Thoughts on Antiquity, Patristics, putting things online, information access, and more
It is summer here, and has been for some weeks. Yes, I know it’s only the middle of May, but it is Saturday morning and there is a cloudless blue sky out there.
A couple of weeks ago it was so nice that I went out for a country walk, along I route I did more often a few years ago. En route I saw plenty of blossom and new growth. Here’s a snap from along the way.
Something made me look at the WordPress statistics page on this blog. It seems that in March the blog received 15,485 hits. In April, however, I was more boring and only got 13,906.
I have no idea whether those stats are real, or good, or bad. But the trend seems to be steadily upwards. It seems slightly unlikely to me that 15,000 people interested in the ancient world came by during March, but if so, it testifies to the level of interest, if this very personal blog can attract those sorts of numbers.
The classicist and patristicist can feel pretty isolated. But the web makes a real difference. We can all find out about each other, and share what we know. We are, indeed, fortunate to live when we do.
I am always suspicious of generalities. One generality that has bothered me for a while concerns the works of Cicero.
Some of these works, like the Tusculan Disputations, assemble a cast of Romans who engage in a debate. These are usually important people, and are all deceased. It is routinely said, without discussion, that this is a literary device; that Cicero is chosing players for the speeches he wants delivered.
Authors do such things, of course. But how do we know that Cicero was doing this? That this was a literary device known and practiced at that date? Or is this merely someone’s speculation?
Yesterday I came across a portion of the Attic Nights of Aulus Gellius that provided something of an answer. In book 17, chapter 5, of the Loeb translation by J. C. Rolfe (online at Perseus here) we find the following:
MARCUS CICERO, in the dialogue entitled Laelius, or On Friendship, wishes to teach us that friendship ought not to be cultivated in the hope and expectation of advantage, profit, or gain, but that it should be sought and cherished because in itself it is rich in virtue and honour, even though no aid and no advantage can be gained from it. This thought he has expressed in the following words, put into the mouth of Gaius Laelius, a wise man and a very [p. 217] dear friend of Publius Africanus “well, then, does Africanus need my help? No more do I need his. But I love him because of a certain admiration for his virtues; …”
As with all such things, we should check the Latin:
… hac sententia atque his verbis usus est eaque dicere facit C. Laelium, sapientem virum, qui Publii Africani fuerat amicissimus: …
I.e. “this idea … he made C. Laelius say, …”. It does indeed say that Cicero was putting words into the mouths of his speakers. Aulus Gellius, at least, recognises the idea.
But what were the parameters of this form of writing?
People tend to talk loosely as if writing material supposedly by another was acceptable. But it is unlikely that this is so, and if it is so, I should like to see the ancient writers who say so.
Pompeius Trogus, indeed, in book 38 of his lost history said something on this subject, as Justinus shows in his epitome, in chapter 3:
He [Mithradates] then assembled his troops, and animated them, by various exhortations, to pursue the war with the Romans, or in Asia. His speech, on this occasion, I have thought of such importance that I insert a copy of it in this brief work. Trogus Pompeius has given it in the oblique form, as he finds fault with Livy and Sallust for having exceeded the proper limits of history, by inserting direct speeches in their works only to display their own eloquence.
This indicates that there were some very definite limits to writing under the names of others. I wish I knew more about this.
The internet jargon term “brinking” is one that seems to be falling out of use. Never commonly used online, and often used with slightly different meanings, it is now scarcely heard.
But the activity denoted by the word has not diminished, and indeed, if anything, has increased, especially on Wikipedia. The loss of the word, indeed, is not a good sign. Most people find it hard to identify things for which they have no specific word.
Brinking is a nastier form of trolling, and, like trolling, is intended to inflict pain on the victim. It relies on the existence of moderation in a forum, and plays games with it in order to hurt others.
A brinker is trying to bait his victim into a rage, while staying just within the rules himself, and then report his victim to the moderator and so get the victim reprimanded by the moderator.
