Origen on unnatural vice

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I was reading through Origen’s Dialogue with Heracleides and came across the following interesting comment on sin:

The things that are liable to punishment, therefore, are not merely the terrible and fearful sins which should not even be named, whether sins of life or of thought, but also sins commonly thought to be of less importance.

That is why, it seems, the apostle puts side by side with acts which are abominable, infamous, and revolting (if I may so say) things which are regarded by most people as of little significance.

What does he say? “Be not deceived; neither fornicators, nor adulterers, nor effeminate men, nor homosexuals, nor thieves, nor drunkards, nor revilers, shall inherit the kingdom of God.”

You see that together with such gross sinners as the homosexual person, the effeminate man, the adulterer, the fornicator, he enumerates the drunkard, the reviler—sins thought by all of us to be of small account, so that we may be taught that it is not for the great sins alone that we are excluded from the kingdom of God, but also for these which are commonly supposed to be of minor significance.

Therefore, let us not revile, nor be drunkards, nor extort, nor steal, nor do anything wrong, even if we are “deceived.”

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

No internet access at home this morning — my broadband provider must be having a problem.  But I have to go out this morning anyway.  Today is the day my cleaning lady comes in, and, if I stay, she talks at me rather than doing her job!

So I’m sat in the local library.  Fortunately there is nothing urgent in my inbox.

Yesterday I went to Cambridge to check whether there was in fact an English translation of letter 100 from the Collectio Avellana.  It turns out that there is not.  I also acquired a photocopy of a most interesting study of how accurate is the translation of Rufinus of Origen’s Commentary on Romans, using the Tura papyrus.  I’ve not had a chance to read it yet.

I also realised that I still need to do something about the fragments of Porphyry Against the Christians. 

And I looked at the Buytaert edition of the Latin homilies of Eusebius of Emesa.  It’s easy to see why these remain untranslated — the titles do not inspire interest.  But something should be done with them.

Someone wrote to me this morning asking about the Ecclesiastical History of Gelasius of Cyzicus.  It ought to exist in English, I agree.

So many projects, so few translators!

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Scrolls and lead codices?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

According to the BBC website,

A group of 70 or so “books”, each with between five and 15 lead leaves bound by lead rings, was apparently discovered in a remote arid valley in northern Jordan somewhere between 2005 and 2007. A flash flood had exposed two niches inside the cave, one of them marked with a menorah or candlestick, the ancient Jewish religious symbol. A Jordanian Bedouin opened these plugs, … the Jordanian government … claims they were smuggled into Israel by another Bedouin. The Israeli Bedouin who currently holds the books … 

The books, or “codices”, were apparently cast in lead, before being bound by lead rings. Their leaves – which are mostly about the size of a credit card – contain text in Ancient Hebrew, most of which is in code. …

One of the few people to see the collection is David Elkington, a scholar of ancient religious archaeology who is heading a British team trying to get the lead books safely into a Jordanian museum.

Elkington, however, may not be a reputable scholar, at least according to blogger Clayboy here.

Another blogger has more details here.

The owner of the cache is a Bedouin named Hassan Saeda who lives in the village of Um-al-Ghanam in the north of Israel,according to the Sunday Times. He is believed to have obtained them after they were discovered in northern Jordan.

Two samples were sent to a laboratory in England where they were examined by Peter Northover, head of the materials science-based archaeology group. The verdict was inconclusive without more tests, but he said the composition was ‘consistent with a range of ancient lead.’

Larry Hurtado comments here.

The writing is reported as some kind of Hebrew but coded.  Until the items are competently read, we don’t even know what their contents are.   The items are miniature codices, of a size that suggests private usage, and, so far as I know, suggests a date much later than the first century (there seems to have been an upswing in the production of miniature codices from ca. 3rd century CE onward). 

