Thoughts on Antiquity, Patristics, putting things online, information access, and more
General announcements
I have now completed my review of this book. My thanks to Wipf and Stock for sending me a review copy. Of course I write as an interested amateur, not a professional scholar, so my opinions are those of an educated layman.
The review may be found here (PDF):
Spent the evening labouring over a book review. This item must have cost me several evenings work. At least I have now got through to the end of it. But I shall reread it in a couple of days time. Always good to judge the tone first!
It will be a good while before I agree to review anything again.
Scribonius Largus was a physician in the time of Claudius.[1] He was the author of a collection of medical recipes, written in 47-48 A.D.
The work begins with a preface; then there is an index; and then the recipes.[2]
At the end of the preface, Largus writes[3]:
Primum ergo ad quae vitia compositiones exquisitae et aptae sint, subiecimus et numeris notavimus, quo facilius quod quaeretur inveniatur. Deinde medicamentorum, quibus compositiones constant, nomina et pondera vitiis subiunximus.
I.e.
So firstly, the illnesses for which medicines are sought-for and found, we have subjoined and numbered, so that the seeker may find more easily. Then we have subjoined the names and amounts of the medicaments which the medicines for illnesses consist of.
The second list has not been preserved, but these words are followed in the edition by a list of illnesses, and for each a numeral.
What this demonstrates is that the concept of producing a numbered table of contents did exist in the time of Claudius, and, therefore, probably earlier.
I need to do some further research on chapter titles in ancient texts, and whether they are authorial. A correspondent has drawn my attention to Bianca-Jeanette Schroder’s Titel und Text: Zur Entwicklung lateinischer Gedichtüberschriften. Mit Untersuchungen zu lateinischen Buchtiteln, Inhaltsverzeichnissen und anderen Gliederungsmitteln (De Gruyter, 1999, 349 pages). It retails for the eye-watering sum of 160 euros; around $240, which is ridiculous. An abstract is here, and in English here at the Google Books preview:
How old are the manuscript titles of Latin poems from Antiquity and Late Antiquity? Why were they written, and who created them? With these questions, the author enters virgin philological territory. Her interest is directed at the organisation of ancient texts.She shows that, contrary to conventional wisdom, the headings which subdivide poetry collections and provide preliminary information for the reader were not invented by medieval scribes or early modern editors; their development can in fact be traced back to Classical and Late Antiquity. The headings in collections of Latin poetry handed down through medieval mss. (incl. Horace, Ovid, Martial, Commodian, Ausonius, Luxurius) are partly authentic, and were partly added in late Classical Antiquity. In their function and linguistic form, they can be compared with book titles and other structural textual devices such as tables of contents and chapter headings. The present study also deals with the development of these devices, which are important for the history of books and of reading habits.
I have ordered a copy of this via interlibrary loan, not very hopefully. It will probably take weeks for the sleepy civil servants to bestir themselves. But at the price given, who can afford to buy a copy?
Through the kindness of Pierre Petitmengin, a copy of the Chronica Tertullianea et Cyprianea 2011 has reached me. This bibliography of Latin patristic materials before Nicaea, with short reviews, is published in the Revue d’etudes augustiniennes, which, I learn, has now become the Revue d’etudes augustiniennes et patristiques.[1]
So, what was published in the last year, and what do we make of it? I shall concentrate on Tertullian material.
The review opens with 4 Italian and 1 Spanish editions of works of Tertullian. These are all based on existing texts with minor modifications and translations. In truth something of the kind is published every year, and it seems unlikely that any of these editions require any special attention from us.
The new Reallexikon project, Bd. 24, p/189-191 includes an article on Minucius Felix by Christoph Schubert. The reviewer comments slightly wearily that every article on this author tends to be similar to every other article, since the subject has been thrashed to death from every possible angle. This one is particularly clear and up-to-date on every point, however.
A volume has appeared, collecting the fragments of the medical writer Soranus, much of it from Tertullian.
There is a proposal by Carmelo Conticello to make an inventory of all the Latin Christian texts that were translated into Greek, from the 2nd to the 15th century; a subject never systematically explored. A set of examples has appeared.
Most of the remainder of the 81 articles reviewed seemed dispensable. Looking at them, I found very little that I thought worth my time to read, and much that seemed not worth the trouble of writing. The latter was the case particularly for material written in English. I read, from time to time, of the litter of substandard journal publications. Here we see clear signs of it, exhausting the patience of reader and reviewer alike.
I mentioned a little while ago how a Canadian episcopal bishop named Michael Bird is now suing a blogger who dared to criticise and satirise him, the Anglican Samizdat blog. Bird has been fervent in promoting non-Christian causes such as homosexuality in his unfortunate church. He has also been zealous in suing his congregations for daring to disapprove, seizing their property and closing the doors. Few will endorse attempts by bishops to silence bloggers. Sadly we live in an era when bishops endorse vice and harass virtue. Not that this kind of thing is actually unknown to history.
This evening I was browsing Anthony Grafton’s Forgers and Critics, and found mention of a work by Erasmus, Julius Excluded From Heaven. An English translation is online here (archived here). It is a satire on Pope Julius II.
Pope Julius II was not a respectable person. He was the kind of self-serving scoundrel who ignores the interests of the church he heads, instead concentrating on increasing his own wealth and power. Such ‘Popes’ were the direct cause of the Reformation.
Erasmus’ witty remarks will strike more than a few as apposite for Bishop Michael Bird, since he seems to keen on turning churches into money and silencing critics by litigation. Indeed they will apply, to a greater or lesser extent, to every worldly prelate. Here are a couple of snippets:
PETER: Fine! but let’s go back a ways: you are the nephew of Sixtus.
