Thoughts on Antiquity, Patristics, putting things online, information access, and more
Some nice photos of decoration on the monuments at Baalbek in Lebanon here.
I so want to go to Baalbek. Unfortunately it’s located in the Bekaa valley, which is where the Hezbollah are currently hunkered down and doing their gun-running from Iran. I can imagine three doors at the site entrance: “Men”, “Women”, “Hostages.”
I can’t talk about Baalbek without reproducing the 19th century Roberts‘ picture:
At the beginning of August 1941, a group of Egyptian labourers employed by British forces in Egypt were labouring to clear some of the ancient quarries of Tura, some 10km from Cairo, so that they could be used to store munitions. The quarries are pierced with galleries constructed by the ancient Egyptians in order to obtain stone to build the monuments of Memphis, and open into the flank of the mountain, where they fan out from a vast rotunda inside.
In one of the three galleries of quarry 35, around 20-25 metres from the rotunda, a worker placed his hand by chance on a considerable pile of papyrus. This pile lay on the floor of the gallery, without anything to protect it or hide it, and covered only by the dust and chippings that had fallen on to it little by little during the centuries. This formed a small mound about a metre high on one side of the gallery.
The fellahs promptly divided the find among themselves. Bindings until then intact were broken, folios dispersed. Some say that some of the pages were used for fuel a fire for coffee. Others were dunked in water to bring out the colour in order to make them seem more appealing to the dealers.
A week later, around 10 August, the police and the Service of Antiquities became aware that a find had been made, but too late. Only one part of the found was retrieved by purchase, at a high price, through the intermediary of the servant of an antiquary. Three lots were successively acquired and deposited at the Cairo museum. The rest — the main part — were removed and sold, page by page, at inflated prices to collectors. The destination of some is no doubt even today unknown.
The manuscripts were written around the end of the 6th century on papyrus. The language of the texts was Greek. The state of the manuscripts was variable. Each manuscript was composed of quaternions, each of four sheets folded to make sixteen pages. The number of quaternions varied. The quaternions were what was traded around, since there was little associating them together in the find into manuscripts. The find was as follows:
Codex 1. This was 29.5 x 16 cm, 6 quaternions, and contained Origen, Dialogue with Heracleides, and On Easter. The quaternions were linked together, and so formed a unit. It seems unlikely that the codex ever contained more.
Codex 2. This was 28 x 18 cms, 6 quaternions, and contained extracts of Origen’s commentary on Romans; Extracts of his Contra Celsum; and a homily on the Witch of Endor. This also seems to be complete.
Codex 3. This was 27.5 x 24 cms, 15 quaternions, and contained the Commentary on Ecclesiastes, probably by Didymus the Blind. This codex, like 4-7, had suffered in antiquity, since each of its quaternions was cut in two horizontally, then the two halves rejoined, and rolled up. The cuts were done with great care to avoid the lines. Since Ecclesiastes is 12 chapters long, it can be inferred that this manuscript was originally 25 quaternions long. Part of the manuscript is in the Cairo collection, the rest in 1955 was in a private collection.
Codex 4. This was 27 x 23 cms, 16 quaternions, and contained the Commentary on Genesis by Didymus the Blind. The quaternions are numbered 1-16, and take the text up to Gen. 16:16. Quaternion 1 is only fragmentary, however; the 6 pages of quaternion 16 are likewise falling apart. If the work covered the whole of Genesis, this would require two codices of 30 quaternions; but it seems doubtful that these were at Tura. The manuscript has blank pages, suggesting that the copyist did not complete the work.
Codex 5. This was 27 x 24.5 cms, 14 quaternions, and contained the Commentary on the Psalms by Didymus the Blind. Most of the pages of this were in private hands.
Codex 6. This was 27 x 22 cms, 26 quaternions, and contained the Commentary on Zachariah by Didymus the Blind. This codex is complete.
Codex 7. This was 31.5 x 15.5 cms, 25 quaternions, and contained the Commentary on Job by Didymus the Blind. All but the last quaternion were at the Cairo Museum, the other being in private hands.
Codex 8. This was 28.5 x 22 cms, 1 quaternion of 12 pages, and contained a Commentary on the Psalms of the Mountains and on John 6:3-28, by an unknown author. It escaped notice in early reports. The first page is blank, and much of the second also. The commentary follows the Alexandrian exegesis.