The usual technique is to posting material which on the face of it is bland or falls within the moderation policy but is actually very insulting to the person being brinked. A successful brink, to the brinker, is when his enemy gets banned. A very successful brink is when the brinker can get his victim to apologise for what the brinker made him do.
I have always thought of the brinker as the most evil of posters. A troll may be relatively harmless. But a brinker means harm. You can’t accidentally brink. You have to be cold-blooded to do this. It is, in online terms, the equivalent of murder, I think.
I have said that this can only occur in a moderated forum. In fact, this is not quite true. Because most people — especially ordinary people, and especially Christians — have a moral code, a brinker can use this to get people to feel guilty for what he made them do. He will post in such a manner as to give incredible offence while superficially being polite. The victim responds in honest anger; and the brinker then coldly reads them a sermon on politeness. The aim is the same.
The latter tactic I have seen employed a number of times online by homosexuals (and only them). In each case, in a discussion about Christianity, an anti-Christian poster declared suddenly and irrelevantly that he was homosexual. In this case the mention of homosexuality is bait. Homosexuality is not under discussion in the thread.
Most of us find such a vice rather disgusting, and the parading of it discourteous as well. Most of us, faced with it, will be polite but express our dislike. Caught unawares by the switch of topic, most of us will say something. But the brinker knows what he is doing. While he is waiting for the response which he has set up to occur — it doesn’t matter if the response is actually mild and reasonable –, the brinker prepares the most vicious personal attack he can manage on his victim as “rude” and “bigoted”. It seems to be a stock response, almost indifferent to what precisely the reply was, with a declaration “I’m not talking to scum like you”, in fact, which has led me to wonder once or twice whether there is some group working from a script here! Once the reply is received, the attack is launched, and the discussion terminated. An ordinary person, shocked at the violence, will wonder if he in fact said something wrong.
This is, in fact, a form of brinking. As with all brinking, the intention is to inflict pain and shut out the victim, in this case as part of a campaigning agenda. I have only once seen this form of brinking used by anyone outside of the gay rights bunch.
Because the term “brinking” is going out of use, I’ve spent a little while this evening attempting to track down whatever remains online about this. One 2005 post suggests (the term is already going out of use):
Brinking is when one establishes the boundaries of the target forum and then posts always on the verge of crossing those boundaries.
In this case, the victim of the “brink” is the moderator. Another describes part of the process:
Neo-flaming: Another form of flaming where upon the user flames or insults the other member, but usually disguises it to make it not look like a flame, insult or baiting.
A longer definition, again where the moderator is the intended victim, in a collection of various unpleasing tricks, is here:
Some users find sport in seeing how close they can get to being thrown off a message board. The system administrator will often have a set of rules (typically known as the “Terms of Service”) which specify how people should conduct themselves. One type of poster, which I call a “brinker”, attempts to get as near to the edge as he or she possibly can without actually going over.
Unlike the troll, who directs his or her efforts at the users of a system, the brinker is actually toying with the system administrator. He or she can be a thorn in the side of the administrator, holding the good name and popularity of the system at stake. Most administrators hesitate to throw people off the system unless they have broken an explicit rule. The brinker enjoys using words (or, occasionally, computer hacking) to exploit “grey areas” and thus wreak havoc.
Brinkers, like trolls, elevate their hobby to an art form (albeit an unpleasant one). They can be so subtle that the administrator may not be sure that he or she is being brinked. For example, on a message board I once ran I explained to the users about “flamebait”. Within a week, one of them had started up a flamebait topic. I was tempted to close it down before it devolved into the usual bickering, but that may have made me look dictatorial. So was the creation of the topic a dig at me, or was I being paranoid? Assessing that user’s past actions, I concluded that I’d been brinked.
If an administrator runs an informal board, it may be counterproductive to explicitly list all the rules. I have sometimes been “taken to court” (so to speak) by users when I kicked somebody off a message board, and had my own rules used to “prove” that my action was not justified. Most message board administrators, if they do have a list of rules, include a statement that they may block any user “at our discretion”. In other words, they can banish somebody without stating a specific reason. This still irritates people, but at least the administrator is covered by his or her own rules.
