Steven Hijmans on the iconography of Sol

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Unknown to most people, and hidden on a Dutch website, is a set of PDF’s for a two volume book by Steven Hijmans, whose work is all about Sol and Sol Invictus.  It’s here.  Ignore the Dutch text, and click on the Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 links.  Despite the titles, nearly all the PDF’s are in English.  Vol. 2 is plates.

I came across this while searching online for information about the temple of Sol and Luna near the Circus Maximus in Rome.  This brought up a link to vol. 1 chapter 5, which contains details on all the temples of Sol in Rome, all excellently footnoted against the sources.

Here’s an abbreviated list of the contents of vol. 1.  It’s impressive!

Chapter 1. Sol in the Roman Empire: Previous Research, General Trends 1
Chapter 2. Classical Art, Roman Religion, and Visual Meanings 31
Chapter 3. Description and Discussion of the Iconography of Sol 71
Chapter 4. The Images: Catalogue and Discussion 103
A. Sculpture: life-size or larger 107
B. Sculpture: small-scale 125
C. Relief sculpture 135
C1. Architectural reliefs 135
C2. Votive reliefs and other religious reliefs 146
C2a-b. Sol alone and Sol with Luna 146
C2c. Mithraic reliefs 152
C2d. Jupiter Dolichenus 186
C2e. Jupiter-giant pillars 190
C2f. So-called “Danubian Riders” 195
C2g. Hosios kai Dikaios 217
C2h. Saturnus 219
C2i. Planetary deities 233
C2j-C2x. Various deities 245
C3. Funerary reliefs 253
C4. Other reliefs 270
C5. Identity of Sol doubtful 275
D. Mosaics and Opus Sectile 280
E. Wall-paintings and stucco decorations 289
F. Decorated plates and vessels 294
G. Lamps 301
H. Intaglios 322
H1. Sol on quadriga to the left 322
H2. Sol on quadriga to the right 327
H3. Sol on frontal “split” quadriga 327
H4. Sol on frontal or three-quarter quadriga 330
H5. Sol/Usil on frontal triga 331
H6. Sol standing 332
H7. Head or bust of Sol to the left 341
H8. Head or bust of Sol to the right 353

H10. Sol as minor figure 355
H11. Sol and Luna as minor figures 358
H12. Sol riding on horseback 361
H13-H18. Varia 361
HA. Intaglios in ancient rings 364
I. Cameos 386
J. Jewellery, costume (including ependytes), personal ornaments 386
K. Minor objects 394
L. Coins (selection) 411
Chapter 5 Temples of Sol in Rome 467
Chapter 6 Not all Light Comes from the Sun. Symbolic Radiance and Solar Symbolism in Roman Art 509
Chapter 7 Sol-Luna Symbolism and the Carmen Saeculare of Horace 549
Chapter 8 Image and Word: Christ or Sol in Mausoleum M of the Vatican Necropolis? 567
Chapter 9 Aurelian, Constantine, and Sol in Late Antiquity 583
Conclusion 621

The work was originally done as his thesis, in Dutch, 20 years ago, but Hijmans has reworked it.

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Chronicle of Hippolytus now online!

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Tom Schmidt has now posted the final version of his translation — the first — of the Chronicle of Hippolytus.  He talks about it here:

I have posted the final version of Hippolytus of Rome’s Chronicon here. … Hippolytus wrote his Chronicon in the year 235AD as he himself tells us.  His goal seems to have been threefold: to make a chronology from the beginning of the world up until his present day, to create a genealogical record of mankind, and to create a geographical record of mankind’s locations on the earth.  For his task Hippolytus seems to have made use of the Old Testament, to research the chronology and genealogies, and a nautical dictionary, to research the distances between locations in and around the Mediterranean Sea.

He adds:

Many historians made use of it, such as the author of the Chronography of 354, Epiphanius of Salamis, the author of the Chronicon Paschal, and George Syncellus.

For this translation the GCS (Die Griechischen Christlichen Schriftsteller) series number 46 was used.

This is excellent news!  These little chronicles never tend to get translated, but they contain the raw data for all sorts of things that we know about antiquity.  Tom has done a wonderful thing in making this available to us all!  Well done!

