A couple of updates on the Severian of Gabala work.
Firstly, Bryson Sewell has sent me a first draft of his English translation of De Spiritu Sancto (PG 52 813-826). It still needs heavy revision, and I haven’t commented on it yet, but it is there in skeleton at least. It looks interesting, for the most part. Apparently Severian’s style is not always of the clearest, tho! As ever, when it is done, it will appear here.
One of the problems in studying Severian is that none of his works were online in any modern language – or at least, none in English, and the one or two, that did exist in French etc, were basically in a dark hole somewhere online. The translations that Bryson is making will fix some of this.
But just getting a list of works is difficult. Regular readers will recall that I have been driven – unusually – to compiling some kind of bibliography myself, as a basis for commissioning translations.
In general, studies on Severian are few, and hard to access. The prince of all the articles on Severian is one by Dr Sever J. Voicu, who is the world expert on Severian: Sever J. Voicu, “Severien de Gabala,” in: Dictionnaire de spiritualité 14 (Paris, 1990), pp.752-63.
This is the most comprehensive introduction to the subject, with a detailed bibliography, and it supersedes all previous work. Of course it is now 24 years old, so it is now somewhat outdated. But it is impossible to access, and the Dictionnaire itself seems almost unknown to patristic scholars in general; certainly to most anglophone scholars.
Fortunately I obtained a copy of this article some time ago, which led me to realise how essential it was. Soon afterwards, a correspondent emailed me a Word document of it, which he had scanned. Dr Voicu has very kindly granted his permission for this transcript to appear online on this blog. This will happen, probably in the next week. I want to check it over first, and to make sure that, in whatever format I upload it, it can be handled by Google Translate.
I may also translate portions of it into English. I’ve been unwell with a virus for a week, but I must return to work on Monday. Much will all depend on how busy next week is!
An announcement this morning that 44 more Greek manuscripts are now online at the British Library, thanks to funding from Stavros Niarchos.
Many are biblical manuscripts. The following will be of interest to us.
(Apologies for any errors; some thoughtless person at the BL site has fiddled with the copy and paste, removing all formatting and adding a pointless general link at the end in plain text. All of which makes it nearly impossible to give a list like this, and include links; you have to delete the cruft and re-add the links manually).
Add MS 39601, Revelation (Gregory-Aland 911), imperfect at the end, with a marginal commentary by Andrew of Caesarea, Commentarii in Apocalypsin (TLG 3004.001). 11th c., from Athos.
Add MS 39614, Xenophon, Hellenica. Early 16th century, Venice.
Add MS 39615, Hermogenes, De constitutionibus (Περὶ στάσεων) (TLG 0592.002). Early 16th century, Venice.
Add MS 39616, [Plutarch], De liberis educandis. Early 16th century, Venice.
Add MS 39617, Demosthenes, Orationes, with the hypotheses of Libanius and occasional scholia and interlinear glosses. 15th century, Greece.
Arundel MS 531, Diogenes Laertius, Vitae Philosophorum, with illuminated head- and tailpieces on f 1r. 2nd half of the 15th century, Italy.
Burney MS 61, Collection of works by Greek lyric poets, including Anacreon, Alcaeus, Sappho, Stesichorus, and Ibycus. Occasional marginal notes with variants of Henri Estienne and T. Faber. 2nd half of the 16th century, France.
Burney MS 70, Basil of Caesarea, De legendis libris gentilium (TLG 2040.002), and other works. Large initials in colour and gold, partial foliate border on f 1r similar to that in Burney 14. 4th quarter of the 15th century, written by Ioannes Skoutariotes at Florence.
Burney MS 71, Callimachus, Hymns (TLG 0533.015-020). c 1500.
Burney MS 88, Libanius, Epistulae (TLG 2200.001). End of the 15th century, Italy.
Burney MS 89, Lycophron, Alexandra, with the commentary of Ioannes or Isaac Tzetzes, imperfect. 1st half of the 15th century, Greece.
Burney MS 96, Minor Attic Orators. End of the 15th century, Venice.
