Author: Roger Pearse

From my diary – Philo of Carpasia and his “Letter to Eucarpios” – Part 2

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Many thanks indeed to Diego and Matthieu Cassin who both contributed a lot of useful information in response to my last post.  Let me summarise their comments.

It seems that the K. Hadjioannos (1975) edition of Philo of Carpasia’s Letter to Eucarpios is a straight reprint of a text printed by A. Papadopoulos-Kerameus’ in Analekta Hierosolymitikes Stachyologias, vol. 1 (1891), item 16, 393-399, minus the apparatus and biblical references. His text was taken from MS St Sabbas 408 (9-10th c.), folios 34-40.   Interestingly the manuscript leads off with two works by a certain John Carpathius.

The Analekta volume is a collection of texts printed from the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate in Jerusalem and its churches in the surrounding area.  Papadopoulos-Kerameus in fact made a detailed catalogue of the manuscripts at the Patriarchate, which includes manuscripts from the monastery of St Sabbas (or Mar Saba as it is often known).  The Mar Saba manuscript appears in this catalogue in vol. 2 (1894) p.536, entry 3 (online here), although I learn from Pinakes that more up-to-date catalogues also exist.  Apparently microfilms of around half the manuscripts at the patriarchate were made in 1950 by an American expedition.

The marvellous Pinakes database also lists another manuscript of the Letter to Eucarpios here.  It is in Greece, on Mount Athos, in the Iviron monastery.  It is Iviron 673 (numbered 4793 in the Lambros catalogue), and dated to the 14th century.  Here the Letter follows two works by Chrysostom, so clearly the Mar Saba manuscript is not just a straight copy of the Iviron manuscript.

I’ve begun to scan the modern Greek translation of the Letter to Eucarpios.  I don’t know a word of modern Greek, but I thought it possible that Google Translate or ChatGPT might be able to do something with it.  Google Translate certainly attempted it, but the results were not very good.  ChatGPT on the other hand has given a very fluent translation of the whole thing, which I will post once I have tinkered with the output a bit.  At one point in particular the thought is obvious but the raw output obscures it.

The letter is written to a monk who is just starting out on the ascetic life and is despairing, and wondering, “what’s the point?”  The response is more interesting than you might imagine.

Update 24/09/24: This is also Letter 42 of Basil. See here.

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Graham Kendrick, “Paid on the Nail” now available as MP3s

Posted on by Roger Pearse

This will mean nothing to most readers of the website, but today I learned by accident that the Graham Kendrick 1975 album “Paid on the Nail” is available for purchase online on his website here.  You have to look for the links, but look for “Paid on the Nail / Album Download:”  The album was originally released on Vinyl, and a CD was produced, but it has been unavailable for decades.

Looking at this took me back to days long ago, days even before I was a Christian.  In 1977 I had started to attend a church youth group, although I knew nothing about the gospel, drawn by the presence of a young lady whom I knew from the sixth form at school.  I heard the album played there.  So I decided to buy a copy.  I walked down to the Christian bookshop in Stafford, the Beacon, which I had never entered, although I knew where it was.  I went in, very shyly.  Conversations stopped and all eyes turned on the stranger.  I walked to the music section, and found the album, and bought it, and escaped.  It was the first Christian music that I ever owned.

I remember taking it with me to Oxford when I went up a somewhat later.  I remember setting up my hi-fi in an attic room – the “worst in the college”, according to the bursar – and playing this album there to help me settle in.  In fact each time I moved room, and then moved house, I played it, starting with the first track, “Beautiful Night”.  A little custom that I have observed all my life.

The album has been part of the soundtrack of my life all these years.  I still have the original vinyl copy.  It is good to have it on my phone now.  I wish his other early albums were available.  Some of these have memories attached to them also, although none so deeply.

If it means anything to you, as it does to me, you can now hear it again for a small sum.  Well worthwhile, I think.

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From my diary – Philo of Carpasia and his “Letter to Eucarpios” – Part 1

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Last week I heard the name of Philo of Carpasia for the first time.  This Philo was ordained bishop of Carpasia in Cyprus by our old friend Epiphanius of Salamis, in the late 4th century.  He is the author of a Commentary on the Song of Songs, CPG 3810.  This is preserved in 10 Greek manuscripts, the earliest 12th and 13th centiry, and half of them 17th century.  There is also an ancient Latin translation of it, made at the order of Cassiodorus in the 6th century, and preserved in a single Vatican manuscript (Vat. lat. 5704) also of the 6th century.  Comparison of the two reveals that the surviving Greek text has been abbreviated a bit.  There’s a text in PG40, 27-154.  The ancient Latin version of this Commentary on the Song of Songs has been edited critically with an Italian translation.

