Roger Pearse

The Greek text of the five books of Irenaeus Adversus Haereses is lost, aside from quotations.  A Latin version exists, created in antiquity, and also an Armenian version of books 4 and 5.  The French Sources Chrétiennes text contains some interesting statements about the tables of contents prefixed to each book, and chapter divisions.

In Sources Chrétiennes 100 (introducing book 4), p.42-3 we have the following statement by B. Hemmerdinger:

The Armenian version is not divided into chapters.  But book 4 is preceded by a summary, while book 5 is not.

In Latin, book 4 is preceded by a summary and divided into chapters [1], while book 5 has neither.  This implies that in Latin the chapters were created from the summaries, and that the Greek archetype of the Latin and the Armenian had a summary before book 4, but not before book 5.

This summary does not vary, either in the manuscripts or in the early editors from Erasmus to Grabe.  It is an innovation in the Latin version to copy these argumenta and insert them in the text as titles of chapters.  So there is no need for us to encumber the text of Irenaeus with these titles, which don’t belong there. 

[1] In 80 chapters in the manuscripts… 

On pp.186-191 there is a lengthy “Observation on the argumenta“.

…all the Latin manuscripts precede book 4 with a list of “argumenta”, which are then repeated in the body of the same book, a few variants aside, as titles for divisions of the text, divisions of very varying lengths.  The Armenian manuscript offers a list which is substantially identical preceding book 4, but, differing here from the Latin manuscripts, the “argumenta” are not reprised in the interior of the book.  This is the first piece of data which is imposed on whoever studies the “argumenta” in either version of the text.

This invites us to make a distinction between the list of “argumenta” on the one hand and the insertion of them in the body of the text on the other.  The list of “argumenta” preceding book 4 is therefore anterior to the Latin and Armenian translators, since both of them translated it.  Thus it belongs to the Greek tradition, even if, as seems certain, it does not go back to Irenaeus himself.   As for the introduction of “argumenta” in the body of the text, it is more recent.  Although it precedes the division of our Latin manuscripts into two families, it seems to be much later than the translation itself.  This is clear from the fact that it does not respect the periods and phrases of the text, as Pitra already noted in 1884.  The translator would hardly have brutally cut these in half, as in the case of V, XL, XLII, XLIV, XLVII, LVI, and LXXIV. … The insertion must be foreign to the Greek archetype common to the two versions, for otherwise it is inexplicable that there is no trace of it in the Armenian version.

What do these “argumenta” represent?  As F. Sagnard has justly noted (SC34, p.78), this is not a division into real chapters, but more an overview of subjects treated, of a series of landmarks punctuating a course of progress quite often alien to the development of the work.  Indeed rather than defining in a neat manner a step in the thought of Irenaeus, and seeking to summarise it personally, the author of the “argumenta” preferred, in a general fashion, to pile up this formula and that which struck him in the course of going through the text, and repeated them in compiling the list.  In consequence there are a good number of “argumenta” which echo phrases in the Adversus Haereses, but where we look in vain for any development of the idea (e.g. “argumenta” VIII, IX, X).  Hence also a certain daftness in the list.  The author dwells unduly sometimes on pages that do not demand it, and sometimes ignores material which deserved a special note.  All this shows that he had no intention of compiling a list of chapters in the modern manner. …

It does not follow that the list is thereby deprived of interest, and we believe that the too severe verdict of F. Sagnard should be revised.  …

He then goes on to point out that because it derives directly from the Greek text, it can be used as a guide to correct transmission errors.  Then there is discussion of the differences between the Latin and Armenian versions of the list, due to mistakes by the translator, or Latin or Armenian copyist errors, and substantial lacunas.