Burney MS 98, Pindar, Olympia (TLG 0033.001), imperfect, with interlinear and marginal scholia; Dionysius Periegetes, Orbis Descriptio (TLG 0084.001), with interlinear glosses and marginal paraphrase; Eustathius Thessalonicensis, Commentarium in Dionysii periegetae orbis descriptionem (TLG 4083.006); Strabo, Geographica (TLG 0099.001), extracts. Beginning of the 16th century.
Burney MS 106, Sophocles, Ajax, Electra, Oedipus Tyrannus, Antigone; [Aeschylus], Prometheus Vinctus; Pindar, Olympia. End of the 15th century.
Burney MS 108, Aelian, Tactica; Leo VI, Tactica; Heron of Alexandria, Pneumatica, De automatis, with numerous diagrams. 1st quarter of the 16th century, possibly written at Venice.
Burney MS 109, Works by Theocritus, Hesiod, Pindar, Pythagoras and Aratus. 2nd half of the 14th century, Italy.
Burney MS 110, Zenobius, Epitome collectionum Luculli Tarrhaei et Didymi (TLG 0098.001). 4th quarter of the 15th century, Italy.
Egerton MS 2625, Thucydides, Historiae (TLG 0003.001), with scholia, formerly forming a single manuscript with Add MS 5110. 15th century, possibly written on Crete.
Royal MS 16 C IV Part 1 and Part 2, John Tzetzes, Antehomerica, with a translation into Latin by Petrus Morellus. 1560-1603, France (Tours/Loches), in the hand of Petrus Morellus.
Royal MS 16 C VII, Constantine Manasses, Breviarium Chronicum , imperfect. Mid-15th century, Italy? Probably formerly owned by Sir Robert Cotton.
Royal MS 16 C XIV, Apparatus Bellicus, followed by extracts from Byzantine authors. 1584, probably written in Italy.
Royal MS 16 C XIX, Simplicius, Commentarius in Epicteti Enchiridion. 1st half of the 16th century, Italy (Padua?)
Royal MS 16 C XX, Isaac Argyrus, De Metris Poeticis, imperfect, with marginalia by Isaac Casaubon. End of the 16th century, Italy?
Phew. That was very unpleasant to transcribe and format.
Another chunk of John the Lydian, De mensibus, book 4, has arrived from Mischa Hooker. Indeed it arrived at the weekend, but was delayed by my own illness. As might be expected, this covers the month of August.
A few tweets this morning were complaining about the inaccessibility of the main reference works for patristics, the Clavis Patrum Latinorum and the Clavis Patrum Graecorum. These works are essentially lists of works by patristic authors. Each is assigned a number, and the opening words of the first line are given. If the text appears in the edition of J.-P. Migne, the reference is given; if not, the manuscript where it may be found.
As may be imagined, it is impossible to work in patristics without access to these volumes.
The complaints were that the volumes – numerous and very expensive – were generally not held by university libraries or, if they were, could not be borrowed. A respondent slyly suggested that perhaps pirate PDFs were available somewhere; which is one answer. Another said that Brepols, who publish the volumes, would undoubtedly eventually make them available online. This drew the retort that access would be through a paywall, and that only tier-1 universities would subscribe for it.
Every word of this is true. We have academics unable to access the tools of their trade, themselves compiled by other academics, because they are – legally – the property of a Belgian publishing house who have to pay their bills somehow, and do so by charging high fees for access.
What is the answer?
A further tweeter said that she would make sure all her work was open access. This is laudable. But it doesn’t solve the problem.
The situation is rather akin to that in place in the British Empire when slavery was abolished. There were great numbers of slave owners, who had obtained their property quite legally, and were financially invested in it. But the public interest was to abolish slavery.
The rulers of that day, being honest man and leaders of a great commercial nation, did not do what the lesser men of today might do. They didn’t pillage their countrymen. Instead they bought out the rights of the slave-owners. The community as a whole had decided; and the community as a whole paid to make it happen. Nobody was robbed. There was no damage to the right of private property, the basis for all civilised life.
