Month: December 2010

Vettius Valens at Mark T. Riley

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Back in the 70’s a young scholar named Mark T. Riley made a translation of Tertullian’s Adversus Valentinianos.  So obscure a work suddenly came alive, in a marvellous manner!  Who would have thought that the work still lived, had things to say to us all, based on the dull ANF version?

I have been reading bits on astrological writers, and I came across Dr Riley’s page again, with a PDF:

“A Survey of Vettius Valens” – Vettius Valens’ Anthologiae is the longest extant astrological work from antiquity. It is unique in several respects: the author was a practicing astrologer; the work includes more than 100 authentic horoscopes of Valens’ clients or associates, including his own, which is used as an example many times throughout the work; the work also includes tables and the description of algorithms used by astrologers and mathematicians. My paper was finished in 1996 and does not take account of scholarship since that time.

The PDF article is invaluable.  It tells us about the manuscripts — three, all later than 1300 — and editions, and the sort of stuff in the text.

But I then saw the next entry:

A short dictionary of Greek terms used in the astronomy and astrology writers can be found here . I made this wordlist for myself while translating Vettius Valens’ Anthologiai, a translation that was never perfected. Some abbreviations in the definitions are GH = Greek Horoscopes by Neugebauer and van Hoesen; HAMA = Neugebauer’s History of Ancient Mathematical Astronomy; Pt = Ptolemy; Cumont = Cumont, L’Egypt des astrologues. The others should be obvious.

This excited me, for there is no translation of this work online (or anywhere else).  I have written to Dr Riley, asking if perhaps it might be placed online.  After all, the hardest thing in working with a text is getting the first translation made.  Every subsequent translator stands on the shoulders of that first effort.  Even if not perfect, it ought to be online.  Translations that sit unpublished tend to get lost!

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Use of “inappropriate force” in schools

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I saw a headline in a local paper: “Teacher suspended after using ‘inappropriate force’ to restrain pupil”.

For some reason my mind drifted back to the halcyon days of Down with skool, and the varied methods of assuring justice favoured by the cane-wielding masters of the day.

What would Nigel Molesworth, the curse of St. Custards — or at least those who had to teach him — have thought?

Probably they would have said that things could go too far. 

But I think that probably the only idea of “inappropriate force to restrain” in Nigel’s mind would be “hanging a boy by the neck until dead”.

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More on Antiochus of Athens

Posted on by Roger Pearse

With Antiochus we are indeed at the edge of knowledge, or so I infer from the article in the Realencyclopadie, which is meagre indeed:

68) Aus Athen (Hephaistion Theb. II 1 bei Engelbrecht Hephaest. von Theb. 36), Astrolog. von dessen Büchern manches handschriftlich erhalten ist (vgl. Englebrecht a.a.O Fabricius Bibl. Gr. 1 III c. 20).

68) From Athens (Hephaistio Theb. II 1 in Engelbrecht Hephaest. of  Thebes 36), astrologer. Some of his books are preserved in manuscript (cf.  Englebrecht ibid, Fabricius Bibl Gr. 1 III c. 20).

Even the reference to “Engelbrecht” seems obscure.  Fortunately there is an explanation and a download online at the same scholarly astrology site we mentioned earlier, here.

A critical edition of the early 4th century astrologer Hephaistio of Thebes’ Apotelesmatics was published by Engelbrecht in 1887. This edition was superceded by David Pingree’s critical edition of the same text in the mid-1970’s, although since Engelbrecht’s edition is in the public domain we provide it below courtesy of Google Books: Hephaistio of Thebes – Engelbrecht edition

The Pingree edition is a Teubner, Hephaestionis Thebani Apotelesmaticorum libri tres: Apotelesmaticorum epitomae quattuor (1974).  There is a wiki page for Hephaestio of Thebes, which tells us:

The first two volumes of the Apotelesmatics have been translated into English (by Robert Schmidt of Project Hindsight); the third volume … is in preparation.

The Project Hindsight page is here, although how to get hold of the translations is not indicated, and these include extracts by Antiochus of Athens). A table of contents is here for Hephaestio. Schmidt’s translations are unknown to the British research system, which indicates not a single copy of any of them is held in any library in the UK.

Looking at Engelbrecht, p.36 quotes the opening of Hephaisto, book 2, which does indeed discuss Antiochus of Athens.  After an extract (untranslated — why let the peasants read it?) he continues that there was indeed an astrologer named Antiochus of Athens, as the mss. Laurentiani plutei 28, 7 and 28, 34 contain an extract of The Thesaurus of Antiochus.  The Vienna ms. phil. gr. 179 contains something “from Antiochus the Astronomer”; and Vienna phil. gr. 108 folio 342v contains another reference.

All this is all very well… but I wish I could get my hands on Boll’s edition of his calendar!

