A free speech victory

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Freedom of speech for those of us who are not part of powerful pressure groups with armies of lawyers and/or rioters at their call has become a somewhat fragile thing in recent years.  The police have felt no option but to enforce laws designed to chill the expression of various opinions. 

But there good news today — one such evil has been struck down by a court in the UK.  The Daily Mail reports:

Police have been ordered to pay compensation to a Christian street preacher who was hauled off in handcuffs for saying that gays will go to hell.

A judge condemned the arrest of Anthony Rollins, who quoted the King James Bible on the subject of the ‘effeminate’ as he preached in Birmingham.

Mr Rollins was handcuffed and then held in a cell for nearly four hours after a passer-by dialled 999 and complained that his language was ‘hugely offensive’  …

Mr Rollins has been speaking on the city’s streets as a member of a Christian mission for 12 years. In June 2008 he was handing out leaflets in the city centre and quoting passages from the King James Bible – the Authorised Version which reaches its 400th anniversary next year – that refer to homosexuality. …

Judge Ashworth’s ruling was dismissive of evidence given by the onlooker who called police and who said he had been offended by the preaching.

He said of John Edwards: ‘I was not impressed by him as a witness. He struck me as a man full of his own self-importance who in the witness box relished the attention and greatly embellished his evidence.’

The ruling was praised by the Christian Institute, the think tank which backed Mr Rollins’s court claim. Spokesman Mike Judge said: ‘Street preachers may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but they are part of our Christian heritage.

It is good news indeed.  The sandwichboard man with his sign “Prepare to meet thy God” is a quaint figure, but surely a harmless one.  Let him preach his message to those who wish to listen without interference from those desperate to be “offended”, ready to call the police, and “full of their own self-importance”. 

UPDATE: A better report than the Daily Mail article is at the Christian Institute site, and also at Virtue Online.  The court took a much more negative view of the case, and of the police actions, it seems, than the Daily Mail indicates.

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The Babylonica of Iamblichus the Syrian

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The 1853 Manual of Greek literature by Charles Anthon may be antiquated, and its opening portions discursive to the point of madness, but it still has use.  Indeed I don’t quite know where else one might go for a survey of Greek literature in the Roman period and after.

I picked it up casually last night, to see if he had anything to say about astrological texts — not much — and found myself reading a section on Greek novels.  On p.488 I found the following:

V. Subsequently Iamblichus, the Syrian, who lived in the time of the Emperor Trajan, wrote his Babylonica (Babulwni/ka). It contained the story of two lovers, Sinonis and Rhodanes, and was in thirty-nine books, according to Suidas; but Photius, who gives an epitome of the work, mentions only seventeen. A perfect copy of the work in MS. existed down to the year 1671, when it was destroyed by fire. A few fragments only are still extant, and a new one of some length has recently been discovered by Mai (Nov. Collect. Script. Vet., vol. ii., p. 349, seqq.) The epitome of Photius and the fragments are given in Passow’s Corpus Eroticorum, vol. i.

I confess that I had never heard of this text before, and it is a shame that it should make it all the way to 1671 only to perish then.

The Corpus scriptorum eroticorum graecorum is a series new to me.  Volume 1, from 1824, is here.  On p.iii we learn that the sole manuscript was in the library of the Escorial in Spain, and destroyed in the fire of 1671.  But the edition is of no great value, I suspect.

Photius’ summary can be found here, in the Bibliotheca codex 94. 

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Eusebius update

Posted on by Roger Pearse

All the corrections to the proof of Eusebius: Gospel problems and solutions were entered on the PDF as stickys a week or so ago.  I’m quite impressed, actually, by Acrobat as a tool for collaborative editing.

The remaining issue is a chunk of text in the Coptic.  The problem is that the manuscript is damaged.  However the translator feels that a chunk close to the end is in fact Eusebian, although it does not say so.  She would like me to add this as a new fragment, enter the Coptic text, plus some extra wording.  The format of the latter is rather different to anything else in the book.  I’m very reluctant to do something like this at this stage.  Hum.  I suspect it isn’t that much, tho.  I will consider this a bit.  The less the typesetter has to do, the better.

The book is showing up on Amazon.co.uk as well, and finding its way through the distribution channels.  Today I had someone write demanding a free copy.  Luckily I don’t have to reply to say that it hasn’t been published yet.

I also need to do something about the cover and logo.   I wasn’t that happy with the output from the design company I used, so I need to find someone else.  In addition I need to work out what to supply to Lightning Source for the cover.  This I’ll do once I have turned round the PDF. 

Lots to do!  But we’re really very close now.

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Vettius Valens at Mark T. Riley

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Back in the 70’s a young scholar named Mark T. Riley made a translation of Tertullian’s Adversus Valentinianos.  So obscure a work suddenly came alive, in a marvellous manner!  Who would have thought that the work still lived, had things to say to us all, based on the dull ANF version?

