Author: Roger Pearse

Free speech in Canada: a commission of enquiry

Posted on by Roger Pearse

This blog is mainly about patristics and ancient history.  But any blogger must take an interest in whether he might be dragged before the courts by someone who decides to be “offended” and belongs to a legally privileged group.  It is for this reason that I link to Ezra Levant, the Canadian blogger who was attacked by the Orwellian-sounding “Human Rights Commissions” in a variety of ways that certainly violated his human rights of free speech and a fair trial. 

The same organisation has systematically harassed Christians, with the intention of “chilling” free speech.  The accusers face no costs; the victims, even if acquitted, face financial ruin: the process of ‘investigation’ is the punishment.  I won’t usually post on the continuing story – Ezra does that every day very ably.  But the same tendency exists everywhere.

Canada’s politicians have been slow to act.  But an inquiry into the functioning of these  bodies has begun.  The unfortunately named Mark Steyn — does no-one read Vanity Fair any more? — has been another victim, and was asked to address the inquiry.  A summary of it is here.

My attention was caught by this section:

…every time you have someone like Haroun Siddiqui at the Toronto Star saying that it’s all about striking a balance and all the rest of it, every time that someone tiptoes down that primrose path, it leads only to tyranny. If you don’t believe in free speech for people you hate, you loathe, you revile, you don’t believe in free speech at all. …

The Tribunal, I think, needs to be brought within the codes and conventions of this country’s legal system. At the moment, it upends them. The burden of proof ought to be on the accuser. The accuser should not be allowed unlimited funds to frivolously torment people for no reason, beggaring them for something that serves no public purpose.

We need to be aware of the concerted attempt across the world to stifle freedom of speech, to make it risky to say anything that might offend those with power.   We need to resist.

Share

EthOS – the first useful service from the British Library

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I have often commented on the British Library, on its greed, obscurantism and general uselessness as a public service.  Nor have I any reason to suppose this worthless institution has reformed.

But for a change, thanks to Ben Blackwell, I have discovered a new service that may conceivably be useful to us all.  Evidently not everyone at the BL is a fool; for this one is a very good idea indeed.  This is a new service called EthOS. 

EthOS is a database of UK PhD theses, rather like the UMI database in the USA.  Universities with a bit of gumption contribute the theses, and you and I can download them.  Yes, that’s right; you don’t have to be in further education to use this service. 

Access to the theses is actually, free, or at least partially so.  The BL want to charge for this.  You have to “place an order” for anything you want to look at, and go through a checkout, as if you were at Amazon.  They quote prices, and do everything as if this was a bookshop (!)  Thank heavens Google Books didn’t engage in such a farce!  Then a link is made available, and you can download it.  Mind you, they’ve made such a dog’s breakfast of it that I haven’t managed to do so yet!

This is the first useful online service that the BL have ever provided for the nation.  I imagine that they will screw it up.  They will have an attack of the greedies, and charge for it, and it will vanish behind a network of “charges” and privileges, etc; all paid for by taxpayers, naturally.  But for the moment, this is useful.  Yes, really it is.

UMI is pretty useless to us all, since only universities can access the stuff without being charged pretty steep prices.  But EthOS means that we can actually look at what our tax dollars are paying for in UK research.

I’m going to award this a couple of cheers.  It is a Good Thing, as 1066 and all that used to put it. 

Yes, they’ve mucked up the interface.  Yes, they’re still salivating over the idea of charging the public for stuff the public has already paid for.  Yes, it’s clunky.  No-one can detest the BL as much as I do.

But the idea is fundamentally sound.  This is precisely the sort of activity that the National Library of each nation should be doing; to make available easily and freely the research that we all pay for and which would otherwise languish, inaccessible, in unpublished paper theses.

There is a search facility.  I tried Tertullian, and Eusebius, and up came results.  But… not all our state-funded universities have cooperated.  Notable absences are Oxford and Cambridge, curse them.  Whether this is from obscurantism or greed I don’t know.  But this service is so manifestly a sensible idea that they will have to contribute in the end.  Let us hope they don’t make their participation conditional on excluding the ordinary man.

PS: I’ve found after, after scouring the help, why the thesis wasn’t available, and just said “Download file being prepared”.  Apparently only theses with a little blue icon next to them in the search results are immediately available.  You have to wait while the others are scanned!  Of course this isn’t apparent to the newcomer and… wait for it… they make you tick a box agreeing that your idle exploratory request for a random thesis can’t be cancelled!

I wonder if they try and bill me for digitisation?  If so, I look forward to them trying it on in court!  Every new user will make this mistake, so I wish them luck!  Bad interface design, boys, bad interface design.