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Manuscripts of Greek astrological works

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Looking at the calendar of Antiochus of Athens, as I was yesterday, led me to a corpus which was unfamiliar, the Catalogus codicum astrologorum graecorum.  Seven volumes of this are on Google books.

What was this series, the CCAG?  I find a splendid blog piece here by Chris Brennan on the Rediscovery of Hellenistic astrology in the modern period.  He also has a collection of PDF’s of these texts online.

The most important efforts in this area were initiated by a group of scholars in Europe towards the end of the 19th century who set out on a mission to collect, catalogue and edit all of the existing manuscripts on astrology that were written in ancient Greek during the Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine periods.  This project, which was led by a Belgian scholar named Franz Cumont, took over fifty years to complete, and it entailed scouring the world’s libraries and private collections for ancient texts and manuscripts that had been copied and preserved over the long centuries since their original composition.  This project culminated in the publication of a massive twelve volume compendium called the Catalogus Codicum Astrologorum Graecorum (Catalogue of the Codices of the Greek Astrologers), more commonly known simply by its acronym as the CCAG. …

This massive compendium, which was published in 12 volumes between 1898 and 1953, consists of critical editions of dozens of astrological texts and fragments which had been carefully sifted through, examined, and edited by diligent linguists and paleographers in order to produce published volumes of all of the extant Greek astrological texts from antiquity. 

This explains why the CCAG, despite its name, is more than this and contains material by Antiochus of Athens.

I can’t say that I am at all interested in astrology, ancient or modern.  But someone has to edit all this material.  It may be junk, but it is part of the literary heritage from antiquity.  It is a reminder that, as in every age, most of what is written is rubbish.

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The calendar of Antiochus and the new birth of the sun

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Roger Beck, The Religion of the Mithras Cult in the Roman Empire: Mysteries of the Unconquered Sun, Oxford University Press, 2006, makes the following interesting remark on p.209-10:

… the nominal solstice on 25 December, becomes the Sun’s birthday, the ‘Natalis Invicti’, as the Calendar of Filocalus famously notes—to which phrase in Greek (heliou genethlion) the less well-known Calendar of Antiochus appends ‘light increases’ (auxei phos).[16]  According to Macrobius (Sat. 1.18.10), not only was the Sun’s birthday celebrated at the winter solstice but he was also displayed as a baby on that day: 

These diverences in age [in the representations of various gods] relate to the Sun, who is made to appear very small (parvulus) at the winter solstice. In this form the Egyptians bring him forth from the shrine on the set date to appear like a tiny infant (veluti parvus et infans) on the shortest day of the year.

16. Calendar of Filocalus, Salzman 1990: 149–53; Calendar of Antiochus, Boll 1910: 16, 40–4.

…

Boll, F. 1910. Griechische Kalender: 1. Das Kalendarium des Antiochos, Sitzungsberichte der Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften, philos.-hist. Klasse, Jahrgang 1910, 16. Abhandlung (Heidelberg). 

The “Calendar of Filocalus” is our familiar Chronography of 354, part 6, which I placed online long ago here.  As we all know, for 25 Dec. it has “Natalis Invicti” against the day.  But the Calendar of Antiochus is not known to me.  I wonder if it is online?  Beck also tells us that this is Antiochus of Athens, an astrologer, whose works must exist — Beck references them as CCAG 4, etc, which turns out to be Catalogus Codicum Astrologorum Graecorum.  The CCAG turns out to be an old work, and some of it is online at Archive.org.

The only real reference to the calendar that I could find online was in D.M.Murdock (Acharya S), Christ in Egypt: The Horus-Jesus connection, p.89, online in preview here (and I know we all wince at the standards of this source, but this new book is much better referenced).  This tells me that the calendar was published indeed by Boll in 1910; that it records the solstice on 22nd December, and dates to ca. 200 AD.

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Useless anger, and doing something with it

Posted on by Roger Pearse

There is an article in today’s Daily Telegraph — soon to vanish behind a paywall, alas — by Boris Johnson (or his ghostwriter) on Useless Anger.  I recommend it. 

…as I held that thought in my head the full difficulties of all these projects became clear, and depression set in — the depression that always follows Useless Anger.

It is beyond my current powers either to declare war or to abolish Fifa or to set up a rival football federation or to train England to win the next World Cup. So the trick of managing that rage — and the subject of the next chapter of my business self-help book – is to find another frustration, and solve that one instead. Is there anything quite as irritating as Fifa?

Is there anything that sends you up the wall like Sepp Blatter? Is there anything else that is so inscrutable and mindless and illogical? There is.

