Author: Roger Pearse

If you want to get ahead, get a hat.

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The linen which he spreads on the crown of your head denotes the freedom to which you have been called. You were before standing bareheaded, as this is the habit of the exiles and the slaves, but after you have been signed he throws on your head linen, which is the emblem of the freedom to which you have been called. Men such as these (=freemen) are in the habit of spreading linen on their heads, and it serves them as an adornment both in the house and in the market-place. — Theodore of Mopsuestia, Liber ad baptizandos.

While scanning the English translation of Theodore’s sermons to those awaiting baptism (now online here), I came across this interesting statement, that during the ceremony of manumission the ex-slave’s head was covered; and thus that being bare-headed was a mark of a slave.

I wonder how this relates to the oft-mocked injunction of Paul, that women should cover their heads, particularly since female slaves and prostitutes could be interchangeable.

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A difficult piece of Greek in Eusebius

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Can someone tell me what the following piece of Unicode Greek means? The problem is the plural ‘angels’, in one section:

Alternatively, perhaps, there is one angel in Matthew, **while the ones who encounter the women are different from that one**, and both the place and the time of the sighting of the angel are also different.   Similarly, too, the two angels in John, seen inside the tomb, are different from the one in Matthew, seen outside, sitting on the stone in front of the tomb.  

The Greek for this bit is:

e#teroi de\ kai\ a!ggeloi au0tou= oi9 pro\j ta\j gunai=kas

ἕτεροι δὲ καὶ ἄγγελοι αὐτοῦ οἱ πρὸς τὰς γυναῖκας

This is from one of the catena fragments of Eusebius of Caesarea, Quaestiones ad Marinum, discussing problems at the end of the Gospels.   A PDF of Mai’s edition is here, and this is found on p.88, where it says:

null

Mai renders it “alii item angeli apud eum mulieribus oblati” which would mean that Eusebius had forgotten that there was only one angel in Matthew 28.

2This is a very puzzling sentence.  The Greek is:  ἕτεροι δὲ καὶ ἄγγελοι αὐτοῦ οἱ πρὸς τὰς γυναῖκας, which at first sight might appear to mean “and his angels that encountered the women are also different”.  However, neither in Matthew nor in John, the only two evangelists here under discussion, do more than one angel encounter more than one woman; Eusebius’ knowledge of the bible can hardly have slipped in this, given its normal accuracy, and he is careful, below, to distinguish the angels appearing in these two gospels from humans in the other two.  The translation printed assumes that αὐτοῦ means not “his”, with ἄγγελοι, but “from that one”, with ἕτεροι (and is not the adverb “there);  but, quite apart from the problems already mentioned, this is also doubtful on linguistic grounds: ἕτερος, which can in some writers have a genitive to mean “from”, is in this text normally put with παρά; and αὐτοῦ is here uncomfortably distant from ἕτεροι in the word-order.  If the text is corrupt, the corruption seems too deep for a convincing emendation.

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Does the manuscript of Tacitus say ‘Christian’ or ‘Chrestian’?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Yesterday I wrote a post criticising the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence in some pretty direct terms.  I’ve deleted it; because it seems that I got hold of the wrong end of the stick.

We all know the reference to the Christians in Tacitus, Annals, book 15, chapter 44.  A discussion arose in an online forum as to whether this said ‘Christians’ or ‘Chrestians’ in the single manuscript.  The only photographs available, from an elderly facsimile, were monochrome and it was impossible to tell.  It certainly said ‘Christians’; but there was a gap after the ‘i’.

A friend saw that the only thing to be done was to get a new photograph of the page.  This he did, and let me look at it, which was kind.  But as it was monochrome also, I was under the impression that the BML had sold him a monochrome photograph.  That would be a disgraceful thing for a library to do, in 2008, when every librarian has a mobile phone with a colour digital camera built in, and I said so.

But later I learned that they had actually sold him an ultra-violet image, which was naturally monochrome!  That left me feeling quite sheepish, and I deleted the post.

The image revealed the erased ‘e’ in ‘Christians’, neatly filling the gap in the manuscript.  They charged him three or four euros for it, which is a very reasonable price, and the image was of the whole opening, not just a single page.  In fact the photograph is rather splendid, nicely displaying the two column mis-en-page.  Of course a colour image under normal light would be nice too!

