I’ve been reading a volume of extracts of ancient Greek wit (by F. Paley), and enjoying them. Many come from the Florilegium of Stobaeus. I wondered whether the work has ever been translated into English?
Author: Roger Pearse
Snow falling in Rome
This image from Rogue Classicism:
Harnack’s Geschichte der altchristlichen Literatur online
I learn from Wieland Wilker at the Textualcriticism list that all four volumes of this (vol. 1 pts 1 and 2, and vol. 2 pts 1 and 2) are online. I was able to find three of them easily enough. But the one I could not find was vol. 1 part 2; that is here:
http://books.google.com/books?id=tlwtAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=editions:OCLC6778038&lr=
The work is very valuable still, because Harnack crammed it full of erudition which later compendia such as Quasten, good as they are, tend to omit.
Testing the catenas – Carmelo Curti on Eusebius on the Psalms
We all know that medieval Greek commentaries on the bible were compiled by chaining together extracts from commentaries on the book in question by the Fathers. Often these catenas continue to exist, when the original works are lost. They are therefore a valuable source for retrieving early Christian comments on biblical verses.
But … to string these quotes together, the compilers had to adapt the quotations, if only slightly; they had to add bridging words, tweak tenses. They had to abbreviate, very often. So the question before us is whether we can rely on the quotations.
Eusebius of Caesarea wrote a monster commentary on the Psalms. Unusually, a third of it still exists, preserved in ms. Coislin 44. This means we can compare the original text with the catenas, and get an idea of the value of each. Carmelo Curti wrote an interesting article on this [1], from which I have translated a couple of passages:
Of the famous “Commentarii in Psalmos” of Eusebius of Caesarea, about a third, Pss. 51-95,3, has been transmitted to us directly in the manuscript Coislin 44, saec. X [1] and the rest of the work, Pss. 1-50 and 95,4-150, came to us through the catenas, i.e. a path which, as is well-known, is among the least easy for the editor of Christian texts in the Greek language. The importance of the Coislin manuscript does not end in giving us a text genuine, complete and, in principle, correct of one part of the commentary of Eusebius. The manuscript also allows us to determine through appropriate comparisons, the value of those catenas that, together with other fragments of the Eusebian commentaries, contain some passages related to Pss. 51-95,3, i.e. that part attested by Coislin 44. This is the case for two catenary codices, Patmos Monastery St. John 215, saec. XII-XIII and Ambrosianus F 126 sup. century. XIII, deriving independently from a common original and, according to the classification of Karo-Lietzmann, Catena-type XI [2]. Together with fragments of other exegetes of the Psalter, the first one transmits fragments of the commentary of Eusebius on Pss. 78,5-150, the other, fragments of the same comment that referring to Pss. 83,4-150 [3].
In my study published in 1972, comparing the text of these manuscripts with those witnessed by Coislin 44, I have demonstrated: first, that the compiler of the base catena, from which directly or indirectly our two witnesses derive, used a copy which belonged to the same branch of the tradition as the Coislin manuscript and secondly, that this compiler, while often omitting the comment of entire entries, has worked on the text under his eyes generally by abbreviating …, i.e. removing words or phrases or even whole periods not deemed essential to the meaning …. It follows that from Ps. 95.4 — as has been said, with Ps. 95.3 the Coislin manuscript unfortunately stops — the editor of the Eusebian commentary can be certain that the text given by the two catena codices is usually genuine, though mutilated and spoiled by the omission of words or phrases or even whole sentences in the passages relating to verses for which they have preserved the comment.
By contrast, the contribution of the two catenas for the constitution of the exegesis of the Eusebian text on Pss. 51-95,3 — for this section, as we have said, we are aided by Coislin 44 — is of course not as relevant but still not entirely negligible. They in fact, as we will show in this chapter, in many cases allow us to improve the text offered by the Coislin manuscript, some correcting obvious mistakes, others filling gaps, others attesting variants which may deserve more consideration.
As documentation of what we have stated above, we give some examples. We quote the text of Coislin, which generally corresponds to that reproduced in PG 23, noting the variations between the two catena manuscripts in parentheses. …
In conclusion, for the constitution of the text even in that part of the Eusebian commentary that is preserved in Coislin 44, the manuscripts Ambrosiano F 126 sup. and Patmos S. John Monastery 215 can not be ignored. They in fact, as we believe we have demonstrated, correct obvious errors in Coislin 44, restored to Eusebius words (or phrases) missing in this codex — both attributable to the copyist of the oislin ms. or that of his source –, and also offer alternative readings that are worthy, in some cases, of some attention. The mistakes of Coislin in truth are mostly of the sort that could easily be corrected by the action of a prudent, unhurried editor (but all those mentioned in the course of this chapter are found in the edition of de Montfaucon reproduced in PG 23). It is a different matter for omissions, which are always difficult to divine and are risky to infer in any text and, more importantly, in a text of prose. For these the testimony of the two catenary manuscripts becomes extremely important and irreplaceable.
