Author: Roger Pearse

From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve settled back down to translating the Life of St Nicholas by John the Deacon.  The new and improved Google Translate for Latin has made it a far easier task.  The word order was exotic, and I had to crawl through each sentence, one by one, decrypting each word.  This was tedious and time-consuming.  Now at least I have a very decent guide to each sentence, and can concentrate on individual points.

As happens sometimes, I have ended up translating the chapters – or readings, for I think these are probably readings for church services – in reverse order.  I have done chapters 15, 14 and 13, and am now wading through chapter 12.

The later chapters are of dubious authenticity.  Chapter 12 is the first – starting from the end – to have transliterations of Greek words in it, for proper names.  This reflects the fact that the Life was translated from the Greek Methodius ad Theodorum, in Naples in the 9th century.

The text is the 1751 edition of Falconius, which is fairly dodgy.  At points I think it must be corrupt.  Curiously this does not bother Google Translate at all, which laughs at spelling mistakes etc.  One word didn’t feature in any dictionary that I have, but it did not stop Google.  I would guess that Falconius has printed some odd medieval spelling.

Once I have a complete draft translation, I think that I shall have to look at manuscripts.  It is really curious that no critical edition exists.  I believe that several manuscripts are online, and it might be useful to look at these.

I also need to follow up whatever bibliographical hints I can get from the Bibliographia Hagiographica Latina.  Simply googling the BHL references will probably lead me to a few sources.

I think there is a full Italian translation of the text by Pasquale Corsi in La traslazione di San Nicola: le fonti, Bari: Biblioteca di San Nicola: Centro Studi Nicolaiani (1987) Series: Studi e testi / Centro Studi Nicolaiani 8.  But much Italian scholarship is ridiculously hard to access here, and little of it is online, or has attracted the attention of the PDF pirates.   However I gather that book might be available from the Centro Studi Nicolaiana, so I have just popped them an email to enquire.

Now back to John the Deacon!

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The April Poems in the Chronography of 354

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Only a single manuscript of the Chronography contains an image for the month of April.  This is MS Vienna 3146, which never contains the poems.  (I am told that the same image reappears in the Leiden MS Voss.Lat.Q 79, a manuscript of the Aratea!  But this I have not seen)  So we are reliant on other unillustrated manuscripts, or the indirect tradition, for the poems.  Here is the 4-line poem (tetrastich):

Contectam myrto Venerem veneratur Aprilis,
lumen veris habet, quo nitet alma Thetis
cereus et dextra flammas diffundit odoras;
balsama nec desunt, quis redolet Paphie.

April worships a Venus robed with myrtle,
He has the light of spring, in which nurturing Thetis blooms,
And the waxen candle on the right diffuses the scents of flame;
Nor is balsam wanting, of which the Paphian (Venus) is redolent.

The 2-line verse (distich), preserved in the St Gall unillustrated manuscript, is as follows:

Caesareae Veneris mensis, quo floribus arva
prompta virent, avibus quo sonat omne nemus.

This is the month of Caesar’s Venus, in which the fields are green,
resplendent with flowers, in which every wood resounds with birdsong.

Divjak and Wischmeyer add an interesting comment, that the tetrastich verse is about the relationship of Venus to April.  The picture shows an older man dancing with castanets in front of a male cult statue.  The man is perhaps a Gallus named “April”, dancing before a statue of Attis, the “Venus” of the Magna Mater cult.

The 16th century Vienna manuscript 3416 (online here) gives us the image:

Vienna 3146, f. 5v – April

The figure is treating on what look like a set of pipes, perhaps belonging to an organ.

(For more information on this series of posts, please see the Introduction to the Poems of the Chronography of 354).

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An Indian delegate at the First Council of Nicaea

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I heard an interesting story yesterday.

Also recently discovered that the Indian Christian tradition was so well established by AD 325 that the First Ecumenical Council in Nicaea had at least 1 delegate from the Indian Church.   … “India” was a more nebulous entity than the modern nation, so it may not have been within the confines of modern India, but “John the Persian, of all Persia and great India” is recorded at Nicea. Other interactions with “India” are described, like Pantaenus in 180.

The Pantaenus is from Eusebius.  But who is “John the Persian, of all Persia and great India”?

I quickly found an article by A. Mingana, “The Early Spread of Christianity in India”, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 10 (1926), 435-514 (online here), which on p.495 reads:

The second bishop of which history makes mention is John, who in the Council of Nicaea of 325 signs himself “ bishop of the Great India and Persia.”[2] If historical this John must have presumably been the bishop of a town in North India, close to the frontiers of Persia proper.