Another old definition:
“BRINKING – Testing rules by getting as close as possible to breaking them without stepping over the line. A technique frequently used by trolls to stir up trouble in a discussion.”
When challenged, of course, the brinker shouts “I’m within the rules!”
Typically, however, brinkers are never caught. It is well, therefore, to be aware of the practice.
While searching for information, I found these wise words about trolling:
“An Internet “troll” is a person who delights in sowing discord on the Internet. He (and it is usually he) tries to start arguments and upset people.
Trolls see Internet communications services as convenient venues for their bizarre game. For some reason, they don’t “get” that they are hurting real people. To them, other Internet users are not quite human but are a kind of digital abstraction. As a result, they feel no sorrow whatsoever for the pain they inflict. Indeed, the greater the suffering they cause, the greater their ‘achievement’ (as they see it). At the moment, the relative anonymity of the net allows trolls to flourish.”
This too was from 2005; but these days, few people in wikipedia or online forums post other than anonymously.
Today I learned from a post by Jim Davila that Isaac Casaubon, the celebrated 17th century philologist, determined that the works transmitted from antiquity under the name of Hermes Trismegistus were not the ancient items that they professed, but rather belonged to the Hellenistic era. I knew that the “Hermetic corpus” was bogus, but not why. This has led me to investigate.
Rather pleasingly, I find online here a PDF of an article by the ever-readable Anthony Grafton: Protestant versus Prophet: Isaac Casaubon on Hermes Trismegistus, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Vol. 46 (1983), pp. 78-93. I was interested, indeed, to learn from a footnote that the best work on Casaubon’s life and thought remains that of Mark Pattison, the Dean of Oriel in the 19th century, whom we meet as a character in the essays of Augustine Birrell, and whose curious and rather sad life is given in Tuckwell’s gossipy Reminiscences of Oxford.
Grafton’s discussion of how Casaubon went about examining the text, and how he saw, as he read it, that it used language quite different from that of the real archaic Greeks, and terminology more like that of Dionysius the Areopagite, is well worth a read and I will not spoil the story.
One paragraph did catch my eye, tho. At one point, the text pretends that it was originally written in Egyptian, in a manner that makes plain that this is merely for effect. Casaubon commented on this, and Grafton summarises:
Here the Corpus Hermeticum was firmly set into its real context, as part of the pullulating mass of pseudo-ancient, pseudo-Eastern literature that does such discredit to the minds of its Hellenistic Greek authors and readers. No one has since managed to remove it from that unpleasant position.
We think at once of the Greek Zoroaster literature; but likewise of Greek magical papyri, gnostic texts, alchemical texts, and indeed cults like the Roman cult of Mithras, unconnected with Zoroastrianism but quite happy to use the Greek names “Mithras” and “Areimanios” (which had meant the Zoroastrian figures Mithra and Ahriman) and attach them to freshly made up non-dualist stories of their own imagination. Indeed I think we may confidently say that if the author of the cult had called his deity “Ostanes” rather than “Mithras”, then no-one would have associated his cult with Persian Mitra at all. Such is the power of borrowed names.
The problems with Hermes had been apparent before Casaubon, of course.
Indeed, even in late antiquity some readers evidently found it hard to believe that the Hermetica were genuine translations from the Egyptian. Jamblichus wrote defensively in De mysteriis VIII. 4 that ‘The works that circulate under the name of Hermes contain Hermetic views, even if they often use the language of the philosophers; for they were translated from the Egyptian language by men who had some knowledge of philosophy’.
Quite by chance, I came across a PhD thesis online from 2006,1 which contained a rather interesting discussion of the sources for the ancient alchemical writer, Zosimus of Panopolis. A few notes from this may be of general interest.
