The last complete copy of Diodorus Siculus, part 2

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Yesterday I mentioned N. G. Wilson’s statement that a complete copy of Diodorus Siculus existed in 1453.  This led me to look again at his two books on how ancient Greek literature came to the west.  These excellent volumes are Scholars of Byzantium, which discusses the fate of that literature in the Eastern Roman Empire from 400-1453; and From Byzantium to Italy, which talks about how it then got to Italy. 

The statement about Diodorus is on the last page of text of the latter, p. 162, and note 4 on it, which tells us that Constantine Lascaris saw that volume in the imperial palace, PG 161:198.  This is the last volume of the PG, in fact; containing material by Bessarion, George Trapezuntinus, Constantine Lascaris, Theodore of Gaza, and Andronicus Callistus.

The work by Constantine Lascaris is De scriptoribus Graecis Patria Siculis – Greek writers from Sicily – is in Latin, addressed to a renaissance ruler of Sicily, and commences on col. 195.  Various writers are listed.  I transcribe the whole entry on Diodorus from an unfortunately indistinct image:

9. Diodorus Siculus Argyrensis, historicus praestantissimus, qui sub Tiberio militavit.  Historiam composuit libris quadraginta, quam Bibliothecam vocavit: de antiquitate Aegyptiorum, de Sicilia et aliis insulis, de bello Trojano, de gestis Alexandri et Romanorum usque ad suam artatem (?), quorum sex a Poggio Florentino traducti circumferuntur. Reliqui vix inventiuntur.  Ego autem omnes ejus libros vidi in bibliotheca imperatoris C[onstantino]politani.

That’s plain enough:

9. Diodorus Siculus, of Argyra, a preeminent historian, who lived in the time of Tiberius.  He composed a History in 40 books, which he called The Library: on the antiquities of the Egyptians, on Sicily and the other islands, on the Trojan war, the deeds of Alexander and the Romans, down to his own times, of which six translated by Poggio the Florentine are going around.  The rest are hard to find.  But I myself have seen all of his books in the imperial library in Constantinople.

We can take Lascaris at his word, I think.  Constantine Lascaris was a nobleman of the empire who fled the city with others in 1454 and went to Italy.  After staying in Milan and Rome he received an invitation from Ferdinand I to go to Naples, and eventually fixed himself in Messina in Sicily, where he taught Greek language and literature.  His library ended up in the Escorial in Spain. 

What became of this copy we do not know.

Share

The last person to see a complete Diodorus Siculus

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The splendid efforts by Bill Thayer to scan the still-massive  remains of the Universal History by Diodorus Siculus have reminded me that the complete text still existed in 1453.  N. G. Wilson in Scribes and Scholars p.72 tells us of a well-established fact, stated by Constantine Lascaris who says that he saw a complete copy of the work in the imperial palace in Constantinople, and that it was destroyed by the Turks. 

Scribes and Scholars is a masterwork, but one of its defects is the casual attitude to referencing.  But by chance a French correspondent asked me about this very event, and in order to give him a page reference, I pulled down the French translation by the excellent Pierre Petitmengin, D’Homère a Érasme.  I was surprised, but delighted, to find on page 48 a reference for this statement: Patrologia Graeca, t. 161, c. 918.  One of the reasons why the French edition is useful is that it does fill in some of the gaps like this.

It would be nice to have Constantine Lascaris’ words in English, but that must wait another day!

Share

Rheinisches Museum 93-147 (1950-2004) now online and free

Posted on by Roger Pearse

It’s available in PDF form from here, courtesy of the German Research Foundation.  This journal contains quite a bit of patristic-related material.  This is because the editor, Bernd Manuwald, applied to that foundation for a grant to do it.  Well done Dr Manuwald!

I understand that he is also applying for money to digitise the remaining issues.  Frankly he looks like a hero to me.

The last three years are not available online.  This protects the subscription income from universities, where the very latest articles are needed.  But it is a mark of Bernd Manuwald’s vision that he has limited the offline material to just that range. 

None of us ordinary mortals will care that the last three years are not freely available.  It is rarely a matter of concern to the interested amateur to keep up with the very latest papers.  But the audience for a century of material is wide.

