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A Coptic fragment of Severian of Gabala on Penitence via Alin Suciu

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The excellent Alin Suciu has continued his trawl through uncatalogued Coptic papyri.  The lost papyri of Louvain have attracted his attention.  A post on his blog reports the discovery of parts of a Coptic version of CPG 4186, a homily by Severian of Gabala on penitence:

Under no. 48, Lefort published an unidentified papyrus fragment which he tentatively dated to the 6th or 7th century.[1] In fact, the text can be identified as a portion from a homily on penitence by Severian of Gabala (CPG 4186). Like all the other sermons of Severian, the Greek manuscript tradition transmitted this text under the name of John Chrysostom. It is thus no wonder that the homily can be found in different modern editions of Golden Mouth’s works. For example, in Montfaucon’s edition, which was taken over by Migne in his Patrologia Graeca, the text was printed as the seventh homily on penitence by John Chrysostom (cf. PG 49, coll. 323-336).

However, the attribution of this sermon to Severian was defended on good grounds by Charles Martin.[2] He pointed out that some Patristic catenae are quoting the text under the name of its real author: Severian of Gabala. Besides, it should be remarked that the style of the document does not conform to that of John Chrysostom, but rather contains many features proper to Severian.

The Coptic text published by Lefort corresponds literally to Migne PG 49, col. 325, lines 15-25. However, as the pagination of the Louvain fragment is lost and Lefort was not able to identify its content, he mixed up the recto/verso faces.

He goes on to give the edition of the Greek and Coptic.

This kind of work is immensely valuable to have online.  Well done, Dr S!

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Autumn has arrived very early this year, with its quota of draughts in the office, and consequent colds and chills and air-conditioner wars.  I am rather preoccupied with some work-related nuisance of just this kind, so don’t expect too much from me for a bit.  But things are moving slowly forward anyway.

I’ve been corresponding with Dr Mary B. Cunningham of Nottingham University, who has translated a number of pieces by Andrew of Crete.  I had hoped that she might translate Andrew’s Encomium on St Nicholas of Myra, but sadly she is otherwise engaged.  That is perhaps unsurprising at the start of a new academic year!

However she has given me the name of a gentleman who might be interested and qualified to do it instead.  So I have written this evening to offer a commission to him.  Let’s hope that it works out.  The work is about 11 pages of Anrich, so far from huge (thankfully).

I have also commissioned a translation of another piece by Severian of Gabala: CPG 4201, “In illud: Quomodo scit litteras (John 7:15)”, text in PG 59. 643-652 = Montfaucon; Savile edition, vol. 5, 752-761.  This is rather more meaty.  But I am hoping to use the translator for the Greek side of several works by Methodius of Olympus preserved in Old Slavonic, so I do need to know that she can handle the task.

The application for grant money to translate two large works of Methodius of Olympus from Old Slavonic (and Greek where it exists) is stalled until I have sorted out a Greek translator.  However one query on the form was resolved this week by a query to the grant body.  But I need to revisit the form entirely – my answers are rather waffly at the moment, and not especially focused on answering the specific question.

Methodius “on the Leech” is still on my hard disk, and the subject of some debate between the translators of the Greek and the Slavonic.  I will try to finalise this in a few days, depending on the crud at work.

A prediction of mine, that the availability of online PDFs would lead to libraries selling off their physical books, appears to be coming true.  A correspondent drew my attention to this item. A book dealer in Oxford is advertising a complete set of the printed 19th century Patrologia Latina, all 221 volumes of it (!), for £6,000 (about $9,000).  The source is “an English cathedral library”.  The volumes have apparently hardly been opened; probably the library never allowed clergy to look at them without onerous conditions.  Now … they’ve been sold off.  Clerical libraries have often been knocked down for cash in times of decay, such as our own, to the rage and chagrin of subsequent generations, and it seems those days have come again.

But did they get very much money for it?  Well, I myself once sold a load of patristic books to that bookseller. I can tell you that I got really very little money for them (but I did get the blasted things off the floor).  We may sure that the cathedral got much less than the sum demanded; probably a couple of thousand, if that.  Ten pounds per volume?

But we may wonder who might have the shelf-space for such an item?  And … considering that they are all online, why would anyone buy it?

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Notes on Andrew of Crete’s Encomium on St Nicholas of Myra

Posted on by Roger Pearse

In all the Methodius stuff, I have not forgotten that there are many untranslated hagiographical texts about St Nicholas of Myra, or Santa Claus, which are still on my hit list.  A correspondent has written to offer help with translating Greek texts, and I recalled that the Encomium by Andrew of Crete (BHG 1362, CPG 8187) might be a possible starting point.  The work dates to the beginning of the 8th century, so might be a little early for that translator.  But we will see.

Since I have to look this up, here’s some bibliography.