Alchemy is usually defined as the attempt to transmute base metals into gold, and the methods adopted led into the creation of modern Chemistry. It seems to have originated in Graeco-Egyptian circles around the time of Christ, among metallurgists and dyers and jewellers and artisans whose crafts involved colouring things like metal and gemstones. The texts are in Greek. Leyden papyrus X and the Stockolm papyrus, from the Theban hoard of Greek magical texts found by Jean d’Anastasi before the 1820’s, are 3rd century and among the earliest examples. The techniques go back much further; but what is distinctive is the pagan religious element, including Jewish and gnostic material.
The religious language and imagery is very much a part of alchemy as a discipline. The modern science of chemistry became definitely a separate entity during the 18th century, and consequently whatever survives of alchemy today forms part of occult literature. With this we are not, of course, concerned.
Zosimus wrote ca. 270 AD, and was perhaps the most important of the Greek alchemists. Collections of Greek alchemical works are preserved in Greek, Syriac, Arabic and Latin. The Greek manuscripts, dated to the 10-15th century, contain some 109 pages of Zosimus, and form the largest portion of his work. The manuscripts are:
This material was translated by Berthelot and Ruelle in 1888 as the Collection des Alchimistes Grecs, which I found at Archive.org here (vol. 1) and here (vols.2 and 3).
In the late 1980’s Michèle Mertens undertook the project of sorting out Zosimus’s writings in these Greek manuscripts. These she catalogued in four groups, from Greek, Syriac, Arabic and Latin manuscripts:2
Some 64 pages of Zosimus are extant in three Syriac manuscripts of the 15-16th century:
These were collected by Berthelot, translated into French by R. Duval, and published in 1893 in a three volume series entitled La Chimie au Moyen Age. The Syriac material is different from that in Greek, and contains material now extant in Greek only in abbreviated form.
The Arabic and Latin manuscripts only contain a few pages of his work. But the Arabic mss., which date from the 13-15th century, do contain a list of all his works, most of which are now lost. The Latin mss. contain extracts from the Chapters to Eusebia which are also found in Greek.
Sadly I fear that all this literature is quite dull!
1. Shannon L. Grimes, Zosimus of Panopolis: Alchemy, Nature and Religion in Late Antiquity, Diss. Syracuse University 2006.
2. Michèle Mertens, Zosime de Panopolis: Mémoires authentiques, Les Alchimistes Grecs, Tome IV, 1re partie (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1995), xii-cxii.
I learn from the New at LacusCurtius & Livius blog that there have been another round of attacks on the Lacus Curtius site, hosted at the University of Chicago.
For those who do not know it — and why on earth do you NOT know it? — it is the personal site of Bill Thayer, which contains a very great quantity of classical texts in the original and in translation, plus secondary material from encyclopedias, backed with notes of great learning by Bill himself, and diaries of his own journeys in Tuscany and Umbria. It is, in short, one of the great treasures of the classical internet, and not nearly mentioned enough on this site or others. The University of Chicago is to be commended to making it possible for this site to be there.
Bill writes:
Lacus has been down since about 2130 GMT. James [the sysadmin] tells me that the problems are getting worse and worse, constant attack from spoofed servers, usually traceable to China, but also to Russia and Brazil. We try to ban wide chunks of the world from getting to us, allowing access only to the civilized world, but decreasing success.
That also means you can’t reach me by e-mail, except those of you who have my GMail address. The immediate problem should be fixed tomorrow by around 1400 GMT; but it’s only a matter of time before we’ll have to shut down; with any luck, move to a server with more robust security measures.
I’m tired of terrorists, cyber and otherwise, whether Arabs or Chinese or whatever. Malevolent fools, who can’t produce anything, but can spoil things for the rest of us, like small puking children.
I have split the last paragraph so that I can comment on the last bit. I entirely share his sentiments. For no-one could possibly have a rational reason to attack so innocuous and so charming a site as Lacus Curtius, and it is hard to believe any civilised person would do so. If they did, the laws of our land would deal with them.