I have been reading bits on astrological writers, and I came across Dr Riley’s page again, with a PDF:

“A Survey of Vettius Valens” – Vettius Valens’ Anthologiae is the longest extant astrological work from antiquity. It is unique in several respects: the author was a practicing astrologer; the work includes more than 100 authentic horoscopes of Valens’ clients or associates, including his own, which is used as an example many times throughout the work; the work also includes tables and the description of algorithms used by astrologers and mathematicians. My paper was finished in 1996 and does not take account of scholarship since that time.

The PDF article is invaluable.  It tells us about the manuscripts — three, all later than 1300 — and editions, and the sort of stuff in the text.

But I then saw the next entry:

A short dictionary of Greek terms used in the astronomy and astrology writers can be found here . I made this wordlist for myself while translating Vettius Valens’ Anthologiai, a translation that was never perfected. Some abbreviations in the definitions are GH = Greek Horoscopes by Neugebauer and van Hoesen; HAMA = Neugebauer’s History of Ancient Mathematical Astronomy; Pt = Ptolemy; Cumont = Cumont, L’Egypt des astrologues. The others should be obvious.

This excited me, for there is no translation of this work online (or anywhere else).  I have written to Dr Riley, asking if perhaps it might be placed online.  After all, the hardest thing in working with a text is getting the first translation made.  Every subsequent translator stands on the shoulders of that first effort.  Even if not perfect, it ought to be online.  Translations that sit unpublished tend to get lost!

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Use of “inappropriate force” in schools

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I saw a headline in a local paper: “Teacher suspended after using ‘inappropriate force’ to restrain pupil”.

For some reason my mind drifted back to the halcyon days of Down with skool, and the varied methods of assuring justice favoured by the cane-wielding masters of the day.

What would Nigel Molesworth, the curse of St. Custards — or at least those who had to teach him — have thought?

Probably they would have said that things could go too far. 

But I think that probably the only idea of “inappropriate force to restrain” in Nigel’s mind would be “hanging a boy by the neck until dead”.

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More on Antiochus of Athens

Posted on by Roger Pearse

With Antiochus we are indeed at the edge of knowledge, or so I infer from the article in the Realencyclopadie, which is meagre indeed:

68) Aus Athen (Hephaistion Theb. II 1 bei Engelbrecht Hephaest. von Theb. 36), Astrolog. von dessen Büchern manches handschriftlich erhalten ist (vgl. Englebrecht a.a.O Fabricius Bibl. Gr. 1 III c. 20).

68) From Athens (Hephaistio Theb. II 1 in Engelbrecht Hephaest. of  Thebes 36), astrologer. Some of his books are preserved in manuscript (cf.  Englebrecht ibid, Fabricius Bibl Gr. 1 III c. 20).

Even the reference to “Engelbrecht” seems obscure.  Fortunately there is an explanation and a download online at the same scholarly astrology site we mentioned earlier, here.

A critical edition of the early 4th century astrologer Hephaistio of Thebes’ Apotelesmatics was published by Engelbrecht in 1887. This edition was superceded by David Pingree’s critical edition of the same text in the mid-1970’s, although since Engelbrecht’s edition is in the public domain we provide it below courtesy of Google Books: Hephaistio of Thebes – Engelbrecht edition

The Pingree edition is a Teubner, Hephaestionis Thebani Apotelesmaticorum libri tres: Apotelesmaticorum epitomae quattuor (1974).  There is a wiki page for Hephaestio of Thebes, which tells us:

The first two volumes of the Apotelesmatics have been translated into English (by Robert Schmidt of Project Hindsight); the third volume … is in preparation.

The Project Hindsight page is here, although how to get hold of the translations is not indicated, and these include extracts by Antiochus of Athens). A table of contents is here for Hephaestio. Schmidt’s translations are unknown to the British research system, which indicates not a single copy of any of them is held in any library in the UK.

Looking at Engelbrecht, p.36 quotes the opening of Hephaisto, book 2, which does indeed discuss Antiochus of Athens.  After an extract (untranslated — why let the peasants read it?) he continues that there was indeed an astrologer named Antiochus of Athens, as the mss. Laurentiani plutei 28, 7 and 28, 34 contain an extract of The Thesaurus of Antiochus.  The Vienna ms. phil. gr. 179 contains something “from Antiochus the Astronomer”; and Vienna phil. gr. 108 folio 342v contains another reference.

All this is all very well… but I wish I could get my hands on Boll’s edition of his calendar!

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Manuscripts of Greek astrological works

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Looking at the calendar of Antiochus of Athens, as I was yesterday, led me to a corpus which was unfamiliar, the Catalogus codicum astrologorum graecorum.  Seven volumes of this are on Google books.

