Thoughts on Antiquity, Patristics, putting things online, information access, and more
A few days ago I managed to find an edition of the “scholia vetera” on Juvenal, in an 1839 edition . It starts on p.153, here. It’s not a critical edition. Indeed I believe the critical edition is that of 1937, but this is not accessible to me. So … let’s make do with what we have.
The scholia begin with a vita. Then the scholia begin, starting with some remarks on Semper ego…? (Why should I always…?) I can’t help feeling that the scholia could usefully be translated.
Lots of emails yesterday and today.
Firstly and most importantly, the PDF containing Eusebius has come back. This should be the last, final version. I will check it over at the weekend — otherwise the translator will lynch me — but that means the book is done. The next stage will be creating a cover, sending it off to Lightning Source, and stuff like that. I expect to get some free time in 2 weeks, so it may work out quite nicely. Many thanks indeed to Bob the typesetter!
An email reached me from the translator of Michael the Syrian, asking what a “sar” or “saros” might be. These terms occur in the Babylonian history of Berossus, as a measure of time. Berossus is lost, but the Chronicle of Eusebius quotes it, and so these curious terms drift down the centuries. I offered my best suggestion, and a selection of materials that I gathered on the subject. Eusebius reckons that a “sar” is 3,600 years, but I suspect it was 18 years.
Another email arrived from a translator, and we may do the Ad Gaurum of Porphyry, on the creation of the soul. I need to look again at the text and work out a price, and reply (probably tomorrow).
An interesting article here via Dyspepsia Generation:
Original Greek statues were brightly painted, but after thousands of years, those paints have worn away. Find out how shining a light on the statues can be all that’s required to see them as they were thousands of years ago.
Something about this reporting — reproduced widely on non-scholarly sites — makes me nervous. It’s not very coherent, and no sources are quoted, no researchers given. The source for the images is supposed to be a certain Venzenz Brinkmann, and there is yet another non-scholarly item — a PDF — here.
Three weeks ago I sent a dozen corrections — the last! — to the Latin and the Coptic to Bob, who is typsetting the book. I’ve heard nothing since, although I’ve sent a reminder. I greatly fear that they went into the spam folder.
Bob, if you’re reading this, could you confirm you received the two emails?
Odds and ends today.
I was thinking again about Severian of Gabala, and the glowing prose that he wrote. I must do something about getting more of his stuff into English. There’s a bunch of homilies in Armenian, which might be attacked; and intermingled with them, some by Eusebius of Emesa. The one sermon of the latter that I encountered was really good! It was translated by Solomon Caesar Malan, an oriental prodigy who appears as a character in Tugwell’s Remniscences of Oxford.
Someone has kindly sent me an article about the sermon by John Chrysostom, Quod nemo laeditur (CPG 4400, PG 52 459-480, SC 103), written from exile. The article also gives “BHG 488d” as a reference — I wonder what that is! * The article discusses a fragment of a Coptic version. The letters of Chrysostom don’t exist in English, as far as I know, aside from selections. They’re probably too lengthy for me. They would be a good choice for some monastic translator, tho.
Into town, and at the library I ordered Festugiere’s La Reveletion d’Hermes Trismegiste, vol. 3. The appendix 2 to this contains a French translation of Porphyry Ad Gaurum. Let’s see if it can be run into English.
The new John Maddox Roberts “SPCK XIII” novel has arrived — or rather, I was able to collect it from the Royal Mail depot this morning. This afternoon I shall consume it! I don’t have nearly enough escapist literature available to me, sadly.
* Apparently BHG is Bibliotheca Hagiographica Graeca, and there is a BHL for the Bibliotheca Hagiographica Latina Antiqua et Mediae Aetatis. If it includes letters of Chrysostom, it must be an index to all sorts of works by all the saints.
I’m reading Juvenal again. This time I keep noticing the portions which the translator omitted, of some length in some cases, such as in the Sixth Satire. The grounds for the omission is obscenity, of course, but even so, it is a pity. And I could use more of a commentary than the old Loeb edition gives me.
I was also reading an article on the life of Juvenal, which propounded the idea that the scholia on Juvenal, which are found in the Pithoeanus manuscript (=P) were compiled prior to 399 AD. The scholia also contain an old biography of Juvenal, which I have not yet found in English. The best edition of the scholia seems to date from 1931, which is an unfortunate age — too recent to be online, but too old to be accessible. Hum.
The same article told me that Juvenal was the last writer of “Silver Age” Latin, and is not quoted by any writer thereafter for a century and a half. It would be interesting to see what sort of testimonia there are for the classics, wouldn’t it?
Home, to find a red card on the mat. Even since the advent of Amazon, these have been regular sights when I came home at night, and I thought non-UK readers might be interested to see these common yet ephemeral items.
OK, they tried to deliver at 10:05 am. Naturally I was at work then, like everyone else. But I knew they would, and I expected to go and pick it up from the depot.
Unfortunately the card tells me — this bit is new — that I can only do so between 9am and 2pm. That more or less makes it impossible, because, like everyone else, I am at work then.
This is yet another degradation of service from the Royal Mail. The sorting office used to be open into the evenings, so you could pick up undelivered mail, such as Amazon deliveries. Then they decided not to open after 2pm — the posties naturally want to go home early –, but they did open from 7am. This made sense — the posties are supposed to be up early, so why not? But no longer. I’ve also heard rumours that Royal Mail wants to charge people to collect the mail from the sorting office.
If you wanted to stop people shopping online, what else would you do? But why would a postal service want to do that? So no more home deliveries for me. I’ll try sending stuff to work, but this can be hazardous at many workplaces. And why did it take them four days to try to deliver it?
What Amazon need to do is start their own delivery business, I suspect. How long will it take before they do?