Share

Isidore of Pelusium: some more letters

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Here are two more letters of this 5th century monastic:

311. TO THE EMPEROR THEODOSIUS
How to provide assurance to the synod

If you could personally take the time to join them in deliberating at Ephesus, I am sure that there will be no censure of you on their part. If you leave the voting to the crowd’s antipathies, who would free the synod from all of the mockery? You would also remedy the situation, if you would stop your servants from dogmatizing, since they stand uncertainly between a great chasm of serving the emperor and quarreling with God, for fear that they make waves for the empire, dashing against the rock of the Church the contrivances of their bad faith. That Church has been set up, and cannot be lorded over by the gates of Hell, as God announced when He was creating it.

322. TO THE READER TIMOTHEOS
On how you cannot argue with an ignorant person.

Just as it is not safe to travel through an uninhabited land with a belligerent person, so it is not very easy to have an educated conversation with an ignorant person. The former will unleash his full force on you when you are alone if something is said or done not to his liking, while the latter, unless everything said is dumbed down to his lack of education, will single out for disgrace and ridicule everyone intelligent in the world, including learned philosophers and virtue-loving men. Frequently, people’s lack of letters tends to spread and at the current time you will find it preeminent everywhere. Even the Church is not without its share of it as well as the State and even the empire itself cannot be governed without it. Because of this, our troubles grow and the spirit of slavery has taken hold through the empire. So be very patient with the unlearned person, because you gladly abstain from the mindless, being mindful of our Lord.

What a picture these give us of the conditions in the fifth century.  The emperor, drawn into pointless dogmatic quarrels, while the nation drifted towards ignorance and contempt for learning.

I’ve now obtained Pierre Evieux’s study of Isidore of Pelusium.  It’s entirely discussion; none of the letters are included. From it I learn that the letters have been highly regarded.  Mainly they deal with Old and New Testament exegesis.  In some cases they quote Demosthenes and are a source of readings for establishing his text.  Isidore was definitely in favour of using pagan learning, so long as it was baptised.

Interestingly many scholars have denied the authenticity of the letters.  They point to the fact that the collection of 2,000 letters emanates from the “Sleepless” monastery of Constantinople — so called because the monks took it in shifts to keep the services going 24 hrs — and suggest that it was forged by them.  We thus have the absurd situation where scholars demand that we call him “pseudo-Isidore” and claim that these letters are not by the otherwise unknown father of the 5th century, but by someone else of the same name!   Evieux remarks that the existence of additional letters in Syriac, outside the “Sleepless” collection, disproves the idea of a later forgery.

Share

Bringing projects to an end

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The recession is biting, and I need to reduce my outgoings.  Luckily the Eusebius is all but done, the al-Majdalus is done, and I have a promise of the Cyril text for a week hence.  I’ve cancelled the translation of letters by Isidore, and decided not to commission a translation of the medieval biographies of Hunain ibn Ishaq.

I have enjoyed doing all these things, but I don’t have a guaranteed source of income, and so must be prudent in hard times.  At the moment I don’t know where my income will come from after March.  This is by no means unusual, but this year there may be no business in April.  It was nervous enough this time last year, when I spent three months hunting for work.    Let’s see what the new financial year brings.

Share

Cicero at Oxyrhynchus

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I wonder how many people know that 10 papyrus fragments of Cicero exist from Oxyrhynchus, etc, the earliest dating from the start of the 1st century AD and the latest from the 6th? I certainly didn’t!

I owe this knowledge to CEDOPAL, the online database of 7,000 papyri.  A look at the drop-down list of authors is interesting by itself.  Julius Africanus is represented.  Three fragments of the lost works of the 2nd century jurist  Ulpian are there.  A few bits of Galen; surprisingly few, really, considering that his works amount of 10% of the now-surviving Greek literature before AD 300.  A fragment of Juvenal Satire 7 from ca. 500 AD from Arsinoe is a poignant relic, considering that he ended his days in exile in Egypt.

Only two snippets of Libanius were found, one from his Monody for Julian the Apostate.  A fragment of an epitome by Manetho exists from the 5th century.  Another 2nd century fragment is from the Chronicle of Phlegon of Tralles; and Hippolytus gives us a fragment of his own Chronicle, 6-7th century.  Polybius is present in a 1st century AD fragment.  And so the list goes on.

I was glad to see that links are starting in CEDOPAL to appear to online images of some of the papyri.  This must come, I think, and will put an end to the absurd concealment of these things behind barriers of money and privilege.  But much remains to be done.

Share

Egypt has it all blog

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A commercial blog on places of interest in Egypt, with lots of nice pictures!  This includes Coptic sites.

Share

Managing my e-mail

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Some weeks I am away from home.  I keep up with my email via a rather dumb SquirrelMail web interface (provided by my ISP), and delete the spam.  But I wish I could organise it!  When I go home, I connect to the net, and my mail client downloads the email.  Then I have to go through it a second time and stuff it in the right folders and generally clear it up.  This takes time that I badly need for other purposes.

I wish that there was a better way.  Ideally I could organize it via the web, and then download it pre-organized.  Any suggestions, anyone?