Finally, the incidence of the forgery of artefacts is so great that any responsible scholar must express profound hesitation about making any judgement on such items until they have been properly analysed.  Especially in light of the “Jesus bone-box” drama, we might all take a few deep breaths and simply call for the items to be put into the public domain for competent study before more rash and pointless claims are proffered.

What we need, clearly, is a team of reputable scholars to examine the things.  There is real money being demanded, apparently, as in all such cases.  We all know that Israel is the centre of a great deal of forgery, doubtless because of the combination of an excellent system of education, ready access to the best references, and a large population of groups like bedouin who are not especially noted for high moral standards towards non-members of the group.

Let us hope the find is genuine.  Let us hope, further, that it is significant.  Like Larry, I suspect it is not Christian but Jewish, and, if genuine, somewhat later in date than is suggested.

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A forgotten poet and the limits of the internet

Posted on by Roger Pearse

This evening I was reading an atheist forum.  Most of them were insane, chattering how Jesus never existed, never walked on earth, and — so often had they told themselves the lie — that there was no evidence whatever that he had.  One, however, much reviled by the rest, continued to protest that this was nonsense, that no sensible person doubted that Jesus had walked the earth, and that to affirm otherwise was to bring atheism into disrepute.  His reward was a hail of mockery.  Today he stands — but for how long?

I found myself murmuring an adage from somewhere:

Bad company is a disease;
He who lies with dogs, shall rise with fleas.

And then naturally I wondered who said it.  It was obviously old, but I was not sure that I had remembered it correctly. 

A Google search promptly attributed it to someone called Benjamin Franklin, some early American.  But this could not right, I felt sure.  It had a Restoration tang to it, I thought.

And so it does.  It turns out to be the work of a poet named Rowland Watkyns, who in 1662 published a volume of verse under the title Flamma sine fumo.   After much difficulty I found a copy here, in strange format.  I had not misremembered too badly:

Bad Company is a disease;
Who lies with Dogs,  shall rise with fleas .

Watkyns, I think, was a Welsh clergyman (1616-1664), dispossessed under Cromwell but restored by Charles II.  It is remarkably hard to discover much about him using Google.  It is a reminder, perhaps, of what is NOT online.  Eventually I found this brief biography.

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Still more on the collectio avellana

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I have just become aware via this site that quite a number of the letters in the Collectio Avellana, a mass of 243 papal and imperial letters of the 5-6th centuries, may exist in English.  There is a three volume collection by P. R. Coleman-Norton, Roman State and Christian Church, 3 volumes (London: SPCK, 1966), which lists a good many of the first 50 as translated (in the rightmost column of the table).

Of course the question is whether letter 100, on the Lupercalia, is one of them!  If it is, I may need to get some of these Latin translation people at work on something else.  Maybe some letters of St. Jerome or something.

I was intending to go to Oxford tomorrow, but perhaps a trip to Cambridge and some library time might be a better option.

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A sunny day this morning – far too nice to sit around in front of the computer with the light on.  But also a day on which chores have to be done.  So I was off out and doing them.  Luckily (?) it clouded over this afternoon so here I am. 

But if it is nice tomorrow morning, then I might go to Oxford for the day.  Next week I have to  go back to work, so each day needs to be used well.

I’ve had a couple of student enquiries about translating Gelasius’ letter on the abolition of the Lupercalia.  The first one sent a sample, which was gibberish.  The title stated that the letter was “Adversus Andromachum” — he didn’t know that this meant “Against Andromachus”!  This is why I specify that a translator that I don’t know must supply a sample — usually the first page — in translation, and that, if it is no good, I don’t owe them anything.

Another enquiry today.  I’ve emailed across the PDF of the letter, and let’s see what happens.

Meanwhile I’ve been reading Paley’s Greek wit again.  Here’s one of the entries:

376.

A celebrated courtesan once said to Socrates, “I have more influence than you; I can draw away all of your followers if I please, but you can win over none of mine.”  “Perhaps so,” said the philosopher; “you lead them all down hill, whereas I make them climb the steep ascent to the temple of Virtue, a road which is familiar to few.” — Aelian, Var. Hist. xiii. 31.

