The Annals of Eutychius of Alexandria (10th c. AD) – chapter 17 (part 8)

Posted on by Roger Pearse

My, this is a long chapter.  But it brings the whole pre-Islamic period to an end, so we’re stuck with it.  The narrative of Chosroes II continues.

24. When Kisra came to Maurice, king of Rum, he was received with very great honors and granted many soldiers in aid.  With the soldiers that Maurice had given him, Kisra entered Armenia and encamped near Adharbayğān, where he fought a violent battle.  Bahram Sūnir was defeated and fled to the Turks.  But Kisra did not desist from pursuing him until he killed him.  Kisra, son of Hurmuz, called Abarwīz, reigned thirty-nine years.  This happened in the seventh year of the reign of Maurice, king of Rum.  When he became undisputed king, Kisra sent back the soldiers that he had been given by the king Maurice, after covering them with gifts, and the best gifts that one of his rank had the authority to give to others like himself.  He then wrote a letter to King Maurice asking him to give him in marriage his daughter Maria.  King Maurice replied with a letter in which he said: “I am not allowed to give my daughter as your wife unless you become a Christian.”  Kisra granted his request and agreed to become a Christian.  His advisers, his ministers and his generals condemned such conduct, saying: “What you intend is shameful for both us and for you.  No king of Persia has ever done such a thing from Azdashīr until today.  Your desire to marry this woman should definitely not lead you to abandon the faith of your fathers.  Moreover, we cannot advise you at all to adopt the religion of the Christians, because the Christians are a people unable to keep a deal, nor you can trust their word.”  But [Kisra] did not accept their advice.  Becoming a Christian, Kisra wrote to the king Maurice a letter in which he made him aware of it.  Maurice sent his daughter with an indescribable amount of gold and silver, with furniture, servants and handmaids, of which the equal has never been seen.  Abarwīz Kisra later arrested those who had killed his father and put them to death, even his uncles Nibdī and Nistām.  Then he set to rule his subjects with despotism and harsh manners, preoccupied with amassing wealth as none of his predecessors had ever been, and avoiding spending it.  He was contemptuous of the nobles and humbled the leaders.

25. Maurice, king of Rum, had a servant named Theodore whom he loved and favored.  But it happened that he became angry with him and had him flogged in blood, to the point that he had a heart full of resentment against him.  There was also one of his generals named Phocas, with whom king Maurice was angry.  Then Phocas said to the servant Theodore, after giving him money: “Find a way to kill Maurice”.  Driven by resentment stored up towards Maurice, the servant came to him at night, killed him and Phocas took possession of the kingdom.  Phocas reigned over Rum for eight years.  This happened in the fifteenth year of the reign of Kisra, king of the Persians.  King Phocas broke out against the children of Maurice and he killed them, but their nurse managed to save one and hid him, replacing him with his own son who was killed.  When he  grew up, the young man embraced the monastic life on Mount Sinai and died.  When Kisra, son of Hurmuz, had notice that the king Maurice was killed along with all his children, he summoned his advisers and said to them: “I can’t avoid claiming revenge for the blood of my father in law, to avenge him”.  Instigating this was his wife Maria, daughter of Maurice.  And his ministers said to him: “We told you that the Christians have neither honor nor religion nor acknowledge an alliance, but you would not listen to us.  If they had had honor or religion, they would not have killed their king.  However now we will advise the king how he should behave with them, to humiliate their hearts, to overthrow the whole state, and annihilate the religion.  They have a temple in Jerusalem which they hold in great reverence.  However, let the king send to destroy it, and as soon as that temple is destroyed their power will weaken and their kingdom will be impoverished.”

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The Annals of Eutychius of Alexandria (10th c. AD) – chapter 17 (part 7)

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Let’s carry on with events in the century from Justinian to Heraclius and the rise of Islam.  Eutychius now returns to events in Persia, where the new King Hormizd IV made himself unpopular and was murdered.  His son Chosroes II fled to the emperor Maurice for help.  This seemingly trivial action was to have immense consequences, whose impact is being felt even now.