A second work attributed to Philo of Carpasia exists… somewhere.  It’s a Letter to Eucarpios.  It’s not listed in the CPG.  But both the Commentary and the Letter to Eucarpios have been printed with a modern Greek translation in a set of volumes produced in Cyprus: K. Hadjioannos Ἡ ἀρχαία Κύπρος εἰς τὰς Ἑλληνικὰς πήγας / Hē archaia Kypros eis tas Hellēnikas pēgas, vol. 3, Leucosia: Ekd. Hieras Archiepiskopēs Kyprou (1975), where they form an appendix.  The Letter is p..534-545.  The Commentary is just the PG text, I believe.  Update 24/09/24: This is also Letter 42 of Basil. See here.

Fortunately a well-stocked research library lies relatively near.  I spent some of yesterday renewing a reader’s card, and this morning I drove up there to collect it, and to look at the Philo of Carpasia material.  But disaster – the library has a super-duper photocopying/scanning system, all run from a central server, and this was out of action.  The server itself was inaccessible, and although the machines made scanning/copying noises, nothing came out.  Apparently a security fix had been deployed hastily a few months ago, and had caused continual problems over the summer.

This configuration is not at all uncommon in libraries today.  In the IT world we would call it “single point of failure” – one thing going down takes down everything.  I began to wish that the library still had its coin-operated photocopiers!  Less high-tech, but infinitely more resilient.  Sadly the trend in modern society is to introduce ever more technology, whether necessary or not, and in the process make everything very brittle.

What made things worse was that the library staff, although very helpful, thought that things were working, or might be working.   But I think that in reality they knew that they were not working, purely because they were getting a steady stream of people asking for assistance.  It took me quite some time and frustration before I realised that my plans for the day were well and truly frustrated.  Had they been upfront about the problems, then I might have deferred my visit!

Of course I had my smartphone with me.  So, despite all the problems, I could still take photographs.  It wasn’t ideal, because the pages come out curved.  You need to place the book face-down on a plate.  But still I was, with some labour, able to photograph the pages of the Letter to Eucarpios.  But I abandoned any hope of doing more.  Plainly the Fates had taken my thread of life in their fingers and introduced a knot!

Tomorrow I shall look at these photographs and see what can be made out of them.  I sat in the canteen and stared at the proemium, and it looks as if Hadjioannos was reprinting from somewhere else, which he unhelpfully alluded to only vaguely.  We shall see.

Thankfully he prefaced these Greek-only volumes with a page in English:

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A sudden rush of emails has arrived.  I can only conclude that the summer is over, people are returning to their bulging email inboxes, and dropping emails to me.  Apologies to anyone that I have not yet replied to!

One of the most interesting came from a mathematical gentleman interested in the calculation of the date of Easter.  He had found a 2006 page with an English translation of material by Dionysius Exiguus, and emailed me some interesting and difficult questions. Part of the difficulty was that I didn’t actually remember anything about that page, after almost twenty years!  I ended up hunting through old emails, and writing a preface explaining what it is, which I placed here.  I also tracked down the Latin text used, that of Rodolphe Audette of Laval University, Canada, uploaded some time before 2000, and long since gone.  I placed a copy here.  I did expand the æ and œ ligatures, however.  I really ought to revise the preface, which I started to translate and then gave up!

The research materials for a post on a certain Philo of Carpasia are gathered, and all I have to do is write it.  I’d never heard of the chap.  But it seems that he was a bishop in Cyprus, appointed by Epiphanius of Salamis, and the author of an extant allegorical commentary on the Song of Songs.  The commentary is real; the information about his biography is frankly sketchy.

I hope that everyone enjoyed their summer.  It is now time to start booking for winter breaks!

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A Voyage to the Levant in 1698

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve been dipping into a 1698 travelogue of the Near East.  It was written by a Dutchman, Cornelis de Bruyn, and thankfully translated more or less immediately into French, and then into English in 1702.  The author was a draughtsman, and made numerous drawings of everything he saw.

I’ve been looking at the chapters on Egypt.  The author seems to have gone no further than Cairo.  His travels in the region were all under armed guard, as bandits were everywhere, and the country was unsafe.  Nor were the guards always to be relied on.

Unfortunately the volume is larded with extracts from books that he read, and has otherwise limited interest.

Here are a couple of extracts.  Page 152:

Next to Khalits, which is the longest street in the city, is the Bazar Street. where market is kept every Monday and Thursday, and where one meets with so many People, especially on market-days, that one has much ado to get through the crowd. ’Tis a fine street, very long and broad; at one end of which is a Bezistan, or Market-Hall, which is full of as fine shops as are at Constantinople; and at the other end is the market for slaves, viz. white slaves, of whom they sell of all sorts, men, women , and children, &c. There is likewise another market where they sell black slaves of both sexes.