Greek text:

G. Anrich, Hagios Nikolaos, der Heilige Nikolaos in der Griechischen Kirche; Texte und Untersuchungen, 2 vols, Leipzig: Teubner, 1913-17. Volume 1, p.419-428.

Patrologia Graeca 97, col. 1192-1205, where the work is given as “oration 18” of Andrew of Crete.  With Latin translation.

Translations:

German translation:  L. Heiser, “Die Festrede des Andreas von Kreta,”  in idem, Nikolaos von Myra. Heiliger der ungeteilten Christenheit, Trier, 1978, p.80-89.  I do have a copy of this, it turns out.

Partial English translation: I find by looking online that someone has made an English translation of a slab of it here, although who and from what is not clear.  There is a link at the end to the PG text, so presumably that was used, or the Latin of it.

Let’s see what comes of this.

UPDATE: I came across a useful article on Andrew of Crete this morning, which gives us a little more information.[1]

The best study of Andrew and his work is apparently S. Valhé, “Saint André de Crete“, Echos d’Orient 5 (1902), 378-87.  There are some modern articles in Greek also.  Also M.-F. Auzépy, “La carriere de André de Crete”, BZ 88 (1995) 1-12.

The Encomium may not, in fact, be by Andrew of Crete.  It seems that Anrich expressed doubts on this (154-60, 339-56) which were endorsed by N. Sevcenko in The Life of St Nicholas in Byzantine Art, Turin, 1983, p.26.  Apparently Auzépy fails to mention this question, tho.

UPDATE: Now translated.

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  1. [1]Mary B. Cunningham, “Andrew of Crete: a high-style preacher of the eighth century”, in: M. Cunningham and P. Allen, Preacher and His Audience: Studies in Early Christian and Byzantine Homiletics, 1998, 267-294.↩

From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I have just spent four hours on an application for grant funding.  I ache as much as if I had been doing manual labour!  Why is this process so awful?  I did smile, though, at the assurances that the process is not intended to be a barrier to applicants – an assurance contained in a PDF guide to applying which was itself 57 pages long!

The application is for money to translate from Old Slavonic Methodius’ De resurrectione and De autexusio, plus the Greek fragments of each, plus whatever remains of other works in Greek.  The price tag is a lot more than I can afford to spend, and the work does need doing.

After all, nobody is ever likely to translate Methodius into English again.  An academic would need Greek and Old Slavonic, and that isn’t such a common combination.  And, as we all know, the way that research funding is set up, just making a translation is not “research”.  So how does it ever get to happen?

Anyway I thought I’d see if anyone might fund the work.

It’s slightly daunting to realise that the timescale for the project is 18 months of my life!  Ouch!  I just wish I could think of some way to get some money out of it myself.  A good project is one that profits everyone.

I’ve produced a combined version of De Lepra, and I’ve today had back some comments from Ralph Cleminson on the differences between the Old Slavonic and the Greek.  I hope to work on this later today, and I hope to get it out of the door.

I rather grudge the time on that application.  I had so much useful to do, and that time is all gone.  Rats!  And I know that I need to reread that application and make sure it explicitly answers the questions asked, rather than rambling.

It’s probably all time wasted.  But I do have to try.

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Thinking about Methodius, De resurrectione and De autexusio

Posted on by Roger Pearse

This evening I combined the English translation of the Old Slavonic text of De Lepra with the translation of the Greek fragments of the same work.  The latter were considerably fuller, where I had both, and sometimes with startling differences.  However I hope to have this completed before too long.

This will complete the four short works of Methodius, leaving some Greek fragments, but also two large works: the De resurrectione and the De autexusio (On Free will).  The latter has a French translation by Vaillant.

I’ve worked out the price of translating both, and it is far beyond my means.  If it is to be done, it must be done by a grant.  Fortunately I have such a body in mind, so this evening I have been doing some calculations.

It is relatively straightforward to work out a price for the Old Slavonic of both works, based on the page count of the manuscript.  That said, Vaillant did edit the Old Slavonic text, so in this case we do have an edition to work from.

But working out a price for the Greek is much harder.  It turns out that there is an awful lot of Greek extant for these works.  The total for the Greek is 50% of the total for the Old Slavonic!

A further issue came to my attention when skimming through Vaillant’s preface.  It seems that the Old Slavonic translation is often almost unintelligible.

The reason for this, says Vaillant, is that the translator simply substituted for each Greek word the equivalent term in Old Slavonic, without bothering much about whether the resulting sentence made sense!  In fact he says that often the best thing to do is to reverse the process – to work out what Greek word lies behind each Slavonic word, and then see what the sentence actually originally meant in the Greek!

If we are to take this seriously – and translators are known to exaggerate the difficulty of their achievement sometimes, at the behest of their publishers – then this would mean that only a translator fluent in both Greek and Old Slavonic could make a translation of Methodius.  Only a native English speaker fluent in Greek and Old Slavonic could make an English translation.  Does anyone know of such a prodigy?

