Category: Ancient world

Damascius in Photius

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Volume 6 of Rene Henry’s edition of the Bibliotheca of Photius arrived this morning.  The first codex in it is a review and summary of Damascius, Life of Isidore.  This now lost work was written by the 6th century Neo-Platonist philosopher, about his predecessor as head of the school at Athens.  I obtained it, as it is said to contain details about the cult of Attis.

The text is a rambling one, full of interesting historical and mythological details.   Here is one, from p.34:

131.  At Hierapolis in Phrygia there is a temple of Apollo and under the temple a subterranean fissue descends, which exhales lethal vapours.  It is  impossible to pass this gulf without danger, even for birds, and everyone who enters it dies.  But the author says that it is possible for initiates to descend into the crevasse itself and stay there without injury.  The author says that he himself and the philosopher Dorus, led by curiosity, descended into it and returned unharmed.  The author says, “I then slept at Hierapolis and in a dream it seemed to me that I was Attis and that, by the order of the Great Mother of the gods, I was celebrating what is called the festival of the Hilaria; this dream signified our liberation from Hades.  On returning to Aphrodisias, I recounted to Asclepiodotus the vision that I had in the dream.  And he, full of admiration for what had happened to me, recounted to me, not “a dream for a dream”, but a great marvel in exchange for a little one.

He said in fact that in his youth he had gone to that place to study the nature of it.  He had rolled his mantle two and three times around his nostrils so that in the event of frequent fumes, he could breathe not the poisoned and deleterious air but pure and safe air which he had brought with him captured in his mantle.  Proceeding thus, he entered on the descent, following a current of hot water which came out from there, and ran the length of the inaccessible crevasse.  All the same he didn’t get to the bottom of the descent, because the access to it was cut off by the abundance of water and the passage was impossible to an ordinary man, but the one descending, possessed by the divinity, was carried to the bottom.  Asclepiodotus then climbed back up from that place without injury thanks to his ingenuity.  Later he even tried to recreate the lethal air using various ingredients.

It would be interesting to know if any such crevasse is found today at Pessinus.   No doubt the fissure was volcanic, the fumes were likely to cause asphyxiation, and those overcome no doubt did dream, influenced by their surroundings.  Did the Attis myth owe its being to the actions of some early priest of Cybele accidentally mutilating himself while imagining himself with the Great Mother?   

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More on morphology, and on life

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Still fighting with the morphology data, trying to find a way to work on it and add back in the part-of-speech data.  Amazing how difficult it is to even load a lot of this stuff into a database so I can run some SQL queries on it.

In my hands I have volume 4 of the Rene Henry edition of Photius.  It has to go back to the library tomorrow, but I was pleased to discover that I could run it through a scanner in around an hour.  I ordered it by mistake, but might translate some bits of the review of Eulogius, sometime.  Tomorrow I get volume 6, which contains Damascius’ Life of Isidore.  Apparently this contains a passage on Attis.

I need to get back to Agapius as well.  I’ve done a few more lines, but I need to make progress with the Greek translator.  Once I stop work on it, it will be psychologically impossible to get started again.

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Loeb loving on the road to Bilbilis

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A couple of weeks ago I was feeling a little unwell, and I looked around my shelves for something undemanding which would take my attention off things.  My eye fell on the old (1920-ish) Loeb Martial, and I pulled down a volume.  There is something very soothing about these old volumes, the genteel English, and the notes, cultivated and inoffensive.  Juvenal has long been a friend in these circumstances; Martial now joins him.

Martial was a Spaniard who came from Bilbilis.  Today I saw some photos online of excavations at Bilbilis, here.  Unfortunately the blog is in Spanish — I expect Google translator would make a reasonable effort at this, if I had time to try. [Note: it really does!]  The photos are worth a look, tho.

Thinking of Martial reminds me of a book plate in the second volume.  The volume itself was a handsome example of its kind.  The plate showed that the book was a gift to Glasgow University Library, long ago, by the Church of Scotland no less.  But the book plate was carelessly cancelled with a stamp; the library doubtless sold it, when a new edition appeared.  I bought it from an online dealer, all unknowing. 

Perhaps when we finish our earthly course, many wonder whether we might donate our libraries to some deserving university.  Alas, not even thus may one procure a little immortality!

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More on John the Lydian

Posted on by Roger Pearse

It seems that at least some of the Tuebner editions of the works of John the Lydian are also on Google books. Daniel Abosso has written to tell me so, and to point out that the Bonn series text is defective, and the Latin translation sometimes quite wrong.  Here is the link (from a search for “lydi Wünsch”):

I still hope to get De Mensibus online.

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New Hypatia movie

Posted on by Roger Pearse

There’s going to be is a movie made about Hypatia, the late fourth-century Neo-Platonist and friend of Synesius who was lynched after venturing into Alexandrian politics.

Let’s welcome it.  It should stir up interest in late antiquity, particularly if they can make the Byzantine world glow with light and colour.  It doesn’t really matter if a shoal of false impressions get created.  What we need to think of is the impressionable teenagers staring open-mouthed at the screen and thinking “Wow! I want to know more about that.”  Some will go on to become academics, more will buy books about the subject, and a few will get rich in the stock market and fund archaeological expeditions.