Share

UK copyrights everything ever made?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Susan Rhoads of Elfinspell drew my attention to this discussion on Wikimedia, where images of out of copyright material were deleted in response to a claim that in the UK any photograph is copyright, even a scan of out-of-copyright material.  The claim is being made by a certain John van Whye, from http://darwin-online.org.uk/, as a reason why stuff from his website should be removed.

There is no indication, as far as I could see, of law or case law to back up these claims.  As far as I know they have never been tested in court.  But then no-one in the UK can afford to defend themselves in court.

It is understandable that van Whye wants to protect his website so he can exploit it commercially — although not all that understandable, since he didn’t pay for it himself.  But this is an evil day, if the already absurdly over-oppressive UK copyright law has managed to be extended yet further.

It all sounds like special pleading to me.

Share

The Suetonius we do not know

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I doubt that many people reading this blog are unfamiliar with the master work of Q. Suetonius Tranquillus, Lives of the 12 Caesars (and if you are, go and buy the Penguin translation by Robert Graves NOW).  But how many of us have read the other surviving works: the Lives of the Grammarians, Poets, Rhetoricians?  I certainly never have.

This afternoon, sitting at the keyboard, for some reason I found myself reading the Wikipedia article, which linked to the Gutenberg translation which included these texts.  They deserve to be better known.

XIII. LABERIUS HIERA was bought by his master out of a slave-dealer’s cage, and obtained his freedom on account of his devotion to learning. It is reported that his disinterestedness was such, that he gave gratuitous instruction to the children of those who were proscribed in the time of Sulla.

Share

More Zenobius

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A query in CLASSICS-L has brought some more info on this obscure 2nd century AD compiler of proverbs.

Andrew Chugg writes:

It’s a bit questionable whether Zenobius is an author or merely a compiler, since according to the Suda (s.v. Zenobios) his Proverbia consists of the proverbs of Arius Didymus of Alexandria and Tarrhaeus (Lucillus of Tarrha in Crete). He himself seems to have taught rhetoric under Hadrian in Rome.

I don’t know of a modern English translation of the whole work, but he is often quoted on various matters, especially concerning Alexandria.

If you’re mainly interested in Proverbia 3.94, then you could try Fraser’s Ptolemaic Alexandria. If you are interested in the whole work, then scholars of Didymus may be able to help. Obviously, it is quite likely that 3.94 is actually Didymus.

Terrence Lockyer adds:

The TLG text (for “Zenobius Sophista” as it classifies him) is from:

 – E. L. von Leutsch and F. G. Schneidewin (edd.), Epitome collectionum Lucilli Tarrhaei et Didymi, Corpus paroemiographorum Graecorum, vol. 1 (Goettingen : Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 1839;  repr. Hildesheim : Georg Olms Verlag 1965)

which is in Google Books, whence it can be downloaded as a PDF, at

http://books.google.com/books?id=0zABAAAAMAAJ

and thereby also in the Internet archive at

http://www.archive.org/details/corpusparoemiog00unkngoog

from which (following the “All files:  HTTP” link) one can download the book in PDF.

There is an apparent scanning issue on pp. 440-1 of the book / 501-2 of the PDF affecting the lower part of the notes, and again between pp. 513 and 514 of the book / 572 and 575 of the PDF, where, however, the affected pages seem to be duplicated, so nothing is lost), DJVU (which I’ve not checked), or the original scans, from the list of files at

http://ia350610.us.archive.org/3/items/corpusparoemiog00unkngoog/

The issues with a small number of pages (4 of 603, and two of them duplicates) do not appear when one reads the book on-line at Google Books, so presumably will not be visible in the PDF downloadable thence.

The (Google Books) PDF looks pretty decent, but there is an issue at the bottom left of p. 223 (280 of the PDF) where a mark visible in browsing the book via Google is much darker and obscures a bit of the note (one or two words on the left of the last three lines), and again on 233 (290 of the PDF, where the first half of the last three lines in the left column is affected), and on 258 (315 of the PDF, perhaps two words obscured);  while 247 (304 of the PDF) is wavy, there is a duplication of pp. 440-1 (on PDF pp. 501-2) with a hand in view on each duplicated page (as in the Internet Archive version, where I should have said that the pages are in fact also repeated, so nothing is actually lost), and pp. 491 (552) and 493 (554) have issues at bottom right.

P. 491 appears to be missing from the Internet Archive PDF.

In short, neither file is perfect, but the two together seem usable enough.

The text of Zenobius starts on p.55 of the Google books PDF, covering pp.1-177 of the edition.  There is no translation of any of it, sadly.  The pages contain only a limited amount of Greek; p.24 seems to contain 57 words, suggesting a total word count of ca. 11,000 words; about £500, at 5p a word, if I commissioned a translation.  Tempted…! 

The TLG tells me it’s actually 27,271, or about double that.  Still not a huge amount… but then there is the hassle of finding a translator and chasing him up, etc.  If I could pay the money and just get the translation, I probably would!

Share