It is always good to test our theories about what is happening in catenas. It is a relief to learn that they really do have value to the editor. That lesson should be applicable well beyond the specific case of Eusebius on the Psalms.
1. C. Curti, I “Commentarii in Psalmos” di Eusebio di Cesarea: tradizione diretta (Coislin 44) e tradizione catenaria. In: Eusebiana 1, 2nd ed, 169-179.
Keyser’s “Encyclopedia of Ancient Natural Scientists”
I was able to get a look at this today. It’s interesting, but some elements of it left me wishing it had been done differently.
One problem hit me immediately:
Because the book primarily contains Greek scientists, Greek names are transliterated without prior Latinization. … Direct transliteration is no more arbitrary than any other system, …
Of course direct transliteration is not more arbitrary than using the standard system. Had the humanists chosen to use it, at the recovery of Greek, all the literature would use it, and there would be no issue. But since they all wrote in Latin, they Latinized the forms, and every piece of literature since is derived from that.
It is exceedingly arbitrary to throw existing writing out of the door in favour of a new system, devised for ideological reasons. The result of this is that the reader finds himself continually retranslating the transliteration in case some random unfamiliar series of vowels and consonants actually represents an old familiar figure. In short the editors have elected to place a barrier in the path of the educated reader; and who else would use such a volume.
Worse still, the transliteration has been done to the level of marking long O and E. Galen acquires an overscore over the ‘e’ — a matter of little importance, except that again it renders the familiar unfamiliar. All this tends to exclude the general reader, tends to elitism and must be deprecated.
My next port of call was the article on the obscure alchemical writer, Stephanos of Alexandria. This article was good. I think it was quite satisfactory, although I would have preferred to see the sources for the statements made referenced. It gave the edition and the translation — including the fact that it only includes three of the nine praxeis. The bibliography was scanty — a complaint that might be levelled against most of the articles. But from the look of it, it is adequate. Modern sources and encyclopedias are generally referenced. There are no footnotes, and I really felt the absence of them. Without references to the ancient sources, the value of the data given is hard to judge.
Another area that I would have liked to see different is the ordering of the entries. Authors are listed in alphabetical order, which is understandable. But if they had been arranged by chronology and region, as in Quasten’s Patrology, it would have been possible to read through the book and gain a good knowledge of the progress of science, simply by so doing.
The book itself, as a reference book, is a bit of a mistake. This book is a website. The book badly needs hyperlinks, connecting authors together.
All these points seem important to me. But let us not lose sight of the key thing here. This books gives us, if we are wealthy enough, a reference text in English to all the ancient scientific writers, together with references for further reading. That is a huge advance on what we had before, and we must welcome it.
An afternoon with the scanner
A book arrived at my local library today, and I have spent a couple of hours turning it into a PDF. After all, it cost me $8 to borrow, and I must return it in two weeks. Also my command of the language in question is not great, so a machine translator will be necessary. The OCR is running at the moment.
Not so long ago I spent most Saturday afternoons scanning and proofing. In those days Google Books did not exist, nor Archive.org, and it was the only way to get things online. The equipment I have today is far better than I had then, but I am quite glad that I don’t have to do it now! All those books on Google books must have taken enormous labour.
Dark ages, middle ages, and how it’s all the fault of the Christians
While reading James Hannam’s blog Quodlibeta I noticed this post, discussing the history of vivisection and dissection. It references a rather bad-tempered post by atheist polemicist Richard Carrier here.
The nice thing in the discussion is to see ancient medical writers discussed and quoted. James shows that the Hellenistic physicians Herophilus and Erasistratus carried out human vivisections in Alexandria, as witnessed by Celsus the 1st century medical author. He rightly comments that we should not suppose that, just because we would find this appalling, an ancient would do so. Martial’s epigrams describing things done to criminals in the arena make that plain enough.
I had never heard of Herophilus, still less that a edition of the fragments existed by Heinrich von Staten (Cambridge, 1989). Religious controversy does unearth things that calmer debate would not, and we can all be enriched therevy.
Richard Carrier’s post is too long and too far outside my area of interest (and too unreferenced) for me to read much of it. A couple of passages in it caught my eye accidentally.
He objected to a Christian saying “[The Christians] preserved and copied an enormous amount of Greek mathematics, technical writings, and natural philosophy.” This unexceptionable statement apparently upset Dr. C, who met it with the objection that only a tiny percentage of ancient literature has survived. I was unclear how this evidently true observation refuted the point made, however. Surely both are true?