The only thing that is unsatisfactory is that I cannot show the image to you.  For it is not online, and copyright in the EU probably covers it.  The image really should be on the BML website.  Here is an excerpt from the photo, although enlarged a little too much.

 Tacitus, Annals: the word 'Christians' or 'Chrestians'
Tacitus, Annals: the word 'Christians' or 'Chrestians'

But well done the BML for selling a good, useful image, very cheaply. 

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Google groups becomes useless

Posted on by Roger Pearse

So, farewell Google groups.  Over the last few days, they changed the search engine and rendered it useless.

Until recently, if you searched for something, and sorted by date order, you got all the most recent postings in usenet which mentioned that word. 

Now you don’t.  You get some random selection of stuff, much of it elderly; none of it different from what you get by default.  It seems as if “date order” has effectively been disabled.

Those of us who posted via this interface have been shut out at a stroke.  After all, what point in posting, if you’ll never find your post again to see if there are replies?

Google have been the custodian of usenet news since the demise of DejaNews.  But lately they were slipping.  Some time back they allowed people to create Google-only groups.  Spammers promptly created these every night, filled with keywords.  Every search suddenly was full of spam.  Google took no action.  This rendered the search by date immensely bad anyway.  But even this pales before the disaster that we now see.

Curious to see usenet news finally collapse, tho.  On the internet, everything is temporary, and will vanish.

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Cyril of Alexandria, Contra Iulianum

Posted on by Roger Pearse

We all know Origen’s Contra Celsum, which preserves the lost anti-Christian pamphlet of Celsus, with Origen’s common-sense replies.

Not so many people are aware of Cyril of Alexandria’s Contra Iulianum, which fulfils the same role for Julian the Apostate’s similar work.  This is because it has never received a critical edition, and still less a translation into any modern language.

Christoph Riedweg in Switzerland began such an edition some years ago, with German translation, but nothing has appeared.  It seems that he has since moved to the Istituto Svizzero di Roma (ISR), and that his edition has not progressed much in the last year.  He tells me that perhaps it might appear in 2010?

Let us hope so.  I have for some time meditated on commissioning an English translation of the work, and naturally I would prefer to use a properly edited Greek text.

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Archimedes Palimpsest data set

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The following press release reached me on the CLASSICS-L list:

Ten years ago today, a private American collector purchased the Archimedes Palimpsest. Since that time he has guided and funded the project to conserve, image, and study the manuscript. After ten years of work, involving the expertise and goodwill of an extraordinary number of people working around the world, the Archimedes Palimpsest Project has released its data. It is a historic dataset, revealing new texts from the ancient world. It is an integrated product, weaving registered images in many wavebands of light with XML transcriptions of the Archimedes and Hyperides texts that are spatially mapped to those images. It has pushed boundaries for the imaging of documents, and relied almost exclusively on current international standards. We hope that this dataset will be a persistent digital resource for the decades to come. We also hope it will be helpful as an example for others who are conducting similar work. It published under a Creative Commons 3.0 attribution license, to ensure ease of access and the potential for widespread use. A complete facsimile of the revealed palimpsested texts is available on Googlebooks as ³The Archimedes Palimpsest². It is hoped that this is the first of many uses to which the data will be put.

For information on the Archimedes Palimpsest Project, please visit:

www.archimedespalimpsest.org

For the dataset, please visit:

www.archimedespalimpsest.net

Now I approve really strongly of this.  Consider how many projects exist to create a locked-in architecture, a prestige website, but NOT to make the data — transcription data in this case, in XML — available to the online community.  I recently posted about the St. Gall project — and how, worthwhile as it is, they hadn’t made the manuscripts available as PDF’s, but had chosen a proprietary and very slow browser which obstructed access.

It reminded me of the Oxford manuscripts site, which had a slow and clunky browser.  But since it was all in JPG’s, I wrapped a perl script around them when I needed to use images of one manuscript as part of a translation project.  The images remained on their site; I just devised a better access method.  That script still gets a lot of links; and I offered it back to the Oxford site if they wanted it.  Everyone benefitted from the open technology.

