Thoughts on Antiquity, Patristics, putting things online, information access, and more
I’ve been working away on translating the Annals by the 10th century Melkite patriarch of Alexandria, Eutychius (or Sa`id ibn Bitriq, to give him his Arabic name). Inevitably there are quite a lot, and a quick way to access them is useful.
A kind correspondent has marched through them all, and I have created a page with the links. It’s in the right menu bar, or you can get to it here.
I will update it as I add more sections of the translation. Many thanks indeed!
My last chunk of the Annals of Sa`id ibn Bitriq, better known as Eutychius, the 10th century Melkite patriarch of Alexandria, took us up to the accession of Heraclius as Emperor of the East. This concluded chapter 17, in Pirone’s Italian translation; and also concluded part 1 of the work. A division into two halves is common in Arabic Christian chronicles; the second half beginning with the rise of Islam during the reign of Heraclius.
I’ve now translated ten chapters – 8-17 – of Eutychius, covering the period from the birth of Christ to the accession of Heraclius, a period of something over six centuries. The earlier chapters will certainly be tedious, and of very limited historical value, which is why I wisely did not start with them.
Looking at Pirone, I see that the remainder of the work is divided strangely. There are two chapters, 18 and 19. Chapter 18 covers the Ummayad caliphs; chapter 19 covers the Abassid caliphs, as far as Eutychius own time. Each chapter is about 90 pages, which is three times the maximum size so far.
Each of these two chapters is divided up into the reigns of each caliph. Pirone restarts the paragraph numbering for each new ruler; but does not assign a numeral to each reign. This does make it somewhat difficult to reference, and I do wonder where these systems of division and organisation come from. No doubt I will find out.
What I will have to do, I think, is to assign numbers myself. So the chunks will become “chapter 18.1”, covering the opening material; then “18.2”, covering the first Islamic ruler; and so on. I dislike this, but it is clearly necessary as a way to control the material. How odd that Pirone did not do this!
The second half of Eutychius was translated into Latin in the 17th century. I perhaps should look at this, to see if there is any interesting system of division in it; but I would suspect not.
Another problem is accessing material that I have already translated. The tag “Eutychius” now is attached to a lot of posts, and it is simply difficult to read through them all. What I probably need to do is to create a page, with links to all the pieces.
Meanwhile, I shall press on with part 2. I’m not quite sure how I will title each chunk, but we’ll see.
Another old photograph of the Meta Sudans has appeared online via Roma Ieri Oggi, this time on Twitter. What makes this one interesting is the angle; it is taken with the Palatine hill in the background. Here it is:
An important article by Dr Emma Gee of St Andrews University has appeared in the Times Higher Education supplement here.
Recently, an audience of “disadvantaged” 16-year-olds listened with rapt attention when I read from my translation of Lucretius’ On the Nature of the Universe.
Written around 55BC, this is the first surviving full-scale account of a cosmology based on atoms and void, dispensing with an active role for the gods. Lucretius’ hallucinogenic poem unpacks every aspect of the world, from the physics of colour to the anatomy of love. It is not a fossil: it is startlingly modern.
Any translation of it, therefore, must be punchy and immediate. In mine, Lucretius’ Latin hexameters play out in the rhythms of rap; the Roman goddess of love morphs into Richard Dawkins’ “selfish gene”; birds rain down from the sky like satellite debris; and the catastrophic collapse of the structures of the universe leaves us stumbling around the ground zero of our exploded certainties.
At no stage did the kids listening seem patronised or alienated. Their questions showed a keen awareness that many ideas we might consider “modern” in fact have a long history.
Last year, Edith Hall, professor of Classics at King’s College London, complained in a newspaper article about the “apartheid system in British Classics”: the subject’s enduring role as an instrument of social differentiation, based on proficiency in ancient Greek and Latin. Yet translation can make powerful classical texts available to people well beyond traditional elite audiences.
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You might expect, therefore, translation to enjoy high status among classicists. But you would be wrong. The Classics subpanel in the 2014 research excellence framework, for instance, offered no separate submission category for translations. They fell under the “other” category, which accounted for only 0.5 per cent of total submissions –and no stand-alone translations were submitted at all.
