Downloading the Iliad

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve pointed some mirroring software at the Centre for Hellenic Studies site where they have online some high-resolution images of the Venetus A manuscript of the Iliad.  It’s been downloading images for the last three hours, and has managed a princely 37 files so far.   It might take a while, methinks!

The reason is that the images are around 17mb each.  They’re splendid, make no mistake.  I opened one using the Windows browser and zoomed in, and quite by accident got text reading “ILIADOS A” – the start of the Iliad.  The commentary in the margin is clearly visible, although a bit faded, but no doubt some graphics manipulations — perfectly possible with such high-resolution images — would make them all brilliantly clear.

But I doubt many people will download a copy.  Broadband technology just is not up to it yet. 

It reminds me of the late 90’s, when we all wanted to put images online but all we had was dial-up connections.  A few things did make their way online, but were painful to get hold of.  It required a step-change in internet access speeds before multimedia and PDF’s and such like could become commonplace.

Similarly mss photographed like this will remain limited in number for now.  But their time will come!

We can only congratulate the CHS for their foresight in making these available.   These are treasures, and signal the next stage of the development of the web.

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Eusebius update

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I need to get the Eusebius book into PDF form ready for printing.  I’ve had some emails from a chap who is willing to help with the final editing.  I’ve also written today to another chap who knows about setting up the book in Adobe Indesign for layout etc.  One issue is how I arrange for Greek to face English; and how do we do page numbers and indexes and things?

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Eusebius on Psalm 51 (52) uploaded in English

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A while back Andrew Eastbourne translated a portion of the Commentary on the Psalms by Eusebius of Caesarea (CPG 3467), starting at psalm 51.  The remains of the commentary on the first 50 psalms are recovered from catenas, but a manuscript of the complete text of the next 50 survives in Paris, so this was a good place to start.

I didn’t actually commission this, but it’s floated around since.  Rather than see it lost, I’ve stumped up for it, and released it into the public domain.  The word .doc file is on Archive.org, here.  You can get the same file from this blog here: Eusebius-Comm-in-Ps-51.  And I will turn it into HTML and add it to the Fathers collection this evening (or this weekend).

I hope it’s useful.  If people would like to see more psalms, let me know.

UPDATE: Html version here.  PDF version here: Eusebius-Comm-in-Ps-51.

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Montfaucon on Eusebius’ Commentary on the Psalms

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Volume 23 of the Patrologia Graeca contains the start of Eusebius’ monster commentary on the Psalms.  At the start of it is a preface, presumably by Bernard de Montfaucon, the 18th century Benedictine scholar.  It’s the size of a small book itself!

It would be interesting to know whether Eusebius takes a literal or allegorical approach in this work.  He was very much a disciple of Origen, whose enthusiasm for the allegorical method led him to the curious statement that the literal meaning of some passages of scripture is of no importance.  But he was also his own man.

I had wondered about commissioning a translation of the preface; but not at that length!

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Don’t let readers photograph rare books – let thieves steal them instead

Posted on by Roger Pearse

An interesting story in the Guardian a few days ago highlights the criminal foolishness of the British Library policies.  These prohibit legitimate readers from photographing pages. 

A Cambridge graduate who stole more than £1m worth of rare books during his career as a professional book thief was today found guilty of stealing £40,000’s worth of books from a celebrated library.

William Jacques, nicknamed “Tome Raider” after stealing hundreds of rare books in the late 1990s, drew up a “thief’s shopping list”, targeting the most expensive books that he could access.

He used a false name to sign in to the Royal Horticultural Society’s Lindley library in London before hiding valuable books under his tweed jacket, Southwark Crown Court was told.

Detective Constable Paul Howitt said Jacques, the son of a farmer from Selby, North Yorkshire, was an “extremely arrogant man, a very greedy man who was obsessed by money” and was “responsible for the biggest ever raid of our leading libraries”.

The Cambridge graduate began selling stolen books at auction houses in the late 90s. The haul that led to his previous conviction, some 500 rare antiquarian books and pamphlets from the British Library, Cambridge University Library and the London Library, was one of the biggest of its kind in British legal history, and many of the works were damaged in an attempt to disguise their origins.

Jacques was jailed for four years in May 2002 by a judge at Middlesex Guildhall Crown Court for 21 counts of theft. He now faces a similar time in jail after his most recent offences.

