Thoughts on Antiquity, Patristics, putting things online, information access, and more
Do you have too much money? If not, you may be interested in this post by Eric at Archaic Christianity. He’s prepared to pay people to type in some unicode ancient Greek for him. Might be a quick way to earn a few bucks, if you’re short of cash and have a bit of spare time.
The resulting text will be made available and public domain, so the effort will benefit everyone.
Jim Davila’s excellent PaleoJudaica blog highlights a number of interesting non-Jewish items this week. I don’t seem to be able to link to his individual posts, so here are some excerpts.
The Cologne Manichaean codex is a tiny parchment codex from middle Egypt, containing an account of the youth of Mani. Digitising it and placing it online is such an excellent idea. This is where the internet scores. Suddenly people can SEE the thing! I wonder if an English translation of the text is around, tho?
Jim has posted on this before and links to other posts. It seems that the mass of Syriac manuscripts in Kerala are to be photographed. Let us hope they go online! But the easy availability of digital cameras makes digitisation simple. Well done, the Kerala clergymen who seem to be leading this one. They’re also trying to encourage interest in Syriac.
This is a book that discusses Oriental Christianity, and which has been criticised to me for being too Christian, and not Christian enough. I’m going to have a read once the paperback comes out here. Anything which will increase the number of people interested in the obscure Syriac and Arabic Christianity must be a good thing.
A tap on the door, as I try to deal with the week’s post, and a neighbour bearing a parcel from Brepols. Yes, it’s the remaining two fascicles of the Patrologia Orientalis of Agapius. I wrote to them over the Christmas period, asking for them, and never heard back. Prompt service indeed!
This brings to an end a week which has snowed books. I mentioned Zamagni’s edition of Eusebius Gospel Questions yesterday; today it arrived — massively quick service that from Amazon.fr — and looks excellent. I decided last weekend that I needed to read Catullus and Tibulus, for what they say about the Roman book trade. On Monday I ordered an out-of-copyright Loeb; a couple of days later it arrived at work. Together with a mail-order pack of 20 100w lightbulbs (used in every house in Britain but now removed from every shop), no day has gone by without a delivery.
It’s frankly overwhelming. I’ve been trying to read N. G. Wilson’s Scholars of Byzantium, and being distracted. Wilson deals with the survival of Greek classical literature in the Eastern Roman Empire, to 1453 — and does it magnificently. It’s a truly splendid book. To read it is a liberal education, and if I could give copies to my friends and know that they would read it, I would. It’s been brought back into print via a print-on-demand service; go and buy it!
The two fascicles of the PO are interesting to see. One is a shiny new anastatic reprint of 2003, but very good quality. The other has uncut edges, and yellowing paper, and looks like an original printing — almost a century old! Evidently not many people ever wanted to buy Agapius! In a way, isn’t it a privilege to be able to get them? Isn’t it a blessing that Brepols keep these in print? Good for them!
When I was in Egypt before Christmas, I got bitten to pieces by mosquitos. On mentioning this, David Miller tells me that “canopy” is derived from the Greek word for mosquito-net.
The word is “k0n0peion”. The derivation is via late Lat. ‘canopeum’ — perhaps with a supposed connection to ‘Canopus’ .
k0n0ps (??”cone-face”??) = mosquito.
Imagine all those hard-bitten Greek mercenaries working for the late Pharaohs in the Nile Delta getting bitten, eh?
It’s here. It comes with a little application, and runs up to 2005. Apparently it contains a lot of stuff not in l’Annee Philologique. Well done, the Gnomon team!
I happened to see this post at N.T.Wrong, decrying the introduction of CE etc, with which I entirely agree. Conspiracies against the public are an evil thing; using them to evict Christianity from our society is pretty hateful.
No-one in the UK outside of these state-funded circles seems to use CE.
Rod Letchford has created a new website dedicated to Cyprian. It’s http://cyprianproject.info/.
At the moment it’s a collection of links, but no doubt will grow!
The excellent Claudio Zamagni has now published his edition and translation of the epitome of Eusebius, Quaestiones ad Stephanum et Marinum in the Sources Chrétiennes series as “Questions évangéliques”. It’s available from Amazon.fr.
Some may remember that I commissioned a translation of the Commentary on the Nicene Creed by al-Majdalus, an Arabic Christian writer of uncertain date and affiliation, but probably a 10th century Melkite. The text has never been published, but I obtained a microfilm of a manuscript from Sainte-Joseph University in Beirut.
I wanted to make it accessible because he might mention a saying attributed to Zoroaster in it; “whoever does not eat my body and drink my blood, the same does not have salvation.” This saying is from the collections of sayings attributed to pagan philosophers and predicting the coming of Christ.
It seems that the translator has almost completed the translation (he has also transcribed it), a couple of words aside. I’m looking forward to reading it! It does indeed include some sayings from Hermes and Aristotle of this kind, although not Zoroaster as far as I can see.
Someone recently asserted in my hearing that books were expensive in antiquity. This led me to wonder how much they sold for. A look in book 1 of Martial produced a price of 6-10 sesterces (ep. 66), and that 10 sesterces was the dole that a rich man might give his client (ep. 11). That dole seems to have been daily (Juvenal, Sat. 1), and equivalent to 100 quadrans, translated ‘100 farthings’ by the Victorian translator.
But how much is a sestertius? 400,000 sesterces was the minimum property requirement of a Roman Knight – the business class. Somehow I feel that a sestertius cannot have been more than a dollar or two, unless the daily dole was enormous, and the minimum fortunes of a Knight likewise. Does anyone have any thoughts on this?