The Archimedes announcement is a contrast to some of the recent projects.  Archimedes are not even supplying a browser.  They’re making the raw data available, and let he that wants devise whatever presentation layer he wants.  Marvellous!  I do hope that some seriously creative solutions are devised, to leverage this data set and produce something that no conventional delivery would ever have thought of.

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Some nice pictures of Theodoret’s Cyrrhus

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I happened across this article on the Iconoclasm blog, where there are some nice pictures of the ruins of the Acropolis and theatre, and a couple of quotes from Theodoret on the errors of paganism.  Curiously the author puts ‘errors’ in quotes; without realising that amounts to endorsement of the prostitution and paganism that Theodoret is attacking!  But still nice photos, and nice to hear a bit of Theodoret.  Wonder where the English quotes come from; as far as I know the Curatio has never been translated. Looks like a good blog too!

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Digitising the manuscripts of St. Gall

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The Benedictine abbey of St. Gall in Switzerland is one of the places where manuscripts travelled down the centuries.  Founded in the Dark Ages, it’s collection crops up in many a discussion of ancient texts.  Quintillian was found here by Poggio, for instance.  There is still a very substantial collection there in the possession of the Roman Catholic church, although the abbey was expropriated in 1805.

I was delighted to learn today from Evangelical Textual Criticism that St. Gall are digitising their collection and placing it online.  Of course ETC are mainly interested in biblical mss; but the rest of us will be interested in the other mss!  The website is here.  Currently there are 144 mss online.

An article in the NY Times says that they have recently received a grant of $1m from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to scan the 355 mss in their collection which were written before 1000 AD.  This tells us that the Swiss intend to digitise all 7,000 medieval mss in that country — wonderful news indeed, and one that must benefit scholars greatly.  Full marks to the Foundation for funding it.  That works out at around $3,000 per manuscript; quite a bit, but getting much closer than the British Library ever has to the real cost to doing the work.

All credit is due to Ernst Tremp, the library director.  It seems that he thought up the project after seeing widespread flooding in Dresden in 2002 which damaged many artworks.  It is great to see a library director who grasps what should be obvious; that manuscripts must be photographed and must be made accessible or they WILL be lost in the mischances of the years.

The site has an English interface.  I had a browse by author to see what’s in there, which gave a short list, and then by title to see the rest.  Most of the stuff is 9th century, it seems.  There’s a 9th century ‘Hegesippus’ (Latin Josephus’ Wars); an copy of Isidore of Seville’s Etymologiae from ca. 900; a bunch of biblical commentaries by Jerome of the same date; Lucan, Pharsalia, 11th c.; Martianus Capella; Orosius; Prudentius; a 9th century astronomical/computistical text; a bunch of composite manuscripts; several volumes of fragmenta rescripta or reused palimpsest parchment pages from late antique books.

Nothing of great interest to me, so far; but still very useful indeed to have available.  My only query: why don’t they make the mss into PDF’s, like Google do?  These itsy-bitsy one-page-at-a-time custom interfaces are a pain to work with.

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Why we care about Nubia

Posted on by Roger Pearse

This picture of some Nubian pyramids, from Talking Pyramids may help us understand.

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Sudan: the Merowe High Dam project and archaeology

Posted on by Roger Pearse

We all remember how the building of the Aswan High Dam drowned the archaeology of much of lower Nubia.  I learned today from Egyptology News that in 2007 Sudan started a project to build its own High Dam at the fourth cataract.  This is known as the Merowe High Dam project.  Nine archaeological missions are at work, under the title of the “Merowe Dam Archaeological Salvage Project”.  Among the international groups is one from the British Museum.  They have already “uncovered thousands of sites dating from the Middle Paleolithic era (150,000 years ago) to the very recent past.”

This is dreadful news for Nubian studies.  Nearly all our knowledge of Old Nubian patristic texts comes from archaeological discoveries.  All the building in this region was in mud-brick; so it will all be destroyed.  Fortunately the pyramids of Meroe are below the new dam.

I’d be grateful for any other concrete information on the finds, particularly the literary finds.

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