Libraries cannot be secure unless they stop being libraries and turn into vaults.  It is of the highest importance to record the holdings of all our libraries, and especially of unique items.  Any long-established collection contains items that once belonged elsewhere.  Indeed medieval manuscripts travel more widely than all but a few of us!  They flit around like bumble-bees.

Any library that believes that preserving the collection means preventing photography is criminally negligent.  Instead it should manage such a process.

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

It’s been almost too hot to breathe for the last few days.  I’ve been very grateful that I purchased an air-conditioning unit for home a year or two back — last night it didn’t get below 27C upstairs until after 11pm! 

So not much is happening.  At work we sit at our desks in heat-exhaustion; in the evenings we lie around and hope for a cooling breeze.

When the air-con is working at work, I’ve been working some more on QuickGreek.  This has been going very well.  I hope to add in all the proper names from the Septuagint sometime, when I can think straight.

The library tell me that Vermaseren’s publication of the excavations at the Mithraeum under Santa Prisca in Rome in the 60’s has arrived.  I was rather doubtful that anyone would do an interlibrary loan for such an item, but apparently they have.  I shall take a look at it this weekend, and see if it makes more sense at home.

Correspondence is slacking off too, as everyone goes off for summer.  But I have had an email from someone looking at Eusebius of Caesarea on the Psalms.  A couple of people have bought copies of QuickLatin, bless them.

I’ve done no more on the Eusebius Gospel Problems project – just too hot.  I need to get back to this and get it finished.  People are still writing to me showing interest in it, and no blame to them.

My current freelance contract comes to an end in a couple of days.  I hope to take a few weeks off, but then job-hunting will be the order of the day.  Finding work in a recession is always challenging, and it will be interesting to see how I get on.  I won’t commission anything very expensive while I’m between contracts, of course.

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Driving in Rome

Posted on by Roger Pearse

This morning I found myself wondering where the church of Santa Prisca was in the city of Rome.  Naturally I thought of Google maps, and experimentally typed maps.google.it to see what would happen. 

Sure enough I found the church easily; and then I noticed that Google Streetview was active for that area.  Quickly enough I found myself driving up the Via di Santa Prisca in my web-browser.  The light in the images was precisely that of Rome early in the morning, and I found myself nostalgic for my visits there.  There was even a hotel next door to the church.

A visit to TripAdvisor suggested that the hotel was rather dodgy, so I don’t think I’ll stay there!  But … aren’t we fortunate to live in days when such a marvellous thing is available!

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Images from the Santa Prisca Mithraeum

Posted on by Roger Pearse

In the Mithraeum under the church of Santa Prisca in Rome, there are a number of verses written on plaster around the walls, in between or above various images in the frescoes.  The frescoes themselves have been badly damaged, partly because of the poor quality of the material on which they were placed, but also because of intentional damage not later than 400 AD.

One of these verses has attracted wide attention.  It reads as follows:

Primus et hic aries astrictius ordine currit;
Et nos servasti eternali sanguine fuso;
Offero ut fiant numina magna Mithre.

The meaning is less than obvious:

Here too the ram runs in front, more strictly in line.
And you saved us after having shed the eternal blood.
I bring offerings so that the great power of Mithras may be shown.

Even Vermaseren is not sure whether this gibberish makes up one sentence or three independent sentences.  The middle line has been eagerly seized on by the headbangers, although the Mithraeum was constructed in 220 AD, and so is not evidence for any pre-Christian beliefs.

The inscription appears on the left-hand wall, at the top of the lower layer of frescoes.  The colour images sent to me by a reader and published in Mysteria Mithrae, appendix 1, are the best I have seen; far better than the wretched effort by Vermaseren.  Here’s the context in which those three lines appear:

Location of the "nos servasti" inscription on the left wall of the Santa Prisca Mithraeum

It should be immediately obvious that the wall is badly damaged.  Also some sort of graphic — is  that a head? — intrudes into the middle of the text.  Note the word “FUSO” – that last word in the crucial sentence is the clearest element we get.  Note also the next lines of the inscriptions, on the right.

Let’s add the diagram by Vermaseren:

Fig.69: "et nos servasti eternali sanguine fuso" - or is it?