But I suspect that this is a tall tale.  Doubtless this may sometimes be the case; but I don’t think that I should abandon the effort of getting a translation made for such a reason.

It is late now, tho, so the application process will have to wait until another day.

One other point caught my eye.  Interestingly Vaillant refers to an unpublished French translation of an Armenian recension of De autexusio.  I wonder where that is now?

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Methodius of Olympus, On the Leech – now online in English

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The third of the short works by Methodius of Olympus, On the leech (De sanguisuaga) is now available online, thanks once again to Ralph Cleminson who has translated it from Old Slavonic for us all.  It’s an explanation of a couple of passages from the Old Testament.

Here are the files:

I have also uploaded them to Archive.org here.

As usual, I make these files and their contents public domain.  Use them in any way you like!

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A list of translations of the Orations of Libanius, at Antiochepedia

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Libanius lived in 4th century Antioch, and he knew everyone who was anyone.  His very voluminous works have not received much attention from translators.  This is probably because his works are rather dull.  Nevertheless they contain valuable data on late antique culture.  But even finding what translations exist can be a challenge.

A useful item, this, at the Antiochepedia website:

Listing of sources for translations of Libanius’ Orations

A very thorough summary of the translations of the Orations by Libanius has been prepared by Christine Lund Koch Greenlee, a graduate student at St Andrews University.

The pdf is available here.

Grab it while it’s hot!

UPDATE: The link seems a bit unreliable: here’s a mirror:

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Work is continuing on Methodius of Olympus.  There has been no progress for just over a week, thanks to a contaminated sandwich purchased at a garage, and then some other trivial but time-consuming difficulties.  It would be nice, sometimes, to be a man of independent means!

However a translation of Methodius “On the Leech” has arrived, and will appear as soon as I can edit it.

The translation of De Lepra was done a little while ago, but we have been waiting for a translation of the Greek fragments of this work.  This has arrived, but I have not been able to look at it yet.

I’m hoping that I shall be able to deal with both soon.

Before I fell ill, I had located a possible source for a grant to translate the two major works of Methodius extant in Old Slavonic.  These are sufficiently lengthy that the price is a little beyond my own purse, but it looks highly likely that a grant may be possible.

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The last gladiatorial show

Posted on by Roger Pearse

In 325 AD Constantine passed an edict against gladiators (Codex Theodosianus book 15, title 12, leg. 1).  The version in Cod. Just. XI. 44 runs[1]:

Bloody spectacles in a time of civil peace and domestic quiet do not meet with our favor, wherefore we absolutely prohibit the existence of gladiators.

But clearly nothing happened.

In 403, Prudentius in Contra Symmachum book 2[2] appealed to the emperor Honorius to abolish the gladiatorial games:

Then on to the gathering in the amphitheatre passes [the vestal virgin] this figure of life-giving  purity and bloodless piety, to see bloody battles and deaths of human beings and look on with holy eyes at wounds men suffer for the price of their keep. There she sits conspicuous with the awe-inspiring trappings of her head-bands and enjoys what the trainers have produced.

What a soft, gentle heart! She rises at the blows, and every time a victor stabs his victim’s throat she calls him her pet; the modest virgin with a turn of her thumbbids him pierce the breast of his fallen foe so that no remnant of life shall stay lurking deep in his vitals while under a deeper thrust of the sword the fighter lies in the agony of death.

Does their great service lie in this, that they are said to keep constant watch on behalf of the greatness of Latium’s Palatine city, that they undertake to preserve the life of her people and the wellbeing of her nobles, let their locks spread nicely over their necks or nicely wreathe their brows with dainty ribbons and lay strings on their hair, and below the ground in presence of ghosts cut the throats of cattle over the flames in propitiatory sacrifice, and mutter indistinct prayers?

Or is it that they sit in the better seats on the balcony and watch how often the shaft batters the bronze-helmed face with blows of its three-pronged head, from what gaping gashes the wounded gladiator bespatters his side of the arena when he flees, and with how much blood he marks his traces?

That golden Rome may no more know this kind of sin is my prayer to you, most august Head of the Ausonian realm, and that you would command this grim rite to be abolished like the rest. See, has not your father’s merit left this space unoccupied, and God and your sire’s kindly affection kept it for you to fill up? So that he should not take for himself alone the rewards of his great goodness, he has said “I keep back a portion for you, my son,” and left the honour for you undiminished and unimpaired.