The museum thus ended up with 1,050 pages of the find, by various means. It is permissible to wonder how much of it escaped.
These notes from H. Puech, Les nouveaux ecrits d’Origene et de Didyme decouverts a Toura, Revue d’histoire et de philosophie religieuses 31 (1951), 293-329, and L. Doutreleau, Que savons-nous aujourdhui des papyrus de Toura, Recherches des sciences religieuses 43 (1955) 161-193.
Agapius continues to make interesting statements. There’s this one:
Starting from this period, among the Greeks, Josephus (Yousifous), i.e. Aesop (Yousfâs) the fabulist began to be illustrious.
Well, no wonder names get mangled! Who would have thought Aesop = Josephus?
Just before that, I’ve seen a discussion of why rulers speak in the plural; “We order that…” rather than “I order that.” According to Agapius, Romulus is responsible (the founder of Rome, O Star-Trek viewer!). After the murder of Remus (whom for some reason I imagine as being short), Rome was shaken by perpetual earthquakes and the inhabitants kept knifing each other in the forum. Romulus then prayed to the gods, who told him that his fratricide was responsible. But if he put Remus on the throne beside him, all would be well. Romulus then prepared a gold statue of Remus, which he placed on the throne and then issued his commands as “We order…” (i.e. Romulus and Remus order).
I wonder what the real reason is?
In 356, Constantius issued the following edict from Milan, one of a series issued in the west and prohibiting pagan sacrifices:
Idem a. et Iulianus caes. Poena capitis subiugari praecipimus eos, quos operam sacrificiis dare vel colere simulacra constiterit. Dat. XI kal. mart. Mediolano Constantio a. VIII et Iuliano caes. conss. (356 febr. 19).
“If any persons should be proved to devote their attention to sacrifices or to worship images, We command that they shall be subjected to capital punishment. Milan, in the 8th consulate of Constantius with Julian Caesar” 1
From two mentions in Libanius we learn that people at Antioch could not pray or offer sacrifice in public for the success of Julian the Apostate’s campaign against Constantius 2, although the accounts leave unclear whether this was because the object of the prayers was attempting to seize the throne, or just because pagan prayers were illegal. Soon after 341, well before this:
[Aristophanes] came to what was left of our temples bringing no incense or victim, no burnt-offering or drink-offering — for that was not allowed. But he brought a sorrowing heart and a voice of grief as he had just been crying or was about to cry. He gazed on the ground, for it was a dangerous business to gaze up to heaven, and asked the gods to call a halt to the ruination of the world.3
The atmosphere of the reign of Constantius was clearly unfavourable to paganism. The general climate of fear that is so ably recorded in Ammianus Marcellinus will have discouraged anyone from doing anything that anyone else might denounce. It will also have encouraged officials to “show their loyalty” by taking informers seriously and harshly punishing those seen to violate the will of the emperor.
Yet in 357 the emperor made a visit to Rome, and the pagan Symmachus records the attitude of the emperor:
“He made no diminution in the privileges of the vestal virgins; he filled up the priesthoods with aristocrats; he did not refuse financial support for the Roman ceremonies; and following the delighted Senate through all the streets of the Eternal City, he gazed calmly at the temples, read the names of the gods inscribed on their facades, inquired about the dates of the buildings, and expressed admiration for their builders.” 4
The contradiction in the portrait of Constantius given in these two accounts is striking. How is it to be explained?
One anachronism must be avoided. The Roman empire was not a state like the modern USA, or UK, where the rule of law prevailed, and a government must pass a law to make its will effective. It was a despotism, where the will of the emperor was the real law, and paper laws held a lesser status, if any. Much the same position applies in black Africa today, where the “law” can be merely a piece of paper. Real authority is the wishes of the “Big Man” who does as he pleases and may, if he chooses, enact a “law” to justify it.
Nor is this situation unknown in the west. The ancient English law of blasphemy remained unused for 50 years, and was then invoked in 1977 after Gay News published a crudely blasphemous article about Christ. At that time there was no support for the offender, and no demand for the law to be repealed. But I remember how, after the trial, the establishment made it known that if the law was invoked again, it would be repealed.5 But in general laws in the west are either enforced or abolished.