Later: Adrian Murdoch at the ever-excellent Bread and Circuses blog has picked up the story, and tells us that ZPE is also available freely online, although I can’t actually find it on that site.  Come on gents at the ZPE: if you’ve done the work, make it obvious where it is!

Share

Visiting Luxor in December

Posted on by Roger Pearse

This morning it was -0.5 C, and I had to scrape the weather off my car before going to work.  But I shall be off to Luxor in Egypt in a week or two, where the temperature today is 24 C in the shade.   Luxor (from al-Uqsa, “the palaces”) is an Egyptian village with a lot of hotels built on the ruins of ancient Thebes of the Hundred Gates, and across the river from the Valley of the Kings.

The 25% collapse in the value of the pound is not great news for me, and I was looking for Egyptian currency online when I came across a non-commercial site on visiting Luxor.  Luxor Travel Tips appears to be a gem. 

Since I went to Luxor last year, I was able to verify what they said about the layout of the airport on arrival, and what you have to do in what order.  It was bang on.  Recommended.

Share

Downloadable dictionaries

Posted on by Roger Pearse

It would be very helpful to be able to lookup words in French within our little translation applications.  But where to find the data?

I was able to find some simple downloadable files, made by Tyler Jones at

http://www.june29.com/IDP/IDPfiles.html

Unfortunately these are quite small.  The French consists only of 3,000 words, the German of 8,000 and so on.  And really we need much more detail.

Share

Making your own translation tools

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I am a profoundly lazy man, in some respects anyway.  I hate pointless labour.  And what can be more pointless than the way many of us translate?

Imagine getting a French text in front of you.  The process goes something like this:

You read the first sentence.  You type an English version into Word.  Then you look back to the book.  A few moments of searching along the line, and you find the second sentence.  You know most of the words, but not all, so you type in a couple of them in an electronic dictionary.  Then you look back again at the page, to get the whole sentence, and spend time again fumbling for it in the mass of text.  Then you write another sentence.  And so on.

Frankly all this switching to and fro is annoying and pointless.

What we need, surely, is to turn the French into an electronic form, split it into sentences, and put each sentence on a separate line.

We could go further.  Machine translators for French are quite good.  Let’s run the electronic text through one of those.  Then split the translation into sentences, and interleave them with the French.

Won’t that be much easier?  We no longer have to find a text in a page in a book; it’s immediately above the line.  We have the machine translator’s vocabulary; that will reduce the amount of looking up.  In short, it’s easier and quicker and less painful.

I’ve written a little utility that does the splitting into sentences and the interleaving.  I use it with a machine translator, and just paste the output back into my utility.

Of course it’s limited in what it does, but the output is a  nice word document with interleaved French and English.

It’s making working on Agapius much easier anyway!  If only there were some way to hover a mouse over a French word and get a full dictionary entry.  Are there any French dictionaries in XML form?

Share

Back to Agapius

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Am I the only person who is terribly easily led?  Someone writes to me about a project that I had put to one side, and the next thing I know I’m dusting it off and working on it again.

I’ve started doing a little more on the translation of Agapius.  Specifically I’ve scanned in the remainder of the pages for part 2.2, which takes us to the end of the manuscript, some time in the Abbassid period.  I’ve also run Finereader 9.0 over them — and goodness, isn’t that a fine piece of OCR software!  Beautiful recognition quality.

I need to get back to translating 2.2, and turning more of it into English.  Perhaps I can do some of that in the evenings this week.

Share

I am objective, you are biased, he is a fundamentalist bigot; blogs and the SBL

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Bill Mounce runs a Christian blog, Koinonia, and happened to mention that:

ETS is now over and many of the people have move on to Boston to attend IBR (Institute of Biblical Research) and SBL (Society of Biblical Literature), which is the largest of the three organizations.  SBL is the least friendly of the organizations toward evangelicals and therefore perhaps our greatest opportunity for engagement in a non-evangelical theological culture.

For some reason Jim West decided to ridicule him for this, surely fairly banal comment:

So -what can SBL do to be ‘friendly’ to the poor, benighted, oppressed inerrantists?  Formulate a statement of faith asserting biblical inerrancy and force members to sign it or be denied membership?  Deny membership to anyone with a different point of view?  (etc)

Phew! This is the language of hate, not reasoned discourse.  Or is the SBL something Holy That Must Not Be Criticised? 