22. Hurmuz, son of Anushirwān, king of the Persians, became famous for [his] violent character, [his] harshness and [his] tyranny.  He oppressed his people, making life difficult, and he imprisoned a number of his subjects, depriving them of their ranks.  He was behaving in this way, when Khaqan rose up against him at the head of a large army.  Hurmuz sent him against a man named Bahram, also called Sūnīr, at the head of twelve thousand warriors.  Bahram Sūnīr killed Khaqan and took possession of his soldiers.  After having destroyed Khaqan, Bahram remembered the violent character of Hurmuz, his despotic conduct and the bad opinion he had of his generals and soldiers, and was afraid to return to him.  Sūnīr then rebelled, while he was still in Khurasan, and refused obedience.  The soldiers of Iraq also rebelled against Hurmuz because of his misrule and declared him deposed.  However they were afraid to kill him.

23. Hurmuz had a son named Kisra, who was then far away from him in Adharbayğān.  Made aware of what was happening to his father, he moved with his men to bring him help, but this failed, and he fled into the territory of Rum to get help from king Maurice and ask him to send with him an army in order to go to the rescue of his father.  With him were eight of his advisers, and his uncles Nibdi and Nistām, who were advising him what to do.  Hearing about this, Kisra said to them: “Come, tell me what you have decided.” They answered: “We do not think that you should leave this country before we have killed Hurmuz; we worry, in fact, that when you reach Maurice, king of Rum, Hurmuz may write to the king Maurice, telling him that we fled from him, and so there will happen something very unpleasant.”  They went to Hurmuz and killed him.  Then they returned to Kisra and went with him on the road until they came to a monastery along the way and spent the night there.  When they awoke, they were taken by surprise by a group of horsemen who Sūnir Bahram had sent to look for them.  Seeing the riders they felt lost.  But Nibdī said to them: “You go and leave me here.  I know how to get us out of this mess.”  They mounted on their horses, and went on their way.  Nibdī then ordered the porter to bolt the door of the monastery.  Meanwhile, the horsemen had arrived and had surrounded the monastery.  Nibdī then went out onto the terrace and said to them: “Kisra sends to say that we are in your hands, but asks you, if you judge opportune, to let us stay in this place for the rest of the day.”  They agreed.  Once it was night, Nibdī climbed once again on the terrace, showing himself to the horsemen and said to them: “Kisra sends to say that we will be thankful if you will allow us to spend this dark night here.  As soon as dawn comes we will come down to you and we will get on the way”.  They agreed.  Nibdī continued to behave with them in this way until it was certain that Kisra and those who were with him were now unattainable and far away.  Then he revealed to the soldiers of Bahram how things were, and they took him prisoner and brought him to Bahram where they told him what had happened to them.  The king felt great admiration, and arranged for his brother named Bahram, son of Siyāwukhsh, to hold him captive.  [Nibdī] approached the said Bahram.  Inviting him to make an act of submission to Kisra and intriguing to unravel the loyalty of Sūnir, he said: “I think it’s better for you to look for ways to kill Sūnīr, and to deserve a high reputation with Kisra”.  He continued to send him one messenger after another, until he gained his heart and he took it upon himself to kill Sūnīr.  But Sūnir noticed this, and ordered them to kill him.  Nibdī managed to escape without being recaptured.

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Has the lost “De baptismo” of Melito of Sardis been rediscovered in Coptic?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Alin Suciu has been undertaking the thankless task of sifting through Coptic patristic papyri.  It looks as if he may have struck gold!  A new second-century patristic text, no less!  From his blog:

At the Coptic congress, which this year will be held in Claremont, California, I will speak about the discovery of Melito of Sardes’ homily on the baptism of Christ in a Sahidic papyrus manuscript. My paper is entitled “Recovering a Hitherto Lost Patristic Text: Greek and Coptic Vestiges of Melito of Sardes’ De Baptismo.”

Here is the abstract:

“In this paper, I will argue that a fragmentary Sahidic papyrus manuscript featuring a homily on the baptism of Christ can be identified as Melito of Sardes’ De Baptismo. This early Christian writing has been considered to be lost with the sole exception of a quotation preserved in a Greek catena collection.

In the first part of the paper, I will show that the only known Greek fragment of Melito’s De Baptismo finds a parallel in a Sahidic papyrus manuscript.

In the second part, I will analyze the Coptic text and I will show that a number of similarities with the other works of Melito strengthen the hypothesis that the fragmentary papyrus actually contains his hitherto lost homily on the baptism of Christ.”

We can only hope that this is indeed the case.  Well done, Dr S.

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Keep christian literature out of the classics!

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Today I saw a series of tweets which started with Tertullian’s Ad Nationes – a work rich in quotations from Varro – and then read as follows:

@hashtagoras: Tertullian v neglected by classicists, methinks.