Let’s talk roadworks. There is a marvellous newspaper interview in which my friend Philip Hammond, Transport Secretary, describes his fury as he is held in a traffic jam. There he is, in the heart of London, the greatest city on earth, unable to get to his meeting because of the orange-and-white cones blocking the road. …

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Why the Wikileaks attack on the US is bad news for free speech

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Wikileaks was once a reputable website which published things that the powerful and corrupt — especially third-world states and nastier corporations — would rather we did not see.  At that time I believe it was run by a group of people, some of them Chinese dissidents.  I don’t know who this Julian Assange might be, but I believe he took over the site some time ago.

The first warning that something was wrong was when Wikileaks published the membership list of the British National Party.  This small political party is the UK party opposed to immigration.  It has been targeted for violence, much of it evidently with the concurrence of the establishment and the police, and is currently being forced out of existence by an abuse of the legal process.  Far from being powerful, its members have to take their lives and livelihoods in their hands in order to belong.  And Wikileaks denounced them, Vichy-style, to the powerful, the police, and the media.  It matters nothing here what the BNP is; but to betray the abused to the abuser, to hand over those afraid to speak to those who would punish them for so doing, this was a betrayal of the whole purpose of the site, which was to deal with attempts to suppress free speech by the powerful. 

Now we have the current scandal.  I have not been able to understand how any of us benefit by the betrayal of Afghans who have assisted our forces to the Taliban.  Making it difficult for the US to conduct diplomacy, forcing it to use force rather than talking … who benefits?  Only those corrupt and hateful regimes which hate us all too.

But Assange has done the world a far greater injury, one that will last far longer than this five days sensation.   For he has found a way to force the liberal democracies to create the means to control what appears on the internet.  He has made it a matter of national security, he has made it essential for governments to have to power to take down websites on little or no notice, and for them to have the power to bring to justice those who post on them.  The Chinese will love it!  So will the big corporations, who whisper in the ears of legislators.

Yesterday I read that domain name hosting companies were refusing to point to the Wikileaks IP address.  Today I read that Paypal has withdrawn it’s support for donations to Wikileaks.  Well and good… except that here is another precedent.  For who believes that any of this did not happen with state pressure?

No-one, in London or Washington, however inclined to freedom of speech, will be able to deny any demands that national security requires this site to be silenced, whatever it takes.  It won’t be politically possible.  And once the deed has happened, what then? 

What happens then, is that the security services on both sides of the Atlantic have a brand-new method of censorship.  And it will be used.  It will be developed.  Policies will be created.  Laws will be passed.  A whole apparatus of control will come into existence.  How can it not, unless the US is run by people heedless of their own convenience? 

Generations to come will not remember the name of Julian Assange.  But he has done more than anyone to make the internet a place where the free speech that we have all relied on will become a memory, and to create corporate control of the internet. 

It is, indeed, a  bitter Christmas present for the world. 

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Artemidorus Daldianus and the interpretation of dreams

Posted on by Roger Pearse

An email arrives today asking about Artemidorus Daldianus.  “Who?” I hear  you ask?  It seems that he lived in the 2nd century A.D., and he was a professional “diviner”.  A work of his survives “On the interpretation of dreams”, in five books.  Interestingly it was translated into Arabic by no less than Hunain ibn Ishaq.  My correspondent is doing a thesis on the work at Cairo university and asks if a Syriac version is extant.

Remarkably an English version by Robert J. White does exist, although I can’t imagine why; and likewise a French version.  A search on Google books reveals a slew of older editions, and a 1644 translation into English.

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The festival of Adonis in Alexandria

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve never really read much Greek poetry, but I found myself looking at the Idylls of Theocritus yesterday.  The 15th idyll depicts in dialogue form the hustle and bustle at the festival of Adonis — the Adonia — in Alexandria in Ptolemaic times.  It ends with a dirge mourning Adonis and looking forward to his resurrection.

Thanks to the wonderful Theoi site the Loeb English translation is here.

GORGO (with her maid Etychis at the door, as the maid Eunoa opens it)
[1] Praxinoa at home?

PRAXINOA (running forward)
[1] Dear Gorgo! at last! she is at home. I quite thought you’d forgotten me. (to the maid) Here, Eunoa, a chair of the lady, and a cushion on it.

GORGO (refusing the cushion)
[3] No, thank you, really.

PRAXINOA
[3] Do sit down.

GORGO (sitting)
[4] O what a silly I was to come! What with the crush and the horses, Praxinoa, I’ve scarcely got here alive. It’s all big boots and people in uniform. And the street was never-ending, and you can’t think how far your house is along it.

…

Do read it.

I love the kind of works that give you a real impression of the ancient world — the letters of Cicero, or Pliny the Younger; and Martial and Juvenal.  Indeed I wish I had more of them.  I had hopes of Aulus Gellius’ Attic Nights, but somehow it didn’t work for me.

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