Category: Thoughts on Antiquity

The BBC reports that an Italian professor of anthropology has violated the tombs of Pico della Mirandola and Angelo Politian, for some frivolous reason or other.  Both were leading figures in the recovery of ancient literature in the 15th century.  

I remember one day finding a letter from Politian bound into a manuscript that I was examining. It was to Tristano Chalci, about the works of Tertullian — what existed, what survived. At that date little had been printed. Politian went on a journey with Tristano Chalci through the Veneto in 1494, looking for manuscripts of classical and patristic works. Something of the sunshine of that civilised journey, in search of lost learning and civilisation, still trickles through his words to the reader, even today.  The letter to Chalci exists in handwritten copies bound into a number of humanist manuscripts of the works of Tertullian, and was printed often in the 16th century.  

Italy is largely a cultured land, aware of its past as the cradle of the Renaissance of ancient learning and the modern world.  It is melancholy to see such impiety.

I’m currently looking at an English translation of a later part of this long work in Arabic, which has transliterations of Arabic words in the middle of it.  Some Greek words also appear.

Some are interesting: “al kurban” is the offering of the mass, i.e. holy communion.

Another is “al-Ka‘k” – cakes!

I wish I could work out what Egyptian copyright is.  These were all published in Cairo, at a time when Egypt had no copyright law.  I suspect that legally these are either orphan or public domain works.

While working on the first chunk of Eusebius, I saw a list of kings in Babylon.  There was quite a different between the lengths of the reigns in the German edition (Karst, 1911) and the Latin one (Petermann, 1870-ish).  The former was based on a photographic copy of E, the main manuscript; the latter on two hand-written copies of it in Venice.   If the numbers could vary that much in one generation, there must be real questions about all of the numerals.

I suspect that I am not the only person who has found the old version 2 layout of the 38-volume Ante-Nicene, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers collection at CCEL rather easier to use than the new, improved, but very much more awkward version 3?

I today found that the v2 version has vanished from CCEL.  Fortunately I had a mirror of it, and I have uploaded it to

http://www.tertullian.org/fathers2

I hope it is useful.  It’s all public domain, so use as you will.  A cdrom of it, plus the additional patristic translations which I have online, is also available:

http://www.tertullian.org/fathers/all_the_fathers_on_cd.htm

As a lad, I used to wargame ancients using the Wargames Research Group rules; indeed a metal 1/72 scale Seleucid army still resides in the loft of my house somewhere.  This week I came across an old-fashioned hobby shop, which is a rare thing indeed these days.  On the shelves were wargaming figures, in plastic, 1/72 scale for a vast range of ancient armies.  These were all by Hat Industrie, whose list is here with photographs.  Persians, Carthaginians, Late Romans, all in sets of 20-50 figures — I would have killed for these as a boy! 

Postscript, 21st May: I went back today and found the shop gone, as if it had never been.