I’ve found another couple gentleman’s translations, these ones of patristic Greek poetry.
The first is properly a lady’s translation: in 1842, Elizabeth Barret Browning submitted some verse translations, interspersed with thoughtful analysis, of the Greek fathers for publication in the Athenaeum. (As a child she had studied Greek patristics in the original with her tutor, Hugh Stuart Boyd, about whom I wrote you a little while ago.) These pieces were republished posthumously in a volume entitled The Greek Christian Poets and the English Poets, online in PDF here and plain text (sans analysis) here.
The second is a little more obscure. In 1568, a gentleman by the name of Thomas Drant published a little book of Gregory Nazianzen’s poems, entitled Epigrams and sentences spirituall in vers, of Gregori Nazanzen, an auncient & famous bishop in the Greke churche Englished by Tho. Drant. It’s happily been transcribed into HTML by the Early English Books Online people and is available online here. Unhappily, the Rev. Dr. Drant wrote before the standardization of English spelling, so his verse is at times a little hard to follow.
I’m not sure how good Drant’s translations are. The DNB includes this takedown of one of his earlier works: “The rhymed translation of Horace’s satires is wholly devoid of grace or polish.” Ouch. Still, Drant himself admitted his Latin was poorer than his Greek.
The “Meta Sudans” was a fountain that stood next to the Colosseum. The remains of the core were demolished by Mussolini in the 1930s, so there are quite a few photographs around. Every so often I come across another.
Here’s one that I found on Twitter, published on 11 Jan 2018. It is unusual, because it shows the monument from an unusual angle, from the Palatine hill. Nice to have it!
A gentleman named David Blocker has made a comparison of the English translations of the passage in Josephus Jewish War where he describes the episode at Jotapata. Very kindly he has allowed this to appear here:
[This is a] tabular comparison of different translations of Jotapata episode from Jewish War beginning with Lodge translation through Thackeray, and including Josephus variants: PseudoHegesippus, Slavonic Josephus, and the Jossipon.
I should have included the Latin as well, but I gave up, I would have to find a Latin text , then locate the proper section and dictionary bash a parallel translation, more work than I felt capable of.
There are some interesting differences between the Greek text and the non Greek versions as shown in the table, suggesting some passages may have dropped out of the Greek manuscript tradition, again showing the need for a study of the Latin text to see if these passages are in the earlier Latin manuscripts.
It is always interesting to see how different translators handle the same passage, and occasionally disturbing! This should be of interest to Josephus people!
Firmicus Maternus, De errore profanum religionum, is a very interesting late Roman text on paganism from the mid-4th century. Unfortunately it has never been online.
A correspondent kindly lets me know that a PDF containing a 1971 thesis with a full translation can be found here (PDF here): Richard E. Oster, Julius Firmicus Maternus: De errore profanum religionum. Introduction, translation and commentary, Rice University, 1971. I suspect that this is the same person who blogs here, with many of the same interests (and outlook) as myself.
Grab it while it’s hot! Rice University are to be commended for making this accessible.
Church lectionaries sometimes contain English translations of chunks of the fathers. I came across this one on Facebook here.
Tuesday after Septuagesima:
A READING FROM QUESTIONS ON DEUTERONOMY BY THEODORET OF CYRRHUS
After the Lord God had brought the people out of Egypt, he gave them, on Mount Sinai, the Law that was to govern the behaviour of the children of Israel. Then, in the second year, he sent them to take possession of the land he had promised their fathers he would give them. But they absolutely refused to set out on the conquest of the country. Then God swore he would not give this land to any of those whom Moses, the lawgiver, had counted but would let them all perish in the wilderness. After forty more years had passed and that entire generation had died in accordance with God’s decree, the Lord ordered a census of their children; the latter were then at the age their fathers had been at the time of the first census.
Before God led them into the promised land, he taught them, through his minister, Moses the prophet, the Law he had given to their fathers and which their fathers had disobeyed. This is why Deuteronomy contains a recapitulation of the events and legal codes found in Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers. There was no question of giving them a second law but of reminding them of the first set of laws, as the book itself tells us at its beginning: Moses began to teach this law clearly to them, saying: The Lord our God spoke to us at Horeb. Moses reminds them of how the Lord had told them to enter the promised land and take possession of it and how he himself had appointed Joshua, son of Nun, to succeed him as leader of the people.