The fact that Constantius issued an edict, therefore, need not have the significance that we would attribute to it today. Unless the emperor chose to enforce it, it remained merely paper. The imperial civil servants would know whether to take action or not. In fact paganism remained legal, and even the religion of the state, throughout this period. But what the edicts did do was to set a tone, to “chill” the expression and practise of paganism, to open the door to the extremist and the informer. We are familiar today with the way in which “anti-hate” legislation has been deployed, not for use but for threat. Doubtless these edicts made clear in a similar way the general preferences of the government, and, in cases of doubt, which way the verdicts would go. They made clear who was up, and who was down; who would be heard, and who would not.
1. Codex Theodosianus 16.10.6, trans. by Clyde Pharr, extra bit by me. The Latin of book 16 is here.
2. Libanius, Oratio 18:114. Tr. W.V.Harris, The spread of Christianity in the first four centuries, p.102 f.
3. Libanius, Oratio 14:41, ibid.
4. Symmachus, Relationes 3.7, MGH 6, ed. Seeck, tr. C. Forbes, Firmicus Maternus, ACW 37, p.133.
5. It was finally abolished in 2008 as part of a raft of laws to promote sodomy and Islam and silence criticism of either.
This lengthy article in Al-Ahram records that a team of conservators are working over the manuscripts in the Coptic Museum in Cairo. This collection contains not merely Coptic texts but also Arabic Christian manuscripts. Thanks to Andie Byrnes at Egyptology News for this one.
The interest in the collection is welcome. But… how can we access the mss? How can we get reproductions? There still seems to be no way to contact them using the internet, which is astonishing. Especially when there is a website here.
Let’s face it, we all have too many scholarly books. We can’t work without them, and we end up with piles of books, often read only once, and piles of photocopies. When we’re on the road, we can’t access them. And who has not realised, with a sinking feeling, that some most interesting observation is in that pile of data somewhere, but that we cannot quite recall where?
The answer is to convert our books into PDF files. Easy to say, I know. But technology has come on, and what would once have taken forever no longer does.
This afternoon I took three books, each of 200+ pages, and made PDF’s of them all. It took about half an hour each. How did I do it?
First, you need a modern scanner. The old ones groaned slowly as they scanned each page. The modern ones can do a scan in 5 seconds. I was using a Plustek OpticBook 3600, and even that is not bang-up-to-date. It’s far faster than my old one, tho. I controlled it from Abbyy Finereader 8, but really any bit of software would do. I set the scanner to scan grey-scale, at 300 dpi (quite enough to be readable), and adjusted the page-size down from A4 to whatever the book size was, by trial and error. I scanned an opening at a time, without splitting the pages. I set the software to scan multiple pages, so that I didn’t have to hit a key each time (I really didn’t want to hit Ctrl-K 300+ times today!), and I set the interval that the software waits between scans to 5 seconds. And then I went for it.
The result was a bunch of images of the twin pages. These I saved as a PDF. I then passed them through Finereader 9 (which has excellent OCR) to create a PDF with page images and text hidden under the images (because the text won’t be perfectly recognised by the software anyway). This means that the PDF is now searchable, and that I scan search a directory of files for keywords.
I didn’t proof any of the OCR, tho — no time. The idea is not to upload digital text, but merely to allow me a better chance of finding things.
I used Finereader, but probably other software would be better. I noted that the PDF sizes varied alarmingly between 200Mb and 20Mb! So I think Adobe Acrobat would be good for this, from what I have heard.
The end result is that I have three searchable PDF’s which I can stick on a key-drive (flash drive), slip into my pocket and look at anywhere. I can look at them at lunchtime at work, for instance.
Unscrupulous people might be tempted to borrow books from the library, scan those, and save themselves the purchase price. Of course I can’t advocate that you break the law in this way; still less exchange them online, as I hear some people do. But we need to be able to manage our own libraries this way, I think. Paper books have their uses, but scholarly books need this feature, as do their users. We need a change in approach from copyright holders to make it possible.
I admit that my sympathy for the copyright industry is not as high as it might be, since their sympathy for those who use their products seems non-existent. Why else do we have laws that criminalise anyone who makes a personal copy of an out-of-print and unavailable book? Why do we have laws that create copyright for a century, but print-runs of 200, other than to create a dog-in-the-manger? Why else do they campaign to increase the scope and reach of copyright, year upon year, while making it impossible for scholars to access out-of-print and obscure texts and even 1937 obscure theses? (a sore point, this last one, as regular readers will know). But really we need better law, and we need better products from textbook manufacturers.