@b_hawk: I’ve a feeling Tertullian is often relegated to religious studies, & often used more for contextual info.

@hashtagoras: By virtue of our training and the constitution of our canon, most classicists contrive to avoid christian stuff

He’s right, of course; they do.  But this is not necessarily a bad thing. Considering the sheer mass of Christian Latin and Greek literature, such a policy by classicists is simply a survival strategy.

If classicists “broadened” their canon, they would cease to be classicists.  Each would muddy the stream with some element of patristic or medieval material – interesting, certainly, but not classical in literary or linguistic terms – and we would lose touch with the pure classical world.  Nobody would know what was really classical any more.  Nobody would study pure classics any more.  In the process, the special qualities of classical studies would dissolve in the stream of all ancient literature.

The classics, as a discipline, is the study of the finest products, the highest point, the “classic” version of the literature of each language.  To focus on that is to identify it, and to study it.  To mix in other things is to cease to be a classicist.

Let us not forget that our society was brought into existence by the rediscovery of the classics.

Boundaries are important things.  We ring-fence things that are important to study, and exclude others from that fenced area.  We exclude other things, not because they don’t matter, but because the practical effect of admitting them is to dilute, to confuse, to muddle, and to dissolve the separate identity of the item we intend to study.

It occurs to me that current proposals in the USA to mingle Patristics and New Testament studies are equally liable to the same objection.  The reason that we study the NT by itself is because otherwise the slender volume of biblical literature will drown in the mass of patristic commentary upon it.  Anybody writing on Romans will instead end up referring 90% of the time to Origen; or Augustine.

In fact, when we start thinking of Augustine, and the mass of material of that date, subsuming the pure New Testament, then aren’t we at once face-ot-face with Catholicism?

I wonder (ignorantly) whether New Testament studies exists as a distinct discipline for exactly this reason.  Did protestants in the early modern world grow tired of patristic wrangling matches with catholics about texts which the former did not consider authoritative?  I can see that it might happen.  I can see that they wanted to study the New Testament for itself, without the long shadow of later anachronistic interpretation.  Medieval bible study is what you get if you combine the two.  It would be ironic if the efforts of atheists like Bart Ehrman, to invade Patristics, resulted instead in New Testament studies disappearing into a Catholic-style discipline.

Let us preserve the distinctions.  If we want something studied, keep a firm hand on the edges.  I know that patristics and late antique studies have benefited greatly from the work of Roman historians like T.D.Barnes, who made the journey over the boundary.  But if we want to keep benefiting, let’s keep classics healthy.

Which means no Tertullian in the classics schools, please.

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Bar Hebraeus, Chronicon Ecclesiasticum – English translation published

Posted on by Roger Pearse

David Wilmshurst writes to tell me that a really important book has finally come out – the first English translation of Bar Hebraeus, Chronicon Ecclesiasticum, is now available from Gorgias Press as The Ecclesiastical Chronicle, ISBN 978-1-4632-0535-5.  It’s a mighty 590 pages long, but sadly it costs $140 although various discounts are readily available.

Bar Hebraeus Front Cover-wilmshurt-2016The work consists of a history of the Syriac world, given as a series of short biographies of people and their works, down to his own time, the 13th century, when the Mongol invasions means that the Syriac world ceased to exist as a literary culture.  What Bar Hebraeus tells us about many of those figures is all that we know, in many cases.  Consequently any work on Syriac of any sort will tend to quote or reference it.

Yet it has never existed in English.  In fact I see that on the About page for this blog, a translation of it is mentioned as something that I would like to see.  So well done David for doing it!

Anybody with any interest in Syriac studies will want a copy.  There is a 40 page introduction, and then the work itself in two sections, as Bar Hebraeus gave it – first all the west Syriac writers, including himself (!); and then the east Syriac writers of the Church of the East.

Well done, Dr. W.  It is a mighty service to have this important work accessible.  I hope that Gorgias make a nice amount on money on it.

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Where St Nicholas lived (if he did) – a paper on the city of Myra

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A correspondent draws my attention to a paper by Dr Engin Akyürek, Myra: the city of St. Nicholas, which is online at Academia.edu here.  Those who have followed the posts about Nicholas of Myra may find it interesting and useful, as the author discusses the physical layout of the ancient city.  That is something known to few of us, so useful.