Then Moses reminds them of how the God of the universe had shown himself to them: he had spoken to them from the midst of fire, but without displaying any form. They are therefore forbidden to fashion any image or to try making for themselves a representation of God, for they had not seen any form of him who is the archetype of all things. “Everything under heaven,” he tells them, “has been made by the creator for the use of men. Do not turn into gods that which the God of the universe has destined to serve the needs of man.”
You realise, of course, that the prophet did not address all these words to the people in a single day, but rather explained them day after day. This fact explains why he often repeats the same ideas, in order that persistent repetition might strengthen their memory of them. Elsewhere the words of the prophet himself show that he is not here giving a new law but instructing in the first law those who, because they were so young, had not been able to hear its promulgation: The Lord your God, he says, made a covenant with us at Horeb. It was not with your fathers that the Lord made this covenant, but with you. Since these fathers had perished because of their sin, it was to them, their children, that the Lord was giving the land once promised to their fathers, that is, to those to whom he was giving the Law.
— Theodoret of Cyrrhus, Questions on Deuteronomy 1 (PG 80:401-408)
On enquiry I was told that this is from A Word in Season, vol. II, 2nd ed., Villanova: Augustinian Press (1999). This, it seems, is a collection of volumes by English Benedictines, containing readings from the fathers for two years. This blog tells us:
The English Benedictines also produced a set of volumes for the two-year lectionary, A Word in Season, Augustinian Press, 2nd edition 1999. These contain the Scriptural references but not texts; and texts of second readings, mostly patristic, but a number from more contemporary sources. These volumes contain responsories for each reading. Copies of some volumes are available from Stanbrook Abbey bookshop and occasionally come up on AbeBooks. There is an especially good representation of English spiritual writers.
The very generic title, unfortunately, makes it hard to find these volumes, but I could see that volumes of an earlier edition (1995) were on Abebooks, and some marked as edited by John E. Rotelle. Google books indicated that they were translated by Edith Barnecut.
However, it seems that there is no need to track these volumes down. For precisely the same entry is to be found in a two-year lectionary which is freely available at Durham University. It is here. The editor writes:
In the English-speaking world there was an attempt to produce a two-year patristic lectionary led by Henry Ashworth which became the eight volume series of books ‘A Word in Season’, most recently published by Augustinian Press. The later volumes in this series, however, departed from the strict concept of a ‘patristic’ lectionary and took the majority of readings from later periods of Church history. Given the special place of the fathers in the history and theology of the Church and the fact that they are part of the patrimony of all Christians, some felt it would be better to have a two-year lectionary which drew most of its readings from the early Church. On this basis Abbot Hugh Gilbert OSB of Pluscarden Abbey in Scotland asked me to create a two-year cycle of patristic readings for use at the Abbey.
Worth being aware that there is a mass of useful material here.
I noted yesterday that my posts no longer appeared in Twitter. Today I noticed that the sharing buttons had vanished from my posts as well. Sigh. It’s all down to WordPress Jetpack, which kindly disabled this functionality without telling me.
Let’s see if I have managed to reenable it…. Hmm….
The ancient city of Lincoln is well-known as a Roman city, Lindum. But an interesting discovery was made in 1836 by a rascally inn-keeper, who was burrowing away at the castle mound, trying to expand his premises. He came across the Roman west gate.
Not the foundations. The whole gatehouse had been buried when the Norman mound was built, and it was intact, certainly to the extent of the first floor chamber. Unfortunately the pressure of earth caused a partial collapse within a few days; and then the authorities stepped in and ordered its reburial where, to my knowledge, it still is.
I owe my knowledge of all this to Dr Caitlin Green on Twitter here. But I feel that it is worth exploring the sources a bit.
Our information comes from the Gentleman’s Magazine of January-June 1836, online here at Google Books, p.583 f. This includes an engraving:
Lindum, West Gate, 1836
The story is as follows, given in a letter of May 17th 1836 (paragraphing mine):
MR. URBAN, Lincoln, May 17.
A very interesting relic of the olden time has been recently brought to view in this city. …
The ditch around the walls of the castle having been suffered to get into private hands, the greater part of it has been filled up for the purpose of being formed into building ground, and the picturesque appearance of the old castle has been nearly destroyed by the erection of a large number of small tenements and other buildings near to its walls. With a view of pursuing this barbarous practice, an individual of the name of Ball has been recently engaged in filling up the ditch at the north-west corner, near to the Sally Port, and has thrown down, to the great danger it is to be feared of the castle walls, a large portion of the earthen bulwark.