JULIUS: Glad to confirm it; I’d like to stop the mouths of those who say I’m his son. That’s slanderous.
PETER: Slanderous indeed-unless perhaps it’s true.
JULIUS: It’s an insult to papal dignity, which must always be protected.
PETER: But I think popes should protect their own dignity by not doing anything offensive to the moral law.
And:
PETER: So the court of Rome is to be, as it were, the treasure chest of the whole world?
JULIUS: Is it such a great matter if we collect all their carnal wealth, seeing we spread our spiritual gifts far and wide?
PETER: What spiritual gifts are you talking about? Up to now I’ve heard only about worldly things. No doubt you attract men to Christ by preaching his holy word?
JULIUS: There are people who preach it, and I don’t prevent them, as long as they don’t in any way question my authority.
The litigious bishop is always a figure of fun. Perhaps we need a new Erasmus!
The Meta Sudans was a fountain in Rome on the Appian Way, just inside the Arch of Constantine. Its remains were demolished by Mussolini to make way for a road. In old photographs it is usually photographed from the Arch of Titus, which makes it look more complete than it was. Today I found online another photograph from the other side here.
Today only foundations remain. I took care to look for them on my recent visit to Rome. There is a circle in the grassy area in front of the Arch of Constantine.
Anthony Alcock continues his translation of the late medieval Coptic text which reads symbolism into the letters of the Greek alphabet. Part 3 (of 5) is now available!
I’m sure that all of us are grateful to Dr Alcock for making this text available to us all. This is wonderful stuff!
When I wrote the PHP scripts that support my Roman cult of Mithras site, I incorporated some code to tell me if anyone was looking at the pages. Specifically it tells me which pages are popular; information that is useful to me when deciding what to work on.
Each page is accessed using an address like this:
http://www.tertullian.org/rpearse/mithras/display.php?page=XXXX
where XXXX is the name of one of the pages. So I display the page names and counts like this:
As you may imagine, I was somewhat surprised to find entries appearing that were most certainly not pages on my site. No link anywhere will produce these.
Here is one example:
Any database programmer will recognise that these are fragments of the database language, SQL. What’s going on here?
This is — can only be — an attempt to hack my website. The hacker has theorised that the pages, as in Wikipedia, are actually stored in a database. He is trying to guess how my site works.
What if, he thinks, the “display.php” script, in the address above, takes the page name, creates an SQL query, and retrieves the page data from this hypothetical database? Then perhaps the SQL is this:
select * from database_table where pagename = 'PAGE'
where PAGE is the text in “display.php?page=PAGE“? If so, he thinks, let’s stick a quote in the address box, and add extra code! Let’s see, he thinks, if we can get somewhere with this! It failed, however.
A few days ago he must have realised that he wasn’t getting anywhere with the SQL injection attack (as it is called). Here’s what he did next:
The hacker has tried again. He’s now guessing that perhaps the website uses files on the disk, rather than a database. He thinks that it is perhaps running on the Linux operating system, as most commercial websites do. And he is guessing that my code perhaps does something like this:
File Open("PAGE");
File Read;
Display file to screen;
So he thought that perhaps he could get the display.php to display the password file from the Linux machine. Indeed he tried various permutations of the same idea:
The %2F is an HTML encoding for a slash character; so he is still trying to get at the passwd file. None of it worked, thankfully.
Now there is one obvious conclusion here. This is not an automatic attack, run by machine. This sort of tinkering requires human input. No doubt there are hacking engines, built and sold to attack common software packages used to write websites. But my site doesn’t use these; it’s all hand-made code.
So, somewhere out there, there is a human being, who is trying to gain control of my website.
Who is this person? Well, I do know a little about him. Back in 2006, when I last created a website using PHP scripting, such people didn’t exist. So when I started the site, in December 2012, I didn’t bother with security. The first version of the new site was promptly hacked. And what did he do, once he could edit the content? Well, he deleted it. The page content was replaced with spam and links to spam sites. It’s undoubtedly the same person, since he has kept up various attacks ever since.
The only person who could find advantage in that is someone who works for a spammer. He’s out there, with some knowledge of programming, trying — for money, I presume — to break my site in order to delete it and replace it with rubbish, because someone else pays him to do it.
Nor is he giving up. The attempts to hack me, using the attack that worked initially, have gone on unceasingly for months. Indeed he tried the same hack again, two days ago at 22:42 hours. It’s usually in the middle of the night that the attacks come. Is he an Australian, perhaps? Or some low-paid oriental?
It is sobering to see such determination to do harm. He has put in months and months of effort – far more effort than I have spent to create the site in the first place. And he keeps right on going.
Possibly all of our websites are under such daily attack. The quantities of spam “comments” to this blog run into thousands every day; which, thankfully, WordPress deal with. Most of the time we just don’t even know it is happening.
How many website authors check their logs regularly? How many of us would recognise an attack if we saw one? It is pure coincidence that I chose a format for this site, and a reporting method for it, that highlight the attacks very clearly.
I hope, therefore, that this post may assist my fellow web-authors. It goes to show that these attacks are real.
Yes, it is sobering, and also rather sad. For this was not how things were in 2006. I ran the translation project for Jerome’s Chronicle without any security at all. And I had no trouble.
But now the criminal classes are on the web. The criminal is he who will wreck anything for any shred of personal convenience, regardless of the harm to others.
Sadly we may have to accept a police force for the web also, in response.