Author: Roger Pearse

All of us know that the internet has revolutionised our access to ancient texts. 

First sites like CCEL came into being, back in the mid-90’s.  This made the Ante-Nicene, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers accessible to us all.  Indeed I remember, long ago, seeing a bound set in 38 volumes of that collection, in Mowbrays Bookshop in Kings Parade in Cambridge.  I was interested in the Fathers even then, but such a thing was far beyond my slender financial means.  But with the internet came CCEL, and suddenly we took it for granted. 

Google books came along a few years ago.  I don’t even remember when it arrived, so much do I take it for granted, but after 2005, certainly.  That gave us access to vast amounts of older literature, of scholarly series such as the PL, PG, the Bonn series of Byzantine texts and much, much more.  All this was given freely, and with the generous aid of American universities like Harvard.  European publishers poisoned the gift, and by their bleating for money made it largely inaccessible; but Google meant us all to have it.

Manuscripts are coming online as well, despite much resistance.

Now we have Google translate.  This improves constantly.  For French it is now very good indeed, and doubtless other languages will improve over time.  Latin has been added already.  All this would have been unimaginable as recently as 2005.

Now let us look into the future; a future that may be no further away than a handful of years.  As translate improves, will there be any purpose in providing hand-made translations?

When I first came on the web, CCEL was all there was.  I sought to help, by scanning more translations and placing them online.  Then Google books came along, and made much of this work redundant.  If you go to Archive.org, or Google books, an OCR of these older translations is generated automatically.  The books are searchable.  Yes, it’s not perfect; but we can always get the text, and often it is very, very good.  So there is now very little purpose in my duplicating this effort, I sometimes feel.

Instead I have been translating stuff, commissioning new translations, and so forth.

But will this go the same way?  Will it too, one day soon, be pointless.

I’m not sure, I admit.  For one thing, digitising texts is still worthwhile.  When I want a text, I rejoice if I find it at Lacus Curtius, accurately typed in and easy to search.  I look there in preference.  Probably other sites like mine are also used in this way.

Will it be the same for man-made as opposed to machine translations? 

Note: I have several interesting emails in my inbox awaiting answers.  Unfortunately I have gone down with the headache bug, so it will be a day or two before I can reply.

A couple of interesting posts have caught my eye, which I thought I would share.

From AWOL:

Open Access ProQuest Dissertations & Theses (PQDT Open)

PQDT Open provides the full text of open access dissertations and theses free of charge.You can quickly and easily locate dissertations and theses  relevant to your discipline, and view the complete text in PDF format.  The authors of these dissertations and theses have opted to publish as open access. Open Access Publishing  is a new service offered by ProQuest’s UMI Dissertation Publishing. ProQuest expects to have many more open access dissertations and theses over  time.

The database includes hundreds of theses and dissertations related to antiquity from American academic  institutions.

For other aggregations of open access dissertations see also:

• EThOS – Electronic Theses Online Service
• DART-Europe E-theses Portal

I have a question, tho.  ProQuest has made money by selling access to dissertations.  So what is the open source idea?  How does this work?  I think we have only part of the story here.

Another couple of items from the same source:

Johnson, Scott Fitzgerald, editor, Greek Literature in Late Antiquity: Dynamism, Didacticism, Classicism. Originally published in 2006 by Ashgate Books. Published online by permission of the editor.

Now that looks interesting!  I must get that.  And well done the editor for making it available now.

Next the Ehrman Project, mentioned at ETC and Evangelion.  The latter comments:

Michael Gorman draws attention to the launch of a website dedicated to engaging/refuting the various works of Prof. Bart D. Ehrman. It is called the Ehrman Project and it was actually begun by Miles O’Neil who works for UNC Chapel Hill where Ehrman is a Professor. Ehrman has written a number of works about textual criticism, the historical Jesus, the early church, God and Evil, etc. and ordinarily with the aim of debunking Christianity and promoting unbelief.

I respect Ehrman’s works greatly, esp. his early TC stuff. But I confess that I simply find it astounding that Ehrman will argue in one book that the biblical manuscripts are unreliable and corrupted and then in the next book he’ll use these corrupted manuscripts to reconstruct the historical figure of Jesus, Paul, Peter, Mary Magdalene, the whole early church. It is kinda like announcing that the emperor has no clothes in one book and in the next book criticizing what the emperor wore to the royal tea party. It’s one or the other!

Indeed it is.  Ehrman is doing great harm to all studies of ancient literature by convincing people that books cannot be transmitted from antiquity.  For instance today I also came across this announcement at PaleoJudaica, of a speech at the University of Tennesse:

Ehrman’s lecture is titled “Does The New Testament Contain Forgeries? The Surprising Claims of Modern Scholars” and is presented by UT’s Department of Religious Studies.

Why go to the Bible belt and introduce the claims of “modern scholars” by insulting their religion?  If I wanted to talk about scholarship, I wouldn’t start by trying to insult my chosen audience’s religion.  That would guarantee that they would not listen.  On the other hand, if I wanted to insult their religion, as my primary aim, of course I wouldn’t care about scholarship except as a means to an end.   I can’t help feeling that this is what is happening here.