UPDATE (6th Oct 2017): The translation has been offline for some time now.  Today brings the news that Gorgias Press have brought it out in book form, here.

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More on QuickGreek

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’m still stuck at home with a temporarily dodgy leg, so I’ve been looking again at QuickGreek.  This is a bit of software to help people like me, who know Latin, deal with polytonic Ancient Greek text. 

The idea is that you paste in a bunch of unicode Greek into one window and hit Ctrl-T. 

qg1

It reads through the Greek, splitting it up into short bits (i.e. when there is a comma or colon or whatever).  For each bit it parses the individual words, looks up the meaning and displays something underneath the word.

The sections and the meanings are interleaved like this:

qg2

Listing the meanings one after another does not make a sentence, but it’s a start on producing your own.

You then hover the mouse over the Greek word you wish to inspect, and you get a morphology in the bottom left — nominative singular etc — and whatever information I have about the word in the bottom right.

In this way you can build up a translation of short sections, even if you don’t know much Greek at all.  Which is sort of the idea.

I’ve done a little more on the thing today, and I’m quite pleased with what I’ve done and what I’ve got so far.  It needs more work in every area.  The problem is that I can never devote very long to it at any one time, and it takes a while to get back into it.

I might make a  version available for download for people to play with.  I think it’s reached the point of serving some purpose.  But I need to play around with texts with wrong or no accentuation now.

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Bettany Hughes on the history of Alexandria tonight on More4

Posted on by Roger Pearse

bettany_hughes_cropped

While looking through the Radio Times I came across a picture of the lovely Bettany Hughes, who is presenting a TV programme on More4 tonight.  Judging from reactions online, a lot of people will be watching just because she’s presenting it.

What’s it about?  Oh, some nonsense about the history of Alexandria, I believe.  I didn’t get the impression from comments like “Bettany on a horse! Yum!” that this subject was absolutely critical to the viewing figures…

Returning to seriousness for a moment, I hope that we don’t get too many references to literary texts which we can’t identify.  There’s nothing more frustrating than listening to some programme on the ancient world, hearing a really interesting statement about antiquity, and then being quite unable to work out what it is based on.

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‘Ancient’ texts composed in modern times

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Before the internet, people could circulate documents containing quotations from ancient writers in reasonable safety.  It was very hard for anyone to check them.  This difficulty was enhanced by the tendency of these collections of quotations to be vague about the precise reference. 

But the internet has thrown light into quite a few dark corners.   It has also brought to light some curiosities.  I came across one such today, posted in a forum by an ignorant person who knew no more than that he had found it online.  These are supposed to be ancient texts about the cult of Mithras.  After Strabo and Statius there were these:

3. Lucius Agrius (ca.107bce-41bce) Roman soldier and Mithrasic High Priest (ca.67bce- 41bce)

“Among these soldiers was a strong and mighty warrior, whose personality drew many of the Cilicians to him. By enquiry, I discovered that he was a holy man, and was therefore sought after as a man of wisdom. He led the Cilicians in Prayer at dawn, and again at mid-day and at dusk, never failing to praise his God, Whom he called Mithras.”

– from “The Conversion of Lucius Agrius”, paragraph 2, written ca.67bce. Lucius Agrius was a soldier in Pompey’s army and became the first Roman to serve Mithras, converted by Cilician immigrants to Italy after their defeat by Pompey’s army. Lucius Agrius served as the first Roman High Priest, and his book is included in the Mithrasic Canon of Scripture.

4. Marcellinus (ca.95bce-33bce) Roman soldier and Mithrasic High Priest (41bce-33bce)

“…and the soldiers of the Faith vow to be chaste for months at a time, in dedication to the Lord. And when we marry, we marry women of pure heart, quiet disposition, and clean spirit, for women of ill repute are despised by the men of the Mysteries.”

-from “The Fragment of the Letter of Marcellinus”, paragraph 1, written between 41bce and 33bce. This, too, is included in the Mithrasic Canon of Scripture. Only this and three other paragraphs of this letter survive.

Whatever are we to make of these oddities?  I’ve never heard of either text — indeed my first reaction is that they are fakes –, and they are not referred to in any textbook on Mithras I have ever encountered.  Much of the comment is plainly by someone very, very ignorant.