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Furthermore, the REF guidelines were applied in a way that militated against translation. Universities played it safe, to the extent of introducing their own supplementary limiting criteria that actively discouraged translation. A former director of research for one of the UK’s larger Classics departments commented: “We worked on the assumption that translations…simply would not be deemed to constitute research.” Perhaps more surprising, translation was marginalised even under the banner of impact. Of the 65 case studies submitted, none obviously involves translation.
Nor does the problem appear to be confined to Classics. Modern languages too had no separate REF category for translations. Among the 4,943 submissions to the modern languages sub-panel, just nine were “other assessable outputs”, which may have included translations. Many colleagues around the country have told me that they either did not produce translations or did not submit them to the REF because they didn’t think they would be valued.
The unavoidable conclusion is that humanities research has become almost exclusively inward-looking in its privileging of academic discourse for academics. Of course, those of us at the coalface knew this anyway: research is a game not about truth. But it is a shame that classicists are failing to use one of the key tools for breaking down class barriers and giving people access to many of the life-changing documents that their discipline has spent millennia preserving.
This is very well said. I hope that important ears are listening.
The Persian king Chosroes II (=’Kisra’) began his campaign against the Eastern Roman empire under the usurper Phocas. As the Persian troops overthrew Byzantine rule in Palestine, a Jewish revolt broke out. Eventually Phocas was assassinated by Heraclius, with whom this chapter ends.
26. So he sent to Jerusalem one of his generals named Harwazayh, to destroy it, and sent another to Egypt and Alexandria to pursue Rum and kill them. Kisra then moved against Constantinople and besieged it for fourteen years. Harwazayh invaded Syria, sowed destruction and plundered the population, then marched to Jerusalem. So the Jews of Tiberias, Galilee, Nazareth and the surrounding area, joined him and together they advanced on Jerusalem, giving a hand to the Persians by destroying churches and killing Christians. When he arrived at Jerusalem, [Harwazayh] first destroyed the church of Gethsemane and the Church of Eleona, which are still a heap of ruins. He then tore down the church of Constantine, of the Skull and of the Tomb, setting fire to the latter two and sowed destruction in much of the city. Together with the Persians, the Jews killed untold numbers of Christians, at the place called Mamilla in Jerusalem. After having set fire, destroyed and killed, the Persians withdrew, bringing with them as prisoners Zachariah, Patriarch of Jerusalem, and a great many people. They also took the wood of the Cross that Queen Helena had left at that place. It was a piece of the wood of the Cross and was taken, along with the prisoners, into the land of Persia. Maria, daughter of King Maurice, asked Kisra to give her the wood of the Cross, the Patriarch Zachariah and a large number of people who were prisoners. She kept it in her home, and they stayed with her. The Patriarch Zachariah died in captivity. From the day when the Patriarch Zachariah was taken prisoner, the see of Jerusalem had no patriarch for fifteen years.
In the fourth year of the reign of Phocas there was made patriarch of Constantinople Sergius. He was a Maronite. He held the office for twenty-two years. In the second year of the reign of Phocas there was made Patriarch of Alexandria Theodore. He held the office for two years and died.
27. In the fourth year of the reign of Phocas there was made patriarch of Alexandria John the Merciful. He held the office for ten years and he died. He was called “the merciful” because, so it is said, he was a native of Cyprus, and saw in a dream, at age fifteen, a woman as young and beautiful as the sun stop in front of him. He said: “I was stabbed in the side and I awoke, and I looked at her and said to her; “Who are you? And how do you dare to come to me at such an hour?”. On her head she wore an olive wreath. She replied: “I am the daughter of the king. If you make me your friend, I will introduce you to the king, because no-one is more familiar with him than I. For I came upon the earth because he brought me, he became man and saved men.” Then she disappeared and I said: “Indeed she is Mercy.” I got up immediately to go to church and in passing I came across a stranger who was naked. It was very cold and it was winter. I took off the coat that I was wearing, gave it to him and I said to myself: “Now I shall know whether what I saw was true, or is of the devil.” As soon as I came to the church, I met him a man with a robe as white as snow who gave me a hundred dinars (in another text he says “a thousand dinars”) saying: “Take these dinars, and do what you want.” Then I turned to give them back, but saw no one. Then I said: “In truth, everything makes sense.” So John the Merciful began to give away everything he had, even the clothes he wore, to the point that once he happened to give away even the vestments with which he used to celebrate Mass, driven by his great compassion for the poor. He was therefore called John the Merciful. In the sixth year of the reign of Phocas there was made patriarch of Rome Theodore. He held the office for three years and died.