Grasp the glory that has been reserved for your times, our leader, and as your father’s successor possess the credit he has left over. He forbade that the city should be wetted with the blood of bulls; do you command that the dead bodies of wretched men be not offered in sacrifice. Let no man fall at Rome that his suffering may give pleasure, nor Virgins delight their eyes with slaughter upon slaughter. Let the ill-famed arena be content now with wild beasts only, and no more make a sport of murder with bloodstained weapons. Let Rome dedicate herself to God; let her be worthy of her great emperor, being both mighty in valour and innocent of sin; let her follow in goodness the leader she follows in war.

Then the following incident, described in Theodoret, Church History, book 5, chapter 26, took place:

Honorius, who inherited the empire of Europe, put a stop to the gladiatorial combats which had long been held at Rome. The occasion of his doing so arose from the following circumstance.

A certain man of the name of Telemachus had embraced the ascetic life. He had set out from the East and for this reason had repaired to Rome. There, when the abominable spectacle was being exhibited, he went himself into the stadium, and, stepping down into the arena, endeavoured to stop the men who were wielding their weapons against one another. The spectators of the slaughter were indignant, and inspired by the mad fury of the demon who delights in those bloody deeds, stoned the peacemaker to death.

When the admirable emperor was informed of this he numbered Telemachus in the array of victorious martyrs, and put an end to that impious spectacle.

This seems to have taken place in 404 AD, although I don’t know on what that date is based.[3]

The ban of Honorius, naturally, only applied in his presence.  I don’t know if we have evidence for later gladiatorial combats.  But Salvian tells us in De gubernatione Dei, book 6, that men were still being eaten by beasts in the arena in his day.

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  1. [1]Via here.↩
  2. [2]vol. 2 of the Loeb Prudentius,  after line 1095, p.92.↩
  3. [3]I owe the reference to Gibbon.↩

From my diary: Gentlemen say “Old Slavonic”, Yankee; the latest on Methodius; plus the Oxford Patristics Conference 2015. All in your soaraway blog!

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Sometimes, it’s just a very good idea to go offline! —

sounds_to_me_like_you_just_need_to_unplug
I’m back after a very pleasant week of holiday, and I’m starting to pick up the threads once more.  I’m still feeling somewhat frivolous.

While I was away, Ralph Cleminson sent over a fresh version of Methodius’ De Lepra (a text which gives an allegorical interpretation of Leviticus 13) in which we discussed various issues.  Part of the problem is that it opens in what is clearly the middle of a passage, and the two lines in question are inscrutable.  It is also in the form of a dialogue, but then one of the “speakers” starts quoting two other people.  So it is nearly impossible to label the speakers, as one might otherwise do.  I’ve had a go at producing a semi-final version, and we’ll see how it looks.

In addition, Andrew Eastbourne has accepted a commission to translate the fragments of the Greek version of De Lepra, preserved in a medieval florilegium, and printed in the GCS 27 edition.  These are fairly extensive, but Dr Cleminson has already indicated that they differ quite considerably from the Old Slavonic text.  We’ll include both.  Not sure how to format that – I do hate the idea of parallel columns.

In the meantime I have commissioned Dr C. to translate the next work by Methodius, “On the Leech”, which I imagine is another piece of biblical interpretation.  Thankfully there is no Greek in this.

Meanwhile I have made an important discovery or two.

The first discovery is what is the difference between “Old Slavonic” and “Old Slavic”.  Around the web, the latter is very common; but the former is the one that I know from literature.  It turns out that they mean the same thing – the very early literature of the Slavs in Bulgaria just after the creation of their alphabet – but that Old Slavonic is the form used in Britain, while “Old Slavic” is the form used in the USA.

At least I now know, when I refer to Old Slavonic, what I am talking about.  Sort of.

Well, I do have a French volume, produced by the Cerf, which has an introduction to that literature.  But somehow I forgot to look for it last week.  I’d read it this week, except that it is at home, and I am back in the hotel.  One day I will remember to read it.

My second discovery is that the English word for slave is indeed connected to “Slav”, via Greek.   I read it on a web page, so it must be true.  But it sounded plausible over lunch.

What they said is that the Greek word for slave was doulos.  But the medieval Greeks captured so many Slavs during the wars against the Bulgarians, that they based a Greek word specially on that.  This of course became known in Sicily, then under Byzantine rule; and, after its conquest by the Normans, around the same time as the Normans conquered England, the term became part of old English.

It sounds plausible.  I haven’t checked.  Believe at your own risk!

Meanwhile this week, the Oxford Patristics Conference 2015 has started – started on Monday, actually.  I’m not attending.  This is because it looked dashed expensive when I looked at it, last November or whenever.  I have to pay for it myself, after all – no grants for me.  I also lose the money I’d earn by working. Also I’m a bit bored with conferences, in truth.  I’m probably just a bit jaded.  And I am not a patristics professional, so I don’t need to be there for career reasons.

Anyway, I hope they all have a super time.  There are some interesting events, notably the launch of the new edition of Cyril of Alexandria against Julian the Apostate.  And of course there are lots of interesting people there.

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