Eusebius update

Bob the typesetter has now emailed me the book in .rtf form.   When the translation goes online, this is what will be used to make the htm files. The rtf’s of the native languages will also get used, I suspect, probably by later editors.  So this stage of the book is done.

I’ve put out an advert for a cover designer, and got a dozen replies.  These I need to reply to, and sift through.  At least one of these has done work with Lightning Source before.

The cover image I had in mind is proving more difficult.  My email to the website where it appeared has not elicted a reply.  So I may need to locate a licensable image. 

I’ve never done anything like that, so will have to investigate.

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A saying of Musonius, quoted by Aulus Gellius

From book 16, chapter 1:

If you accomplish anything noble with toil, the toil passes but the noble deed endures.   If you do anything shameful with pleasure, the pleasure passes, but the shame remains.

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From my diary

I’m stuck at home with a headache-inducing virus still, and getting very bored and frustrated.  Unfortunately I can’t do much without setting it off again.  Health is something we all take for granted, until we lose it!  I’m not being paid while I sit here, so I urgently want to go back to work.

I saw a news story today about a woman who stood behind a policeman and said “bang bang”.  She was promptly arrested and charged with a public order offence.  Thank heavens she didn’t say “poof poof”, eh?

Yesterday I encountered Nonius Marcellus, the late Roman dictionary writer.  While trying to locate the text and understand what I was dealing with, I ended up rewriting the Wikipedia article on Nonius Marcellus, and adding lots of the data I found.  After all, if I found it useful, probably others will.

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Aulus Gellius thought of his own work as being divided into “chapters”

Book 11, chapter 9 of the Attic Nights of Aulus Gellius is a tale from the lost author Critolaus.  It relates how Demosthenes accepted a bribe not to speak against the Milesians.  Chapter 10 begins as follows:

10.  Quod C. Gracchus in oratione sua historiam supra scriptam Demadi rhetori, non Demostheni, adtribuit; verbaque ipsius C. Gracchi relata.

1. Quod in capite superiore a Critolao scriptum esse diximus super Demosthene, id C. Gracchus in oratione, qua legent Aufeiam dissuasit, in Demaden contulit verbis hisce…

10. That Gaius Gracchus in a speech of his applied the story related above to the orator Demades, and not to Demosthenes; and a quotation of Gracchus’ words.

1. The story which in the preceding chapter we said was told by Critolaus about Demosthenes, Gaius Gracchus, in the speech Against the Aufeian Law, applied to Demades in the following words…

At the end of the preface, we find also these words:

25Capita rerum quae cuique commentario insunt, exposuimus hic universa, ut iam statim declaretur quid quo in libro quaeri invenirique possit.

25Summaries of the material to be found in each book of my Commentaries I have here placed all together, in order that it may at once be clear what is to be sought and found in every book.

We learn a great deal from this about how a second century author with a collection of miscellaneous material organised it.

Caput is being used somewhat flexibly, but here we see it used both to indicate the summary of the content of a self-contained portion of a book — a chapter title, if you like — and also for that self-contained portion itself.  We might say “passage”, but there seems no special reason not to say “chapter” and “chapter title / summary”.

This tells us that Aulus Gellius himself organised his work into capita — chapters.  Also that he composed these capita — chapter summaries.  We may speculate that a literary slave may have been used to compose these, as Cicero had Tiro do work for him, and Josephus used Greek ammanuenses to give polish to his works.  But there seems no need to suppose this.

On reading the Loeb, I thought at first that we also knew that these capita (chapters) were numbered at some point.   If we look at book 8 in the Loeb, we find under the chapter summaries (capita) in a couple of cases small excerpts from the lost text.  These, of course, have been extracted by editors from quotation by later authors, who must have specified the numeral of the chapter.  So chapter 3 has a fragment. 

3. Quem in modum et quam severe increpuerit audientibus nobis Peregrinus philosophus adulescentem Romanum ex equestri familia, stantem segnem apud se et assidue oscitantem.

Et adsiduo oscitantem vidit, atque illius quidem delicatissimas mentis et corporis halucinationes.

3.  In what terms and how severely the philosopher Peregrinus in my hearing rebuked a young Roman of equestrian rank, who stood before him inattentive and constantly yawning.

. . . and saw him continually yawning and noticed the degenerate dreaminess expressed in his attitude of mind and body.

But what does the actual source say?  Well, the Loeb note on the fragment says:

 This fragment is preserved by Nonius, II, p121, 19, s.v. halucinari.

