Month: February 2009

Isidore of Pelusium: some more letters

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Here are two more letters of this 5th century monastic:

311. TO THE EMPEROR THEODOSIUS
How to provide assurance to the synod

If you could personally take the time to join them in deliberating at Ephesus, I am sure that there will be no censure of you on their part. If you leave the voting to the crowd’s antipathies, who would free the synod from all of the mockery? You would also remedy the situation, if you would stop your servants from dogmatizing, since they stand uncertainly between a great chasm of serving the emperor and quarreling with God, for fear that they make waves for the empire, dashing against the rock of the Church the contrivances of their bad faith. That Church has been set up, and cannot be lorded over by the gates of Hell, as God announced when He was creating it.

322. TO THE READER TIMOTHEOS
On how you cannot argue with an ignorant person.

Just as it is not safe to travel through an uninhabited land with a belligerent person, so it is not very easy to have an educated conversation with an ignorant person. The former will unleash his full force on you when you are alone if something is said or done not to his liking, while the latter, unless everything said is dumbed down to his lack of education, will single out for disgrace and ridicule everyone intelligent in the world, including learned philosophers and virtue-loving men. Frequently, people’s lack of letters tends to spread and at the current time you will find it preeminent everywhere. Even the Church is not without its share of it as well as the State and even the empire itself cannot be governed without it. Because of this, our troubles grow and the spirit of slavery has taken hold through the empire. So be very patient with the unlearned person, because you gladly abstain from the mindless, being mindful of our Lord.

What a picture these give us of the conditions in the fifth century.  The emperor, drawn into pointless dogmatic quarrels, while the nation drifted towards ignorance and contempt for learning.

I’ve now obtained Pierre Evieux’s study of Isidore of Pelusium.  It’s entirely discussion; none of the letters are included. From it I learn that the letters have been highly regarded.  Mainly they deal with Old and New Testament exegesis.  In some cases they quote Demosthenes and are a source of readings for establishing his text.  Isidore was definitely in favour of using pagan learning, so long as it was baptised.

Interestingly many scholars have denied the authenticity of the letters.  They point to the fact that the collection of 2,000 letters emanates from the “Sleepless” monastery of Constantinople — so called because the monks took it in shifts to keep the services going 24 hrs — and suggest that it was forged by them.  We thus have the absurd situation where scholars demand that we call him “pseudo-Isidore” and claim that these letters are not by the otherwise unknown father of the 5th century, but by someone else of the same name!   Evieux remarks that the existence of additional letters in Syriac, outside the “Sleepless” collection, disproves the idea of a later forgery.

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Bringing projects to an end

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The recession is biting, and I need to reduce my outgoings.  Luckily the Eusebius is all but done, the al-Majdalus is done, and I have a promise of the Cyril text for a week hence.  I’ve cancelled the translation of letters by Isidore, and decided not to commission a translation of the medieval biographies of Hunain ibn Ishaq.

I have enjoyed doing all these things, but I don’t have a guaranteed source of income, and so must be prudent in hard times.  At the moment I don’t know where my income will come from after March.  This is by no means unusual, but this year there may be no business in April.  It was nervous enough this time last year, when I spent three months hunting for work.    Let’s see what the new financial year brings.

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Cicero at Oxyrhynchus

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I wonder how many people know that 10 papyrus fragments of Cicero exist from Oxyrhynchus, etc, the earliest dating from the start of the 1st century AD and the latest from the 6th? I certainly didn’t!

I owe this knowledge to CEDOPAL, the online database of 7,000 papyri.  A look at the drop-down list of authors is interesting by itself.  Julius Africanus is represented.  Three fragments of the lost works of the 2nd century jurist  Ulpian are there.  A few bits of Galen; surprisingly few, really, considering that his works amount of 10% of the now-surviving Greek literature before AD 300.  A fragment of Juvenal Satire 7 from ca. 500 AD from Arsinoe is a poignant relic, considering that he ended his days in exile in Egypt.

Only two snippets of Libanius were found, one from his Monody for Julian the Apostate.  A fragment of an epitome by Manetho exists from the 5th century.  Another 2nd century fragment is from the Chronicle of Phlegon of Tralles; and Hippolytus gives us a fragment of his own Chronicle, 6-7th century.  Polybius is present in a 1st century AD fragment.  And so the list goes on.