UPDATE: I went to collect my mail this morning and was told that the postman had simply used an old card! Apparently I could have collected my mail yesterday morning at 7am if I had wanted to (and I did want to). I was also told that Royal Mail, in fact, is extending hours, not curtailing them. That is good news!
We all know the Amazon.com book ordering process — you register an account, choose the book, hit the button, enter the delivery address, hit the button, choose a credit card, hit the button, display the order, and hit go.
I’d always thought of that as pretty streamlined, until today when I ordered a copy of the Loeb edition of Aulus Gellius’ Attic Nights from Book Depository. They didn’t make me create an account, or do most of that. I clicked to add the book to the basket. I clicked to check out, entered my address and card details on one spartan screen, pressed one click and it was all done.
Very nice!
I’ve decided that I must read the Attic Nights. Bill Thayer at Lacus Curtius has the Latin and part of the English online, which I was looking at this lunchtime. But I can’t read this sort of book on-screen, useful as it is.
In book 1, I read the first story, about how the Greeks calculated the shoe-size of Hercules, as measured from the length of the race-track at Olympia.
Another anecdote related how Demosthenes secretly approached the whore Lais, who demanded an enormous sum. Demosthenes replied that he would not purchase shame for 10,000 drachmas.
A quotation from Metellus Numidicus on marriage followed:
If we could get on without a wife, Romans, we would all avoid that annoyance; but since nature has ordained that we can neither live very comfortably with them nor at all without them, we must take thought for our lasting well-being rather than for the pleasure of the moment.
It seems like it might be a good book to read on the sofa in front of the TV on these wintry nights.
Another interesting statement from Reynolds and Wilson, Scribes and Scholars (3rd ed) appears on p.34:
Although papyrus is tougher than most people think, and a roll might last as long as 300 years (Galen 18(2),630), the average life would be shorter, and parchment was a much more durable material; in time its toughness was to prove a vital factor in the survival of classical literature.
The reference, to the Roman medical writer Galen, would be inscrutable to most of us. Fortunately on this blog we wear our underpants over our trousers, metaphorically, and so readers may know that this is a reference to the 20-volume edition of the works of Galen by Kuhn, published in the series Medicorum Graecorum between 1821-6. Such brief references are an unnecessary pain to the beginner, however.
Several volumes of this series are online. Vol. 18, part 2 is on Google books here, and page 630 is here. On p.629 we find that this is Hippocratis de medici officina liber et Galeni in eum commentarius I — 1 book by Hippocrates on the workshop of a doctor and Galen’s commentary on it. The work begins with a preface from Galen, of which this is a part. I might see if I can get the preface as a whole translated.
Meanwhile, here’s the sentence. Galen is talking about the work of Hippocrates which he is reproducing:
τινὲς μὲν γὰρ καὶ πάνυ παλαιῶν βιβλίων ἀνευρεῖν ἐσπούδασαν πρὸ τριακοσίων ἐτῶν γεγγραμμένα, τὰ μὲν ἔχονιες ἐν τοῖς βιβλίοις, τὰ δὲ ἐν τοῖς χάρτοις, τὰ δὲ ἐν διαφόροις φιλύραις, ὥσπερ τὰ παρ̕ ἡμῖν ἐν Περγάμῳ.
Quidam enim etiam vetustissima volumina ante trecentos annos scripta invenire studuerant, quae partim quidem in libris, partim vero in chartis, partim demum in tiliaceis membranis, quemadmodum apud nos Pergami conservabant.
For some also had desired to find very old volumes, written three hundred years ago, which I had at Pergamum, of which part were preserved in rolls, part on papyrus (χάρτοις), and part on excellent lime-tree bark (διαφόροις φιλύραις).
The διαφόροις φιλύραις I thought was parchment — that’s what membranis usually means in the sort of books I read! — but LSJ suggests that φιλύραις is the “the bass underneath [the lime-tree’s] bark, used for writing on, Gal. 18(2).630,” — this very passage! — “Hdn. 1.17.1, D.C. 72.8 ; for garlands, φιλύρας . . ἄφυλλος στέφανος Xenarch. 13 .”
Galen at least did indeed believe a roll could be 300 years old. The fact that some of the material wasn’t even on papyrus, but on bark, suggests that this is real testimony.
UPDATE: A translation of the whole preface from the Greek is here.
In 529 AD the emperor Justinian closed the Academy in Athens. The remaining heirs of Plato chose to travel to the court of the Sassanid Persian King of Kings in order to continue their studies there. Finding conditions among the barbarians uncongenial, in time they returned.
But it raises the question of why we never hear of translations of Greek literature into Persian. The Persian empire was a potent adjacent power throughout the Greek classical period, and revived in the 3rd century and continued down to the Moslem conquest in the 7th century.
I never read L. D. Reynolds and N. G. Wilson, Scribes and Scholars (3rd) without learning something. On page 256 I learn that a few texts are indeed extant in translations into Pehlevi.
Wilson lists four texts: the novel about Alexander the Great known as ps.Callisthenes; the Geoponica; and two astrological texts, the handbook of Vettius Valens which we have discussed before, plus Teucer of Babylon’s Paranatellonta, which is a new text to me.
Wilson references “Studies presented to E. G. Browne, 1922” (in his usual casual fashion), which turns out to be A Volume of Oriental Studies Presented to Edward G. Browne on his 60th birthday (7 February 1922), and thankfully online at Archive.org. The specific article is that by C. A. Nallino, which turns out to be on p.345-363 and entitled Tracce di opere greche giunte agli Arabi per trafila Pehlevica. Unless my eyes deceive me, this is about texts which ended up in Arabic via Persian, rather than about Greek texts in general. The article merely discusses these four texts, and the evidence for them.
It would seem, therefore, that there might be more, were one to look.