And now the photograph.  Since this is long and thin, it’s in two halves; first the left, then the right.  Click on the images to get the full size.

The nos servasti inscription - left hand side

The "nos servasti" inscription - right hand half

Myself I would have thought that colour would be clearer, but  maybe not.  At all events, this is all we get.

Possibly more is visible on the wall than can be photographed.  But frankly… it’s not very good, is it?  How much of what Vermaseren read is imaginary?

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More on the ancient Greek and Latin at Google

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A few days ago I gave a link to 500 ancient Greek and Latin texts at Google.  What I had not realised was that this list was not just a bunch of pointers, but a new set of scans, done at high resolution specifically to aid OCR.  A reader has emailed me a link to an article on the Inside Google Books blog — itself new to me. This states, after an intro:

I’m pleased to announce that Google Books is now assisting this work by sharing high-resolution digital scans of over 500 volumes of Ancient Greek and Latin, dating from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries. (Of course, downloadable versions of over a million volumes in all fields are available from books.google.com, in a more compressed form.) Jon Orwant and I created this collection using a list of several thousand important Classics volumes identified by our collaborators Professor Gregory Crane and Alison Babeu of Tufts University. We are analyzing additional volumes and expect to be able to release more high-resolution scans in the future.

These scans will aid the development of accurate OCR (Optical Character Recognition) algorithms for Ancient Greek, and provide the basis for electronic versions of important editions of these Classics texts; but perhaps their greatest value will be for the development of new methods in this emerging field. We’re honored that Professor Crane called this donation “a major contribution to what scholars can do.”

It also mentions something equally interesting:

… scholars around the world can now consult a high-resolution digital scan of Venetus A, one of the best manuscripts of the Iliad, at the Center for Hellenic Studies.

Mind you, I find on linking to it that someone at the website decided to block people using Internet Explorer.  That’s strange, but a minor thing.  The great thing is to get the thing online.

Among the manuscripts of the Iliad, one of the oldest and most important is the manuscript in the Biblioteca Marciana, shelfmark gr. 822.  This is given the reference letter (=siglum) “A” in the editions.  It is not merely a very important copy, beautifully written, nor merely one of the oldest outside of the very extensive papyrus fragments.  It also contains the ancient scholia to the text, originating in the text critical school at the Museum in Alexandria ca. 150 BC.   I have yet to manage to see any of the pages, thanks to the quirk above, but it can only be a very good thing indeed!

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How not to publish an excavation

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’m still (10:30am) in the West Room in Cambridge University Library, where I have been working on Vermaseren’s The excavations in the Mithraeum of the church of Santa Prisca.  The objective is to obtain an image of the inscription said to record that Mithras “saved” people by the shedding of the eternal blood, not least in order to see if it actually says any such thing.

Despite what the Google books preview might suggest, the book itself is a big heavy volume of large size.  It’s a shock to be reminded of how unwieldy a paper book can be, compared to a PDF.

There are terminals here, quite close together, which is fortunate.  The photocopiers are incredible – they’ve bolted on a scanner facility.  But… the interface is pretty hostile.  So I scan the image, then go back to the terminal to see if it came out OK.  I had to move terminals once, thanks to a chap with bad breath who came into this empty room and sat plumb next to me!

I’m disappointed with Vermaseren’s book.  The first question I have is as to where the inscription appears in the Mithraeum.  This I cannot determine.  The book is filled with waffle.  The nearest I can come is that there are two levels of paintings around the walls of the Mithraeum, an upper and a lower layer, and the inscriptions relate to the lower layer.  That’s not really very good.  Nor can I gain any overview of the layout from his book, because he dives into detail instead.

Hum.

The upper layer consists of pictures of people, full length, walking toward the Mithras figure at one end.  These have names above them – “Nama Gelasius Leoni”, etc.  The lower layer seems to be similar stuff.  But… where oh where are the verse inscriptions located?

The plate is not very good.  It’s fine for what it is; but it is monochrome, and consequently everything is a jumble.  I’ve tried several times scanning at 600 dpi, and it won’t get any better than I have.  I’ll get this online, tho, for what it is.

It’s now 11am.  I think I’ve had enough of Vermaseren’s effusion.  Time to walk into Cambridge and get away from it for an hour.

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