That’s not very helpful, is it?  I must admit that the over-brevity of Loeb references always annoyed me!  What normal person could follow such a reference?  Even I don’t know who “Nonius” is, and I have a better grasp of ancient literature than almost anyone not professionally active.  Which work, which edition, I wonder, is meant? 

But the  mention of a work at the end suggests a dictionary compiler, and a search brings first the Wikipedia article for Nonius Marcellus, a 4-5th century grammarian, then W.M.Lindsay’s 1901 article, and then Muller’s 1888 edition: vol. 1, and vol.2.  Finally Lindsay’s 1903 Teubner, vol. 1vol. 2 and vol. 3.  All I have to do now is track down the reference, and even so, it is still nearly impossible.

After two hours struggle, I find that the correct reference is book 2, which is in vol. 1 of Lindsay, in the section under H (which is NOT in alphabetical order), Lindsay p. 175.  At the head of this page are some gnomic numerals “121. 122 M.”  The “page” is therefore a reference to some elderly standard edition.  This reads:

HALVCINARI, aberrare et non consistere atque dissolvi et obstupefieri atque tardari honeste veteres dixerunt, ut est (cf. Gell. VIII, 3): ‘et adsiduo oscitantem vidit atque illius quidem delicatissimas mentis et corporis alucinationes’.

But this gives no textual link to Aulus Gellius.  So my initial impression here was mistaken.  Possibly some of the other fragments will give us more information, but I lack the time to pursue this now.

There is more we could learn, if we knew more about the textual history of this collection of all the capita, immediately following the preface.  Because book 8 of the Attic Nights is lost.  Yet we do have the capita for book 8.  This means that either the collection of all the capita was transmitted at the correct place; or, that the collection of capita circulated independently.

All this is valuable information on the way in which ancient authors worked.  They did have chapters, if they chose.  They did have chapter titles, if they chose.  They did have chapter numbers, if they chose.

So is there really any case for denying the authenticity of any transmitted chapter divisions, numerals, and headings, unless we find multiple different ones in the manuscripts?  If so, what is it? 

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TLG has a free improved LSJ and click-through to texts

Tom Schmidt writes:

The TLG added a new free section to their website which contains a updated and digital version of the LSJ a dictionary which supersedes the version available at the Perseus Project. It’s quite good and has all sorts of good hyperlinks for cited authors. I talk about it a bit on my blog.

Have a look at that article, which makes clear just how useful this is, even if you don’t have a TLG subscription.

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Why the life of men is like a lump of iron, according to Cato “Carmen de Moribus”

Book 11 of Aulus Gellius preserves a delightful remark by Cato the Elder from the lost Carmen de Moribus:

Indeed, human life is very like iron. If you use it, it wears out; if you do not, it is nevertheless consumed by rust. In the same way we see men worn out by toil; if you toil not, sluggishness and torpor are more injurious than toil.

Thanks to Bill Thayer for making this available online.

 

 

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From my diary

My enquiry about cost of a book cover brought back a quotation of 600 GBP for a cover with plain text on it, and 1200 GBP if some picture research was required.  That’s well outside my budget.  I’ve today posted a job on the Student Gems website for a student doing graphic design for the same job.  Let’s see if I can get something more in line with my expectations.

I’m stuck at home with a virus still, which gives me a blinding headache.  But to stave off boredom I’m reading the Attic Nights of Aulus Gellius.  I’ve been turning over the corner on those passages I will want to revisit – a bad habit of mine, but then, what else can one do?  In a way, this is like what Gellius himself did, extracting passages from his reading.  Perhaps the Attic Nights might claim to be the first blog!

Rather surprisingly I cannot find PDF’s of the Loeb translation by the American academic John C. Rolfe online.  It was published in 1927-8, and must be out of copyright in the USA, I would think (unless it was renewed).

After considerable searching online I find that Prof. Rolfe’s death is mentioned in the introduction to the Loeb Quintus Curtius, which I found in a snippet: “John Carew Rolfe October 15, 1859-March 27, 1943 It is with a profound sense of a personal loss that the Editors of the Loeb Classical Library record here the death of Professor Rolfe…”  So he died in 1943, which means his work comes out of copyright in Euroland in 2013.

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Secret Mark conference

An blanket email from Tony Burke of Apocryphicity:

I just wanted to bring your attention to a conference that Phil Harland and I are planning at York University April 29, 2011 on the Secret Gospel of Mark. This is intended as the first in a series of annual symposia on Christian Apocrypha, so we really hope for a good turnout. If you cannot (or would rather not) attend, please be so kind to let others know about the event (on blogs or what-have-you). See the link below for information. Thanks.

http://www.tonyburke.ca/yorkchristianpocrypha/

This is a Canadian university, not York in the UK as I thought on first reading.