A point that might escape many is that philosphers charged for their teaching.  One of the things that struck me, as I read through the volume, was how important the financial aspect of teaching was.  A professional philosopher, to put it simply, was someone who could attract enough people willing to pay to hear him teach.  Contests between philosophers, therefore, had a very financial aspect.  A defeated philosopher might lose all his livelihood as his pupils deserted him.  The necessity to find something novel to say, to be witty and be quoted, lies behind so much of this.

Only the Greeks, perhaps, could have devised a system where talking could be a trade!  The result of it, however, was a constant stimulus to intellectual activity, of a kind seldom paralleled before the modern age.

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Dies sanguinis – what do we know about this?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

There are some pretty adventurous claims out there, about the Roman holiday of the “dies sanguinis” or “day of blood”.   This article from About.com is rather better than most, in that it is referenced, but it includes one of the odder claims I have seen:

In ancient Roman history, the 24th of March (VIII Kal Apriles) was the Dies sanguinis ‘day of blood,’ possibly a precursor of Good Friday.

Today I have been attempting to find out what, if anything, the ancient sources actually tell us.  I even looked in the RealEncyclopadie in vain.

In the Chronography of 354, part 6 (the Philocalian calendar), I recall an entry for the 24th March, IX kal. April. — sanguem.

22 H D A XI ARBOR·INTRAT
23   E B X TVBILVSTRIVM
24   F C IX SANGVEM     DIES·AEGYPTIACVS
25 I G D VIII HILARIA

Web searches suggest a festival of Bellona.  Others suggest that this is the day on which the priests of Cybele castrated themselves.  So … what are the facts?

Looking at Duncan Fishwick, “The Cannophori and the March Festival of Magna Mater”, Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association, Vol. 97 (1966), pp. 193-202, we get something on p.201:

The earliest direct allusion to the dies sanguinisis in connection with the death of Marcus Aurelius in A.D. 18o (Tertullian, Apolog. 25), but a passage in Valerius Flaccus (ob. A.D. 92 or 93) seems to make clear reference to the sanguinary rites of the day as early as the Flavian period (Argonautica. 239-42):

sic ubi Mygdonios planctus sacer abluit Almo
laetaque iam Cybele festaeque per oppida taedae
quis modo tam saevos adytis fluxisse cruores
cogitet aut ipsi qui iam meminere ministri?

With this may be compared a text of Martial (ca. A.D. 40-104) suggesting that the lavatio served also to purge the instruments used on the dies sanguinis (3.47.1-2):

Capena grandi porta qua pluit gutta
Phrygiumque Matris Almo qua lavat ferrum.

OK.  Let’s turn those quotes into English.  Tertullian, Apologeticum 25:5 is online here. 

[5]  Why, too, even in these days the Mater Magnahas given a notable proof of her greatness which she has conferred as a boon upon the city; when, after the loss to the State of Marcus Aurelius at Sirmium, on the sixteenth before the Kalends of April, that most sacred high priest of hers was offering, a week after, impure libations of blood drawn from his own arms, and issuing his commands that the ordinary prayers should be made for the safety of the emperor already dead.

Valerius Flaccus, Argonautica, book 7 contains this:

And just as the anger of the mournful Mother29rends every year the frenzied Phrygians, or as Bellona lacerates the long-haired eunuchs,…

29. Cybele mourning for Attis; Bellona, goddess of war, whose priestesses and votaries, eunuchs called Bellonarii, cut themselves with knives at her festival (Juvenal, 4. 123; Lucan, 1. 565).

But book 8 is our reference:

So when the holy Almo washes away Mygdonian sorrows,10 and Cybele now is glad and festal torches gleam in the city streets, who would think that cruel wounds have lately gushed in the temples? or when of the votaries themselves remember them?

10. The festival of Cybele, the Great Mother, on March 27th (Ovid, Fasti4. 337); the image of the goddess was washed in the Almo, a tributary of the Tiber.

