A twitter thread by @EzhmaarSul from June 11, 2023, made some interesting points about the use in English of spellings like “Nikaia” rather than “Nicaea”. Few will have seen it, and I’ve never seen another public discussion of the subject. So let’s give it a bit more visibility.
It went as follows:
Something I really hate about modern amateur historians (and which will leak into the professional class as these amateurs achieve doctorates) is the mixing of Greek and Latin spellings of Greek names. I’ve fallen prey to the same because of the ubiquity of amateur historians.
It starts with people wanting to use phonetic spellings of closer to the original Greek.
This urge comes from a deranged, nerdish desire to “well actually” people through text. Not as malicious as BCE, but coming from an adjacent place in petty souls.
“It’s Nikaia, not Nicaea!”
Not only does this look ugly and wrong in modern English, which is based on Latin rules of spelling and grammar, but it betrays a certain philistinism.
Greeks don’t use our alphabet! You’re broadcasting to us, “I don’t know how to pronounce this unless I spell it wrong.”
This also screws up scholarship. We have centuries of scholarship referring to Alexius Comnenus and John Palaeologus. Then along comes some redditor-turned-PHD writing about “Alexius Komnenos” and “Ioannes Palaiologos.”
And they invariably f**k it up.
“Oh Theodoros is obviously Theodore, so I’ll call him Theodore Laskaris in my paper… but Ioannes is exotic! I’ll call him Ioannes even though everyone recognizes it’s the Greek version of ‘John.’”
Don’t get me started on “Constantine.”
Just stick with the Latin and Anglophone spellings, you buffoons.
I think the author has a point. It does look hideous. It does create a barrier. It makes Greek history look barbarous.
There is a definite tendency among elites to create barriers for others in order to advance themselves, to order others around while feeling smug. How else did we end up with printed Latin texts where the useful modern separation of consonant and vowel, of “i”/”j” and “u”/”v”, was actually and deliberately abandoned? So… I rather agree.
I’ve just become aware of a blog that started in 2021 called The Three Pillars. It’s written by Scott Cooper, another layman like myself. The blog is devoted to church history stuff, just as I do here. It’s very nice to see a new blog in this space!
The first of these is an extremely interesting experiment. The author modestly confesses that he has almost no Latin, so it must have taken some courage to venture out there and have a go! What he has done is to get the Latin text, and translate it bit by bit using ChatGPT. This he is controlling using Google Translate. The output is in two columns, Latin on the left, English on the right, so be aware of this if you are viewing it on a handheld mobile device.
I’ve only glanced at a few lines, but it’s not bad at all; certainly better than no translation at all. Fascinating!
One glitch that happens in Google Translate is that it omits a clause; but using two services should catch that. I would imagine that over time the author will find his Latin improving enormously, just as mine did back in the late 90s.
The “Octavius” of Minucius Felix is one of the most attractive works of early Latin Christianity. It features three friends going to the baths at Ostia, when one of them kisses his hand to a statue of Serapis. Reproved by the other, the three settle down to debate the merits of paganism and Christianity. There is a lovely translation included in the Loeb Tertullian volume.
The “Octavius” is preserved in a 9th century manuscript of the work of Arnobius the Elder against the pagans. This manuscript is now in Paris, where it is BNF lat. 1661, and online. In this manuscript, Minucius Felix appears without identification as “book 8”. It would appear that, when Arnobius was copied from a collection of scrolls into a parchment codex, the modern book form, the scribe found an extra roll in the box. Presuming that it belonged with the rest, he copied it too.
Here’s the beginning of the work, on f.162r:
BNF lat. 1611, f.162r (excerpt): the beginning of Minucius Felix “Octavius”, under the title of book 8 of Arnobius.
and here’s the end on folio 190r.
There is no external evidence as to when Minucius Felix wrote. The Quod idola dii non sint attributed to Cyprian makes extensive use of it, or so I understand; but this work itself may not be authentic. If it is, it perhaps dates to 248-9, after Cyprian’s conversion and before his ordination.[1].
But the really thorny question is whether the work is considerably earlier. Is it, in fact, second century, dating to 150 AD or later? Or is it later than Tertullian, whose Apologeticum is securely dated to 197 AD? For quite a large chunk of material that appears in Tertullian’s Apologeticum also appears in Minucius Felix.
As long ago as 2001, I wrote a page online with whatever quotes on the date of the work I could find. It is still here. The tendency was to place Minucius Felix later. Tertullian makes the same arguments in his earlier Ad Nationes, but extends them in the Apologeticum. It is hard to think that Tertullian borrowed some of Minucius Felix in his first work; and then went back and borrowed some more in the second!
But the classic discussion is in C. Becker, Der “Octavius” des Minucius Felix, (1967), p.74–97. I have a feeling that many anglophone scholars have rather shied away from a volume of German. Indeed I have myself not felt any urge this evening to go through 25 pages of German.