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The Annals of Eutychius of Alexandria (10th c. AD) – chapter 17 (part 6)

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Agapius now begins the events of the reign of the emperor Maurice.  This chunk ends with an oriental tale, with which authors of histories of that period evidently were obliged to lace their narratives. 

17. Then Justin the Younger, King of Rum, died.  After him there reigned over Rum Tiberius, for four years.  This happened in the third year of the reign of Hurmuz, son of Anushirwān, king of the Persians.  In the first year of the reign of Tiberius, King of Rum, there was made patriarch of Constantinople Cyriacus.  He held the office for sixteen years and died.  In the second year of his reign there was made patriarch of Jerusalem Anus.  He held the office for eight years and died.

18. Tiberius, King of Rum, died.  After him there reigned over Rum Maurice, for twenty years.  This happened in the seventh year of the reign of Hurmuz, son of Anushirwān, king of the Persians.  In the time of Maurice, King of Rum, there lived a monk named Marun, who claimed that Christ, our Lord, has two natures, one will, one operation and only one person, so corrupting the doctrine of the people.  Most of those who followed this doctrine and became his disciples were inhabitants of the city of Hamah, of Qinnisrīn, al-‘Awāsim and a large number of the people of the land of Rum.  His followers and those who professed the doctrine were called Maronites, named after Marun.  After the death of Marun, the inhabitants of Hamah constructed at Hamah a monastery, calling it “Dayr Marun”, and they embraced the religion of Marun.

19. In the fifth year of the reign of Maurice, there was at Antioch a terrible and violent earthquake.  A great part of the city of Antioch was destroyed and the inhabitants perished.  In the nineteenth year of his reign there was another violent earthquake in the land of Rum and in Syria, about the third hour of the day.  Many cities in Syria and in the land of ​​Rum were destroyed, and many people died because of the earthquake.  In the seventh year of the reign of Maurice, king of Rum, there was made patriarch of Jerusalem Isaac.  He held the office for eight years and died.  That same year died Gregory, Patriarch of Antioch.  The inhabitants of Antioch then went to Jerusalem to look for a man to designate as their patriarch.  Isaac, patriarch of Jerusalem, said to them: “For my part I would suggest this old sexton who serves at the Church of the Resurrection”.  They found him easily, and they undertook to bring him to Antioch.  Then [the old man] said to them: “Do you not recognize me?”  They answered no.  And he said to them: “I am Anastasius, and I was your patriarch.  But having been accused of fornication, I fled away from you and since then I have looked after the Church of the Resurrection service, after I buried my garments in such a place in Antioch.”  He led them to Antioch, took them to the place where he had buried his clothes, unearthed them and was restored to office.  He was their patriarch for nine years and died.

20. In the seventeenth year of the reign of Maurice another Anastasius was made patriarch of Antioch.  He held the office for six years and died.  After the death of Anastasius the see of Antioch remained without a Patriarch for twenty-two years.  In the fifteenth year of the reign of Maurice there was made patriarch of Jerusalem Zechariah.  He held the office for seven years and was exiled.  In the fifth year of the reign of Maurice there was made patriarch of Rome Gregory.  He held the office for thirteen years and died.  In the eighteenth year of his reign there was made patriarch of Rome Sabinianus.  He held the office for a year and died.  In the nineteenth year of the reign of Maurice there was made patriarch of Rome Boniface.  He held the office for six years and died.  In the fourteenth year of his reign there was made patriarch of Constantinople Thomas.  He held the office for fourteen years and died.  In the second year of his reign there was made patriarch of Alexandria Eulogius.  He held the office for twenty years and died (In another text it says “for two years”).

