Thoughts on Antiquity, Patristics, putting things online, information access, and more
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The Origen book – a text and translation of his works on Ezekiel, including masses of catena material – is complete! This afternoon, after a mighty struggle with the crummy online interface that Lightning Source Inc provide their hapless customers, I managed to upload the files and order the full proofs, complete with covers and dust-jackets. Yay!
Less pleasing was my opinion of the following screen, displayed by their system, which showed what percentage of the cover price I would receive, after allowing Amazon (etc) 20%, and deducting LSI’s own fees to manufacture the book.
Yes, that’s right: of a $45 cover price I get $25. It doesn’t pay, this game.
Never mind. We’ll sell a few copies of the thing, and then get it online. But it should look very impressive in printed form. Really I think it will!
Today I made a decision to do something necessary, yet it was a wrench. I decided to give away my copy of the 1608 Commelin edition of Tertullian’s works.
I bought it over the internet, years ago. In those days we had no PDFs online. The only way to get hold of the detailed apparatus, found in early editions, of the works of Tertullian was to venture onto the market and buy copies.
Indeed most Tertullian scholars have little collections of early editions; the 1539 of Rhenanus, the 1545 Paris edition, the 1550 of Gelenius – if they could find one – and the 1583 Pamelius edition, high-point of the counter-reformation scholarship.
My Commelin is a reprint of the Pamelius. It is still bound in the original ornate white leather binding, a bit battered after the centuries but perfectly sound. The book itself has clearly seen little use.
I got it from a German book dealer. It arrived in a big yellow Deutsche Post box – for it is a folio volume, and some two inches thick. And in that box it has remained; for, like most people, I live in a little house and I have antabuse online no bookshelves suitable for folio-sized volumes. There seemed no point in taking it out, merely to expose it to dust.
Also it would need to rest on its side. I knew better than to stand it on end, thereby placing the whole weight of this heavy volume on its ancient stitching. Where to put it?
This has been the question for many years. I have seldom opened it. Once it sat in a cupboard, inside its box. For the last couple of years, or maybe more — how quickly the years pass these days, without my being aware of them — it has sat, big and obtrusive, atop a set of bookshelves that I constructed myself in younger days.
No more. Today I decided that it was time for us to part. I can’t sell it. I don’t know the rare books market, and I don’t live near any dealers. I could post it, and get lasix online it back, and do all that; but I do not care to, and I should certainly be taken advantage of.
Instead I have agreed with a fellow Tertullian scholar to donate it to him. He will treasure it, I am sure. Tomorrow I shall take it to the post office and send it on its way.
It has long been my policy not to keep a book unless I believe that I will read it again, or, in the case of reference books, have use of it in future. This is particularly essential for novels, for which most of us have a tyrannous appetite. Unless you have some similar policy, you will quickly find your book cases, and then your house, filled with books which you have no appetite to read. I have a pile in the corner of one room, to which I assign books that I believe I will not read again; and, if after a suitable period, a book is still there then I dispose of it. I took two bags full of books to a charity shop yesterday, in fact.
It is harder to know what to do with scholarly books that we no longer need. Some have donated their books to libraries; yet I know too much about libraries and their practices to suppose that any such donation would be more than temporary.
Let us accept the fact that one day they must go on, and let us donate them freely to our fellow workers. They will value them; and we need not grieve at their departure, knowing that they go to serve another as they have served us.
For one day all of our books will pass into the hands of others. Rough hands will pull at our shelves and throw our treasures into boxes, most of which will perhaps end up in some second-hand ambien shop. The little paperbacks we bought at college, once fresh and bright as we ourselves then were, now foxed and yellowed, and which have accompanied us through life, and are almost friends to us, will end up in some second-hand shop. If they are lucky they will pass into the hands of one whom we might have been pleased to call friend.
Sic transit gloria. For the world and all that is in it are always passing away.
But the Christian has hopes of more than this from life! He can thank God for Good Friday. And so can all of us, if we sign up with them.
NOTE: Annoyingly WordPress deleted a large section of this post when I posted it. I will try to recover it from memory.
This evening I happened across some files on my hard disk containing an English translation of the Ecclesiastical History of Rufinus. The following account is given of the fall of the Serapeum in Alexandria:[1]
11.23. I suppose that everyone has heard of the temple of Serapis in Alexandria, and that many are also familiar with it. The site was elevated, not naturally but artificially, to a height of a hundred or more steps, its enormous rectangular premises extending in every direction.