Martial, book 3, epigram 47:

Yonder, Faustinus, where the Capene Gate drips with large drops, and where the Almo cleanses the Phrygian sacrificial knives of the Mother of the Gods, …

Michelle Salzman’s On Roman Time is accessible to me and page 167 says:

The mourning became more violent on the following day, 24 March, Sanguem, when the devotees flagellated themselves until they bled, sprinkling the altars and effigy with their blood. This was also the day when certain devotees of the goddess, carried away by their emotion, would perform self-castration. During the “sacred night” of the twenty-fourth, Attis was ritually laid to rest in his grave and the new galli were inducted into the priesthood(presumably symbolizing the god’s rebirth); at dawn, then, a day of rejoicing Hilaria could begin.

Note the lack of footnotes, tho. 

And so it goes on.  How do we know that this day is associated with these events?  Which source says so?

I suspect that we are looking at the backwash of some early 20th century textbook, in which the statement was made as a theory to explain these references, and has thereafter been taken as fact.  Perhaps it is sound.  Perhaps not.  It would be interesting to know its origins.

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Macrobius on Dionysius in the Commentary on the Dream of Scipio

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The final text referenced by J. G. Frazer in the Golden Bough when discussing the “resurrection” of Dionysus was the Commentary on the Dream of Scipio by Macrobius.  A kind correspondant has emailed me a page or two from Stahl’s English translation of this.

Part of what Frazer said is this (see a fuller discussion earlier):

In other [stories] it is simply said that shortly after his burial he rose from the dead and ascended up to heaven;[1] …

[1] Macrobius, Commentarium in Somnium Scipionis i, 12, 12; …

So what does book 1, chapter 12, verse 12 say?

12.   Members of the Orphic sect believe that material mind is represented by Bacchus himself, who, born of a single parent, is divided into separate parts.[20] In their sacred rites they portray him as being torn to pieces at the hands of angry Titans and arising again from his buried limbs alive [21] and sound, their reason being that nous or Mind, by offering its undivided substance to be divided, and again, by returning from its divided state to the indivisible, both fulfills its worldly functions and does not forsake its secret nature.

Stahl’s notes:

20.  Cf. Macrobius Saturnalia 1.xviii.15; Proclus (Diehl) 53C, 184E. See Lobeck, pp. 557, 711, 736; F. M. Cornford, From Religion to Philosophy (London, 1912), pp. 209-10; J. E. Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (Cambridge, England, 1922), pp. 489-90.

21. Following Eitrem’s reading vivus et integer, Nordisk Tidsskrift for Filologi, III ( r 915), 55. The MSS read unus et integer. 

How I wish this translation was online!

Verse 12 is a little brief, so some explanation may be in order.  The reference to “that material mind” is to the World Soul, and has been discussed in verse 6:

6.   This is the condition that Plato called “at once indivisible and divisible” when he was speaking in the Timaeus about the construction of the World-Soul. Souls, whether of the world or of the individual, will be found to be now unacquainted with division if they are reflecting on the singleness of their divine state, and again susceptible to it when that singleness is being dispersed through the parts of the world or of man. 

So lots of philosophical stuff there, but not relevant to Dionysus as such.

Returning to Macrobius Saturnalia, as the footnote suggests, we find this in book 1, chapter 18:

[ 1 3] Orpheus here has called the sun “Phanes” (φανερός), from its light and enlightening, for the sun sees all and is seen by all. The name Dionysus is derived, as the soothsayer himself says, from the fact that the sun wheels round in an orbit.  [14] Cleanthes writes that the name Dionysus is derived from the Greek verb meaning “to complete” (διανύσαι), because the sun in its daily course from its rising to its setting, making the day and the night, completes the circuit of the heavens. [15] For the physicists Dionysus is “the mind of Zeus” (Διὸς νοῦς), since they hold that the sun is the mind of the universe; and by the universe they mean the heavens which they call Jupiter — and that is why Aratus, when about to speak of the heavens, says:

From Zeus be our beginnings. [Phaenomena I]

[16] The Romans call the sun Liber, because he is free (liber) to wander — as Naevius puts it:

Here where the wandering sun flings loose his fiery reins and drives nearer to the earth.

