain a cheque from a building society without a name on it.  And you wouldn’t want to post it anyway, because how do you get an acknowledgement that it has gone to the right place, and not been stolen by a postman?

Of course one could sneak up to their door, wearing a rubber Tony Blair mask, and stuff an envelope full of twenty pound notes through the door.  That would do it, for relatively small sums.  You could write on it something about “I don’t need this.  I believe that you do.  When the time comes, repay me by being generous to someone else.”  But of course this strategy is full of risks itself!

A google search reveals results entirely from the USA.  That is very creditable to the generosity of this nation; less so, to the generosity in the UK, or Australia, or wherever.

Anyone any ideas?

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More manuscripts online at the British Library

Posted on by Roger Pearse

At the British Library manuscripts blog, there is news.

Final Harley Science Manuscripts Published

We are delighted to announce that the remaining manuscripts in our Harley Science Project have now been published to the British Library’s Digitised Manuscripts site. All 150 manuscripts in this project have been digitised and recatalogued thanks to the generosity of William and Judith Bollinger. We hope that this resource, part of our ongoing campaign to make our collection items more accessible, will promote new research into the books in question.

I hope so too.  It can’t do the slightest harm.  The cataloguing is pretty good too, I have to say.  But … I wish we could get PDF’s of the mss, rather than being at the mercy of slow broadband and a quirky interface.  I suspect it will come, once libraries recognise that it doesn’t harm them in any way.

Access to these texts was always the problem; only a tiny handful of geographically local scholars could do much.  Now … there are NO excuses for lazy scholarship.  Get publishing articles, gentlemen!

In the current tranche, the following items will be of interest to us.

  • Harley 2686  Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae (France, 9th century)
  • Harley 3748  Galen, Opera (France or Italy, 14th-15th century)
  • Harley 3892  Miscellaneous texts on rhetoric, grammar, geometry and divination (Italy, 1400-1454) — this actually also contains parts of Horace, Ars Poetica and Letters.
  • Harley 3915  Collection of chemical, alchemical and medical recipes, and texts on the techniques and technology of various arts (Germany, 1200-1444) — Includes an extract from Vitruvius, and an autograph note by Nicholas of Cusa, indicating that this book once belonged to him (and so ought to be in Berkastel-Kues with the rest of his books).
  • Harley 3969  Works on history, natural history and rhetoric (England, 14th century) — Actually includes extracts from: Cassiodorus, De orthographia, Censorinus de natali die, Apuleius, Dares Phrygius, Pliny the Elder, and Jerome’s Letter to Helvidius.
  • Harley 4241  Aristotle, Metaphysica (Germany, c. 1450-1464) — Another of St. Nicolas of Cusa’s books.

There are a number of other Latin translations, of Euclid and Aristotle.

Good to have these.

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Notes on the Askew codex

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Not all gnostic literature comes to us from Nag Hammadi.  A series of codices in Coptic have leaked out of Egypt and onto the art market down the centuries.  One of these was the Codex Askewianus, as the older literature calls it.

On this item, the following information may be of use:[1]

The Askew codex, a volume of unknown provenance containing the texts of the Pistis Sophia treatises, was named after its first owner, A. Askew, a London doctor.  Askew was a collector of old manuscripts, and he bought the codex from a bookseller (probably in London) in 1772 [1].  After the death of Askew, the manuscript was bought by the British Museum.  A copy in the British Museum of the sale catalogue (1785) of Askew’s manuscripts contains the entry: “Coptic MS., £ 10.0.0.”  This reference was presumed by Crum to apply to the present document which appears in his catalogue as Add. 5114.[2]

1. J. G. Buhle, Literarische Briefwechsel von Johann David Michaelis, Leipzig 1794-6, vol. 3, p.69.
2. W. E. Crum, Catalogue of the Coptic Manuscripts in the British Museum, London, 1905, p.173.

Doubtless it emerged from the sands of Egypt, as other codices have done.  One wonders how it ended up in London.  The price is a considerable one, note: a curate around the same period could live (in poverty, admittedly) on £50 per annum, at least according to the novels of Jane Austen.