28. After the Persians had destroyed the churches of Jerusalem, set them on fire and had retired, there lived in the monastery of ad-Dawākis, i.e. in the monastery of St. Theodosius, a monk named Modestus who was the superior of the monastery. After the Persians left, he went to ar-Ramlah, in Tiberias, in Tyre and Damascus to ask Christians to give him offerings to help to rebuild the churches of Jerusalem, which had been destroyed by the Persians. With the offerings he gathered a good sum and returned to Jerusalem where he rebuilt the Church of the Resurrection, of the Sepulchre, of the Skull and of St. Constantine, which exist to this day. When John the Merciful, Patriarch of Alexandria, heard that Modestus was intent on [re]building the churches that the Persians had destroyed, he sent a thousand beasts of burden, a thousand sacks of wheat, a thousand bags of vegetables, a thousand jars of anchovies, a thousand “ratl” of iron and a thousand workers. As for Harzawayh, who had destroyed Jerusalem, he marched to Egypt and Alexandria. Having learned that the Persians had reached Alexandria, John the Merciful fled in fear, heading to Cyprus together with the patrician who ruled Alexandria, named Nicetas. When they came to Cyprus, Nicetas asked him to go with him to Constantinople to King Phocas to greet him, and to ask him to free them from the siege of the Persians. They were on the beach when John the Merciful saw in a dream a young man who told him:”The King of heaven is closer to you than the king of earth.” John woke up and said to the patrician Nicetas: “Take me back to Cyprus, because I’m about to die.” He returned to Cyprus and died after being Patriarch for ten years. He was buried in a village in Cyprus called Asātuntā. After the death of John the Merciful Alexandria remained without a patriarch for seven years.
29. When Kisra besieged Constantinople, the territory of Syria found itself without any Byzantine soldiers. There were, in the city of Tyre, four thousand Jews. The Jews who were in Tyre sent letters to the Jews of Jerusalem, Cyprus, Damascus, Galilee and Tiberias, inviting them to all gather on the night of the Christian Easter, and exterminate the Christians who were in Tyre, to go up to Jerusalem, and kill every Christian who was there and take over the city. Having received notice, both the patrician of Tyre and the population of Tyre, they took the Jews who were in Tyre, bound them with iron chains and threw them in jail. They bolted the gate of Tyre and positioned there catapults and ballistae. When it was the night of the Easter of the Christians, the Jews from every country gathered at Tyre as the Jews [of Tyre] had written to them, and according to the agreement reached. They were about twenty thousand men. [The inhabitants of the city] fought fiercely against them from the walls. The foreign Jews then demolished every church which was located outside the walls of Tyre. But for every church that was demolished, the inhabitants of Tyre brought a hundred Jews whom they were holding prisoner onto the walls, beheaded them and threw down their heads. So they beheaded two thousand men. Then there was an outcry among the Jews, and they were defeated. The inhabitants of Tyre came out, pursued them, put them to flight (in another text he says “manahū aktāfahum”) and made a great slaughter. The survivors returned humiliated to their respective places of origin.