In the signatures to the decrees of the Council of Nicaea, as reproduced by Cyzicenus,[3] the same entry is found : “Joannes Persa, Ecclesiis in tota Persia et Magna India.” In 1908 [4] I treated as a fable the presence in the Council of Nicaea of this John the Persian, and for Persia I substituted Perrhe, on the Upper Euphrates. Against this view may be urged the fact that Eusebius of Caesarea was present at the Council, and that in his De Vita Constantini,[5] he actually makes mention of a bishop of Persia as present in the Council: “Quidam etiam ex Perside episcopus Synodo interfuit.” The presence, therefore, in the Council of Nicaea of a bishop John, from one of the numerous sees of Persia of the beginning of the fourth century, preferably Riwardashir, is not altogether impossible. Michael the Syrian expressly states in his history [6] that this John the Persian attended the Council of Nicaea. We must admit, however, that in a passage of Michael the Syrian quoted above, the expression “Great India” is used of Ethiopia and Arabia Felix combined. Speaking of the Council of Nicaea, Barsalibi, another well-known West Syrian writer says : “Among the Fathers of the Council Jacob of Nisibin and Ephrem his pupil, Ithalaha of Edessa, Mara of Macedonopolis, and John of Persia, were Syrians.”[1]

2. Labbé’s Sacrosancta Concilia, ii. 235. …
3. Pat. Gr. lxxxv, 1342 sq.  The author, however, is not very reliable.

This is no doubt the origin of our story.

“Cyzicenus” is Gelasius of Cyzicus, History of the Council of Nicaea ( = CPG 6034).  A quick search on the web found volume 2 of Labbé, but this (in column 227) turned out merely to reproduce the text of Gelasius of Cyzicus, book 2, chapter 28 (link here).

Gelasius was given a critical edition for the first time by G. C. Hansen, Anonyme Kirchengeschichte (Gelasius Cyzicenus, CPG 6034), de Gruyter, Berlin-New York, 2002; GCS N. F. 9.  This, being a German publication, printed without translation, of an obscure text which the editor chose to suggest is anonymous, is naturally accessible to almost nobody.  (I saw a copy offered for sale online for nearly $200!)   Luckily a kind correspondent supplied me with the page (p.85).  The chapter is 28, rather than the 27 of Labbé.  The entry for John duly appears on line 22.

Dr Hansen suggests (p.xi) that the work was composed around 480 AD.  This date is no doubt based upon the contents which include discussion of ecclesiastical controversies of a period rather later than Nicaea.  He also suggests that the work is a compilation of earlier writers, including the lost Gelasius of Caesarea, Theodoret, Philip of Side, and so forth.

I’ve never looked at the ancient lists of delegates.  An article that might address this is E. Honigmann, “The Original Lists of the Members of the Council of Nicaea , the Robber Synod and the Council of Chalcedon”, Byzantion 16 (1942-1943), pp. 20-80, but this also is inaccessible to me, since my JSTOR access via my old university does not include it.

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Google Translate Latin – how it was, and how it is

Posted on by Roger Pearse

In 2019 I prepared to work on translating John the Deacon’s Life of St Nicholas.  I created a separate file for each chapter.  In each file I had the full text of the chapter.  Beneath that, on alternate lines, interleaved, was a sentence of the Latin and then the Google Translate output.  It is interesting to rerun that Latin and compare the raw output.

Here’s the start of chapter 13:

Imperator autem audiens famam pacis et victoriae, repletus gaudio, obviam eis exiit, cum magna multitudine populorum, et Magistro militum, et omni coetu utriusque sexus, et gloriose quasi victores suscipiens;

Google Translate Latin 2019:

The Emperor, having heard of the fame of the victory of peace, and, filled with joy, that he went out to meet them, with the great host of peoples, and the captain of the guard, and to all the congregation of men and women, and of the glorious, as it were the victors, he took it;

Google Translate Latin 2022:

The emperor, on hearing the news of peace and victory, was filled with joy, and went out to meet them, with a large number of people, and with the captain of the soldiers, and with every assembly of both sexes, and receiving them with distinction as conquerors;

Then:

magnifici in Palatio eius fuerunt.

Google Translate Latin 2019:

There were magnificent in Palatine.

Google Translate Latin 2022:

There were magnificent men in his palace.

Next:

Coacti autem quidam, et invidia diaboli ducti, caeperunt nova consilia exquirere, quatenus illos morti traderent:

Google Translate Latin 2019:

And some were forced and led envy of the devil, began to seek out new plans, highlighting them to death;

Google Translate Latin 2022:

But some, being compelled, and led by the envy of the devil, began to seek out new counsels, that they might deliver them to death:

And so on.  I should add that this is the raw, unamended output in both cases.

We are very, very fortunate.

 

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I have returned to work on making a translation of John the Deacon’s Life of St Nicholas.  In July 2019 I prepared a Latin text.  The edition of Falconius, in 1751 seems to be all that there is!   During November and December 2020 I translated a couple of chapters with immense pain and huge labour – the structure of the sentences is hard to work with – and then I set it aside and went off to do other things.  At one point last night I was seriously contemplating simply abandoning the job.

How things have changed.  Last night I jumped to the end and passed chapter 15 through the new and greatly improved Google Translate for Latin.  It did a  magnificent job, far better than I could have done, and did it in seconds.  Of course it needed manual adjustment, but it was sobering how much better it was.  In half an hour the chapter was complete.

At one point Falconius printed in the text, “Ab atis dirigas”, in the middle of a prayer asking the Lord to guide the monks, etc.  This was beyond me, until I put the sentence into the standard Google search and found a parallel text with the same sentence, where it read “Abbatis dirigas” – “may you guide the abbots”!  Wonderful!