This, however, has led to a most unexpected result, the discovery of the western gate of the old Roman city, which was found in the bank on Monday the eleventh of April last, where it has no doubt been hid for more than seven hundred years. It will be seen from the Plate, that the long-lost Western gate was near to, and a little north of the Sally Port, and that it was buried in the earth when the fortifications were constructed by our Norman conquerors.
This very interesting relic of the great Roman people was, however, no sooner found, than it was again lost for ever, as the square mass of masonry nearest the Sally Port gave way on the Friday after it was first discovered, and the fine old arch, constructed in all probability more than fifteen hundred years ago, fell to the ground.
As the workmen had only partly excavated the arch at the time it fell, any account of its dimensions must necessarily be in some respects a matter of conjecture; it appeared how ever to have been very similar to the North gate, measuring about fifteen feet in the clear, and being composed of about the same number of large ponderous stones four feet deep from front to back, two feet high, and from twelve to eighteen inches broad.
On each side, the masonry was carried up above the crown of the arch for about twelve feet, and went, no doubt, originally much higher, forming two pillars or wings measuring seven feet by four; and between these the work men represent there were the remains of three smaller arches forming as many openings four feet wide over the centre of the great gate.
The masonry on the north side was forced over by the workmen, and as the earth in consequence gave way behind it, part of the square return-wall of the gate was then disclosed to view. This showed another opening towards the north, of the same width and on the same level as those mentioned to have been observed in the front towards the west; and as there were the appearances around the inner parts of the wall, above the crown of the arch, of places where floor timbers had once been, there can be no doubt the Romans had a square watch-tower over this gate, standing in advance of the walls of their town, which they used as a place of observation, the situation of it being such as to command a very extensive prospect, not only over the plain north of Lincoln, but also over a considerable extent of country to the west and south…
The arch had in some degree lost its proper semicircular form, and had become a little flattened towards the north abutment, which had been thrown considerably out of the perpendicular, causing two of the large stones to separate more than four inches at the bottom. The traces of the Roman wall are very apparent in various parts around Lincoln, and as this great gate must have been double, the inner arch may be buried in the earth a little way within the area of the castle, as will appear probable on inspecting the Plan in Camden’s Britannia, by Gough, Vol. II. Pl. v1.11. and drawing a straight line from the marks indicating the remains of the Roman wall on each side of the castle.
The crown of the recently discovered arch was about nineteen feet below the castle walls, about thirty-five feet in advance of them, and the entire front occupied a space of thirty-three feet. The posterns, if there were any, have not yet been exposed to view; and it is not now probable any further excavations will be permitted, as the Vice-Chancellor has recently granted an in junction against Ball, restraining him from doing further damage to the castle walls by removing more earth from the western mound.
In making the excavations, three Roman coins, and the iron head of an arrow, bent and blunted at the point, were found. Two of the coins are so much cankered and defaced, that it is impossible to decypher them; but the other is a Galba in good preservation. On the obverse around the head of the Emperor is the inscription IMP. SER . GALBA CAESAR AVG . P: M. and on the reverse is the legend DIVA AVGVSTA, with the figure of Concord holding a chaplet in her right hand, and a hasta pura in the left. This may be considered rather a scarce coin, as the emperor Galba reigned less than seven months, having succeeded Nero in the middle of the year of our Lord 63, and fallen a sacrifice to his avarice and severity at the very commencement of the year following, in which short period no very great number of medals could be coined. FREDERICK BURTON.
A reconstruction by David Vale of how it looked is here:
The wretched “Ball” is apparently a certain Philip Ball, as an 1854 guidebook to Lincoln, The Strangers’ illustrated guide through Lincoln, by George Lockyer, p.6 makes plain. It also documents the process of widespread destruction of the Roman walls then in progress.
The 1856 History, gazetteer and directory of Lincolnshire by William White, p.65 adds that
the arch was completely bared, and exhibited a counterpart of the north gate, with this difference, that no posterns could be found, nor could any traces be found to shew that there had been any. After gratifying the eyes of many antiquaries for a few days, the whole fell down, but not before a very excellent sketch had been made of it, which has since been lithographed.