The comparison of the Latin and Armenian lists furnishes us a third piece of data.  The numbering of the items in one is quite independent of that in the other.  For the Armenian one can say that the numbering, made in the margin, seems to be the work of a later hand.  This tends to show that the numbering formed no part of the early Armenian text, and was just added ad-hoc later on.  Just by considering the numbering of book 4, we are driven to conclude that numbering did not form part of the Greek text.  However this conclusion is weakened if we step outside book 4, which is our present study.  For book 2, in fact, in Vaticanus 187 (Q), the “argumenta” are listed with a numbering in Greek numbers.  J. B. Pitra drew attention to this and reproduced it in his Analecta Sacra vol. 2 (1884) p.215.  Also the lemmas of three Syriac fragments, one of book 2 (Harvey II, p. 435, n. 1) and the first two of our book 4 (Harvey II, p.443, n.1; p.444, n.1) also attest to the existence of one and even many numberings, the origins and value of which we cannot discuss here.  These observations may support the idea of numbering in the Greek text.  But it must not be forgotten that book 5, in whatever version, manifests a kind of incompleteness in that it has no “argumenta”.  In the era in which translators and compilers were using the book of Irenaeus, the Greek manuscripts must have presented, in the fragile portion which the initial list is,  important lacunas and divergences, which the differences of the Latin and Armenian only reflect. 

The author adds two studies on the subject of the Armenian argumenta: A. Merk, Der armenische Irenaeus Adversus Haereses — IV. Das argumentum des 4. Buches, ZKTh 50 (1926), p.481-494; and J. A. Robinson, The Armenian capitula of Irenaeus Adv. haereses IV, JTS 32 (1931), p.71-4.

In Sources Chrétiennes 152 (introducing book 5), p.30-31 we find the following interesting statement:

A peculiarity of book 5 in the manuscript tradition is the absence of argumenta, and consequently of chapters.  The absence is a feature of the Armenian version as well as the Latin version, which suggests that the Greek copies which served as a basis for each were likewise devoid of argumenta.  Why?  Was it just laziness by the scribe originally charged with compiling them?  Or an accident to a Greek archetype?  It is not our intention nor within our power to pursue this question.  But it is worth knowing that editors have reacted very differently to this absence.

It is worth mentioning that book 5 does have a preface.

In Sources Chrétiennes 34 (introducing book 3) the discussion is on p.77-8.

It was stated earlier that the argumenta found at the start of the books are the same in all the manuscripts.  This is particularly so for book 3, where the list comprises 46 chapters.  Loofs has already demonstrated in tabular form the agreement of the lists found in the manuscripts.  However he made a mistake in assigning V a different numbering system.  The error is simple: the numbers initially appear before the title to which they relate, and so at the end of the preceding title, but later on, because of long titles covering more than one line, they appear at the end of their own title.

The scribes have made many errors, which are easy to spot.  …

The remainder of the comments are of a similar kind to those in SC 100, although he dismisses the titles as of no  value.

I also had a look at SC406, which publishes Irenaeus Proof of the apostolic preaching, extant only in Armenian and found in the same manuscript (Yerevan 3710) as books 4 and 5 of Adversus Haereses, which it follows.  The table of contents is mentioned for book 4 of AH, the lack of it for book 5, and no mention of one is made for the Proof.

I will perhaps look at books 1 and 2 tomorrow.

In the medieval manuscripts which transmit to us the text of Josephus Antiquities, each book is preceded by what looks to us like a table of contents.  These are present in the Loeb edition edited by Henry St. John Thackeray, who very properly includes and translates them, although they are at the back of each volume.

The books of this work were certainly subdivided in antiquity, because Cassiodorus refers to portions of the text by number in his Exposition on the Psalms, as I verified a post or two ago.  Polybius added tables of contents to his history, at least initially, as we learn from the introduction to book 11, and other writers followed.  Divisions of literature into numbered sections are found in papyri.  So it seems clear that the tables of contents in Josephus are ancient, and probably authorial or — since this is a work so much the work of secretaries — from the original team of authors and editors.