What was this series, the CCAG?  I find a splendid blog piece here by Chris Brennan on the Rediscovery of Hellenistic astrology in the modern period.  He also has a collection of PDF’s of these texts online.

The most important efforts in this area were initiated by a group of scholars in Europe towards the end of the 19th century who set out on a mission to collect, catalogue and edit all of the existing manuscripts on astrology that were written in ancient Greek during the Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine periods.  This project, which was led by a Belgian scholar named Franz Cumont, took over fifty years to complete, and it entailed scouring the world’s libraries and private collections for ancient texts and manuscripts that had been copied and preserved over the long centuries since their original composition.  This project culminated in the publication of a massive twelve volume compendium called the Catalogus Codicum Astrologorum Graecorum (Catalogue of the Codices of the Greek Astrologers), more commonly known simply by its acronym as the CCAG. …

This massive compendium, which was published in 12 volumes between 1898 and 1953, consists of critical editions of dozens of astrological texts and fragments which had been carefully sifted through, examined, and edited by diligent linguists and paleographers in order to produce published volumes of all of the extant Greek astrological texts from antiquity. 

This explains why the CCAG, despite its name, is more than this and contains material by Antiochus of Athens.

I can’t say that I am at all interested in astrology, ancient or modern.  But someone has to edit all this material.  It may be junk, but it is part of the literary heritage from antiquity.  It is a reminder that, as in every age, most of what is written is rubbish.

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The calendar of Antiochus and the new birth of the sun

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Roger Beck, The Religion of the Mithras Cult in the Roman Empire: Mysteries of the Unconquered Sun, Oxford University Press, 2006, makes the following interesting remark on p.209-10:

… the nominal solstice on 25 December, becomes the Sun’s birthday, the ‘Natalis Invicti’, as the Calendar of Filocalus famously notes—to which phrase in Greek (heliou genethlion) the less well-known Calendar of Antiochus appends ‘light increases’ (auxei phos).[16]  According to Macrobius (Sat. 1.18.10), not only was the Sun’s birthday celebrated at the winter solstice but he was also displayed as a baby on that day: 

These diverences in age [in the representations of various gods] relate to the Sun, who is made to appear very small (parvulus) at the winter solstice. In this form the Egyptians bring him forth from the shrine on the set date to appear like a tiny infant (veluti parvus et infans) on the shortest day of the year.

16. Calendar of Filocalus, Salzman 1990: 149–53; Calendar of Antiochus, Boll 1910: 16, 40–4.

…

Boll, F. 1910. Griechische Kalender: 1. Das Kalendarium des Antiochos, Sitzungsberichte der Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften, philos.-hist. Klasse, Jahrgang 1910, 16. Abhandlung (Heidelberg). 

The “Calendar of Filocalus” is our familiar Chronography of 354, part 6, which I placed online long ago here.  As we all know, for 25 Dec. it has “Natalis Invicti” against the day.  But the Calendar of Antiochus is not known to me.  I wonder if it is online?  Beck also tells us that this is Antiochus of Athens, an astrologer, whose works must exist — Beck references them as CCAG 4, etc, which turns out to be Catalogus Codicum Astrologorum Graecorum.  The CCAG turns out to be an old work, and some of it is online at Archive.org.

The only real reference to the calendar that I could find online was in D.M.Murdock (Acharya S), Christ in Egypt: The Horus-Jesus connection, p.89, online in preview here (and I know we all wince at the standards of this source, but this new book is much better referenced).  This tells me that the calendar was published indeed by Boll in 1910; that it records the solstice on 22nd December, and dates to ca. 200 AD.

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A hard frost here last night, and I find myself coughing and coughing, just from the cold.  Then I see this:

Why am I living here again!?

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Useless anger, and doing something with it

Posted on by Roger Pearse

There is an article in today’s Daily Telegraph — soon to vanish behind a paywall, alas — by Boris Johnson (or his ghostwriter) on Useless Anger.  I recommend it. 

…as I held that thought in my head the full difficulties of all these projects became clear, and depression set in — the depression that always follows Useless Anger.

It is beyond my current powers either to declare war or to abolish Fifa or to set up a rival football federation or to train England to win the next World Cup. So the trick of managing that rage — and the subject of the next chapter of my business self-help book – is to find another frustration, and solve that one instead. Is there anything quite as irritating as Fifa?

Is there anything that sends you up the wall like Sepp Blatter? Is there anything else that is so inscrutable and mindless and illogical? There is.

Let’s talk roadworks. There is a marvellous newspaper interview in which my friend Philip Hammond, Transport Secretary, describes his fury as he is held in a traffic jam. There he is, in the heart of London, the greatest city on earth, unable to get to his meeting because of the orange-and-white cones blocking the road. …

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