30. In the city of Thessalonika there was a young man named Heraclius, with some patricians of Thessaloniki. The patricians took the ships, loaded them with barley, wheat and legumes, and sent them to Constantinople with Heraclius to rescue and provide food to the people who suffered due to the exhausting siege. When Heraclius arrived in Constantinople, the people rejoiced and perked up at the sight of that wheat, barley and legumes. Heraclius was a courageous young man, a very capable administrator, shrewd and cunning. Heraclius said to the ministers and generals: “The king Phocas is a very bad politician and he causes misery for all Rum. In fact since he began to reign, you have undergone eight years of uninterrupted siege and the lands of Rum, Egypt and Syria are in serious afflictions because the Persians have taken hold of your kingdom and all your territories. For my part, I suggest you kill him and make another king”. The leaders expressed their approval and Heraclius attacked King Phocas and killed him. The ministers and generals gathered to choose a descendant of the royal house and make him king, but Heraclius said to them: “You must not elevate any other king except the one in whom there are the following qualities: he must have more integrity and knowledge with regard to religion than anyone else; discernment, truthfulness, courage, eloquence; clemency to his own subjects; and wisdom in foiling the machinations of the enemy.” They said: “And where we will ever find such a man?” He answered: “Promise me that if I show you, you will choose him as your king.” They promised this, and when he was sure of them he said: “I am that man.” They elected him as their king and Heraclius reigned over Rum. This happened in the twenty-third year of the reign of Kisra, son of Hurmuz, Abarwīz, king of the Persians.
In the 16th century there were a number of ancient monuments in Rome which have since disappeared. Among these was a massive temple on the Quirinal Hill, which was generally thought to be the Temple of Sol Invictus dedicated by the emperor Aurelian in 274 AD, but today is thought to be the temple of Serapis.
As with many of these older monuments, drawings exist, and I have written a number of posts about them, such as this one. But today I came across a colour painting of this monument.
It is by Willem van Nieulandt the Younger (1584-1635 ca.), View of the Forum Romanum. Thankfully a copy is at Wikimedia Commons here.
The temple is circled:
This drawing by Jan Goree, before 1704, is the same monument from roughly the same angle:
I wonder what other paintings exist of the vanished monuments in Rome.
My, this is a long chapter. But it brings the whole pre-Islamic period to an end, so we’re stuck with it. The narrative of Chosroes II continues.
24. When Kisra came to Maurice, king of Rum, he was received with very great honors and granted many soldiers in aid. With the soldiers that Maurice had given him, Kisra entered Armenia and encamped near Adharbayğān, where he fought a violent battle. Bahram Sūnir was defeated and fled to the Turks. But Kisra did not desist from pursuing him until he killed him. Kisra, son of Hurmuz, called Abarwīz, reigned thirty-nine years. This happened in the seventh year of the reign of Maurice, king of Rum. When he became undisputed king, Kisra sent back the soldiers that he had been given by the king Maurice, after covering them with gifts, and the best gifts that one of his rank had the authority to give to others like himself. He then wrote a letter to King Maurice asking him to give him in marriage his daughter Maria. King Maurice replied with a letter in which he said: “I am not allowed to give my daughter as your wife unless you become a Christian.” Kisra granted his request and agreed to become a Christian. His advisers, his ministers and his generals condemned such conduct, saying: “What you intend is shameful for both us and for you. No king of Persia has ever done such a thing from Azdashīr until today. Your desire to marry this woman should definitely not lead you to abandon the faith of your fathers. Moreover, we cannot advise you at all to adopt the religion of the Christians, because the Christians are a people unable to keep a deal, nor you can trust their word.” But [Kisra] did not accept their advice. Becoming a Christian, Kisra wrote to the king Maurice a letter in which he made him aware of it. Maurice sent his daughter with an indescribable amount of gold and silver, with furniture, servants and handmaids, of which the equal has never been seen. Abarwīz Kisra later arrested those who had killed his father and put them to death, even his uncles Nibdī and Nistām. Then he set to rule his subjects with despotism and harsh manners, preoccupied with amassing wealth as none of his predecessors had ever been, and avoiding spending it. He was contemptuous of the nobles and humbled the leaders.