I was glad to see that links are starting in CEDOPAL to appear to online images of some of the papyri.  This must come, I think, and will put an end to the absurd concealment of these things behind barriers of money and privilege.  But much remains to be done.

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Managing my e-mail

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Some weeks I am away from home.  I keep up with my email via a rather dumb SquirrelMail web interface (provided by my ISP), and delete the spam.  But I wish I could organise it!  When I go home, I connect to the net, and my mail client downloads the email.  Then I have to go through it a second time and stuff it in the right folders and generally clear it up.  This takes time that I badly need for other purposes.

I wish that there was a better way.  Ideally I could organize it via the web, and then download it pre-organized.  Any suggestions, anyone?

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UK copyrights everything ever made?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Susan Rhoads of Elfinspell drew my attention to this discussion on Wikimedia, where images of out of copyright material were deleted in response to a claim that in the UK any photograph is copyright, even a scan of out-of-copyright material.  The claim is being made by a certain John van Whye, from http://darwin-online.org.uk/, as a reason why stuff from his website should be removed.

There is no indication, as far as I could see, of law or case law to back up these claims.  As far as I know they have never been tested in court.  But then no-one in the UK can afford to defend themselves in court.

It is understandable that van Whye wants to protect his website so he can exploit it commercially — although not all that understandable, since he didn’t pay for it himself.  But this is an evil day, if the already absurdly over-oppressive UK copyright law has managed to be extended yet further.

It all sounds like special pleading to me.

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The Suetonius we do not know

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I doubt that many people reading this blog are unfamiliar with the master work of Q. Suetonius Tranquillus, Lives of the 12 Caesars (and if you are, go and buy the Penguin translation by Robert Graves NOW).  But how many of us have read the other surviving works: the Lives of the Grammarians, Poets, Rhetoricians?  I certainly never have.

This afternoon, sitting at the keyboard, for some reason I found myself reading the Wikipedia article, which linked to the Gutenberg translation which included these texts.  They deserve to be better known.

XIII. LABERIUS HIERA was bought by his master out of a slave-dealer’s cage, and obtained his freedom on account of his devotion to learning. It is reported that his disinterestedness was such, that he gave gratuitous instruction to the children of those who were proscribed in the time of Sulla.

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More Zenobius

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A query in CLASSICS-L has brought some more info on this obscure 2nd century AD compiler of proverbs.

Andrew Chugg writes:

It’s a bit questionable whether Zenobius is an author or merely a compiler, since according to the Suda (s.v. Zenobios) his Proverbia consists of the proverbs of Arius Didymus of Alexandria and Tarrhaeus (Lucillus of Tarrha in Crete). He himself seems to have taught rhetoric under Hadrian in Rome.

I don’t know of a modern English translation of the whole work, but he is often quoted on various matters, especially concerning Alexandria.

If you’re mainly interested in Proverbia 3.94, then you could try Fraser’s Ptolemaic Alexandria. If you are interested in the whole work, then scholars of Didymus may be able to help. Obviously, it is quite likely that 3.94 is actually Didymus.

Terrence Lockyer adds:

The TLG text (for “Zenobius Sophista” as it classifies him) is from:

 – E. L. von Leutsch and F. G. Schneidewin (edd.), Epitome collectionum Lucilli Tarrhaei et Didymi, Corpus paroemiographorum Graecorum, vol. 1 (Goettingen : Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 1839;  repr. Hildesheim : Georg Olms Verlag 1965)

which is in Google Books, whence it can be downloaded as a PDF, at

http://books.google.com/books?id=0zABAAAAMAAJ

and thereby also in the Internet archive at

http://www.archive.org/details/corpusparoemiog00unkngoog

from which (following the “All files:  HTTP” link) one can download the book in PDF.

There is an apparent scanning issue on pp. 440-1 of the book / 501-2 of the PDF affecting the lower part of the notes, and again between pp. 513 and 514 of the book / 572 and 575 of the PDF, where, however, the affected pages seem to be duplicated, so nothing is lost), DJVU (which I’ve not checked), or the original scans, from the list of files at

http://ia350610.us.archive.org/3/items/corpusparoemiog00unkngoog/

The issues with a small number of pages (4 of 603, and two of them duplicates) do not appear when one reads the book on-line at Google Books, so presumably will not be visible in the PDF downloadable thence.