I was looking at some notes on this page, and came across the following footnote, alluding to the same source:

4. 1794. Buhle (J. G.). Literarischer Briefwechsel von Johann David Michaelis (Leipzig), 3 vols., 1794-96, iii. 69.

Under date 1773 there is a letter from Woide to Michaelis, in which the former says in reference to the [Pistis Sophia] Codex that Askew had picked it up by chance in a book-shop. There follows a description of the MS.

Now I confess that I never heard of Johann David Michaelis — he turns out to be an 18th century biblical scholar involved in orientalism –, but his letters are online at Google books.  Volume 3, page 69 may be found here.  The old fraktur letter forms are not easy to read, and the long-s is also deployed.  The relevant passage may be this (and please correct my errors):

Vermutlich ist dieses ein ahnliches Manuscr. [of those in the White Monastery]  Der herrn Dr Askew hat es zufalliger Weise in einem Buchladen gekauft.  Es is in 4º auf Pergamen geschrieben, und sehr stark gebraucht.  Es enthalt 354 Seiten, die mit Buchstaben numerirt sind.  Jede Seite hat zwei Columnen; und es fehlt an dem ganzen Buche nur ein Bogen S. 337-345….

I had hoped that we might get more, but this seems to be it. Sadly this gives us no more than we knew.  But how does C. A. Woide know this?  What is his authority for this statement?

The letter as a whole begins on p.20, and seems to consist of a very lengthy description of Bodleian Coptic manuscripts.

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  1. [1]Carl Schmidt and Violet MacDermot, Pistis Sophia, The Coptic Gnostic Library, Brill, 1978, p. xi. Google Books Preview here.↩

The “Res Gestae Divi Saporis”

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The middle part of the third century AD is not well endowed with historical sources.  We are largely dependent on later, often very abbreviated, texts.  But about 50 years ago, an inscription was found in Persia, at Naqsh-e Rustam, which supplements these:

To these sources has recently been added a unique monument, the inscription of Shapuhr I, engraved on three walls of the first floor of the Kaabah of Zoroaster, the towerlike stone building of Achaemenian times which still stands in front of the rock cut graves of the Achaemenian kings of Persia near Persepolis at Naksh i Rustem (Pl. VII, 1-2).

The inscription which gives the same text in three languages, Arsacid Pehlevi, Sassanian Middle Persian, and Greek, was discovered in 1936 and 1939, by Dr. Erich Schmidt, director of the Iranian expedition of the Oriental Institute, University of Chicago. [1]

The “Kaabah of Zoroaster” is literally the “Cube of Zoroaster”, and looks just like one. The plates showing the monument are these:

A complete English translation may be found here in PDF form.  I’m not sure where it comes from, tho.

Much of the text consists of material of interest only to Persian specialists.  But the portion of most interest to us is as follows (I have added extra paragraphing):

When at first we had become established in the empire, Gordian Caesar raised in all of the Roman Empire a force from the Goth and German realms and marched on Babylonia [Assyria] (Asuristan) against the Empire of Iran and against us. On the border of Babylonia at Misikhe, a great ‘frontal’ battle occurred. Gordian Caesar was killed and the Roman force was destroyed. And the Romans made Philip Caesar. Then Philip Caesar came to us for terms, and to ransom their lives, gave us 500,000 denars, and became tributary to us. And for this reason we have renamed Misikhe Peroz-Shapur.

And Caesar lied again and did wrong to Armenia. Then we attacked the Roman Empire and annihilated at Barbalissos a Roman force of 60,000 and Syria and the environs of Syria we burned, ruined and pillaged all.

In this one campaign we conquered of the Roman Empire fortresses and towns: the town of Anatha with surroundings, (Birtha of Arupan?) with surroundings, Birtha of Asporakan, the town of Sura, Barbalissos, Manbuk [Hierapolis], Aleppo [Berroia?], Qennisrin [Khalkida], Apamea, Rhephania, Zeugma, Urima, Gindaros, Armenaza, Seleucia, Antioch, Cyrrhe, another town of Seleucia, Alexandretta, Nicopolis, Sinzara, Hama, Rastan, Dikhor, Dolikhe, Dura, Circusium , Germanicia, Batna, Khanar, and in Cappadocia the towns of Satala, Domana, Artangil, Suisa, Sinda, Phreata, a total of 37 towns with surroundings.