I do wish I knew what Ehrman’s actual scholarly contribution was, tho.  Being outside NT studies, I don’t know.

An evening of uploading.  I’ve added a few more volumes of the RealEncyclopadie (all pre-1923, of course) to Archive.org, which will doubtless appear in the search in a few days.   There are now the first 16 volumes accessible there. 

I had an email from the German wikisource project, working on digitising the RE there.  It contained this very interesting observation:

Another trick question is the copyright status. Over 1100 people (mostly white European males) have been working for the RE from 1891 to 1978 under the seven editors. The copyright (as viewed by German and European jurisdiction) rests in the single authors which we at Wikisource document here: http://de.wikisource.org/wiki/RE/A

Strictly speaking, a volume is, as a whole, in copyright as long as any author who contributed to it is not in the Public Domain. For example in case of vol. I [publ. 1893/1894], the Tübingen Professor Wilhelm Schmid (who died in 1951) was supposedly the last surviving contributer, so this volume won’t be PD (as a whole) before 2022. There are, also, authors who died before they could see their articles published (for example Heinr. Wilh. Schaefer and Leop. Schmidt who died in 1892). As for the more recent authors: The oldest surviving author has to be Emmanuel Kriaras (b. 1906 and still very active in Thessaloniki); the youngest is Herbert Bannert (b. 1950).

Isn’t that absurd?  That a volume published in 1893 is in copyright now, in Germany?  No doubt the Germans set up the EU copyright as well.

Someone also wrote to me to say that volume 1 of Cyril of Alexandria’s commentary on John (English version, 1874, by P.E.Pusey) has vanished from Archive.org.  A quick visit, and it had indeed been withdrawn, for unspecified “issues”.  It can’t be copyright, so this is weird.  I ended up making my own PDF from the image scans I made back in 2005, and uploading it here.    I didn’t crop the pages from the photocopies, since back in 2005 Google Books didn’t exist and I was uploading HTML scans.  So it’s a bit rough, but will do the job.

I’ve been mirroring my Google mail account to my hard disk.  Since I started using it in January 2008, I have sent or received 9,790 emails.  Um.  I wonder how long that took, and what I could have been doing more usefully in the time!  I can’t easily count the number of emails in my main client — must be a frightening number!

I’d hoped to start proof-checking the Latin of Eusebius this evening, but it will have to wait until tomorrow now.

Does anyone have a copy of Reeve, Michael D., “The Transmission of Vegetius’s Epitoma rei militaris,” Aevum 74 (2000) 479-99 that they could let me have?  Less important, but also interesting would be Shrader, Charles R., “A Handlist of Extant Manuscripts Containing the De re militari of Flavius Vegetius Renatus,” Scriptorium 33, no. 2 (1979), 280-305.

Many thanks!

In the spring a young man’s fancy, lightly turns to thoughts of foreign holidays, as Tennyson might have remarked in Locksley Hall, but, obsessed with his piffling love affair, for some reason did not.  The sun broke through the incessant rain yesterday, giving that bright winter sunshine which always reminds me of the Mediterranean. 

I found myself remembering two trips to Libya, taken with Cox and Kings, who do a very nice Libyan Long Weekend tour.  So I did a Google search, and found myself looking at their Classical Libya tour.  By coincidence the next one is on the 19th February, the day after my current contract at work finishes, so I could take a week then without fear of disappointing my clients. 

On holiday, the hotel is all.  I’ve stayed at the Corinthia in Tripoli, which was truly excellent.  But this tour would also take you to Benghazi, to visit Cyrene and Apollonia, which means two nights over there.

Geographically the country is fundamentally two countries, linked by a narrow strip along the coast.  The area around Cyrene had and has a very different culture to that around Tripoli.  In ancient times the former was Greek, while the latter was Punic or Latin.  Even today, the two populations have local loyalties which outweigh any idea of “Libya” as a whole.

So to visit Cyrene means staying at some rather less good hotel.  The page lists the Al-Manara, which doesn’t get too bad a write up in TripAdvisor, except as being very noisy.  Maybe I should consider it.  I must admit that I have always wanted to go there.

But the instability in Tunisia raises questions.  Will it spread to Libya, one wonders?

Perhaps the answer is to book, and merely ensure one has good cancellation travel insurance.  I admit that I am still irked, a year on, that Voyages Jules Verne, and their partner in crime, europAssistance insurance, helped themselves to $350 of my money under various pretexts when I had to cancel my trip to Syria last year.  I don’t need a repeat performance.

I also looked for their Libyan Long Weekend tour, which I remember so fondly.  I notice the price has dropped quite a bit — a consequence of the recession, no doubt.  But that doesn’t go until April.

Hmm, what to do?  Probably sort out the insurance first, I suspect.

There is a triennial Classics conference in Cambridge in late July.  Details from here.

I’ve never been to a classics conference, but it sounds interesting.  I might attend.