The (Google Books) PDF looks pretty decent, but there is an issue at the bottom left of p. 223 (280 of the PDF) where a mark visible in browsing the book via Google is much darker and obscures a bit of the note (one or two words on the left of the last three lines), and again on 233 (290 of the PDF, where the first half of the last three lines in the left column is affected), and on 258 (315 of the PDF, perhaps two words obscured);  while 247 (304 of the PDF) is wavy, there is a duplication of pp. 440-1 (on PDF pp. 501-2) with a hand in view on each duplicated page (as in the Internet Archive version, where I should have said that the pages are in fact also repeated, so nothing is actually lost), and pp. 491 (552) and 493 (554) have issues at bottom right.

P. 491 appears to be missing from the Internet Archive PDF.

In short, neither file is perfect, but the two together seem usable enough.

The text of Zenobius starts on p.55 of the Google books PDF, covering pp.1-177 of the edition.  There is no translation of any of it, sadly.  The pages contain only a limited amount of Greek; p.24 seems to contain 57 words, suggesting a total word count of ca. 11,000 words; about £500, at 5p a word, if I commissioned a translation.  Tempted…! 

The TLG tells me it’s actually 27,271, or about double that.  Still not a huge amount… but then there is the hassle of finding a translator and chasing him up, etc.  If I could pay the money and just get the translation, I probably would!

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Eusebius project progress

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Regular readers will know that a year ago I commissioned David Miller to translate all that now exists of Eusebius of Caesarea’s Quaestiones Evangelicae ad Stephanum et Marinum.  This consists of an epitome of the work, plus a large number of fragments from catenae and the like. 

The subject of the work is differences between the gospels, at the start and at the end, and how they should be resolved:  Why are the genealogies in Matthew and Luke different?  Why is there more than one ending in Mark?  As may be imagined, this makes it an interesting book indeed!

I’ve not been posting updates, because every week there has been a new chunk translated.  But we’ve now reached the end of the text.  The last few fragments of Greek and Latin reached me today in English translation.   The quality has been improving all the time, and the notes are extremely interesting.

The next stage will be to revise the whole and make sure that formatting is consistent, etc.  This will probably take place in a month or two, to allow the translator a bit of distance from the process of actual sentence-by-sentence translation and to see the text as a whole.

The Syriac and Coptic have made only limited progress, and I fear that I will have to go with what has been done and ignore the rest.  This is unfortunate, of course.

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The curse of too much reading

Posted on by Roger Pearse

JPS points us to a post by Kevin Edgcomb:

I curse my studies. Sometimes, anyway. What good is it to be following a Bible reading plan for the faithful when half of what is going on during my reading is (Lord, have mercy!) a critique of the translation, a mental retroversion to the Hebrew and/or Greek involved, mental notes on historical illumination and literary parallels, and all manner of distractions. The wonder is often gone. I hate that.

The same experience can afflict the classicist, who can no longer sail with Telemachus in a black ship across the wine-dark sea to see fair-haired Menelaus, for all the scholarly footnotes that howl in his head. 

Is there much practical difference between this and being unable any longer to read the book in question?  Is a textual scholar — let us say one with perfect command of Homeric Greek, who has memorised the scholia and knows every volume of important scholarship published in the last millennium — perhaps the least able, of all men, to read the Odyssey any more?

Kevin rightly observes the problems in bible reading for those with too much head knowledge.  It has been many years since the ordinary off-the-shelf bible-reading guides have been of much service to me.  They are aimed at some common average, of sympathies and intellect and attitude; and perhaps few of those inclined to study, even as amateurs, will fall into that group.

I say this with regret, not pride.  I am the loser, not the gainer thereby.  I have not gained in knowledge of God; I have merely become unable to learn from some who know more than me on every important point, except in matters of manuscript studies.

How easy it is for the less perceptive to suppose that they have “risen above” this sort of guide, when in truth they have merely become  unable to read it and profit from it, for all intents and purposes.

What shall it profit a man, if he knows every footnote in Nestle-Aland, and loses his soul?  In my time of dying, which may be very much sooner than I suppose, how much of that to which I have devoted my life will seem other than dry and dusty shreds of paper?

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