Month: April 2022

Les Oeuvres complètes de Saint Augustin : évêque d’hippone – a 19th century translation

Posted on by Roger Pearse

It seems that there is a 32 volume (plus a volume of indexes) French translation from the 1860s of all the works of St Augustine.  Four translators are listed on the title page – Peronne, Vincent, Ecalle and Charpentier.  It’s published in Paris by Louis Vives.  How good the translation is, I do not know.  But it is something to have it available, and I certainly had never heard of it.

Nearly all the volumes can be found at Archive.org here.  The only one that I did not see is volume 31, and that is available at the French National Library here.

Curiously there seems to be another series of similar translations, from around the same time, in 17 volumes translated under the direction of a certain M. Raulx, and printed at Bar-le-Duc by L. Guerin.  Volume 1 of that is here.  I do not know what the connection is, but I would expect that there is one!

In these days of Google Translate, such things are valuable.

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The Byzantine Sea Walls of Thessalonica

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Thessalonica is a city that I have never visited, and have never had much awareness of.  But it is littered with Roman and Byzantine remains.

Until the 1870s, the Byzantine walls of the city were largely intact.  This included massive walls all along the sea-front.  The existence of these forms a sad testimony to the loss of control of the Mediterranean Sea – mare nostrum – by the late Roman imperial government.

Sadly the sea walls were entirely demolished by the Ottomans in the last few decades of the 19th century.  Apparently they obstructed the cooling breezes, and no doubt were a problem for trade also.  The result has been stated by Michael Vickers, “The Byzantine Sea Walls of Thessaloniki”, Balkan Studies 11 (1970) 261-274 (online here):

The plans of the Byzantine harbour and sea walls at Thessaloniki that have been produced in the past are in several respects unclear and it is my purpose in this paper to attempt, in the light of new evidence not hitherto employed in this connection, to make a more accurate reconstruction of their original layout.

The reason for the lack of clarity is that there has been so little information upon which to proceed. The walls along the shore were removed before detailed plans were made. Demolition of the wall along the shore began in 1873; we hear of part of the harbour wall being taken down in 1874, and before long there was very little of the walls in the lower city to be seen apart from a stretch of mid-fifth century wall to the north of the former Тор-Hane Ordnance Barracks.  The general outline of the sea walls at Thessaloniki is fairly clear: they ran from the Venetian White Tower in the east to a point south of the church of St Menas where the harbour wall began. This wall ran northwards to Odos Frangon, the line of which it followed westwards as far as Top-Hane.  So much is agreed upon, but when it comes to topographical details something less than unanimity prevails.

Vickers appends a couple of low-resolution drawings from 1686 and 1780, which reveal little.

But a few years ago – I can find no real details – something amazing appeared.  It was found in the Hungarian National Archive, among the photographs of the Festetics family.  It was nothing else than a photograph of the sea walls!  It was made by Abdullah Freres, some time during the 1860s.  Here it is (via Tumblr here):

Sea wall of Thessaloniki by Abdullah Freres (1860s) From a photo album owned the Festetics family. Now in the Hungarian National Archives

I don’t know where this comes from.  The Hungarian National Archives have digitised the Festetics family photographs, but they do not seem to be accessible.  One document at their site, via this page, gives a link here.  The document shows a directory of sepia images, which must be the raw images, and perhaps the photograph above has escaped from there?  I was also unable to find any news reporting.

Some decent soul has enhanced the photo here:

Isn’t that just amazing?  To go from Vickers’ doleful statements in 1970 to this?

(H/T Rome in the East here.)

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I have spent a very busy afternoon, pulling together most of the pieces of the Council of Hippo (393) and the two sessions of the Council of Carthage (397).  Despite all that I have done on this in the last twelve months, it has been rather awful.  I’m still not quite sure how to arrange all the material.

The problem is not with the edition of Charles Munier, although this is not fun to work with.  I think that the problem is caused by the material; a mass of stuff, repeated, revised, edited, abbreviated, reordered, through council after council, source after source.  It is a very tangled mass of stuff.

Editors like Mansi simply gathered together what belonged to each council.  Munier tried to follow some kind of transmission unit.  I have a feeling, tho, that the first course is the only possible course for what I want to do.

I’m trying to remember, in all this, what that original objective was.  I started with the widespread conception that the Councils of Hippo and Carthage “decided” by vote what should be in the canon of scripture.  This only works if you only quote canon 36, however.  But then that is exactly what the books all do.

I felt the answer was to present the context; the other canons, and material produced by the councils.  This is still true; but I had no conception of the sheer difficulty in working with this mass of material.  It is telling that Munier says that he spent ten years on this onerous task.  What a way to spend the 1960s!  I myself will be more than glad to be rid of this one.

The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers translated the Register of the church of Carthage, a collection of canons appended to the council of 419 (?) by the 6th century editor Dionysius Exiguus.  This contains stuff that I need to include; mostly canons of the second session of the Council of Carthage.  This evening I have been copying and pasting the relevant portions to a word document, in order to work on them further.

I think that I will largely use them as is, with minor tweaks.  At one point the translator mysteriously dropped into Jacobean English!  Thee and thou appeared all over the place; and then vanished again.  The translation veers between very literal and almost paraphrase.  At one point he just sticks the Latin word in here or there, untranslated, unfootnoted.  I infer that nobody, nobody, really read it that hard!  More interesting was a note to one canon where the translator said that the Latin was a mess and he followed the Greek translation instead.  I sympathise, I truly do.  How funny that Latin so well-used and copied should be corrupt!

Oh well.  Onward.

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