There is, therefore, possibly an original sketch somewhere, maybe with a plan?
Again my sincere thanks to Dr Green for making this information accessible to the rest of us!
I came to blogging comparatively late, and I was never one of the “cool kids” anyway. But here I am still, while the grandly named “blogosphere” has passed into history.
I read two very interesting posts recently on the demise of blogging, destroyed by social media and click-driven media. ….
“I feel entirely the same way about the blogging golden age. What was precious about it was its simple integrity: A writer gets to explore his craft and develop his own audience. We weren’t in it for the money or the clicks or the followers. We were in it for the core experience shared between a writer and a reader — and the enormous freedom that removing the editorial gatekeepers unlocked. It was a brief period, but an alive one, and it was largely lost — or abandoned — because of a major failure of nerve on the part of most print media….”
“But there’s hope on the horizon again. The sewer of most of Twitter is now so rank that even addicts have begun to realize that they are sinking in oceans of shitholery. Facebook is long overdue for a collapse, and the old institutions are showing signs of developing more character and coherence….”
Social media really is a sewer, and I attribute much of the evaporation of the blogosphere to Twitter. It’s much easier to find an instant audience on Twitter than to build the relationship with readers to get them to come to your website. Twitter pundits are the worst pundits, counting their worth based on “followers” (many of whom are fake and purchased).
I saw this on the 5th February. It seems prescient, with the mob now baying for Facebook’s blood (if on largely spurious grounds).
The centralisation of the web is an evil. It has placed the web in the hands of a tiny handful of people, none of them worthy of our trust. Wikipedia sucked out of the web the joy of research, and replaced it with an official truth decided by trolls and perverts and who knows what. Facebook was always dishonest. Twitter has turned into a platform for censorship.
What started off as a world in which anyone might be heard is now all about deciding who may be allowed to speak. Instead of a place where anybody could start a blog, or a website, on equal terms with everyone else, we have this tiny number of corporations.
Fortunately this too will pass. Let us hope that better days lie ahead.
Let’s continue with translating the “Annals” of Sa`id ibn Bitriq, the Melkite patriarch of Alexandria in the 10th century.
1. After him reigned David, son of Yassà. From the departure of the sons of Israel from Egypt to the kingdom of David there had passed 606 years; from Abraham to the kingdom of David, 1,113 years; from Fāliq to the reign of David, 1,654 years; from the flood to the kingdom of David, 2,185 years; from Adam to the kingdom of David, 4,441 years. At the age of thirty David, son of Yassà, reigned over all the tribes of Israel. He reigned forty years and six months, of which seven and six months were at Hibrūn, and thirty-three at Jerusalem. The head of Saul’s soldiers was Abnīr, son of Nīr. Abnir killed ‘Ashā’il (1), brother of Yuwāb. Yuwāb then went out with his men and killed three hundred and sixty men of Abnīr’s, burying his brother ‘Ashā’īl at Bethlehem. After the killing of Saul, Abnīr took Yasūsit (2), son of Saul, and proclaimed him at Ğal’àd, as king of the sons of Ephraim and of the sons of Israel. Yasūsit was forty years old at the time he began to reign. Between the soldiers of Saul and those of David there were many wars and many deaths. Saul had a concubine named Risfà (3). Abnīr took her for himself, but Yasūsit, son of Saul, forbade him. Abnīr became irritated and went over to David asking for his protection. David accepted him and left him at liberty. Yuwāb, son of Sāruyā (4) and husband of David’s sister, took Abnīr, who was the commander of David’s soldiers, and had him killed to avenge the death of ‘Ashā’īl, brother of Yuwāb. David became very annoyed when he learned of it, and he ordered all his soldiers to tear their clothes and weep over Abnīr. Then he had him buried at Hibrūn. There were two brothers among the commanders of Saul, one named Rihāb and the other named Bā‘anā, of Rimmūn (5), of the tribe of Beniamin. When they heard that Abnīr had been killed, they went at night (6) to the house of Yasūsit, son of Saul, and they set fire to the door, went in and killed him. They then took his head and brought it to David. But David had their hands and feet cut off, had them killed and hanged. The head of Yasūsit, son of Saul, was buried in the tomb of Abnīr.