Looks as if Cyril of Alexandria is being cast as the baddie — he’s going to be played by Actor-With-An-Arab-Name (i.e. Not One Of Us), while Hypatia will be played by the distinctly anglo-saxon Rachel Weisz.  But I can live with that, if the directors can; some of those Greeks may get quite shirty if a favourite saint is demonised, and they can be aggressive when they put their minds to it!

Update: The movie is called Agora and has already been made. A trailer exists here; with all the titles in Italian!  Thanks to Christopher Ecclestone for the link.

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Notes on John the Lydian, De Mensibus

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Looking at the downloadable PDF, I find book 4 of De Mensibus (on the months) starts on p. 127 (p.50 of the printed text).  It is devoted to discussing events in the Roman calendar, month by month, so starts with January.  February starts on p. 138;  March on p.143; April on p.153; May on p.163; June on p.169; July on p.171; August on p.178; September on p.182; October on p.184; November on p.185; and December on p.186.  So the whole work is not very extensive.

IV.41 reads:

On day 11, the kalends of April, a pine tree is carried into the Palatine by the tree-bearers.  But the emperor Claudius instituted these these ferias, a man of such justice in judgement that…

This event looks like the carrying of the sacred tree into the temple of Cybele.  That the festival was created by Claudius again indicates the lack of Attis-related events in Republican times.

The short entry on December does not seem to mention Christmas, nor Saturnalia, nor any solar festival.

I can’t find any translations of De Mensibus, although a 1983 English translation of his work in 3 books on the Roman Magistrates exists, and a French edition and translation of the same work was made in 2006.  An Italian version of another of his works.  I’ve asked in the BYZANS-L if anyone is working on this text, and also emailed Prof. Jacques Schamp, who did the French translation of the Magistrates book.

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Using X-Rays on the Herculaneum scrolls

Posted on by Roger Pearse

When Vesuvius went pop in 79 AD, the lava flows buried the city of Herculaneum.  One of the houses buried contained a library of papyrus rolls, mostly containing otherwise lost works by the epicurean philosopher Philodemus.  When rediscovered, they were in the state of charred logs, unreadable and very difficult to unroll.

Now Brent Seales is going to see if he can read two of the charred scrolls without trying to unroll them.  (They tend to fall to dust when unrolled, you see).

Brent Seales, the Gill professor of engineering in UK’s computer science department, will use an X-Ray CT scanning system to collect interior images of the scrolls’ rolled-up pages. Then, he and his colleagues hope to digitally “unroll” the scrolls on a computer screen so scholars can read them.

“It will be a challenge because today these things look more like charcoal briquets than scrolls,” Seales said last week. “But we’re using a non-invasive scanning system, based on medical technology, that lets you slice through an object and develop a three-dimensional data set without having to open it, just as you would do a CT scan on a human body.”

The two scrolls that Seales and his team will work on are stored at the French National Academy in Paris. The UK group will spend July working there.

Their system was developed at UK through the EDUCE project, or Enhanced Digital Unwrapping for Conservation and Exploration, which Seales launched through a grant from the National Science Foundation.

Experts say that if the UK system works as well as hoped, it could provide a safe new way to decipher and preserve more scrolls from Herculaneum, as well as other ancient books, manuscripts and documents that are too fragile to be opened.

“No one has yet really figured out a way to open them,” says Roger Macfarlane, a professor of classics at Brigham Young University who also has worked on scrolls from Herculaneum. “If Brent is successful it would be a huge, potentially monumental step forward.”

Seales admits that there are hurdles, the biggest being the carbon-based ink thought to have been used on the scrolls. He says that since the papyrus in the scrolls was turned to carbon by the fury of Vesuvius, it might be impossible to visually separate the writing from the pages, even with powerful computer programs.

“The open question is, will we be able to read the writing?” Seales said. “There is a chance that we won’t be able to do it with our current machine, and that we’ll have to re-engineer some things. But if that’s the case, that’s what we will do.”

The full story is here.

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Latin translation of John Lydus

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I was looking at the edition of John the Lydian, here.  I had not realised that the Bonn Scriptores Historiae Byzantinae editions came with Latin translations at the bottom of the page.  This makes things much easier for those of us whose Latin is much better than our Greek. 

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All the hot chicks love Indiana Jones

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Occasionally I wonder whether scholars have all been shot through the brains before receiving tenure.  But then I read an article which cheers the heart.  This from Dan Shoup at Archaeology hits the nail on the head.

On that note, I offer you two propositions about the discipline.

1) In the popular imagination, archaeology is a form of science fiction.

2) Archaeologists should embrace this, and start writing science fiction that promotes their vision of the past and agenda for the present.

You heard that right: for most people, archaeology is just a flavor of science fiction. And that’s not a bad thing.

Dan has grasped what the role of archaeology in popular culture is.  His article is well worth reading.

But don’t we *envy* the archaeologists?  Their effortless access to the media, their “Indiana Jones” image?  Their state-funding?  Of course we do.  Most scholars of classics or patristics can only dream of such things.

But the cure is in our hands.  We need to communicate better.  We too need to be selling Science Fiction to the masses.  If we want funding, that is.

We’ve coasted, for a long time, on the image of the ivory tower, and the elitism of classics.  But these don’t play nearly as well today as they did when university meant Oxford or Cambridge, where the sons of the gentry went to learn Latin verse.  So what kind of image should we pursue?

For patristrics, we have to ask why patristics scholars make no effort to communicate with the Christians — the natural and normal audience for their work?   The nearest we get is cranks  going out to look for Noah’s ark!  Well, can’t we think of something better?

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