All the rooms up to the floor on top were vaulted, and being furnished with ceiling lights and concealed inner chambers separate from one another, were used for various services and secret functions.
On the upper level, furthermore, the outermost structures in the whole circumference provided space for halls and shrines and for lofty apartments which normally housed either the temple staff or those called hagneuontes, meaning those who keep themselves pure.
Behind these in turn were porticoes arranged in rectangles which ran around the whole circumference on the inside.
In the middle of the entire area rose the sanctuary with priceless columns, the exterior fashioned of marble, spacious and magnificent to behold.
In it there was a statue of Serapis so large that its right hand touched one wall and its left the other; this monster is said to have been made of every kind of metal and wood. The interior walls of the shrine were believed to have been covered with plates of gold overlaid with silver and then bronze, the last as a protection for the more precious metals.
There were also some things cunningly devised to excite the amazement and wonder of those who saw them.
There was a tiny window so orientated toward the direction of sunrise that on the day appointed for the statue of the sun to be carried in to greet Serapis, careful observation of the seasons had ensured that as the statue was entering, a ray of sunlight coming through this window would light up the mouth and lips of Serapis, so that to the people looking on it would seem as though the sun was greeting Serapis with a kiss.[2]
There was another like trick. Magnets, it is said, have the power to pull and draw iron to themselves. The image of the sun had been made by its artisan of the finest sort of iron with this in view: that a magnet, which, as we said, naturally attracts iron, and which was set in the ceiling panels, might by natural force draw the iron to itself when the statue was placed just so directly beneath it, the statue appearing to the people to rise and hang in the air. And lest it unexpectedly fall and betray the trick, the servants of the deception would say, ”The sun has arisen so that, bidding Serapis farewell, it may depart for its own place.”
There were many other things as well built on the site by those of old for the purpose of deception which it would take too long to detail.[3]
Now as we started to say, when the letter had been read our people were ready to overthrow the author of [the] error, but a rumor had been spread by the pagans that if a human hand touched the statue, the earth would split open on the spot and crumble into the abyss, while the sky would crash down at once.[4]
This gave the people pause for a moment, until one of the soldiers, armed with faith rather than weapons, seized a double-headed axe, drew himself up, and struck the old fraud on the jaw with all his might. A roar went up from both sides, but the sky did not fall, nor did the earth collapse. Thus with repeated strokes he felled the smoke-grimed deity of rotten wood, which upon being thrown down burned as easily as dry wood when it was kindled.
After this the head was wrenched from the neck, the bushel[5] having been taken down, and dragged off; then the feet and other members were chopped off with axes and dragged apart with ropes attached, and piece by piece, each in a different place, the decrepit dotard was burned to ashes before the eyes of the Alexandria which had worshiped him.
Last of all the torso which was left was put to the torch in the amphitheater, and that was the end of the vain superstition and ancient error of Serapis.
Over the last couple of months, I have become aware of another individual who, quietly, and without any fanfare, is making a real difference to ancient history online. Her name is Carole Raddato, and she writes the Following Hadrian blog.
What she is doing is travelling all over the Roman Empire, and photographing its material remains. The results appear on Flickr here.
She’s going into museums, and photographing exhibits, and placing them online. In quantity: there are over 14,000 photographs in that Flickr collection. And at very high quality: far, far better than anything we see in published literature.
I became aware of her work, while working on the Mithras site. Again and again I found that a striking, clear, good quality image would be … by Carole Raddato. It might be in Wikimedia Commons (a site that takes a pretty casual attitude to copyrights of others); more usually on her own Flickr feed.
Again and again I would look for some artefact in some museum and then find … Miss Raddato had visited that museum and made a collection of photographs, all now freely online.
The path she is following – that of the Emperor Hadrian in his travels about the empire – is taking her to the major sites and repositories of the ancient and modern world. The result is this marvellous collection of material.
A lot of people put holiday photos online. They are of variable quality. But I don’t know of anybody else who is undertaking such a herculean task, and doing so in a way that is of permanent value.
We are all in your debt, Madam. May your camera flash never grow dim!