But Thackeray points out one piece of evidence that suggests otherwise.  In Niese’s edition, at the end of the table of contents / prographe for book 1 is a reference to the Chronicon of Eusebius.

Of course that could not be a first century piece of text.  But Thackeray points out that it is not actually found in most of the manuscripts.  There is also an ancient Latin version of Antiquities, which also has these tables; and it is not found in there either.  Here is the apparatus from Niese, showing this:

This variation tends to suggest that this piece of text has a different textual history to the rest.  Perhaps we may surmise that it is a later addition.  No such details are found under the tables for other books.

There seems no real convincing reason to suppose that these titles are not part of the original book, and they should be printed as such.  Birt indeed opined that such tables were originally written on the outside of the roll, and Polybius confirms that copyists tended to ignore them.

These tables exist for some works where the text has been lost.  The prologoi of Pompeius Trogus exist, but the whole history by this contemporary of Livy has vanished apart from a 2nd century AD epitome by Justinus.  So these items had a life of their own, and might circulate by themselves.

Perhaps they were of service to booksellers also.  Is it possible to imagine these things being hung up on columns in the book-sellers’ shops?

I referred a while back to Matthaeus Gesner’s opinion, delivered in 1787, as to why chapter divisions were not authentic.  Diana Albino gives him as her first reference on why there is a habit of treating such things as inauthentic.

Prior to his chapter 21, which I translated there, he makes the following remarks:

Commode hic nobis accidit, & commodius multo lectoribus accidet, illa capitum quae vocantur & titulorum in minora segmenta divisio, iam a Schoettgenio instituta, quae etiam ad parallelismum, quem vocant, indicandum, unum optimum interpretandi libros quoscunque instrumentum, apprime utilis est, ut mirer, rem ita facilem, & olim cognitam, negligi fere in splendidis librorum antiquorum editionibus, praesertim cum metus non sit, ne ea similia bonis libris vulnera infligat, qualibus capitum illa divisio occasionem dedit.

XX. Hic locus est plura de infelici illa capitum divisione, conjunctis ei rei lemmatibus disputandi; qua de re visum est hic uno loco ita dicere, ut totam complecti aliquis animo possit, ac tum in his, tum in aliis libris eorum, quae hic disputata sunt, meminisse. Jam ipsos antiquos scriptores uno fere tenore & continuatione libros scripsisse, satis constat, ut non tantum historias in unum perpetuum & undique cohaerens corpus redigerent, sed ea etiam, quae diversitatem aliquam habent, arte quadam inter se devincirent, latentibus, ut in Corinthia columna, membrorum finibus, aut in statuarii opere commissuris, & subtiliter permixtis, velut in pictura extremis partis cujusque lineis. Cujus rei nescio an clarius & mirabilius exemplum exstet Ovidiano Metamorphoseon opere: quod qui uno quasi spiritu legere volet, ille demum poetae ingenium mirabitur, qui mille partes dissimillimas ita inter se coagmentaverit, ut uno solido factum marmore totum illud templum videatur. Ita quam apte Plinius ille naturae historicus transitione res saepe diversissimas connectit? ut unum voluisse illum librum uno quasi protelo percurrere appareat. Quae cum ita sint, dissecuisse antiquos, quae scripsissent, in partes libris ipsis minores, non est probabile: qui librorum ipsam divisionem ad voluminum & chartarum modum necessitate quadam attemperaverint.

Well, quite so.  He argues that ancient books are all written in a single piece to join together diverse materials, like a Corinthian column, and even Pliny the Elder in his Natural History does the same.

Of which I do not know whether a clearer and more admirable example exists than the Ovidian work Metamorphoses: because he who chooses to read it as if in one spirit, he will marvel at the ingenuity of the poet, who has joined together a thousand utterly dissimilar pieces in such a way, that it seems made like a temple out of one solid marble. So Pliny, the historian of nature, often joins together the most diverse materials by an appropriate transition, so that it appears that he wanted to run through that one book as if in one go. This being so, it is not probable that the ancients divided, what they had written, into smaller parts than the books themselves, when that division into books was only forced on them by the necessity of the medium of rolls and papyrus.