Much more interesting in the same part of the post was an image of a book cover attached, which proved to be that of Paul Keyser &c, Encyclopedia of Ancient Natural Scientists (here). I had not heard of this book, but as regular readers will know I am rather an enthusiast for compedia of authors. But at $360, who of us could buy a copy? Keyser himself is interviewed here; he turns out to be a fellow software engineer, working for IBM, who has also produced Greek science of the hellenistic era on the basis that:
Science accounts for more of the texts surviving from antiquity than any other sort of writing, and yet is rarely studied or even read because the texts are relatively hard to find in translation.
Well said, sir! How many of us are even familiar with the dusty volumes of ancient science, the 20-odd volumes of Galen, and the like?
I don’t pretend to be that interested in the history of science, so much of what was discussed was above my head. But one element involved a curious misunderstanding. Carrier barks repeatedly that the term “Dark Ages” is one that is being suppressed in our day, and being suppressed by the awful Christians, because they are trying to conceal how awful it was.
The attempts to remove the term from our language certainly exist, in our day, but I never heard that the Christians were responsible. After all, whoever used any other term, before our own days? On the contrary; most Christians I ever heard of think the middle ages was a period of degeneration in religion and everything else, and think of the poor conditions in the West during the Dark Ages, rather than the unknown splendours of Syriac and Arabic science.
The people who object to it seem primarily to be the medievalists. Presumably professional pride influences this. Indeed one medievalist has never spoken to me, ever since I queried a gross mis-characterisation of that wretched period of human existence. Another, probably more influential group, seems to be the politically correct. Why these object to it I do not know.
But what seems quite clear to me is that the dichotomy is not between Christian and heathen, but between those like myself who look at the Dark Ages as a time in which we would certainly not like to live, unlike antiquity; and those more interested in it who see things differently.
More on the lost manuscript of Eusebius’ “Quaestiones” and the deeds of Cardinal Sirleto
One of the mysteries attached to the Gospel Questions and Solutions by Eusebius of Caesarea is the question of what became of the last known manuscript of the full text. It was seen “in Sicily” in 1563 by Cardinal Sirleto (who became a cardinal only in 1565, but was already librarian at the Vatican at that time), together with a manuscript of ps.Eustathius on the Hexameron. Sirleto intended to publish the text, but never did. A manuscript of the Eustathius, copied in the same year in a South Italian hand, is in the Escorial Library in Spain. According to the IRHT catalogue it does not contain the Eusebius.
This evening I was reading the cheap reprint copy of Harnack’s Geschichte der altchristlichen Literatur I.1 that I received a couple of days ago, and browsing the section on the manuscripts of Origen. On p.393 I came across repeated references to “Cod. Sirl. xxxx (Miller, Esc. 123)”.
19th century tomes loved to abbreviate. Sometimes we may reasonably curse them. But I can think of no library which might be abbreviated “Sirl.”, and “Esc.” sounds an awful lot like “Escorial”. Are the manuscripts of Sirleto all in the Escorial, I wonder?
An article by Irene Backus, Le cardinal Guglielmo Sirleto (1514-1585), sa bibliothèque et ses traductions de saint Basile, online here, tells me that Sirleto was appointed Cardinal-protector of the Basilian Greek monasteries in Southern Italy in 1571. On p.899 it continues (my translation):
No doubt the contacts of Sirleto with the Basilian communities of the South (he had been named Visitor on 4th March 1566 [38]) had facilitated a nomination above all honorific, and which was not a cause of great regret to him. Likewise this facilitated his access to the monastic libraries, the engagement of copyists, and perhaps even the borrowing of certain manuscripts. It is on the other hand certain that Sirleto collected Greek manuscripts from the decaying Italo-Greek monasteries of Calabria — and also in the East (cf. Vat. lat. 9054) — and he was set to reform these monasteries in collaboration with Cardinals Savelli, Carafa, and Santoro.[39]
The footnotes on this are also of interest:
[38] Commodaro, p. 126 (Calabria, Sicily and Basilicate). {{which I presume from BBKL is P.E. Commodaro, Il Card. Sirleto 1514-1585, in: La Provincia di Catanzaro 3 (1985) Nr. 4}}
[39] One of the most celebrated Basilian monasteries, S. Giovanni Teresti, was situated in Sirleto’s native country (Stilo). On the decay of the monasteries and their reform undertaken by Sirleto, see the very well documented expose in Commodaro p. 126-132. It also served the aims of Philip II, who, as sovereign of Southern Italy, desired to acquire manuscripts for the Escorial Library; ibid. p. 141, n. 8.