In the third campaign, when we attacked Carrhae and Urhai [Edessa] and were besieging Carrhae and Edessa Valerian Caesar marched against us. He had with him a force of 70,000 from Germany, Raetia, Noricum, Dacia, Pannonia, Moesia, Istria, Spain, Africa (?), Thrace, Bithynia, Asia, Pamphylia, Isauria, Lycaonia, Galatia, Lycia, Cilicia, Cappadocia, Phrygia, Syria, Phoenicia, Judaea, Arabia, Mauritania, Germania, Rhodes [Lydia], Osrhoene (?), Mesopotamia.

And beyond Carrhae and Edessa we had a great battle with Valerian Caesar. We made prisoner ourselves with our own hands Valerian Caesar and the others, chiefs of that army, the praetorian prefect, senators; we made all prisoners and deported them to Persis. And Syria, Cilicia and Cappadocia we burned , ruined and pillaged.

In that campaign we conquered of the Roman Empire the town of Samosata, Alexandria on the Issus, Katabolos, Aegaea, Mopsuestia, Mallos, Adana, Tarsus, Augustinia, Zephyrion, Sebaste, Korykos, Anazarba ([Agrippas]), Kastabala, Neronias, Flavias, Nicopolis, Epiphaneia, Kelenderis, Anemurion, Selinus, Mzdu- [Myonpolis], Antioch, Seleucia, Dometiopolis, Tyana, Caesarea [Meiakariri], Komana Kybistra, Sebasteia, Birtha, Rakundia, Laranda, Iconium, altogether all these cities with their surroundings 36.

And men of the Roman Empire, of non-Iranians, we deported. We settled them in the Empire of Iran in Persis, Parthia, Khuzistan, in Babylonia and in other lands where there were domains of our father, grandfathers and of our ancestors.

 There are some interesting photographs of the site at the Wikipedia article, and there is a Wiki article on the Cube.  It seems that there is a further text in Middle Persian below that of Shapur I, the inscription of Kartir, a fire-priest.  This is online here,  and contains the following interesting statement:

And in kingdom after kingdom and place after place throughout the whole empire the services of Ahura Mazda and the Yazads became preeminent, and great dignity came to the Mazdayasnian religion and the magi in the empire, and the Yazads and water and fire and small cattle in the empire attained great satisfaction, while Ahriman and the devs were punished and rebuked, and the teachings of Ahriman and the devs departed from the empire and were abandoned. And Jews, Sramans (Buddhists), (10) Brahmins, Nasoreans (Orthodox Christians), (Gnostic) Christians, Maktak (Baptisers), and Zandiks (Manichaeans) in the empire were smitten, and destruction of idols and scattering of the stores of the devs and god-seats and nests was abandoned. And in kingdom after kingdom and place after place many divine services in magnificence and many Warharan fires were established, and many magi became happy and prosperous, and many fires and magi were imperially installed.

The translation does not seem to be very good.  But, if correct, I wonder if this indicates conversions to Christianity in the period, leading to the abandonment of temples, followed by this record of an official Sassanid counter-campaign?

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  1. [1]Michael I. Rostovtzeff: Res Gestae Divi Saporis and Dura, Berytus Archaeological Studies, vol. 8, 1943, p.17-60.  Quotation is from p.18.↩

Website for Sidonius Apollinaris

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The last Roman of Gaul, Sidonius Apollinaris, has a new website dedicated to him!  It doesn’t come up in a Google search, strangely, but is here:

http://www.sidoniusapollinaris.nl/

Contents include an excellent bibliography, and there are also links to some of the items.

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Developing web pages in PHP

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Most web space these days comes with the PHP language, usually running on the Apache webserver, with the MySql database.  When developing scripts of one’s own, ideally one replicates this on the PC.  But frankly, installing all this stuff is a faff.