Falconius’ text is less than ideal.  This morning I was looking at chapter 14 – I’ve already done about half of it using the same tools – and I suffered a bit from him printing “penniculum” rather than “peniculum”, a sponge.  There is no critical edition.  Falconius seems to be the only edition of any sort, except for an incunable by Mombritius which does not contain these final chapters.  But there are manuscripts online – more than Falconius had -, and I have Google search.  The job can be done.

It is 10:20 here, and I must go out.  This afternoon I shall return to John the Deacon.  I’m looking forward to it.

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The Acts of the Council of Carthage in 397 and the Council of Hippo in 393 – online in English

Posted on by Roger Pearse

It is done.  I have finally finished the task of creating a translation of the Acts of the Council of Carthage in 397, incorporating the remains of the Acts of the Council of Hippo in 393.  The purpose of this exercise is to show how canon 36 of Hippo, which lists the canon of scripture, actually fits into the other material from the council.  This is not a bunch of men voting on the Word of God, as is often crudely supposed. Instead it is a set of administrative regulations, which could be – and were – revised, summarised, and otherwise improved.

Here are the files.  They are also available on Archive.org here.

As usual, this material is public domain.  Use it in any way you choose, personal, education, or commercial.

These two files do not seem like very much, as the output from the labour of most of a year, but they are what they are.  I need to thank those who commented on the original blog posts, especially Bill North and Diego, for rescuing me from many a misunderstanding.

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The Pseudo-Chrysostomica database is now online

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Back in 2017 a project began (see a copy of the announcement here) to create a database of all the texts which in the manuscripts are wrongly attributed to John Chrysostom.  This is a very large number of texts – more than a thousand -, mainly Greek but also in Latin, Syriac, Armenian, Coptic, Georgian and many other languages.  In the medieval period ancient works that had no known author quite often ended up attributed to the main Greek Father, John Chrysostom.

So this deposit of material contains many things, often of great interest, and there are many texts by many authors.  Nearly all the works of Chrysostom’s enemy, Severian of Gabala, ended up as pseudo-Chrystostomica, for instance.

The  project is led by Sever J. Voicu, the expert on all things pseudo-Chrysostomian, who is based in the Vatican.

Today I received an email from him:

Dear colleagues and friends:

The Pseudo-Chrysostomica database is now online at: https://www.trismegistos.org/pseudo-chrysostomica/

The site is under construction. Suggestions welcome. Please write to: [email address]

Regards

I won’t put the email here, in these days of spam-spam-spam, but there is a contact link on the website.

This is very welcome news indeed.  At the moment the data contained in it is limited, but it is still good.  The more information that can be loaded into this, the better.  I don’t know what the plans for enhancement are.

Anyway, I thought that I would try it out!  This is not any kind of comprehensive test – just me doing a quick push of a few buttons!

I set Author=Severian, and searched.  The website gave:

The following authors matched your search query:

Severian of Gabala

And below that, some more material which I will talk about in a moment.

The “Severian of Gabala” link itself was of the form https://www.trismegistos.org/pseudo-chrysostomica/detail.php?author=7.   It would be better if the author key was a unique meaningful string like author=SeverianOfGabala rather than a “magic number” like “7” – possibly an automated row ID in the database, and therefore subject to change if the database is unloaded and reloaded?

Clicking on it gives a very satisfactory list of works and links:

The authorities are linked to, and you can get a very good idea of what is available.  I deeply approve.

But I nearly didn’t find any of this.  If you don’t click on that link – perhaps because, like me, you don’t realise that it is a link – and just scroll down, then you get an interesting but unusual search using pie charts:

A table of works by Severian appears.  I initially assumed that this was the result of my query, not the link above.  But it seems to be a very abbreviated list, if you look at it in Chrome on a PC, as I did.  It did not contain De Pace, for instance.  This I found very misleading before I discovered that I could click on “Severian of Gabala”.  I have only discovered, as I type, that in fact this is a scrollable box!  I think the scroll bar needs to be wider.

Moving on, I clicked on the first link in the table, which led to a page with the various language versions of “Quomodo animam…”.  Clicking on the Greek gave me some brief but useful information.  The publication of the Greek was given as “Savile”, but this name is not hyperlinked to anything.  I suppose most people getting this far will know about the Savile edition of Chrysostom’s works. The bibliography is at the moment in a PDF, which is fine for now.

The Slavic version of the same work had:

  • Publication: \\Makarij, Nov.

which looks like a formatting error of some sort, and no doubt will be fixed quickly.  (I bet the developers hate me already!  But any fresh pair of eyes will find something – that’s just how life is)

I looked at the material for De pace (here).  This gives Greek and Georgian language versions, and referenced to the sources for the text; although I seem to remember that the Patrologia Graeca also contains an abbreviated Latin translation?  I was actually rather excited to learn about the Georgian version!  Someone with Georgian skills needs to add stuff to that page – it cries out for additions!

And that, in truth, is part of the merit of such a database.  We can see what we cannot see.  In fact it makes your fingertips itch, to add stuff.  Which is what it is all about.

Recommended.  I must add it to my links!

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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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