As to the number of its inhabitants, I never saw a city so populous; and a man has much ado in the markets and other places of concourse to thrust through the crowd, besides he must take care of his pocket, for the Arabians are the greatest filchers in the world, and have a good knack at it.

The rest of the inhabitants, as in almost all parts of Egypt, consist of Turks, Moors (some of which are very black) ,Jews and Christians, viz. Coptes and Greeks: As for Europeans there are but few of them, and those that I saw there in my time were most of them French, who had their consul. As for the English and Dutch, I did not meet with one of them. This multitude of people is the cause that in the time of the Plague a prodigious number of them die, a thousand or fifteen hundred in a day is very common; and tho’ during the whole course of the contagion two hundred thousand have been swept away, yet there is hardly any miss of them. At some times six or seven hundred thousand have died of the Plague. Add to this, that there are no women, or at least but very few, to be seen in the streets, because in the Levant they have not the same liberty as elsewhere.

After leaving Cairo he returned to Alexandria.  (chapter 43, p.171):

De Bruyn, Alexandria. (plate no. 97)

A day or two after I took the draught of a prospect within the city, which represents an avenue that leads into Alexandria on one side through a breach in the wall with some towers that are fallen down, as is to be seen N. 97. From thence is to be seen the open sea with the two castles, that guard the passage one on the right, the other on the left hand, as they are marked with the letters A B. These two castles are placed so exactly opposite to one another, that, as they told me, when they fire off together, the bullets sometimes meet and dash one another to pieces.

On this side is likewise to be seen the remains of Cleopatra’s Palace which was on the sea-shore. By the stately chambers and apartments, the ruins of which still remain, ’tis but reasonable to suppose that it was a very proud and magnificent Building, ’tis marked at the letter C.

Zooming in a bit:

Hard by this Palace there is an obelisk full of hieroglyphic characters; ’tis to be seen N. 98. on that side which I took the pains to design with all its figures, just as they appeared upon the obelisk. There are but only two or three of them which are not well done, doubtless it is because they are worn by the long process of time. Let this be as it will, I have represented them just as I found them. For not understanding what those Characters meant, I was not willing to alter any thing in this, no more than in any of the rest, and I have left the explication to those who understand it, provided they will admit of any explication. …

Plate 99 is another and larger view of the ruins of “Cleopatra’s Palace”, much of which he says is fallen into the sea.  Adjacent to this building, although not depicted, was a round tower of the 9th century, part of the Tulunid walls, and known as the “Tower of the Romans” and this survived to the beginning of the 20th century.  Photographs from 1870 exist.

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Back into the time machine – Greek words embedded in the Syriac of the “Life of Mar Aba”

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Back in 2013 I translated the “Life of Mar Aba” from the German translation into English, with an introduction.  Unless I am mistaken, this remains the only English translation of this very interesting text.  It captures the period in the 6th century when Christianity began to become acceptable in the Sassanid Persian empire.  At the start of his episcopate, Christianity was an illegal religion, practised only by the lower classes.  By the end of it, when Mar Aba died, the King of Kings promptly appointed a trusted friend as patriarch.

The process of change is visible within the “Life”.  Mar Aba himself was a Persian nobleman, and could deal with the nobles as equals.  What we see in the “Life” is the gradual realisation, by the Sassanid monarch, that the presence of the Christians might be a solution to a perpetual problem for these monarchs, namely the power of the Zoroastrian clergy.  The Sassanids were always threatened by these fire priests, who even deposed one king and ruled directly themselves for a few years.  But priests distracted by a religious problem are much less of a threat to the secular power.  Again and again we see demands for the execution of Mar Aba.  And every time the king loudly agrees with the priests, expresses his outrage, and … does not execute him.  The king becomes more powerful, and the fire priests have to come to him with their problem.  By the time of the Muslim conquest, there were Christians everywhere, and the Sassanids openly used them as a counter-balance to the Zoroastrian clergy.

Today I received an enquiry about my translation, asking why it has Greek words embedded in it.

The short answer is that they were present in the old German translation in the BKV series that I used (online as electronic text here, and in PDF here).

The longer answer is that I do not know.  The introduction told me that the Syriac was printed by Paul Bedjan in 1895, and happily I found the volume here.  The Life of Mar Aba is section 20, and begins on page 206.

The Archive.org scan is not the best in the world, as you can see.  Unfortunately the days when I could read any Syriac are now behind me.

But I suspect that the words given in Greek in the German translation are what the Syriac uses – Greek words transliterated into Syriac characters and used in the absence of a native Syriac word for the item.

Interesting anyway!

UPDATE (22 August 2024): Grigory Kessel has kindly answered the question, in the comments:

Those are Greek loanwords. Many of such loanwords have a long history and were naturalised rather early.