Fortunately T. D. Barnes summarises the key points for us, in a review of M. Edwards, M. Goodman, S. Price and C. Rowland, “Pagan Monotheism in Late Antiquity” in Phoenix 55 (2001), pp.142-162 (JSTOR). On p.150-1 we read (paragraphing mine):
Price reverts to the untenable view that Minucius Felix wrote his Octavius in the late second century before Tertullian (p.111-112). He makes it transparently clear that he has either not read Carl Becker’s proof that Minucius Felix copies Tertullian or not understood the force of Becker’s arguments when he asserts “‘parallels’ cannot establish the priority of either author” (112).
That observation applies only to cases where priority is inferred from a comparison of two texts or authors without any external control.
But Becker did not merely compare the two Christian writers with each other. He first analysed how Minucius Felix adapts Plato, Cicero’s De natura deorum and Seneca (1967: 10-74); only then did he turn to the relationship between Minucius Felix and Tertullian in order to show that the former adapts the latter in exactly the same way as he adapts Plato, Cicero, and Seneca and, furthermore, that in some passages he has combined his Christian model with his pagan sources (1967: 74-97).
It was the introduction of Plato, Cicero, and Seneca into the argument that provided undeniable proof of the priority of Tertullian – as Becker himself explicitly observed (1967: 79-80, 90, 94).
To paraphrase, Minucius is adapting material from Plato, Cicero, and Seneca in a very particular way. The “parallel” material, taken from Tertullian, relates to the text of Tertullian in the same manner as his excerpts from Plato / Cicero / Seneca relate to the original text of Plato / Cicero / Seneca . Indeed he is combining Tertullian with these pagan writers. Tertullian on the other hand is simply writing what he wants to say, and is adapting nobody.
[1]Geoffrey D. Dunn, “References to Mary in the writings of Cyprian”, in: Papers Presented at the Fourteenth International Conference on Patristic Studies Held in Oxford 2003, vol. 4 (2006), p.371. Preview.↩
I’ve been away on holiday in York. It was very grey and rained a lot of the time. But I stayed in a hotel in a very central location and I enjoyed myself anyway. One day I went up onto the city walls, using the stairs at the medieval gateway named Mickelgate Bar. I walked around a section, and came down in front of the Yorkshire Museum, from where the photograph at the end was taken.
Various items came to my attention while I was away. Naturally I ignored them. Only a fool picks up email while on holiday. Burnout is a real risk for people of our sort, so we really must take our holidays. Likewise if you wrote to me, pardon my failure to respond.
By coincidence I also learned of the Brill fonts. These are commercial fonts, designed by that publishing house to give a common appearance to their books. They are of interest because they implement a lot of odd characters useful to manuscript researchers. They are free for non-commercial use.
I also managed to get banned from Twitter for a week. Once more onto the naughty step, dear friends. It’s about the third time now, in each case because I made an off-the-cuff humorous reply to something which their censor-bot didn’t like. So I have ended up browsing my old Mastodon account instead. I was also able to create a Bluesky account, although I have yet to work out how to feed my posts there. Twitter gets a lot of bad press these days, but most of this seems to be politically motivated. All the same I’m rather in favour of dispersing social media among more than one site, to be honest.
But in the process I came across a truly interesting and perceptive article by Cory Doctorow on just why sites like Facebook, Google, Amazon, are getting steadily worse and worse to use. It appeared in January, but was reposted in Wired, and it clearly struck a chord with others. It is unfortunate that the author gave it a coarse title: Tiktok’s enshittification.
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
Ignore the first four paragraphs. The next few summarise the Doctorow article. But then… it gets interesting.
Well, if you use a public library in the United States or Canada, and you ever access their ebooks or audiobooks, you’re almost certainly familiar with the OverDrive platform or its mobile app Libby. That’s because OverDrive, a private corporation, has a monopoly on managing the availability and distribution of ebooks and audiobooks for government-funded public libraries in North America. …
I saw that in June 2020, OverDrive was sold to global investment firm KKR…
Even in the world of investment capital, where evil is arguably banal, KKR is notoriously vile. They are the World Champions of Grabbing All The Money And Leaving Everyone Else In The Shit.
“In the popular imagination, private equity is often portrayed as a vulture, or some other scavenger that feasts on the sick and dying,” writes Hannah Levintova in Mother Jones. “But the bulk of the work done by modern-day private equity firms is not to finish off sick companies, but rather to stalk and gut the healthy ones.”
Calling them “vampire capitalists” would be more accurate.
Enshittified platforms are not an accidental outcome; they are just one of the inevitable dessicated corpses the vampires leave behind.
And these vampire capitalists currently have a chokehold on the digital catalogs of the public library systems of North America.
Again, if you can wade through the article, it will be enlightening. The term “enshittification” seems to have caught on, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it starts to shape policy.
Anyway, enough about boring stuff. Here’s my photograph of the splendour of York Minster!