[17] The Orphic verses, too, by calling the sun “Eubouleus,” indicate that he is the patron of “good counsel”; for, if counsel is the offspring of the Inind and if, in the opinion of our authorities, the sun is the mind of the universe from which the first beginning of intelligence is diffused among mankind, then the sun is rightly believed to preside over good counsel. [18] In the line:

The sun, which men also call by name Dionysus

Orpheus manifestly declares that Liber is the sun, and the meaning here is certainly quite clear; but the following line from the same poet is more difficult:

One Zeus, one Hades, one Sun, one Dionysus.

[19] The warrant for this last line rests on an oracle of Apollo of Claros, wherein yet another name is given to the sun; which is called, within the space of the same sacred verses by several names, including that of Iao. For when Apollo of Claros was asked who ‘among the gods was to be regarded as the god called Iao, he replied:

[20] Those who have learned the mysteries should hide the unsearchable secrets, but, if the understanding is small and the mind weak, then ponder this: that lao is the supreme god of all gods; in winter, Hades; at spring’s beginning, Zeus; the Sun in summer; and in autumn, the splendid Iao.

[21] For the meaning of this oracle and for the explanation, of the deity and his name, which identifies Iao with Liber Pater and the sun, our authority is Cornelius Labeo in his book entitled On the Oracle of Apollo of Claros.

[22] Again, Orpheus, pointing out that Liber and the sun are one and the same god, writes as follows of the ornaments and vestments worn by Liber at the ceremonies performed in his honor:…

The syncretism which destroyed late paganism is certainly present in all that, as myths melt down into a puddle of meaningless names.

But note how the material from the Saturnalia does not, in fact, connect to the statement in the Commentary for which Stahl gives it as a reference!

We seem to be largely done with the resurrection of Dionysus.  Nothing in this connects to the idea of a fertility god who rises in the spring.

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Angelo Mai’s Nova Patrum Bibliothecae now online complete at Archive.org

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I learn from this link that the whole series is now online for the first time with the arrival of volume 4.  Excellent news!

Volume 2  => http://www.archive.org/details/novaepatrumbibli02maiauoft

Volume 3 => http://www.archive.org/details/novaepatrumbibli03maiauoft

Volume 4 => http://www.archive.org/details/novaepatrumbibli04maia

Volume 5 => http://www.archive.org/details/novaepatrumbibli05maiauoft

Volume 6 => http://www.archive.org/details/novaepatrumbibli06maiauoft

Volume 7 => http://www.archive.org/details/novaepatrumbibli07maiauoft

Volume 8 => https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_avgztuwAX1IC

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The colophon of the Tura papyrus of Origen Contra Celsum

Posted on by Roger Pearse

At the end of book 1 of the papyrus containing extracts of books 1 and 2 of Origen’s Contra Celsum, is an interesting note:

μετεβληθη και αντεβληθη εξ αντιγραφου των αυτου ωριγενους βιβλι[ων]

Revised and corrected from the copy of the books of Origen himself.

This is quite a statement, in a manuscript of the 7th century.  Presumably this means at Caesarea, where Origen’s library ended up.

One interesting feature of this papyrus is that two readings are given in some cases.  The editor of the papyrus, Scherer, suggests that this is because the ancient editor — presumably at Caesarea — found two readings in his sources.  In other words … we have indications of an ancient edition with a critical apparatus.  More interesting still, the two-fold reading makes its way even to the 13th century codex of Contra Celsum.

We’re all familiar with the colophons in biblical mss recording the editorial work of Pamphilus.  It’s interesting to see evidence of the same activity on other works being copied.

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