James McGrath noted this exchange, and it was his comment that I found most interesting:

That post helps clarify what the issue is: at SBL we study the Bible, have to face critical scrutiny of our arguments from others, and cannot get away with simply imposing our presuppositions on the text. So indeed, those who want that should look elsewhere, but the irony is that those who do go elsewhere form sectarian groups that manage to persuade themselves that they are the ones who are treating the Bible with respect by shielding it from the honest critical investigation of mainstream Biblical scholarship.

Those of us with a habit of looking at arguments from all sides will recognise that this is open to the objection that he is merely saying that the views he agrees with are objective, “honest”, “critical”, it seems; those of others are not.  But asserting it does not make it so; indeed usually indicates the reverse.

Isn’t treating the bible as NOT inspired just as much a religious position as treating it as inspired?  Is there any practical difference between treating the bible like this, and treating the bible as uninspired?  The latter is emphatically NOT a value-neutral position, after all. To say that “we cannot get away with simply imposing our presuppositions on the text” is the problem; that is precisely what any such gathering must do, once it decides to reject the Christian perspective as a “presupposition”.

The tendency for those who study the bible from the non-Christian point of view to treat this as if it was objective has gone on for at least a century.  Christians naturally demur, and quite rightly.  It’s time to recognise that, on issues of politics and religion, there is no neutrality.  We Christians notice the animosity — and Jim West will help any who don’t! Instead, wouldn’t it be more constructive to manage the various biases, rather than blandly claiming objectivity for one side?

Postscript: Jim West did not comment on this post.  James McGrath posted three comments, all essentially the same, attacking the ETS instead of addressing the post or engaging in dialogue.  When he posted yet another, I was forced to moderate it, as he knew I would have to – brinking me, in effect (I explain this version of trolling in the comments). Then he posted a further FOUR diatribes; eight in total.  He then scampered back to his own blog and attacked me personally for being “intolerant” in a further three posts.  I admit to being mildly amused at provoking such a vicious rage for merely querying whether the SBL was doing the right thing! 

I’m not a member of either the ETS or the SBL.  But the original query was whether the SBL was as welcoming as it might be to Christians.  The response of its defenders was to viciously attack the Christians in a frankly hysterical manner.  Still, this indicates just why the Christians feel hostility – because, indeed, there is hostility. 

Share

Antioch, Mithras, and Libanius

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Christopher Ecclestone writes a very informative post on al-Masudi referencing a possible shrine of Mithras in Antioch next to the Grand Mosque; and follows it up by discussing ancient “universities.”  There is a charming quotation from Libanius, who was unable to get many (paying) pupils until he took over a shop near the marketplace and sat there all day.  “Today’s special offer at the philosophy shop… Libanius!”

Share

Agapius translation – great minds think alike

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The Arabic history of Agapius was published with a  very simple French translation in the Patrologia Orientalis.  Since there is no English translation of this interesting work, I’ve been working on making one from the French.  The PO version was made by a Russian, so is not complex French and machine translators can make quite a good attempt at it.

I heard today from another online chap, who has been doing the same!  He’s suggesting we look at collaboration, or at least avoiding doing the same job twice.  That would be sensible, I think.

I never imagined that there was any risk of someone else doing this.  I felt a bit shifty about it; translating a translation is a bit rubbish.  But after a century it is clear that no-one was going to make an English translation of any of the five important Arabic Christian histories.  Maybe my efforts might provoke one!

In a way, we’re looking at a positive spiral here.  An amateur does a rubbishy translation of part of it from French, which provokes another amateur to do a better one, which provokes someone who knows Arabic to improve the situation again, which leads a professional to do an academic version.  That’s what is happening with Eusebius Chronicle (more or less!), and everyone benefits as momentum takes hold.

Of course there is a negative spiral possible, as Kenneth Sylvan Guthrie found out almost a century ago.  He produced some bad translations of Proclus, often from the French.  No-one took any notice.  The only person to take any notice was a now-forgotten academic, who published a review slagging them off as worthless.  So Guthrie was discouraged, no-one else was motivated to do better, and to this day the works he attempted have never received a proper translation.

Let’s hope that everyone who sees efforts like mine will think “I can do better” — and do better; rather than spend time debunking them.  Per ardua ad astra.

Share