I know that some of Sirleto’s papers are in the Vatican, and the Backus article makes this clear. But … are the manuscripts in the Escorial? The Backus article certainly suggests that an investigation there might pay dividends.
I don’t think we should be deterred by one aspect that always clouds searches at the Escorial; the fire in the Greek manuscripts. I do wish, tho, that I could consult Gregorio de Andrés, Catálogo de los códices griegos desaparecidos: de la Real Biblioteca de El Escorial (1968).
That said, a note in Simon Ditchfield, Liturgy, Sanctity and History in Tridentine Italy, p. 61, is discouraging: he tells that Sirleto built up a library of almost 2,000 mss, which Philip II considered buying but found the price too high:
… Sirleto subsequently became Prefect (1570) and finally Cardinal-Librarian (1572-85). In addition to the familiarity which he enjoyed with this the largest and most comprehensive library of liturgical and church history in Christendom, we have already seen that Sirleto himself owned a notable personal library, which was considerably enriched by material that had come from Cervini’s collection, containing almost 2,000 manuscripts in Greek, Latin, Hebrew and Arabic and valued at 20,000 scudi at his death.[171]
[169] E.g. a single ms.: BAV, Vat. lat. 6191 … consists entirely of letters to Sirleto, 1571-73. On Sirleto the best monograph is still G. Denzler, Kardinal Guglielmo Sirleto (1514-1585) … (Munich, 1964). For a list of mss. in the BAV which contains material by, to and from Sirleto see ibid. p. ix. Cf. L. Accattatis, Le biografie degli huomini illustri delle Calabrie, vol. 11 (Cosenza, 1870; repr. Sala bolognese. 1977), pp. 31-6 and P. Paschini, ‘Guglielmo Sirleto prima del cardinalato’ in his Tre ricerche sulla storia della chiesa nel ‘500 (Rome, 1945), pp. 155-281.
[171] Philip II of Spain deputed his ambassador Count Olivares to investigate the possibility of buying this library for the Escorial but the king decided the price was too high. See P. E. Commodaro, ‘Il Cardinale Guglielmo Sirleto’, pp. 171-3. Cf. L. Dorez, ‘Recherches et documents sur la bibliotheque du Cardinal Sirleto’, Melanges d’archeologie et d’histoire, 11 (1891) pp. 457-91.
It seems to me that there is a trail to be followed here.
Why was Domitian unpopular?
The emperor Domitian has never had a good press. After his assassination, his successors awarded him the damnatio memoriae. The account in Suetonius is evidently comprised mainly of scurrilous gossip. Martial’s epigrams flattering the emperor become ever more fulsome as the reign progresses — although hardly more so than Pliny the Younger’s Panegyricus on Trajan — only to suddenly condemn the emperor as a despot once he was safely dead.
Much that Domitian did was laudable. He did his best to resist the debasement of the currency, and left a surplus in the treasury, a sure sign of fiscal competence. He adopted the role of perpetual censor, and attempted to reform the equally debased morals of the people. He cleared hucksters off the pavements of Rome. He was a competent, if not sparkling war leader, and his administrative reforms were retained by his successors.
Several things made him look bad. He was unpopular with the senatorial class, mainly because he didn’t socialise effectively with them and treated them as just another lobby group in Rome. Considering his autocratic ways, that meant subjecting them to the fear of immediate execution that lesser men more commonly had.
Domitian also had himself named “god” in his official titulature, which his enemies did not fail to mention. An epigram by Martial on his courtiers, praising them for their moderation and fairness, contrives to give an impression of haughty, greedy minions whom no man could safely oppose. The widespread use of delation — informers who stood to gain from the estate of the accused man — meant that few felt safe. First it became unsafe to criticise the emperor; then, as the evil worked its course, it became unsafe not to flatter him. This process we do see in Martial, and it is probably unfair not to remember this when reading his works. It reminds me of those video clips of Stalin receiving frenzied applause with a stony face, looking to and fro, not to accept the applause, but to see who is not clapping.
There must have been relief when Domitian was murdered. Suddenly the climate changed. Suddenly it was safe to speak your mind. It is perhaps for this, that the memory of Domitian is damned.
My life as a television series
Consternation in the office this morning. The coat-rack has vanished.
I have offered the suggestion to my colleagues, based on intensive study of BBC’s Dr. Who, that in reality the coat-rack has not vanished. Rather, we have all been transported to a parallel universe which is identical to our own, except for this small detail.
Unfortunately they seem a little resistant, which is curious. I am fairly sure that Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect would agree with my reasoning. In Stargate SG-1 whole episodes were hung on less solid evidence.
For the moment, I will stick with the hypothesis that I am on another planet this morning. My colleagues seem to agree with me there, which is odd given their earlier thoughts. Most curious.