I remember days when anonymity was merely an incidental effect of using charming “handles” chosen for amusement. Too often, these days, anonymity is deliberate and intentional, and practised for the same reason that criminals prefer to be anonymous.
Too many people online are criminals, in truth. They are criminals in every sense other than the technicality that a law prohibits it. Some of them, indeed, have no compunction about illegality either.
The key element in a criminal is that he is someone who will do without hesitation whatever he thinks he can get away with. The criminal acts without the slightest regard for whether someone else is injured thereby. That is what makes a criminal, from the smallest vandal to the greatest banking fraudster in the world. And they are on the increase in the world today.
I have myself been the victim of such people, determined to “get their way”, and indifferent to right and wrong. Indeed I have been forced to give up editing Wikipedia because of several months of harassment by a pair of youths acting in just such a manner. I believe those attacking me to be Pakistanis, looking at some of the articles they edited. Their conduct was of precisely this kind. Rules were there to be gamed, not followed.
But if so, we have to ask why Wikipedia is open to editing by the scum of the earth? Why do people like ourselves have to fight to inform, in the face of those interested only in getting their own way? It is, in truth, because the borders of the civilised world have been opened too widely, and so people like Bill and I end up acting as border control policemen, but without the resources of the state.
It is an illusion, although a generous one, to suppose that “people are the same everywhere.” Those who planted bombs on airliners on 9/11 showed this was false. Many of the inhabitants of many countries are criminals, by the above definition; and if we give them access to our lands, our websites, our social networks, they will not contribute whatever they know. Instead they will simply use them as opportunities for plunder and savagery.
Let us wish Bill and James well, and hope that they will soon be sorted out.
OK you chaps. Enough of poring over a grimy Illiad, men. We have important news.
Bettany Hughes, the pin-up of the pre-socratics, has a new TV programme out. It’s called Atlantis: the evidence. And very nice she looks in it too. Lots of stuff about Thera and the Minoans, although I don’t think she puts on a Minoan costume, sadly.
There’s also a Daily Telegraph article here.
Refreshingly, she doesn’t slag off the popular ideas about Atlantis. Yes, they’re mistaken; but wisely she sees them rather as a bridge to ordinary people, a way in which people like us will be attracted to the study of antiquity and drawn into the fascinating subject.
Is it any wonder that I adore her?
The second century philosopher Peregrinus Proteus is best known to us because of a rather vicious satire directed at him by Lucian, The Passing of Peregrinus. The satire has achieved a wide readership because it is one of the early texts which mention the Christians.
But a far more kindly, and probably more accurate, portrait appears in Aulus Gellius, book 12, ch. 11. It is much less well-known, and I give it here from the Loeb text:
11. That those are deceived who sin in the confident hope of being undetected, since there is no permanent concealment of wrongdoing; and on that subject a discourse of the philosopher Peregrinus and a saying of the poet Sophocles.
When I was at Athens, I met a philosopher named Peregrinus, who was later surnamed Proteus, a man of dignity and fortitude, living in a hut outside the city. And visiting him frequently, I heard him say many things that were in truth helpful and noble. Among these I particularly recall the following:He used to say that a wise man would not commit a sin, even if he knew that neither gods nor men would know it; for he thought that one ought to refrain from sin, not through fear of punishment or disgrace, but from love of justice and honesty and from a sense of duty. If, however, there were any who were neither so endowed by nature nor so well disciplined that they could easily keep themselves from sinning by their own will power, he thought that such men would all be more inclined to sin whenever they thought that their guilt could be concealed and when they had hope of impunity because of such concealment. “But,” said he, “if men know that nothing at all can be hidden for very long, they will sin more reluctantly and more secretly.” Therefore he said that one should have on his lips these verses of Sophocles, the wisest of poets:
See to it lest you try aught to conceal;
Time sees and hears all, and will all reveal.Another one of the old poets, whose name has escaped my memory at present, called Truth the daughter of Time.