Today I learned via Maïeul Rouquette of a fascinating court case in France, here, (in French). The question is whether editing a critical text of an ancient author creates a copyright.
The dispute is between two companies, Droz and Garnier. Garnier placed online the text (without apparatus or commentary) of certain medieval texts, using the text published by Droz. Droz sued.
The court ruled:
Therefore it appears that the company Libraire Droz has not provided proof that the raw texts used by the society Classiques GN are protected by copyright. Thus its cases, which are solely based on infringement, must be rejected.
It is worth reading the page, even as translated into English in the Google Translate version, because the points made are interesting and generally relevant. A work is protected if it is fixed in form (i.e. an idea is not protected) and it is original in character, reflecting the personality of its author. But the court stated:
However, it should be noted that the law of intellectual property is not meant to include all intellectual or scientific work, but only that based on a creative contribution which arise
This indicates the direction of the court’s thinking. They are plainly familiar with the fact that one critical edition may differ only slightly from another, and argue that the process of textual criticism, since Lachmann, is largely mechanical. Specifically copyright does not apply to someone doing a lot of tedious work; only to creative work.
This demonstrates enormous common sense on the part of the court. Nobody, nobody, when the copyright laws were invented, imagined that stuff like a critical edition of an ancient text was involved. They were thinking of novels, belles-lettres, poetry, composed by modern figures and sold for money. They were quite right.
The practical effect, if we say that the raw text of an ancient author, as given in a critical edition, is the copyright of the editor, is to make the text of that ancient author into the property of this or that modern publishing house. That, frankly, is ridiculous.
Of course the plaintiffs are appealing. The case has considerable importance. But I hope that we will get a clear ruling on this.
The commentary in a critical edition may reasonably be copyright. The apparatus, largely compiled by mechanical methods, seems doubtful to me. But the raw text … surely the whole point of the edition is NOT to create an original work, but rather to give us Homer, or Origen, or Martial, or Juvenal?
Let’s think of a modern example. I do not believe that someone should acquire a copyright over my work, enough to allow him to bar access to others, simply because they did some work on my spelling, or fixed some errors from a corrupted hard disk file! That would be the modern equivalent. It’s palpably fraudulent. So why should it be different, simply because the author lived long ago?
Let us raise a glass to the common sense of the French court, and hope that the higher courts are not pressured or bribed by publishing interests.
The edition and translation of Origen’s Homilies on Ezekiel that I commissioned is now in its final stages. I need someone to check that the latest bunch of changes were applied correctly, and also to go through the footnotes in one (long 150 page) section and check that the numerals are in the right places, and match up with the text at the bottom of the page. It’s a bit tedious, and will probably take a few hours, and I haven’t the time to do it. Unfortunately the proof-reader is otherwise engaged.
Would anyone like to volunteer to assist? I can’t pay a lot, but I can pay something. If you’d be interested, please contact me.
The circus of the Roman city of Leptis Magna in Libya was plundered for stone by a rascally Frenchman a couple of centuries ago. However we can get a good idea of what it looked like from a mosaic at the Villa Selene, nearby. Unfortunately it’s not that easy to make out. Here’s my 2006 photograph, taken from one end.
However I discovered a funny thing this evening. I loaded that image into Paint.Net this evening and, idly, hit the menu option to “auto-level”. This never does anything useful; but it’s the top option on effects, so I often try it. And … there is always a first time, and this is what I got! —
Suddenly we can see! The gates at one end, the spina, even the colours, all become possible.
Digital photography … it is such a gift!
The task is done; the peace is signed,
Fearful tensions now unwind,
Peace in our time! the foolish cry,
The wise will keep their powder dry.
— Bob Harrison, Ashford, Kent, 27 Feb. 98, on BBC Ceefax.
It’s a new financial year, which means a new set of accounts here in the UK where I currently am staying. I threw out a bunch of papers from 2008, and then went through my filing cabinet throwing out a bunch of old bills.
But attached to one of them was a stray postit note. On it were the lines above. I thought them worthy of record back then; I think them worthy of it now.
I don’t recall the crisis that must have provoked that dry comment. The BBC’s teletext service, Ceefax, only just exists now, and its letters page is a memory, gone with the analogue TV service.
We forget, perhaps, that the majority of human thought and communication passes away, unrecorded. Not all of it deserves to.