2. David founded the city of Ūshā and he called it the city of David, which is now Sihyūn (7). When the kings of the foreign tribes heard that David had become king, they gathered to fight him. David confronted them with his army, killed them and annihilated them, thus consolidating the foundations of his reign. The counselor of David was called Yūshàfāt, son of Akhlīq (8). Hīram, king of Sūr (9), sent him as a gift wood of cedar and fir, with which David built a temple. He gathered the chiefs of the sons of Israel and he went to the house of Abīnādāb. He brought out the ark and placed it on a cart. The wagon was led by ‘Uzza and Ahyū, sons of Abīnādāb (10), two Israelites of the descendants of Qāhāt, son of Levi, because no one else of the Israelites could carry the ark apart from the descendants of Levi. In loading the ark on the cart they covered it with fabric, and between the ark and the people there was a distance of a thousand cubits. ‘Uzzā and Ahyū had already loaded the ark onto the cart when the bullocks leaned on their legs and the ark threatened to fall. ‘Uzza then grabbed the ark but he fell dead to the ground. David was frightened and he had the ark brought to the house of ‘Ubaydādūm the Hittite (11). The ark remained with him for three months. David later took the ark away from the house of ‘Ubaydādūm. Around the ark there were seven rows of men with trumpets, flutes and all sorts of musical instruments. David wore a colorful robe, and he danced and strutted before the ark. He then placed the ark in the middle of the tent that David himself had raised at Giluwā (12).[1] David slaughtered many heifers and rams. The ark was made of cedar wood, it was long, wide and tall a cubit and a half and all covered with gold.
In my previous post, I put up a picture of a vessel, a cista or modius, surmounted by a cock, which belonged to the High Eunuch (archigallus) of Cybele at Ostia, M. Modius Maxximus. In fact there is a pun here; the Latin for a cock is a gallus, which is depicted on top of a large modius (modius maximus).
Here is the image from yesterday again.
In fact the image is also available on Wikimedia Commons here, where the source is given as Rieger, Heiligtümer in Ostia, 1994. The image is no clearer, tho.
Looking at this intently, some things are visible.
The syrinx or pan-pipes are in the middle. To the left seems to be an animal with a tail, and above that a head wearing a phrygian cap. Is there something above that also?
The picture leaves much unclear; and I have been attempting to track down more images. This is not simple. The item was held in the Lateran museum; but this has long since been moved to the Vatican. But surely there is a published drawing?
One annoyance in 19th century scholarship is the use of abbreviations for references. In case my struggles may help others – or at least turn up in Google, let me outline how I went about this.
Thus Decharme tells us in his article (p.288 n.7 and 8) that Visconti’s publication of the cista may be found in “Annal. Inst. Arch., 1868, p.390 et suiv; Ibid., 1869, p.242″. Graillot says the item is studied on p.240 ff. That’s helpful; if you don’t already know what that might be, you aren’t going to find out from here.
Luckily we have the internet. After some difficulty I found this:
Annali dell’Instituto di Corrispondenza Archeologica = Annales de l’Institut de Correspondance Archéologique
And found it at Arachne, here, attached to the 1877 volume. It required a bit of fiddling to find the list of volumes, which led me to volume 41 (1869), which – again with some fiddling – can be downloaded. Volume 40 (1868) does not appear to be there. The resulting PDF is enormous. p.240-5 seem to deal with the cista. But no image. On p.240 tho is a reference – infuriatingly abbreviated also – to “la nostra tav. VIIIa n. 1”. On p.245 I find references to “Mon. dell’Inst. Vol. VIIII tavv.” and Showerman refers to “Mon. dell’ Ist. IX, tav. 8 a. 1”; not helped by a misspelling.
Guessing, therefore, I substitute “monumenti” for “annales” and get “monumenti dell’instituto di corrispondenza archeologica”. And … this does exist! (as does “bulletini dell’instituto di corrispondenza archeologica” – what a system). This likewise points me to Arachne, and, searching in Arachne, clicking on “books”, then “list” leads me to volume 9, 1869. There it is! And the drawing is as follows (click to enlarge):
The “statua di Atti” I have cropped. The “utensile sacro” is our cista. Both found in the excavations of Ostia.
Zooming on the left-hand side, we get this:
The three figures that Visconti thought he saw are certainly present. The top one is supposed to be Attis, the middle one Zeus Idaios or possibly a river, the bottom one a lion (sacred to Cybele), while the vertical elements are reeds.
In the absence of a better image, it’s hard to see more.