By the way, there is now a new edition of the life of Mar Aba with a French translation:

F. Jullien (ed.), Histoire de Mar Abba, Catholicos de l’Orient; Martyres de Mar Grigor, général en chef du roi Khusro Ier et de Mar Yazd-Panah, juge et gouverneur (CSCO 658/659; Scriptores Syri 254/255), Louvain: Peeters, 2015.

Thank you!

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English translation of letters on the Acacian schism in the early 5th century

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve just come across this rather marvellous blog post, “The Libellus of Hormisdas and the Failure of Policy”. This is at the Ubi Petrus Ibi Ecclesia blog, previously unknown to me.

The following are translations of key letters in the Acacian Schism and will be added to over time.

A fairly niche subject, but wonderful to have these texts!

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Fragments of two lost plays by Euripides discovered in Egypt

Posted on by Roger Pearse

In November 2022 a Colorado classical scholar, Yvona Trnka-Amrhein, was sent a digital photograph of a papyrus containing 98 lines of text, and measuring 10.5 inches square, by Basem Gehad, an Egyptian archaeologist with the ministry of tourism and antiquities.  The papyrus came from Philadelphia, and the two scholars had been working together also at Hermopolis Magna.

Investigation of the find using the TLG quickly revealed that the material was Greek tragedy: 22 of the lines proved to be a slightly different version of material from two plays by Euripides, the Polyidus and the Ino.  The rest was new, and probably from the same source.

There is a little more information here.  Unfortunately there is no photograph of the papyrus, or other details of the find.  Let us hope that this swiftly becomes available.

It’s out there, people.  There is more of the literature of antiquity just sitting there, awaiting discovery.  Rather good news, all the same.

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I finished OCRing the Novesianus edition of Ephraem Latinus, De Beatitudine Animae, although with some difficulty.  The text grew more and more abbreviated, until on the last page every single word was abbreviated somehow, anyhow.  It looks as if the editor/printer had allocated a certain amount of space, and got it wrong.  Very odd.

I saw some more marginal notes, and these seem to be corrections, or emendations.  The publisher is clearly printing a manuscript, but these are places at which he thinks the text before him is in error.

The text is divided into four chapters, each with a short introduction, just as in the incunable; but the introductory text is not always the same as the incunable.

It seems that there is a 6th century manuscript of this ancient Latin translation of Ephraem, at the Vatican Library, and it is online!  I’ve not got my hands on it yet tho.

I don’t feel like doing any text critical stuff at the moment, so I’ve started passing the electronic text into Google Translate and ChatGPT, and working on the output.  The text is addressed to monks, and those living a monastic life.  The Latin seems fairly simple.  It starts with a series of beatitudes, and then moves into exhortations to the brothers.

This little collection (parva corpus) of sermons by “Effrem” seems to have been popular.  There were copies in a good many libraries in the Dark Ages.

I confess that I am getting a little fed up of medieval monasticism and hagiography – I would like to return to the hard mediterranean light of antiquity – but I’ll make an English version of this.

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A very strange summer here, with hardly any summery weather.  I’ve been feeling rather stale for a while now, as you do, so I was looking forward very much to my holiday.  We had booked a trip away to a seaside town and left ten days ago.  Unfortunately my girlfriend got norovirus on day one of the holiday, and I followed a day later.  We endured an awful week in pyjamas in our hotel rooms.  Then, at the end, we we were obliged to vacate before we were actually fit to travel.  I am extremely thankful to God that I was able to drive us home safely.  The day before a short walk had left me trembling.  Thankfully my recovery is now well in hand.  But the process of putting my system back together means sitting up for a good hour after meals.  This in turn lends itself to doing some light work!

So I’ve started to create an electronic text of Ephraem Latinus, De Beatitudine Animae, from the 1547 Novesianus edition.  While I already have an electronic text of the later Menchusius edition of 1563, it would be handy to have both.  Then you can machine-compare the two.  It’s also an undemanding task, which I can pick up and put down.

The number of abbreviations in the printed text seems to be increasing, however.  These are sometimes a bit weird.  A few minutes ago I found this section.

I.e. “anima, frater * confuge semper ad Deum, …”  I liked the “per” at the end, which I have never ever seen before.

I’m expanding abbreviations as I go, and putting an “@” in the text where I am unsure, for later attention.  Rightly or wrongly, it is almost as if it is the printer who is doing the abbreviating, rather than any editor.  Who knows?  Paper can hardly have been a factor.  Possibly this was just what was in his exemplar.

The marginal note “confurge” is also interesting.  Where does it come from?

The earlier incunable with the same divisions and chapter introductions – unlike the Menchusius – gives no help.  And this is even more abbreviated:

The “semper” also has the “per” abbreviation at the end, preceded by simply “s”!  I am so glad that I didn’t try to transcribe that.

Lots of mysteries here, none of which need attention now.  I shall just keep correcting the OCR output in Abbyy Finereader, expanding the abbreviations, and we’ll see where we get to.

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