21. In the time of King Maurice there lived a robber from the city of Ifrīqiyah, the head of a gang of robbers, who preyed on and killed anyone who came into his hands.  The ways were so unsafe that no-one dared to walk the streets of the city of Ifrīqiyah for fear of this robber.  Under intense pressure, the patrician of Ifrīqiyah resorted to every means and even ruses  to catch the robber, but his efforts were in vain.  Hearing about this, the king Maurice sent one of his men to offer the robber a safe conduct.  He accepted it and went to the king Maurice who was very generous towards him, filled him with honors and gave him a high position.  After a short time the robber fell ill and was admitted into the sanatorium which was in the city of Constantinople.  One night, prostrate with grief that afflicted him, and convinced that he was about to die and appear before his Lord, gracious and merciful to his worshipers, he began to cry and to raise supplication, saying: “My Lord, as you received the tears of Peter and forgave him, as you have received the tears of Hezekiah, and as you received the thief who was crucified with you, so also receive my tears and erases with them my sins.  Please, in your great mercy receive my prayer!”  So he is saying he wiped his eyes with the cloth that he had on his face.  For hours the robber continued to invoke his Lord and to confess his sins.  Then he gave up his spirit.  There was a man in Constantinople, who was among the most distinguished, charitable and virtuous doctors, who used to visit the sick every day in the sanatorium.  Now, while he was sleeping in his house, he saw in a dream, at the same time as when the robber died, a troop of negroes approach the bed of the robber, carrying with them several sheets on which were written in detail the sins that he had committed.  Then he saw two men, whose faces shone white as snow and as beautiful as the sun, who carried with them a set of scales.  The negroes came forward, and they laid on the balance all the sheets so that one side rose and the other went down under the weight.  Then one of the white men said to his companion: “We have nothing to do here.”  And the other replied: “What can we do, in fact, if it is not even ten days since he stopped robbing?”  But then they began to rummage in his bed, and they found the cloth with which he wiped his eyes, and they threw it on the plate.  The empty plate sank down and the other rose, on which were the sheets, and they were all scattered.  Then they cried out, and said: “He won the mercy of God!” and so saying, they took the soul [of that robber] and took him away with them, while the negroes, confused and sad, fled.  The doctor awoke, immediately went to the robber and found him dead with a cloth over his eyes.  Those who slept next to the robber reported that they had heard his crying out and his prayers.  The doctor then took the cloth, was received by the King, showed it to him and told him about what he had seen in his dream and what he had heard from those who slept next to the robber.  Then the doctor said to the king: “Praise be to God who welcomed the robber, thanks to your good offices, and forgave his sins, just as he did with the first thief on the cross.  This in fact was the first, and that the second.”

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Ezekiel the Tragedian’s play on Moses; quoted by Eusebius, found at Oxyrhynchus

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A number of news reports have circulated this week about the finds of Greek literature at Oxyrhynchus.  One of the better ones is in the Daily Mail, which has been running a lot of articles on subjects of interest lately.  The report by James Dunn (2 March 2016) is here.  It’s based on an article in the soon-to-be-extinct Independent, which nobody reads.

A long-lost speech from a play about Moses has been discovered on newly translated papers found more than a hundred years ago on an ancient Egyptian rubbish pile.

The speech explains how he was given the name Moses because he was found on the riverbank, written in a Greek-style tragedy about the Biblical character written in the Second Century BC.

It means that the classic Biblical story would have been performed more than 2,000 years before Charlton Heston played Moses in the 1956 blockbuster The Ten Commandments.

It is one of 500,000 documents found when the Victorian archaeologists Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt discovered the ancient city Oxyrhynchus, about 120 miles south of modern Cairo, in 1897.

Between then and 2012, only 5,000 had been translated, but thousands more have been translated thanks to an army of volunteers who have inspected the documents which were put online.

…

But the most interesting to many will be the fragment of a long-lost rendition of the Book of Exodus, written in the style of a Greek tragedy by little-known author called Ezekiel.

It had been quoted in another documents by Church Father Eusebius, written 400 years later, but until now, no-one had ever seen it.

Dr Dirk Oddbink, of Oxford University, co-ordinating the project, said: ‘We didn’t know for certain that a text existed: Eusebius might have made it up or misremembered it,’ reports The Independent.

‘Now we have a real copy, a long speech by Moses, in iambic trimeters, telling the history of his life and how he was discovered as a baby in the bulrushes.

‘We can put some flesh and bones on a lost work of literature, one that was presumably performed long before Charlton Heston.’

Dirk Oddbink is better known as Dirk Obbink.  The Independent has a less people-friendly introduction, but then adds a translation:

Newly discovered fragment of Ezekiel’s Exagoge, spoken by Moses:

Then the princess with her maidservants came down to bathe.
When she saw me, she took me up and recognised that I was a Hebrew.
My sister Mariam then ran up to her and spoke,
‘Shall I get a nursemaid for this child from the Hebrews?’ The princess urged her on.
Mariam went to fetch our mother who presently appeared and took me in her arms.
The princess said to her, ‘Woman, nurse this child and I shall pay your wages.’
She then named me Moses, because she had taken me from the watery river-bank.