The second of these items gives no results aside from the forum post.  The first gives four web pages like this one.  It’s hard to feel any confidence in such material.

In Google books I was able to find a reference to an inscription by a certain Lucius Agrius Calendio, from 162 AD, as dedicator of an inscription in a Mithraeum in Ostia.  A search of Clauss-Slaby reveals the inscription is only “Soli Invict(o) Mit(hrae) d(onum) d(edit) L(ucius) Agrius Calendio” (“L. Agrius gave a gift to the unconquered sun Mithras”).

It’s hard to imagine that any of the people quoting this have the wit to invent it.  Possibly there is some, now forgotten, novel, in which this material appears?  But if so, there is no trace of it online.

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When will the police come for me?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Yesterday it became a criminal offence in the UK to express strong approval of some sections of the bible in public or to reproduce them on the internet, punishable by up to seven years imprisonment.  For instance:

hate crimesThou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination (Lev 18:22).

If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them(Lev 20:13).

The New Testament says:

Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor male prostitutes nor homosexual offenders nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God (1Cor 6:9f).

Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another (Rom 1:24). *

As Cranmer (from whom I borrow the image) rightly observes:

Whatever one’s interpretation of the above scriptures, as of today it would be a bold preacher who so much as jokes about homosexuality.

Today is the appointed time by our wonderful Government for Section 74 of the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008 to come into force. It creates the new offence of intentionally stirring up hatred on the grounds of sexual orientation.

What is ‘hatred’?

OED: ‘intense dislike’.

It is not a matter of inciting violence or grievous bodily harm: there are already laws against that.

So it is now a crime to ‘intensely dislike’ homosexuality.

Or to ‘intensely dislike’ homosexuals.

Because the two are so easily confused in the mind of the victim (if not the perpetrator) that the mildest disapproval of the behaviour might be mistaken (or purposely distorted or misinterpreted) as vehement disapprobation to the extent that it becomes an irrational attack upon the person.

It is true that the Lords won an important ‘freedom of speech’ amendment, but it will exist only on paper. In practice, the culture will shift towards an auto-self-censorship: people will be so afraid of transgressing the law (or, worse still, of merely being accused of transgressing the law) that the jokes will subside, humour will diminish, drama will avoid the subject and real life will consequently be impoverished. Debates on sexuality will become taboo, not because of a statutory prohibition but because of an impediment to negativity, questioning, accusation and allegation.

Did you hear the one about the gay guy who…?

Bigot.

Call the police, report the crime.

And you can be very sure that the police will treat the allegations with the utmost urgency.

God forbid that Her Majesty’s Constabulary might be accused of being homophobic.

Nor is this effect accidental.  It is intentional.  It is intended to chill certain types of speech, to make people afraid to say what they think.  It is intended to allow gay campaigners to torment their enemies, to drag them into courts. 

Not the slightest effort has been made to limit the effect of the legislation.  As one minister gloated, the churches had better start  hiring lawyers.  This too is intentional — Ezra Levant has documented the technique of “lawfare”, of “maximum disruption” where a campaigner is given a legal basis to make as many complaints as he likes, at no charge to himself, against others, to drag them through the courts for months and years, to force them to run up huge legal bills.

Normal people may wonder why the establishment is so desperate to force unnatural vice upon us all, to make it a norm, to force us all to speak politely about it.  But the answer may be found in Paul Kocher’s Master of Middle Earth, which studied the Lord of the Rings: “It is not enough for evil if its victims do as it wants; they must be forced to do it against their wills.”  It is the arrogance of power to choose some evil, detestable to almost everyone, and force all to bow down to it.

This is evil.  This is a piece of hate, passing laws to permit and encourage and foster attacks by one tiny well-organised section of the community on another which is quiet, law-abiding, and harmless. 

It is specifically targetted at the churches.  Indeed we can be sure that the law was drafted by the gay lobbyists who intend to use it — there’s been enough in the press lately about the way in which Blair simply implemented the demands of Stonewall for some huge list of rights and privileges.

Some may say that this all has only a limited bearing on the gospel.  But so did sacrificing to Caesar; “a pinch of incense… what’s the harm in that?” asked the atheist Roman procurators.  It is a fingerprint.  It is intended as a test case.  Do you follow Christ, or Caesar?