Unless I am quite misunderstanding the argument, this is merely a subjective opinion.

When I translated the relevant portions of Theodor Birt’s 1882 classic, Die antike Buchwesen (The ancient book trade), I mentioned that Birt revised his opinions after the discoveries of papyrus fragments of actual ancient books.  In his Abriss des antiken Buchwesens  (Outline of the ancient book trade)(1923), he makes the following remarks.

[p.10] The ancient world knew nothing of printing or writing machines. A manuscript was not only the first incarnation of the text by the author, but also its method of reproduction. Therefore it is fundamental for all textual criticism to realize, first how the writing material and the book was put together, which carried the texts from the hand of the author through ancient and medieval times down to us, and second in what type of work the texts are found and were originally written. The “book trade” and “paleography” are auxiliary disciplines of textual criticism.

Roll and codex

Firstly in this “Outline of the ancient book trade”, we will cover the most important things. It is important to know that writing may already have been known in the Homeric age, but neither books nor book-copying; further, that the book of the ancient world was of a modest size, which contained only a small amount of text, and that the spacious bound codex first appeared in the 4th-5^th century A.D.; it completely replaced the roll as a carrier of literature. The transmission of the text from the roll into the codex is above all the most important event in the history of the text. A codex could probably not contain the whole of Livy, but it probably could include a complete Virgil in itself. Thus, there are gathered together  24 dialogues in the Codex Clarkianus of Plato; Aeschylus comes together with Sophocles and Apollonius Rhodius in a Florentine ms. The medieval miscellaneous manuscript meant that we received in transmission the anonymous work “On the Sublime,” περὶ ὕ ψους, along with the Aristotelian φυσικὰ προβλήματα; and Seneca’s satire on Claudius, the “Apotheosis”, together with the lives of the saints, medical texts and other fragments, and Theophrastus’ Characters in the collected works of orators, along with Aphthonius, and Hermogenes. 

inscriptio and subscriptio

An ancient scroll never contained on the other hand more books (with exceptions later on); on the other hand, because the roll was not large, more extensive works fell into several books, i.e., rolls.  If we print each time the title of the work at the top of each book by an author (eg Lucanus de bello civili liber V), this goes back to the fact that in ancient times each book of the whole work consisted of a roll by itself, each also including as an indication of its membership the exact title words with the number.  Likewise, each book concludes with the word explicit or explicitus, ie “All rolled up or rolled up to the end”, and anyone who wants to imagine the original edition of a work like the Aeneid, has to add this also each time, [p.11] just as we are obligated to give accurately the unexpected book titles.  The latter has implications, e.g. for the Monobiblos of Propertius (a liber primus of the poet is missing).  Now, at last, an editor of this poet, C. Hosius has decided to put Monobiblos (1) in the title at least. This is likewise true of the Editio ad libellum of Apollinaris Sidonius. This original, where the title is guaranteed by the best text-tradition, means that the “edition” put a name on the poem-booklet that was sent out into the world. (2) Furthermore, it is wrong to print “liber quartus”, in the works of Τibullus over  the Panegyricus Messalae, against the reading of the mss., because “Panegyricus Messalae” was rather the ancient heading of the roll following the third book of Tibullus, to which then, so it seems, the Tibullus poem that is mistakenly numbered as IV 2-14, was added in ancient times as an appendix. There is no “fourth” book of Tibullus. It is also perverse to add the content of the so-called fourth book of Tibullus to the 3^rd Book, as Hiller did.

(1) On monobiblos see Rhein. Mus. 64 p. 393 ff.
(2) Max Krämer, Res libraria cadentis antiquitatis etc., Marburg 1909, p. 49.