This week I came across the Wampserver package.  This allows you to install all three items in one go, and has a single menu to start (and stop) the lot.  It doesn’t install a load of things that you then have to manually disable, and it just works out of the box fine.

I’ve used Notepad++ for most such scripting, but this is rather underpowered.  Instead I have been using lately Eclipse for PHP, the PDP development tools (PDT) version.  This likewise works well.  If you are a Java developer, with an Eclipse setup, you can relax — it unzips to a different directory, and doesn’t interfere at all.  You can run, thus, two different versions of Eclipse quite happily.

For unit testing I’ve been using SimpleTest.  You get the software and unzip to a directory on your C: drive.  There is an obsolete eclipse plugin for this — which no longer works and ought to be updated.  But you can run SimpleTest just fine in eclipse anyway, using the following instructions:

  1. download and install SimpleTest.
  2. put a require_once('autorun.php'); at the top of the test file.

    note: this requires the SimpleTest directory containing autorun.php to be in your include_path. alternatively, you can include autorun.php by full path, like require_once('C:/full/path/to/your/Simpletest/autorun.php');. it might even be possible not having to change the test file by including autorun.php via auto_prepend_file.

  3. run the test by right clicking on the test file and select “Run As PHP Script”
  4. the output from the testing shows up in the eclipse console

Although in my case it doesn’t show up in the console, but as a web page, so long as Wamp has been started.

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Graeco-Roman mummy portrait exhibition at the John Rylands Library

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A news item which seems to have passed unnoticed: the John Rylands library in Manchester, UK, is running an exhibition from today, 19th July until 25th December. 

The ten mummy portrait panels and the 40 or so papyri, both from around 2000-years-ago, were mostly found in the Fayum region, south of Cairo.

Dating to the Roman Empire, the portraits and papyri provide a unique insight into how the  Egyptians living under Roman rule saw themselves.

The so-called ‘Fayum portraits’ were found covering the faces of mummies found by the archaeologist William Flinders Petrie in 1888 and 1911.

Petrie was financed by the wealthy Manchester cotton magnate Jesse Haworth, and most of the portraits came to the University’s Manchester Museum as his legacy.

The papyri came to Manchester through acquisitions made by John Rylands Library founder Enriqueta Rylands, from 1901 to her death (1908), and later continued by the Library until 1920.

They include famous pieces, such as one of the two extant Greek fragments of the apocryphal Gospel of Mary, possibly Mary of Magdala, and documents from everyday life such as a contract of marriage and census returns.

The exhibition is entitled Faces and Voices, and includes 10 of the marvellous Graeco-Roman portraits found by Flinders Petrie in the Fayoum.

The portraits were painted on boards, which were then attached to mummies, and so recovered in modern times.

The papyri are equally interesting.  Most are documentary; but there is a fragment of the pseudo-gospel of Mary.  It is mildly depressing to see some paleobabble in the press-release:

Professor Cooper said: “The exciting thing about the papyri is that they show a forgotten side of history. For example, the Gospel of Mary fragment argues that women should have a leadership role in the Christian church, a view which the medieval Church tried to suppress. This third-century document is very timely in light of the current debate about women bishops in the Church of England.”

This is a little misleading, I’m afraid.

The early Christians themselves tell us that there were people who followed teachings that they made up themselves, or borrowed from contemporary pagan culture rather than learned it from the apostles.  They also tell us that such folk were not above forging texts under the names of apostles, in order to project their teachings back into the apostolic age.  Various texts of this kind, from the 2nd century AD onwards, survive.  Each is clearly recognisable, in that it laces pseudo-biblical material with material derived from contemporary paganism, in just the manner described by Tertullian in De praescriptione haereticorum.  The so-called “gospel of Mary” is one of these late texts, and tells us nothing about early Christianity; only about those who sought to corrupt it. 

Likewise the “women bishops” link is of doubtful relevance to antiquity.  Unless, of course, we could see this as just one more example of how outsiders in every age attempt to impose their own doctrines on Christians, by pressure, by politics, and by violence?  But I fear this is not what Dr Cooper intended that we should hear.

This lapse aside, it is still very pleasing to see these documents.  I was glad to see that English translations of some of the papyri were appearing on the blog.  More please!