How we oppose this evil I do not know.  That we can either oppose it together, or be picked off, one by one, seems certain to me.

* Cranmer also quotes a section of the Koran; but we can be sure that the Moslems are in no danger of interference!

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An algorithm for matching ancient Greek despite the accents?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I need to do some more work on my translation helper for ancient Greek.  But I have a major problem to overcome.  It’s all to do with accents and breathings.

These foreigners, they just don’t understand the idea of letters.  Instead they insist on trying to stick things above the letters — extra dots, and quotes going left and right, little circumflexes and what have you.  (In the case of the Greeks they foolishly decided to use different letters as well, but that’s another issue).

If you have a dictionary of Latin words, you can bang in “amo” and you have a reasonable chance.  But if you have a dictionary of Greek, the word will have these funny accent things on it.  And people get them wrong, which means that a word isn’t recognised.

Unfortunately sometimes the accents are the only thing that distinguishes two different words.  Most of the time they don’t make a bit of difference.

What you want, obviously, is to search first for a perfect match.  Then you want the system to search for a partial match — all the letters correct, and as many of the accents, breathings, etc as possible.

Anyone got any ideas on how to do that? 

I thought about holding a table of all the words in the dictionary, minus their accents; then taking the word that I am trying to look up, stripping off its accents, and doing a search.  That does work, but gives me way too many matches.  I need to prune down the matches, by whatever accents I have, bearing in mind that some of them may be wrong.

Ideas, anyone?

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Notes on Severian of Gabala

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Who was Severian of Gabala?  And do we care?

In Gennadius’ continuation of Jerome’s On Famous Men, c. 31, we read:

Severianus, bishop of the church of Gabala, was learned in the Holy Scriptures and a wonderful preacher of homilies. On this account he was frequently summoned by the bishop John [Chrysostom] and the emperor Arcadius to preach a sermon at Constantinople. I have read his Exposition of the epistle to the Galatians and a most attractive little work On baptism and the feast of Epiphany. He died in the reign of Theodosius, his son by baptism.

As we learn from Socrates (book 6, c.11-16) Severian was from Syria, and spoke in a definite but pleasant Syrian accent.  His abilities as a preacher made him welcome in Constantinople at the end of the 4th century AD, when John Chrysostom was Bishop.  Among his friends was the empress Eudoxia.  Unfortunately he fell out with one of Chrysostom’s subordinates, the administrator Serapion, a man who could make enemies with a blink of an eye.  Even the pro-Chrysostom Socrates writes:

But Serapion’s arrogance no one could bear; for thus having won John’s unbounded confidence and regard, he was so puffed up by it that he treated every one with contempt.  And on this account also animosity was inflamed the more against the bishop.

On one occasion when Severian passed by him, Serapion neglected to pay him the homage due to a bishop, but continued seated [instead of rising], indicating plainly how little he cared for his presence. Severian, unable to endure patiently this [supposed] rudeness and contempt, said with a loud voice to those present, `If Serapion should die a Christian, Christ has not become incarnate.’

Serapion, taking occasion from this remark, publicly incited Chrysostom to enmity against Severian: for suppressing the conditional clause of the sentence, `If Serapion die a Christian,’ and saying that he had made the assertion that `Christ has not become incarnate,’ he brought several witnesses of his own party to sustain this charge. But on being informed of this the Empress Eudoxia severely reprimanded John, and ordered that Severian should be immediately recalled from Chalcedon in Bithynia.

He returned forthwith; but John would hold no intercourse whatever with him, nor did he listen to any one urging him to do so, until at length the Empress Eudoxia herself, in the church called The Apostles, placed her son Theodosius, who now so happily reigns, but was then quite an infant, before John’s knees, and adjuring him repeatedly by the young prince her son, with difficulty prevailed upon him to be reconciled to Severian. In this manner then these men were outwardly reconciled; but they nevertheless continued cherishing a rancorous feeling toward each other. Such was the origin of the animosity [of John] against Severian.

From this we learn that Severian was the victim of an intrigue in which he was banished by Chrysostom, and restored by the efforts of the empress.  Severian became an enemy of Chrysostom, which led him into bad company.  He took part in the Synod of the Oak, organised by the evil Theophilus of Alexandria, which deposed and exiled Chrysostom in 403 AD.  He died some time after 408.