Chapter division

However a single prose book can be divided again into chapters and a book of poems into individual poems. It is necessary to determine to what extent those chapter divisions, together with chapter headings, and the tables of contents often prefixing the overall text, is ancient, and possibly to publish them carefully.  Treatment of this area was until the most recent times very bad, in that material that is genuine was rejected, and allowed to fall under the table.  Recently, R. Friderici (3) established that the chapter division of prose texts, such as stand before us in the New Testament, is quite ancient and prevailed in textbooks and especially in collected writings, with or without headings. As an illustration from inscription texts; so the Gortyn law already has chapter divisions. In the Heraclean tables the text was from the first divided into two parts, separated by the heading συνθήκα Διονψ́σω χωρῶν. So also in literature. The great Πίνακες or list of writers of Callimachus was divided into sections with headings such as δεῖπνα ὅσοι ἔγρψαν (Athenaeus, p. 244 A). Each Vita in Nepos’ book has a title, which sometimes uses hic as a reference, such as in cap. 2:  Themistocles Neocli filius Atheniensis. Huius vita ineuntis adulescentiae etc.  Rutilius Lupus does the same, and in a medical journal of the 5th Century B.C., which reaches us in an inscription, the process is quite similar: on the great Epidauros inscription IG. IV 951 f. the identity of the patient is always given briefly as a heading, then with οὗτος the medical history is given without a conjunction. (4) This explains why the Romans use the term “rubric”, rubrica (Digest. 43, 1, 2).  The chapter title was in fact written in red; as already in the lex Acilia repetundarum from the year 123 to 122 B.C.

(3) De librorum antiqu. capitum divisione atque summariis, Marburg 1911.
(4) Also in the Achiqarpapyrus it must be noted that the individual Sayings are separated: see Ed. Meyer, Papyrus­fund von Elephantine p. 111.

[p.12] Objections have been made to the transmitted chapter divisions of authors, e.g. in Cato’s work On Agriculture, because sometimes the divisions do not correspond very well to the sense.  But we have the classic demonstration of the Monumentum Ancyranum whose arrangement — Mommsen’s verdict – is no better.

The term caput must be examined once more. (1) Perhaps it means the same as κεφάλαιον. In my opinion, caput in a book was originally the “top line of a paragraph” and then the section itself became so named, and also was occasionally numbered. (2)

(1) Jerome also names the chapter comma: see the Vulgate, praef. Iob: libri partium comma quod remanet; and in Habac. 3, 11, p. 649: commatice per capitula disseramus.
(2) On chapter numbering in antiquity see Friderici p. 12 f. When Cicero Pro Murena § 57 does not refute the individual charges prepared against Murena, but only the crimina themselves given only in brief, such as De Postumi criminibus, these are, in my opinion, words or title headings, capita, where the detail is missing.

Summaries

Similarly, unless compelling grounds for suspicion are present, the transmitted summaries should be printed at the front of the work or the book, as H. Mutschmann has finally done in his insightful Sextus Empiricus. Also genuine are e.g. those in Josephus’ Antiquitates; genuine is the πίναξ τῶν κεφαλαίων of Hermogenes the rhetorician, especially the aforementioned Summarium of Cato, as I pointed out earlier, and as Friderici has corroborated on linguistic and substantive grounds. No different to these are Columella, Palladius, etc. Pliny in his Natural History, it seems, avoided section titles, but his whole first book was given over to the contents of his detail-rich work, and in this, as he tells us, Valerius Soranus was his model, whose books named βίβλοι ἐποπτίδες, i.e. “statements”, actually mean “the guardians”. (3)  The term ἐποπτίδες is related to σύνοψις [=synopsis] “Compendium” (Plutarch Mor. p. 1057 C).

(3) Friderici p. 56.