On the link the few speakers I recognise all seem to belong to the “Secret Mark is genuine” camp.   But apparently there is no intention to push this agenda.   Tony adds:

We wanted Stephen [Carlson] to attend but he declined. He will contribute a paper to the published proceedings, however. Several other “nongenuine” scholars declined also. But we have Craig Evan, Bruce Chilton, Peter Jeffery, and Pierluigi Piovanelli, all of whome feel it is not genuine. We DID aim for balance.

I myself always had doubts about the supposed Letter to Theodore and all it contained, without ever spending much time on it.  I was persuaded definitively by Stephen Carlson’s convincing book on the subject, which crystalised much of the unease that I had found hard to articulate.   But there is certainly room for argument, I would have thought.

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From my diary

I think I really do need a dust-jacket for the Eusebius book.  I’ve emailed a website which had an image that I would greatly like to use and asked if they have a larger image and if so for permission.  I’ve also emailed a designer and asked for some prices.  Let’s see what comes back.

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Solon and Lycurgus in the marquis de Sade

Few of us, I hope, will have spent our time turning the pages of the kind of literature written by and for the corrupt.  If you are what you eat, in body at least, then what does “what we read” make us?  We need to be at least as careful of what we let into our heads.  I myself could do without some of the images that have come my way down the years.

An interesting email reached me, however.

I was reading a copy of De Sade’s Philosophy in the Bedroom for a history class and I came across a reference to Solon’s using pornography in the theater as public moral conditioning.

I would like to find out if this is really true; and Wikipedia says the source is an excerpt form one of Philemon’s plays- but they wrongly attribute Menander’s The Brothers to Philemon.

The reference to the pornographic work of De Sade, La Philosophie dans le boudoir, may be found easily enough online.  The French is here:

Lycurgue et Solon, bien pénétrés que les résultats de l’impudeur tiennent le citoyen dans l’état immoral essentiel aux lois du gouvernement républicain, obligèrent les jeunes filles à se montrer nues au théâtre[6].

The English translation reads:

Lycurgus and Solon, fully convinced that immodesty’s results are to keep the citizen in the immoral state indispensable to the mechanics of republican government, obliged girls to exhibit themselves naked at the theater.13

(The footnote is not a reference, unfortunately, but an elaboration).

I quickly found via Wikipedia that the 2nd century writer Athenaeus, in the Deipnosophists (= The foodies), book 13 (“Concerning Women”) (here), mentions that Solon established brothels at Athens, quoting the comic writer Philemon.

25. And Philemon, in his Brothers, relates that Solon at first, on account of the unbridled passions of the young, made a law that women might be brought to be prostituted at brothels; as Nicander of Colophon also states, in the third book of his History of the Affairs of Colophon, — saying that he first erected a temple to the Public Venus with the money which was earned by the women who were prostituted at these brothels. But Philemon speaks on this subject as follows : —

But you did well for every man, O Solon;
For they do say you were the first to see
The justice of a public-spirited measure,
The saviour of the state— (and it is fit
For me to utter this avowal, Solon) ; —
You, seeing that the state was full of men,
Young, and possess’d of all the natural appetites,
And wandering in their lusts where they’d no business,
Bought women, and in certain spots did place them,
Common to be, and ready for all comers.
They naked stand : look well at them, my youth, —
Do not deceive yourself; a’nt you well off?
You’re ready, so are they : the door is open —
The price an obol : enter straight — there is
No nonsense here, no cheat or trickery;
But do just what you like, and how you like.
You’re off: wish her good-bye; she ‘s no more claim on you.

The verse is satirical, of course, and perhaps we need not entertain this claim against Solon too seriously, particularly considering that it is being made six centuries after the supposed events.

But it’s not really the same story.

Searching further online for material about Athenian prostitution, I find suggestions that that prostitutes who danced and could provide entertainment were known as auletrides — the familiar ‘flute-players’ of ancient literature.  There is a History of Prostitution by William W. Sanger online, which on p.43 discusses (with references, thank heavens!) the miserable profession in ancient Greece.  But nothing in it associates Solon with any of this, beyond the reference in Athenaeus.

And there the trail goes cold.  Does anyone else know of anything to support the allegation of De Sade?

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