Surely the situation is much the same now. The academic publishers once served a vital purpose. That purpose is disappearing. The absurd copyright laws give them ownership of materials lasting back a century. The public interest is that this material should be freely accessible online.
The answer, surely, is for western governments to buy out the academic publishers. The Belgian government needs to buy out Brepols and free the archive. The terms might be negotiated; but the end is necessary, and it should be pursued. The same applies to Brill in the Netherlands, and so on.
It might be objected that it is rather hard on the middle classes – the only people who pay tax, and who are currently being fleeced of their savings by low interest rates and money-printing – to add to their burdens. There is merit to this, and it needs to be considered.
But I do not see how else the problem can be solved.
Free access to learning is a national necessity. Let our politicians find a way.
The 5th British Patristics conference is beginning today in London, and it runs until Friday. There is a great mass of interesting papers on offer.
Unfortunately I am unable to attend. I wish that I was there, and I booked back in January. But a virus has laid me low since Saturday – undoubtedly acquired on the aircraft back from Rome a week earlier.
I hope that perhaps some other attendees will post accounts of the event. These conferences are uniformly excellent.
It is wonderful what a difference it makes to have the right tools.
Years ago I obtained a thesis from the US, for which I was charged like a wounded bull. It was printed double-sided, and I had no sheet-feeder able to handle that. Today I found two very old Finereader projects on disk, neither comprising more than 70 pages, and both clearly scanned by doing a bunch, first one side, then the other. It must have been very labour-intensive, for I never proceeded further.
Anyway a correspondent caused me to look for it again. Thankfully I was able to find the paper copy. But these days I have a Futijsu Scansnap which is designed to turn bunches of papers into PDFs. It made short work of the whole document. Then I numbered the pages in Adobe Acrobat, which revealed one case where two pages had gone through. I also found that a few pages had acquired a vertical line; these I rescanned.
At the moment Adobe is OCRing the PDF for me. When it is done, I shall have a nice, compact, 400 dpi copy of the whole thing.
I hardly ever consult the thing; but at least, if I so wish, I can do so easily.
That little document reader was a splendid investment. When I think of the pain I endure with things which won’t go into it, I am deeply impressed.
There are other advances also. At my current workplace they have one of these combined scanner-printer-photocopier. It has a sheet-feeder for copies, and outputs scans to PDF. I have used it to scan a load of paper articles early one morning into PDF. But … if you look closely … it will scan A3 as well, through the same A4-looking sheetfeeder. Which means that even bulky old A3 copies – and who hasn’t got at least some of these? – can be turned into PDFs and the paper discarded!
Worth looking out for at your work. After all, it doesn’t use consumables, and is way faster than any home device. Just make sure nobody is likely to object.
Readers of twitter will be aware that I went to Rome last Friday, coming back Monday afternoon. I booked only a couple of weeks earlier, so I had to pay a large sum to the airline. But the hotel was cheap, relatively. Even so, the money seemed to vanish!
Going to Rome in August was a bit different. The traffic is much reduced. But the sun was truly brutal. It was 32C in the shade every day – although on Sunday night there was rain and a thunderstorm – which made it impossible to do much outdoors.
Sites close, also. I walked to the Trevi fountain on my first evening there, only to find it drained and empty. I had hoped to go and see the Mithraeum of Santa Prisca, which is open at 4pm on the 4th Sunday of the month; but it was closed because it is August.
I stayed at the Hotel Nerva, which is behind the ruins of the temple of Mars Ultor, and right on the imperial forums. I was shown to my garret – rooms in Rome always seem very small – but fortunately the aircon was on, if not as cool as I would have liked. I asked for, and got, a desktop fan as well, which helped quite a bit.
The staff ordered a number of items for me in advance, and also, at my request, asked for the ticket for Santa Prisca. This is useful if you don’t speak Italian. They ordered me a “Roma” pass which gave me free use of the underground (trains also airconditioned; stations not), as well as the train to Ostia. Interestingly I found that you can buy this pass in the arrivals hall at Ciampino, while waiting for your luggage. They also got me a ticket for the Vatican museums for 10:30 on Monday, although I could have bought this online and printed it off myself.