Poem titles

In contrast, reasonable doubt may be directed against certain poem section titles, namely such poems, that are on a smaller scale and are only parts of a book. (4) In Horace’s odes they must have been added not long after the poet’s death, because they betray good personal knowledge of him. In reality, it seems gradually after Ovid’s death to have become customary to provide the individual poems in the book collection with titles. Doubtful witnesses are Statius’ Silvae; secure witnesses are Martial Books XIII and XIV.  This process first arose, I suspect, in the service of anthologies or poetry reading. Among these is the earliest example known to me, the section title Ἴαμβος Φοίνικος, in a papyrus collection of the 2nd century B.C., after another one, which began the Phoenix text (5). Likewise Meleager must have given one in his Στέφανος, who gave a title to each of the epigrams which named the poet and so could not be omitted.  No older than Meleager is the Bacchylides papyrus, which shows not only section headings but also some poems arranged alphabetically in title order. (1) The titles found in Theocritus are in some part suspect. Only in Late Antiquity, in the time of Ausonius, when the habit had become established, do you have these subsequently invented and added for the older poets, Vergil’s Ecloges, Propertius, Martial books I-XII. Some poem titles in the Anthologia Palatina seem however to be relatively old, i.e. to belong prior to the time of Ausonius, because Ausonius translates them; this is true of Anthol.Pal.16, 275 εἰς ἄγαλμα τοῦ Καιροῦ, see Ausonius. epigr. 11 in simulacrum Occasionis et paenitentiae, and 16.129 εἰς ἄγαλμα Νιόβης, see Ausonius epigr. 51 in signum marmoreum Niobe.

(4) See Ad. Kiessling, Progr. Greifsw. 1876.
(5) See G. A. Gerhard, Phoinix von Kolophon p. 5.
(1) See Wilamowitz, Die Textgeschichte der griechischen Lyriker, Abhandl. der Göttinger GW. 1900 S. 43, ascribes these titles to a supposed edition by the Alexandrians. On the other hand Strabo p. 728 quotes Σιμωνίδης ἐν Μέμνονι διθυράμβῳ κτλ., so this Memnon, whether genuine or not, at any rate filled an entire book.

In particular there is the puzzle-poem, which we regularly encounter in late antiquity equipped with titles; the title gives us every time the solution, and it is indispensable.  This we see not only in Symphosius, but also in Anthol. lat. 281—284; 481 ff.; thus e. g.:

         De funambulo.
Vidi hominem pendere cum via,
cui latior erat planta quam semita,

a process, that appears to originate with Martial’s books of gifts, XIII and XIV; for if the descriptions of Martial’s gifts were not accompanied by the title, which gives the solution of the puzzle, it would often be very difficult to understand.

Birt then adds “Let us move on” and starts a new section on palaeography.

It is extraordinary that these interesting books have never received an English translation in all this time, and that no-one has attempted to produce a more definitive guide.  Birt’s remarks are rather vague, and his argument rather loose.  But his conclusion — that summaries and titles found in the manuscripts should be printed in the editions unless there is a very convincing reason not to — is striking, and probably right. 

One other remark seems worth highlighting.  He says that the section titles in the Monumentum Ancyranum do not correspond all that well to the sense of the text.  This inscription contains Augustus’ own account of his actions, and since it is contemporary, it has to be taken seriously.  One argument that is often made against the authenticity of chapter titles or summaries is precisely that, that they do not correspond to the author’s intention.  Yet here we have an indisputably ancient set of titles with the same problem.  From this he infers that this argument must be discarded. 

The argument has not been discarded, however.  In the Sources Chretiennes edition of the Adversus Haereses of Irenaeus we find chapter titles dismissed as non-authorial on just these grounds, ancient although they undoubtedly are, and found in both the Latin and Armenian versions and therefore presumably in the Greek from which both derive.  It would be nice to suppose that this argument is made today because Birt’s comments have been weighed but rejected.  I suspect, however, that his remarks have simply not been taken into account.

This brings to an end the translations of the German material on chapter titles from the 19th and early 20th century.  I’m not sure how much more time I will have, but I hope to return to the materials I have on this subject, and to start to post more of it.