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I spent some time today reading the online French translations[1] of the poems of Sidonius Apollinaris.  I was very struck by the way that the poet appeals repeatedly to the works of the early empire, to Horace and Sallust and Varro and Tacitus.  I saw no mention of any later writers, indeed.

This evening I found myself wondering whether the Loeb edition and translation, Sidonius. Poems and letters, tr. W. B. Anderson, Harvard, 1936, was actually out of copyright in the USA.  (Anderson died in 1959, I learn, so his work won’t come out of copyright in the European Union until 2029, by which time most of us will doubtless be dead).  I suspect that it is.  Copyright at that period was for 28 years, and could be renewed for a further 28 years.  But I found no evidence that it had been renewed.

The situation is complicated, for works between 1923 and 1964, by the “copyright restoration” for foreign works that followed the US signing of the Berne convention in 1994.  A fascinating paper by Peter B. Hirtle[2] discusses this subject, and makes the following, startling statements:

It has long been assumed that most of the works published from 1923 to 1964 in the US are currently in the public domain. Both non-profit and commercial digital libraries have dreamed of making this material available. Most programs have recognized as well that the restoration of US copyright in foreign works in 1996 has made it impossible for them to offer to the public the full text of most foreign works. What has been overlooked up to now is the difficulty that copyright restoration has created for anyone trying to determine if a work published in the United States is still protected by copyright. …

This paper has demonstrated that it is almost impossible to determine with certainty whether a work published from 1923 through 1963 in the US is in the public domain because of copyright restoration of foreign works.

What idiots our politicians are!  What knaves the publishing lobbyists must be, to cause so much nuisance for so little gain for anyone, including themselves!

All the same, I tentatively conclude, after reading Hirtle’s paper carefully, that Anderson’s translation of the poems of Sidonius Apollinaris is indeed now in the public domain in the USA.

I have also been reading a paper discussing whether Sidonius actually criticises Majorian, in carmen 5, the Panegyric for Majorian.[3].  There is a long section in the panegyric in which a polemic against Majorian is placed in the mouth of Pelagia, wife of the deceased Aetius.  Perhaps this does reflect the nervousness of the Gallo-Roman supporters of the unfortunate emperor Avitus towards the military newcomer Majorian.  Desperate times, suspicion everywhere, harsh punishments for speaking the wrong thing, supporting the wrong candidate for the throne, while the empire fell apart … such times make men adopt whatever shifts they can.

Does it matter now?  Well, only inasmuch as parallels might be drawn for later history.  The assassination of Majorian in 461 by his own prime minister, the sinister Ricimer, made the fate of Gaul — to become France — certain.  The western empire itself had only fifteen more years to live.  And Majorian himself lives now only in the portrait drawn of him by Sidonius, partly in the panegyric, but more in the letters.

Yet … Majorian does indeed live in that portrait.  He failed to save the Roman state.  Probably no-one could have done so at that stage.

Yet, because of the words of Sidonius, we, fifteen centuries later, are discussing him.

UPDATE (20/7/2012): I find that vol. 1 of the Loeb, which includes all the poems, is in fact online at Archive.org, here.

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  1. [1]At remacle.org.↩
  2. [2]Peter B. Hirtle, Copyright Renewal, Copyright Restoration, and the Difficulty of Determining Copyright Status, D-Lib Magazine 14.7/8, 2008. Online here.↩
  3. [3]Philip Rousseau, Sidonius and Majorian: The Censure in “Carmen” V, Historia: Zeitschrift für Alte Geschichte, Bd. 49, H. 2 (2nd Qtr., 2000), pp. 251-257. JSTOR url: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4436579 ↩

JSTOR access for Oxford University alumni

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I see that Oxford University has arranged to provide JSTOR access to its graduates, those who have left college and are sat in offices, vaguely longing to read another paper on Cicero.

In this case you go to the alumni office website, obtain the card number for an alumni card (they email you after a week or so), then register an account on the website (a couple more weeks), and, when that is validated, you can register for JSTOR.

This is a good thing.  All universities should do this.

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