25. Maurice, king of Rum, had a servant named Theodore whom he loved and favored. But it happened that he became angry with him and had him flogged in blood, to the point that he had a heart full of resentment against him. There was also one of his generals named Phocas, with whom king Maurice was angry. Then Phocas said to the servant Theodore, after giving him money: “Find a way to kill Maurice”. Driven by resentment stored up towards Maurice, the servant came to him at night, killed him and Phocas took possession of the kingdom. Phocas reigned over Rum for eight years. This happened in the fifteenth year of the reign of Kisra, king of the Persians. King Phocas broke out against the children of Maurice and he killed them, but their nurse managed to save one and hid him, replacing him with his own son who was killed. When he grew up, the young man embraced the monastic life on Mount Sinai and died. When Kisra, son of Hurmuz, had notice that the king Maurice was killed along with all his children, he summoned his advisers and said to them: “I can’t avoid claiming revenge for the blood of my father in law, to avenge him”. Instigating this was his wife Maria, daughter of Maurice. And his ministers said to him: “We told you that the Christians have neither honor nor religion nor acknowledge an alliance, but you would not listen to us. If they had had honor or religion, they would not have killed their king. However now we will advise the king how he should behave with them, to humiliate their hearts, to overthrow the whole state, and annihilate the religion. They have a temple in Jerusalem which they hold in great reverence. However, let the king send to destroy it, and as soon as that temple is destroyed their power will weaken and their kingdom will be impoverished.”
Let’s carry on with events in the century from Justinian to Heraclius and the rise of Islam. Eutychius now returns to events in Persia, where the new King Hormizd IV made himself unpopular and was murdered. His son Chosroes II fled to the emperor Maurice for help. This seemingly trivial action was to have immense consequences, whose impact is being felt even now.
22. Hurmuz, son of Anushirwān, king of the Persians, became famous for [his] violent character, [his] harshness and [his] tyranny. He oppressed his people, making life difficult, and he imprisoned a number of his subjects, depriving them of their ranks. He was behaving in this way, when Khaqan rose up against him at the head of a large army. Hurmuz sent him against a man named Bahram, also called Sūnīr, at the head of twelve thousand warriors. Bahram Sūnīr killed Khaqan and took possession of his soldiers. After having destroyed Khaqan, Bahram remembered the violent character of Hurmuz, his despotic conduct and the bad opinion he had of his generals and soldiers, and was afraid to return to him. Sūnīr then rebelled, while he was still in Khurasan, and refused obedience. The soldiers of Iraq also rebelled against Hurmuz because of his misrule and declared him deposed. However they were afraid to kill him.
23. Hurmuz had a son named Kisra, who was then far away from him in Adharbayğān. Made aware of what was happening to his father, he moved with his men to bring him help, but this failed, and he fled into the territory of Rum to get help from king Maurice and ask him to send with him an army in order to go to the rescue of his father. With him were eight of his advisers, and his uncles Nibdi and Nistām, who were advising him what to do. Hearing about this, Kisra said to them: “Come, tell me what you have decided.” They answered: “We do not think that you should leave this country before we have killed Hurmuz; we worry, in fact, that when you reach Maurice, king of Rum, Hurmuz may write to the king Maurice, telling him that we fled from him, and so there will happen something very unpleasant.” They went to Hurmuz and killed him. Then they returned to Kisra and went with him on the road until they came to a monastery along the way and spent the night there. When they awoke, they were taken by surprise by a group of horsemen who Sūnir Bahram had sent to look for them. Seeing the riders they felt lost. But Nibdī said to them: “You go and leave me here. I know how to get us out of this mess.” They mounted on their horses, and went on their way. Nibdī then ordered the porter to bolt the door of the monastery. Meanwhile, the horsemen had arrived and had surrounded the monastery. Nibdī then went out onto the terrace and said to them: “Kisra sends to say that we are in your hands, but asks you, if you judge opportune, to let us stay in this place for the rest of the day.” They agreed. Once it was night, Nibdī climbed once again on the terrace, showing himself to the horsemen and said to them: “Kisra sends to say that we will be thankful if you will allow us to spend this dark night here. As soon as dawn comes we will come down to you and we will get on the way”. They agreed. Nibdī continued to behave with them in this way until it was certain that Kisra and those who were with him were now unattainable and far away. Then he revealed to the soldiers of Bahram how things were, and they took him prisoner and brought him to Bahram where they told him what had happened to them. The king felt great admiration, and arranged for his brother named Bahram, son of Siyāwukhsh, to hold him captive. [Nibdī] approached the said Bahram. Inviting him to make an act of submission to Kisra and intriguing to unravel the loyalty of Sūnir, he said: “I think it’s better for you to look for ways to kill Sūnīr, and to deserve a high reputation with Kisra”. He continued to send him one messenger after another, until he gained his heart and he took it upon himself to kill Sūnīr. But Sūnir noticed this, and ordered them to kill him. Nibdī managed to escape without being recaptured.