On Saturday I spent most of the morning at the Museo Nazionale in the Baths of Diocletian, opposite Termini railway station. It was air-conditioned, it had toilets – although not toilet seats, curiously -, a vending machine for bottled water and sweeties, and … practically no visitors. This made it ideal for photographing some of the exhibits. It was also very interesting to find that some exhibits which had been absent last year had returned, and vice versa. I took quite a collection of photos of the Mithras exhibits using the 10mp camera on my mobile phone. I’ve not yet done more than copy the photos to my hard disk, however.
Some of the finds from the Mithraeum of S. Stefano Rotondo
For lunch I ventured out to one of the tourist bar-restaurants nearby, and was duly scalped for poor quality food. Avoid “steak” – I have twice been offered some mass of stringy fat with bits of meat interspersed in it. The bread was nice, but the waiter whisked it away before I could eat much of it!
After that, I headed downtown. For I had discovered that my 11 euro ticket for the museum would also admit me to the museum site at the Crypta Balbi, where I knew that there was a Mithraeum. This too was largely empty, and I was able to get myself onto an Italian-speaking tour of the basement areas, including the Mithraeum – rather disappointing, the latter. The staff were very helpful. But I must say that the printed materials were profoundly confusing, and it took quite some effort to get oriented! Upstairs there were Mithraic artefacts!
Remains of a tauroctony in the museum of the Crypta Balbi.
Then I walked up to the Pantheon, and then back to the hotel to snooze for a very necessary hour. Then in the evening I went out, bought a panini at a food shop, and then I sat in the shade next to the Colosseum, and watched the people go to and fro, until the sun went down.
On Sunday I used my Roma pass and took the tube to Pyramide, transferring from there to the train for Ostia Antica (also free). I have never seen a sign indicating which train is for Ostia Antica; but if you look inside, the tube-train-like panels above the doors indicate the stations to be visited. The train was airconditioned, which was nice. On arrival at the station, I walked to the ruins, and became aware how hot it was. It seemed an interminable walk from the ticket office to the cafeteria, which – and I recommend doing this – I visited first. It was empty, but I got some food, bought and drank more water, bought a 2 euro site plan in the bookshop, and then I looked to see where the Mithraea were.
Then I ventured out to see if I could find a particular site. It was bestially hot, and I quickly became aware that it was no fun at all. I was unable to locate the Mithraeum, and I realised that all I wanted to do was go back to Rome. So I did, getting back around noon. It was very good to get back to my nice cool room!
Far too hot in Ostia.
But the room had not been made up! So I ventured out, and ended up wandering up the backstreets, eventually emerging at Termini. There is a large Spar supermarket on the far side of the station, which is worth being aware of. Then back, and, after lying around a lot, out back to the Colosseum. It was rather threatening with rain. I walked down to where the Septizonium used to be, but couldn’t see much sign of it. Then back. I bought an umbrella from a street vendor, and sat near the Colosseum. Then it rained! Up went my umbrella, while everyone else ran for cover, except for a woman sitting not that far from me who got progressively drenched. For some reason she didn’t have, or buy, an umbrella. I felt a little sorry for her; but not enough to forgo my own umbrella! Eventually I spoke to her, and she turned out to be a sports journalist from Plymouth.
On the Monday I went to the Vatican museum. The pre-booked ticket meant that I could go through the entrance immediately without queuing; but the desks inside to exchange it for a ticket were a disaster. I emerged feeling very stressed. I went first to the Pio Christiano gallery, and found the statue of Hippolytus there. Fortunately this gallery was empty, and indeed was closed later. The bad news was that the statue was just a cast. Then to the cafeteria! Then I went in search of the Mithras monuments, which were in the “room of the animals”, but impossible to see from more than a distance. There were also some monuments in the Chiaramonti gallery. But on the whole the experience was awful – a great, sweaty crush of people in corridors too small for them, and no way out. I felt quite claustrophobic at one point, and eventually ducked under a rope and escaped!!