Some of Severian’s works have reached us, although it is not quite clear what.  It seems that some work is needed in this area!  The commentary on Galatians is lost, unless some fragments are preserved in catenas.  Quasten states that around 30 sermons are extant.  The Clavis Patrum Graecorum vol. 2 assigns CPG 4185-4295 to Severian.

Most of the works were preserved, ironically, under Chrysostom’s name.  There are at least 15 homilies in Greek, and probably the same again in Armenian, not all genuine.

The most important of his works now extant are the 6 sermons On the Six days of Creation.  According to Quasten these take a very literal approach, to the point of absurdity.  They are printed in PG 56, 429-500, and also in Savile’s edition of Chrysostom, in vol. 7, p. 587-640.  Fragments also exist in later writers, including Cosmas Indicopleustes, who tells us that the author was Severian, not Chrysostom.  A Coptic version of Sermon 6 exists; fragments also exist in Armenian; and 7 sermons (not 6!) in Christian Arabic.  CPG 4217 is the remains of a further sermon on the same subject, and it seems that the Arabic seventh sermon is a translation of the full text of this.

The CPG list seems the most comprehensive.  It also lists three unpublished sermons.  There’s also a Syriac sermon on the Nativity of Our Lord, which might be interesting for the history of Christmas considering its early date.

There was interest in producing a critical edition of his works.  The article to read is apparently C. Datema: “Towards a critical edition  of the Greek Homilies of Severian of Gabala“, Orientalia Lovaniensia Periodica 19, 1988, 107-115.  I’ve not seen this, tho, and it does not seem to be in JSTOR.  The project was to be continued by Karl-Heinz Uthemann, and published by GCS.  Holger Villadsen in Denmark was to do the homilies on Genesis, and did collect 11 manuscripts in microfilm, but had to pull out.

A christological treatise was edited by Michel Aubineau in Cahiers d’orientalisme n° 5 (1983).  The BBKL bibliography is probably fairly up-to-date, although I always find their articles hard to read!

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Festival of Cybele today?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

My attention was drawn to a post at about.com by a certain N. S. Gill here:

On This Day in Ancient History: Entrance of the Tree
Monday March 22, 2010

The ancient Roman festival of the Magna Mater (Great Mother Cybele) included the Arbor intrat (entrance of the tree) on March 22. An imported goddess from Phrygia, Magna Mater was installed in Rome in 204 (at the time of Hannibal) where she grew in importance. A pine tree was made to represent the dead Attis for the day of the entrance of the tree. The Dies sanguinis “Day of Blood” followed on the 24th of March and the “Cleansing” on the 27th. See

“The Cannophori and the March Festival of Magna Mater,” by Duncan Fishwick. Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association, Vol. 97. (1966), pp. 193-202.

Now I am a sceptical soul.  I do wonder, therefore, what ancient evidence stands behind all these statements.  Unfortunately I don’t have a copy of the Fishwick article, although it is in JSTOR here — anyone care to send me a copy? — but I have a feeling that the answer is “very little”.  Indeed some of this may be inferred from rather than stated by ancient sources.

I looked into Attis and the sources some time ago, although I never compiled a final version.  My working notes are here.  These tell me that a statement in John the Lydian, De Mensibus IV. 41 reads:

On day 11, the kalends of April, a pine tree is carried into the Palatine by the tree-bearers. But the emperor Claudius instituted these these ferias, a man of such justice in judgement that…

John the Lydian’s work needs translation.  It always has interesting things to tell us about Roman religion and festivals.  But moving on, Arnobius, Adversus Paganos book V tells us:

… how can you assert the falsehood of this story, when the very rites which you celebrate throughout the year testify that you believe these things to be true, and consider them perfectly trustworthy?

For what is the meaning of that pine which on fixed days you always bring into the sanctuary of the mother of the gods? Is it not in imitation of that tree, beneath which the raging and ill-fated youth laid hands upon himself, and which the parent of the gods consecrated to relieve her sorrow?