Alin Suciu has been undertaking the thankless task of sifting through Coptic patristic papyri. It looks as if he may have struck gold! A new second-century patristic text, no less! From his blog:
At the Coptic congress, which this year will be held in Claremont, California, I will speak about the discovery of Melito of Sardes’ homily on the baptism of Christ in a Sahidic papyrus manuscript. My paper is entitled “Recovering a Hitherto Lost Patristic Text: Greek and Coptic Vestiges of Melito of Sardes’ De Baptismo.”
Here is the abstract:
“In this paper, I will argue that a fragmentary Sahidic papyrus manuscript featuring a homily on the baptism of Christ can be identified as Melito of Sardes’ De Baptismo. This early Christian writing has been considered to be lost with the sole exception of a quotation preserved in a Greek catena collection.
In the first part of the paper, I will show that the only known Greek fragment of Melito’s De Baptismo finds a parallel in a Sahidic papyrus manuscript.
In the second part, I will analyze the Coptic text and I will show that a number of similarities with the other works of Melito strengthen the hypothesis that the fragmentary papyrus actually contains his hitherto lost homily on the baptism of Christ.”
We can only hope that this is indeed the case. Well done, Dr S.
Today I saw a series of tweets which started with Tertullian’s Ad Nationes – a work rich in quotations from Varro – and then read as follows:
@hashtagoras: Tertullian v neglected by classicists, methinks.
@b_hawk: I’ve a feeling Tertullian is often relegated to religious studies, & often used more for contextual info.
@hashtagoras: By virtue of our training and the constitution of our canon, most classicists contrive to avoid christian stuff
He’s right, of course; they do. But this is not necessarily a bad thing. Considering the sheer mass of Christian Latin and Greek literature, such a policy by classicists is simply a survival strategy.
If classicists “broadened” their canon, they would cease to be classicists. Each would muddy the stream with some element of patristic or medieval material – interesting, certainly, but not classical in literary or linguistic terms – and we would lose touch with the pure classical world. Nobody would know what was really classical any more. Nobody would study pure classics any more. In the process, the special qualities of classical studies would dissolve in the stream of all ancient literature.
The classics, as a discipline, is the study of the finest products, the highest point, the “classic” version of the literature of each language. To focus on that is to identify it, and to study it. To mix in other things is to cease to be a classicist.
Let us not forget that our society was brought into existence by the rediscovery of the classics.
Boundaries are important things. We ring-fence things that are important to study, and exclude others from that fenced area. We exclude other things, not because they don’t matter, but because the practical effect of admitting them is to dilute, to confuse, to muddle, and to dissolve the separate identity of the item we intend to study.
It occurs to me that current proposals in the USA to mingle Patristics and New Testament studies are equally liable to the same objection. The reason that we study the NT by itself is because otherwise the slender volume of biblical literature will drown in the mass of patristic commentary upon it. Anybody writing on Romans will instead end up referring 90% of the time to Origen; or Augustine.
In fact, when we start thinking of Augustine, and the mass of material of that date, subsuming the pure New Testament, then aren’t we at once face-ot-face with Catholicism?
I wonder (ignorantly) whether New Testament studies exists as a distinct discipline for exactly this reason. Did protestants in the early modern world grow tired of patristic wrangling matches with catholics about texts which the former did not consider authoritative? I can see that it might happen. I can see that they wanted to study the New Testament for itself, without the long shadow of later anachronistic interpretation. Medieval bible study is what you get if you combine the two. It would be ironic if the efforts of atheists like Bart Ehrman, to invade Patristics, resulted instead in New Testament studies disappearing into a Catholic-style discipline.
Let us preserve the distinctions. If we want something studied, keep a firm hand on the edges. I know that patristics and late antique studies have benefited greatly from the work of Roman historians like T.D.Barnes, who made the journey over the boundary. But if we want to keep benefiting, let’s keep classics healthy.
Which means no Tertullian in the classics schools, please.