After that, I went back to the hotel, and got a car to the airport. I arrived 2 hours before hand, and it took an hour to get through baggage checkin and security. After sitting on a chair for half an hour, I went through and they were just boarding the priority passengers. So I had no real time to wait.
I don’t think that I would go to Rome in August again. It is just too hot to stand in the sun. But it was very interesting to see, all the same.
UPDATE: The Mithras tauroctonies in the Chiaramonti gallery are these. Unfortunately none of my photos came out well.
Mithraic monuments in the Chiaramonti gallery in the Vatican museum
The Mithraeum of Santa Prisca in Rome is of great importance to Mithraic studies because it contains striking wall paintings, with text against the images. The scenes depict a procession of the seven grades of initiate, and other interesting items. Among the verses is a statement that “you have saved us after the shedding of the eternal blood”, which has attracted attention. The mithraeum will be open to visitors at 4pm on Sunday 24th August, and I intend to be in Rome and go and see it. Apparently it stands on the Aventine Hill, just south of the Circus Maximus.
A long view of the Mithraeum of Santa Prisca
This week I have been collecting the literature about the place. I have visited Cambridge University Library and stood over their photocopiers, not once but twice!
One item gave me especial difficulty: Krautheimer’s Corpus Basilicarum Christianarum Romae. This contains an English-language article on the church of Santa Prisca, and a fine piece of work it is too. But, quite unnecessarily, the series has been printed in double-size volumes, nearly impossible to handle or photocopy. Each page requires an A3 photocopy; although, thanks to the miracles of modern technology, I was able to photocopy it down onto A4. It’s worth being aware of this series, if you want solid scholarly material, oriented on primary data and with copious bibliography, on the churches of Rome.
The church stands 3 metres above ground level, because it stands atop a platform of Roman brick walls and arches. This is, in fact, the basement level of a Roman house of imposing dimensions, dated by brick stamps to 95 AD. It was possibly the private house of Trajan, but perhaps more likely that of his close friend L. Licinius Sura, whose baths stand immediately to the north of the church (as a fragment of the ancient map of Rome shows) and whose house was adjacent to this. The mithraeum was erected ca. 190 AD in one of the cellars, and destroyed some time at the end of the 4th century (supposedly – it is hard to know exactly when).
I was going to photocopy the archaeological report also, which runs to 520+ pages, with more than a 100 plates, until I realised that this would cost me around $80! Fortunately an interlibrary loan is promised, and my little scanner at home will do the deed.
One reason why I read Krautheimer was that I wanted to know about supposed Christian archaeology in the area. There is a tremendous amount of false information on this point in circulation. Web-pages confidently assert that an early Christian church was also based in the cellars! Others say that a small building next door was “church-like”. All these claims go unreferenced, of course. Apparently the excavation report has a couple of pages making some claim of this sort, but I don’t know on what basis. One writer, in a review of the archaeological report in 1965, went so far as to say:
Why, as stated by the authors, is the same physical proximity between Christians and devotees of Mithras found under San Clemente and at least once in Ostia? How or why did they live side by side rather peacefully for nearly 150 years? Are the similarities between the two cults in the early third century strong enough to postulate that the masculine worshipers of Mithras someway encouraged the female members of their families to attend the neighboring Christian mysteries? These questions might be partially answered if further excavations could be carried out under Santa Prisca
This perhaps tells us rather more about the cultural assumptions of an American man in the 1960’s, that churchgoing was “womens’ stuff”, than anything about the history of the site or the cult of Mithras. Here, as ever, Mithraic studies is bedevilled by too much sheer imagination.