What mean the fleeces of wool with which you bind and surround the trunk of the tree? Is it not to recall the wools with which Ia covered the dying youth, and thought that she could procure some warmth for his limbs fast stiffening with cold? What mean the branches of the tree girt round and decked with wreaths of violets? Do they not mark this, how the Mother adorned with early flowers the pine which indicates and bears witness to the sad mishap?

What mean the Galli with dishevelled hair beating their breasts with their palms? Do they not recall to memory those lamentations with which the tower-bearing Mother, along with the weeping Acdestis, wailing aloud, followed the boy? What means the abstinence from eating bread which you have named castus? Is it not in imitation of the time when the goddess abstained from Ceres’ fruit in her vehement sorrow?

17. Or if the things which we say are not so declare, say yourselves-those effeminate and delicate men whom we see among you in the sacred rites of this deity-what business, what care, what concern have they there; and why do they like mourners wound their arms and breasts, and act as those dolefully circumstanced?

What mean the wreaths, what the violets, what the swathings, the coverings of soft wools? Why, finally, is the very pine, but a little before swaying to and fro among the shrubs, an utterly inert log, set up in the temple of the Mother of the gods next, like some propitious and very venerable deity?

…

That pine which is regularly born into the sanctuary of the Great Mother, is it not in imitation of that tree beneath which Attis mutilated and unmanned himself, which also, they relate, the goddess consecrated to relieve her grief?

I don’t see a reference here to the tree representing Attis; rather it represents the tree under which that luckless boyfriend of Cybele castrated himself.

Arnobius is clearly well informed.  But these are the two references to pine trees in the sources I could find.

What about calendrical material?  I always look at the calendar in the Chronography of 354.  And sure enough, on the 11th day before the Kalends of April we find ARBOR INTRAT.  A couple of days later, SANGUEM.  And the day after, HILARIA.

When Mommsen edited the calendar, in Inscriptiones Latinae Antiquissimae, Berlin (1893) pp.256-278, he added learned notes.  I wish I had a copy of these!

A google search on “arbor intrat” reveals a miserable collection of sites repeating hearsay, often referencing the Fishwick article.

Update (10th Feb. 2022): The link to my Attis notes is to a long deleted Wikipedia page.  I’ve updated it to point to my own wiki which I must really write up one day!

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Updates on various projects

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Origen’s Homilies on Ezechiel: homilies 11-14 have come in, in Latin, with a revised nearly-final version of the English translation.  The translator has been struggling with how to format the catena fragments in a readable, usable way — not nearly as easy as you might think, without ending up with very intrusive signs and brackets and quotes of several different types.  The Duval System used for French texts has been interesting to see, for comparison.

Eusebius, Gospel problems and solutions: translations of the two extra Syriac fragments (from the Letters of Severus of Antioch, and the Commentary on the gospels of Ishodad of Merv) have arrived.  I’ve commissioned the translator to type up and vocalise all the Syriac text.  I’ve also sent him the five fragments of Eusebius in the Arabic Christian catena on Matthew edited by Iturbe, for translation and transcription as well.  Finally proofing of the Greek text is now going ahead.  We’ve started with the fragments of the questions To Marinus, printed by Mai and reprinted by Migne (Patrologia Graeca 22) and the first three have been done, and I can already see that the exercise was very necessary.  The translator of the Greek is now otherwise occupied, unfortunately.

My attempt a month ago to commission a translation of a sermon by Severian of Gaballa seems to have failed.  I always ask for a sample page, and I had hoped to do the whole thing by now.  Nothing has come back in response to my emails.  Oh well.  I could really use someone able to translate Greek to professional standard, tho, other than those at work on my other projects.

Rather a long time ago I commissioned a translation of the 20th treatise in Paul Sbath’s collection of 20 Arabic Christian treatise.  I’ve nudged the translator.  I know he will get to it, eventually, and he does a good job.  Let’s hope this gets done soon. 

I think that’s everything currently on the go.  If you ever wonder why I don’t manage to get more translated than I do, these notes should enlighten you. 

Rather annoyingly, I managed to injure myself at the weekend.  It’s probably just a pulled muscle, but at the moment I can’t walk fast or far.  Indeed on Saturday night I couldn’t walk at all.  I’m hoping that this will sort itself out before I go to Syria and Lebanon in 10 days time!

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