In the mean time, I hope these notes will help people convert their libraries into a usable form. The key thing to remember is that we are not trying to produce something perfect; just something usable, and produce it quickly.
There’s a sale on — 30% off — at Les Belles Lettres, the French publishers of a great number of classical texts in parallel Latin-French editions.
That takes a volume of Photius down from 30 to 20 euros. Of course British people who’ve just watched the pound sterling fall like a paralysed albatross will still find it expensive, tho! But… do we really want these sort of books in paper form any more? or in nice OCR’d PDF form? If I buy any, where will I put them?
Thanks to Fr. Dominique Gonnet in LT-ANTIQ for this one!
A discussion of the two recensions of the Chronicle of Isidore of Seville, with English translations of them both, is online here. Thanks to the LT-ANTIQ list for the tip!
The following interesting passage can be found in a work by the Venerable Bede 1:
The same apostle (Paul) said, “a night and a day I was in the depth of the sea’ (2 Cor. 11:25). I have heard certain men assert that Theodore of blessed memory, a very learned man and once archbishop of the English people, expounded the saying thus: that there was in Cyzicus a certain very deep pit, dug for the punishment of criminals, which on account of its immense depth was called the depth of the sea. It was the filth and darkness of this which Paul bore, amongst other things, for Christ.
Theodore was a Greek from Tarsus, who happened to be in Rome in 667 AD at the moment when a Saxon archbishop-elect of Canterbury had died while in Rome to get his pallium. Pope Vitalian was open to eastern influence, and promptly appointed this 67-year old man (d. 690) as archbishop. His episcopate was a considerable success, he increased the status of the clergy, reorganised the diocese, and Bede says of him that he was the first archbishop whom the whole English church willingly obeyed. This in turn helped to foster English political and cultural unity. He brought knowledge of Latin and Greek to Dark Ages England, and interesting snippets like this from a part of the ancient world where the darkness had yet to fall.
1. Liber Quaestionum, Patrologia Latina 93, cols. 456D-457A. The reference comes to me from Henry Mayr-Harting, The coming of Christianity to anglo-saxon England (1972), repr. 1977, p.207, n. 58 (on p.312).
An old post in Hypotyposeis “Origen on Creation” reported post by a Chris Heard, “Absurdities” as genre markers (Nov. 28, 2008), in which he contends that Genesis ought to be read non-literally because the original audience would have heard it so:
I submit to you that “absurd” chronologies and geographies serve in biblical narratives as genre markers informing readers that the discrete textual unit in which these markers appear is not to be taken as “history,” but must be read in a “non-literal” mode. * * * But my point is that the person(s) who wrote Genesis 1, and expressed their creation faith in a schematic seven-day creation story, weren’t so foolish as to suppose that they were giving a precisely accurate timeline of the deity’s creative acts—and they told us so right there in the text.
“N. T. Wrong,” dismisses this as “modernist apologetics” in The Absurdity of Genesis 1 – Just-So Stories – Literal Meaning; Non-Literal Apologetic Interpretation (Nov. 28, 2008); ideas that none of the ancients would have had, on reading Genesis. Carlson points out a passage from Origen, writing in his On First Principles 4.3.1 (trans. Henri DeLubec [Harper & Row, 1966], p. 288) as follows:
4.3.1 Now what man of intelligence will believe that the first and the second and the third day, and the evening and the morning existed without the sun and moon and stars? . . . I do not think anyone will doubt that these are figurative expressions which indicate certain mysteries through a semblance of history and not through actual events.
The post is useful, and rightly points up the genre markers that we should expect to find in ancient texts. The issue of ancient attestation of genre markers in texts deserves wider scrutiny.
For Heard’s argument to work — which is Origen’s — we need to have some evidence that the original audience of Genesis would have understood this, rather than a Hellenistic audience. I don’t think we have enough data on Genesis itself to answer that for or against; but such data might exist with respect to later Old Testament books, and be instructive.
I suspect that Heard has a point, although the argument probably needs to be more nuanced and based on a little more than just Origen. Such an argument looks odd to us, because we don’t use myth for teaching purposes in our day, and so we are ill-equipped to recognise that it *was* widely so used and what the rules of the game were. We can tell from Plato’s “Laws” that it was so used; and Cicero’s letters discussing the dramatis personae of the Tusculan Disputations make it clear that there *were* rules.
These examples off the top of my head, of course, and neither evidently applicable to Hebrew literature — about which I know nothing — but offered as a start.