Krautheimer makes clear that there is pretty much no evidence of any Christian activity on the site before the erection of the church in the 5th century in the ruins of the house. The construction of churches in Rome in this period is related to the devastation caused by the Goth and Vandal sacking of Rome, making use of high-status locations now conveniently vacant. Perhaps the house of Sura was one such? An oratory in the garden was discovered in the 18th century, with depictions of apostles, and dated by the finders to the 4th century; but this has since been demolished, and Krautheimer makes the point that frescos of the apostles are generally a medieval decorative feature. The first literary reference is in a synod of 499 AD, to a single priest of the church – suggesting that it was a small and unimportant one. And that seems to be all the data. If there is more data, I have yet to see it.
I must say that I am unimpressed by the scholarly articles, on the whole. Not that I can complain – at least the excavations were published! But there is a vagueness about them, which is quite infuriating, when you want specifics.
What I did was go and find the reports of the original discovery in the 1930’s. These, thankfully, have diagrams that make it MUCH clearer what is where!
It will be interesting to see what can be seen on the ground!
Today, at work, I cast around for a web-based form to point a computer program at, for testing purposes. I recalled my own feedback form, at Tertullian.org, and decided to use that. I was having one of those days, you know, when everything goes wrong. But at least my own website wouldn’t let me down, right?
Wrong. The form didn’t work.
Clearly it hadn’t worked, for quite some time. Yet I couldn’t see why. It was a very simple piece of software, and hadn’t changed in, well, probably a decade.
But of course it wasn’t running on the hardware-software platform of 2004 any more. Somewhere, sometime, my website provider had upgraded. It happens all the time.
Some software upgrade had broken it, silently. The form is written in PHP, and clearly one or the other of the PHP upgrades had silently removed features on which it depends. It emails me in a distinctive format, and, now I come to think of it, I haven’t seen one in quite some time. A year? Two? How time flies…
I spent a less than pleasant hour this evening, rewriting the way it captures variables. The new version is considerably more baroque than the old. It’s longer. It might be more secure, I don’t know. But it’s not the same form any more.
Of course this makes me wonder what other PHP scripts are lying around on my website, long forgotten. I can’t even face looking.
This is how the internet dies. We all know that it is less than permanent. What we forget is that software less than a decade old, designed to run and be accessible by the world, is probably only sporadically working.
All those eager-beavers, upgrading and improving constantly, are … leaving a trail of wrecked websites behind them.
I wonder how many of us are actually hosting deadware – scripts that once worked and no longer do?
Today I came across an image by Sophie Hay, of the British School of Rome, of an inscription lying near the west gate of Leptis Magna in Libya. She kindly sent me a hi-res copy, which I have sharpened (click on it to see the full size image):
Looking at a section of the lower line, it quite clearly refers to “SEPTIMIO SEVERO”!
I was very excited by this!
But … a look at the freely available and very useful Clauss-Slaby database (which has moved, I note, to here) gives us these details:
Imp(eratori) Caes(ari) M(arco) Aurelio Antonino Aug(usto) Arm(eniaco) Med(ico) Par(thico) Ger(manico) p(ontifici) m(aximo) tr(ibunicia) pot(estate) XXVIII imp(eratori) co(n)s(uli) p(atri) p(atriae) arcus ex HS CXX m(ilibus) n(ummum) ab Avilio Casto in eum et statuas legatis / praeter HS quae de publico adiecta sunt dedicatus C(aio) Septimio Severo procons(ule) L(ucio) Septimio Severo leg(ato) pr(o) pr(aetore)
Which reveals that in fact we are not dealing with a monument erected at Leptis by Septimus Severus, the emperor – whose home town this was, and whose praenomen was Lucius -, but with an earlier monument of the time of Marcus Aurelius, when C. Septimius Severus was proconsul and L. Septimius Severus was propraetor.
Fortunately a search of Clauss-Slaby for “septimio severo” quickly reveals any number of inscriptions which ARE imperial, and do show that spelling. They also give him the cognomen “Pertinax”, adopted as part of his bid for imperial power. No inscriptions with “septimo severo” are found. So that’s that.
In fact the Leptis monument does testify to the gens of “Septimii Severi” at Leptis, listing both the emperor-to-be and his older cousin, Gaius.