The Mail also prints a couple of pictures of papyri, but I learn from a correspondent that these are in fact nothing to do with the Exodus, but are POxy 1.2 (Matthew) and POxy 6.846 (Amos).

We learn more about this author from Louis H. Feldman, here.[1]

2.26 Ezekiel the Tragedian, The Exodus, quoted by Alexander Polyhistor (first century BC), cited by Eusebius (end of third and beginning of fourth century AD), Preparation for the Gospel 9.29.4-6

We know of a Jew, Ezekiel, who composed tragedies, considerable fragments of one of which, The Exodus, have been preserved. His thorough familiarity with various classical authors, particularly Aeschylus and Euripides, indicates that he was well schooled in Greek literature. The play itself follows the biblical narrative closely, though the dream here mentioned, together with the interpretation by Moses’ father-in-law Raguel (Jethro), is non-biblical. There would appear to be significance in the fact that this crucial dream is interpreted by a non-Jew, Raguel.

Ezekiel thus mentions these things in his work The Exodus and includes the dream seen by Moses and interpreted by his father-in-law.

In the following extract, Moses himself speaks in dialogue with his father-in- law.

‘I dreamt there was on the summit of Mount Sinai
A certain great throne extending up to heaven’s cleft,
On which there sat a certain noble man
Wearing a crown and holding a great sceptre
In his left hand. With his right hand
He beckoned to me, and I stood before the throne.
He gave me the sceptre and told me to sit
On the great throne. He gave me the royal crown.
And he himself left the throne.
I beheld the entire circled earth
Both beneath the earth and above the heaven,
And a host of stars fell on its knees before me;
I numbered them all.
They passed before me like a squadron of soldiers.
Then, seized with fear, I rose from my sleep.’
His father-in-law interprets the dream thusly:
‘O friend, that which God has signified to you is good;
Might I live until the time when these things happen to you.
Then you will raise up a great throne
And it is you who will judge and lead humankind;
As you beheld the whole inhabited earth,
The things beneath and the things above God’s heaven,
So will you see things present, past, and future.’

Feldman does not make clear that Eusebius actually quotes far, far more than this: too much, indeed, for me to include in this post.

The Gifford translation of the Praeparatio Evangelica of Eusebius is online, and book 9 is here.  

Eusebius is not quoting directly, however.  He introduces, in chapter 17, his source: the lost work by Alexander Polyhistor:

AND with this agrees also Alexander Polyhistor, a man of great intellect and much learning, and very well known to those Greeks who have gathered the fruits of education in no perfunctory manner: for in his compilation, Concerning the Jews, he records the history of this man Abraham in the following manner word for word…

The Ezekiel material is stated to be copied “word for word” from Polyhistor.

It is nice to see Eusebius confirmed, once again, as an accurate source for lost works.  It has always seemed rather mean-minded, to me, to cast aspersions on a man to whom we owe so much knowledge of antiquity.

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  1. [1]Louis H. Feldman, Jewish Life and Thought among Greeks and Romans: Primary Readings (1996) p.41. Online here.↩

A quote from Tacitus and its source

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Around the web, you will find the following:

Cornelius Tacitus: He had a certain frankness and generosity, qualities indeed which turn to a mans ruin, unless tempered with discretion.

The thought was striking, as indeed it should strike anyone who is fairly open, like myself.  But is it Tacitus?

Well it is!  It is in fact from the Histories, book 3, chapter 86, as translated by A.J.Church and W.J.Brodribb (London, 1873 in this case, p.140.)  It is a description of the character of Vitellius!

 

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’m on holiday, and not doing very much, other than dealing with some of minor nuisances that fill our days if we are not careful.  I have no desire to do anything very demanding!  I’m browsing twitter for anything of interest to us, and finding it rather full of tedious hooting and shouting about US presidential candidates.

But I am translating each day a piece of the 10th c. Annals of Eutychius (=Sa`id ibn Bitriq), as it gives me very little trouble to do so, and it’s good to push that along.  My apologies if it isn’t very interesting to some people.  I view it as a text in the Byzantine tradition of chronicles, which preserves some material not known elsewhere.

The translation (from the Italian, using Google Translate) has no scholarly value, but it does make this obscure text far more accessible.  Someone with Arabic can do a proper translation sometime.

I can’t recall if I have any translations in flight elsewhere.

Once I get a little more fit, and if the weather improves, then I might try a visit to Leicester one day.  I believe there are substantial Roman remains there!  We’ll see.

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