Category: Thoughts on Antiquity

I had an email from Dominique Gonnet at the Sources Chretiennes, asking if I had a copy of the OCR program Anagnostis.  I’d never heard of it, but this turns out to be an OCR utility for Greek which can handle Ancient Greek! 

Of course I want one!  But I was quickly put off, by the unbelievable price-tag of 585 euros for the ‘pro’ version — almost £400 or $800.  A ‘standard’ version exists for 78 euros, but this doesn’t do ancient Greek, so is useless to us all.  I don’t really think that I can justify spending such a very large sum.  I wonder if anyone else has seen or used this product?  If so, how well did it work?  A trial download is available: but I have not tried this, and I have seen a post suggesting that it doesn’t let you try the OCR!

I’ve also written to the company suggesting that they do an ‘ancient Greek’-only version for our market, for 78 euros. You might like to do the same, if you think that you’d buy such a product.

The 3rd century historian Herodian of Antioch wrote a history in eight books of the emperors from the death of Marcus Aurelius to the accession of Gordian III. The 1961 English translation is now online here. This is out of copyright in the USA, so copy freely if you are based there.

I have found and ordered a copy of F. L. Griffith The Nubian Texts of the Christian Period (1913), which apparently has some 130 pages and contains all texts known at that time. It includes the Miracle of Saint Menas, one of the longest available texts in this language. This text was contained in a manuscript which was purchased by the British Museum in 1908. According to the description by E. A. Wallis Budge, it measures about 15.5 by 110 cm and consists of 8 leaves of parchment in three quires, and is bound in covers of brown leather. This book is out of copyright in the US, so I will see what can be scanned from it.

Postscript. According to Copac, F. L. (Francis Llewellyn) Griffith lived from 1862-1934. The latter is more than 70 years ago, so puts all his books out of copyright in Britain and the EU, as well as in the US.

£20 (i.e. $40) got me a copy of the uncommon second edition of Alice Zimmern’s translation of Porphyry’s Letter to Marcella.  It came as an early paperback, rather foxed (‘slight foxing’ in the optimistic words of the seller).  I started to scan the pages of this, using Abbyy Finereader 8.0 and an OpticBook 3600, and got very good results, without breaking the frail spine of the book. 

Unfortunately the copy I have has that mouldy smell that one finds in books that have been exposed to unclean conditions.  Since I don’t want a smell of dirt in my house, it will have to be returned, and I will have to get another.   But I wonder what this smell is?  At all events booksellers should certainly indicate if it is present.

The introduction by Alice Zimmern is general, and of no special interest, although I will include it when I scan it.  She doesn’t indicate any revisions to the translation, and the ‘revised edition’ is only mentioned on the title page.  I have yet to compare the two, but I wonder if perhaps the ‘revision’ is an invention of the publisher?   In 1920 the first edition was out of print.  At all events a revision would allow it to appear with a different publisher, where a straight reprint would fall foul of copyright.

The Phanes Press reprint got rid of the thee’s and thou’s which disfigure the copy before me.  As such it is much more readable.  But I will leave the text as I find it.

We need to be grateful to Google Books for making material available gratis. Today I learned again just how much a library can charge for a photopy. When I was still looking for a copy of Hart’s 1749 translation of Herodian, I contacted several libraries who had one (located using Copac) and asked. The British Library wanted around $200. Aberdeen University have just managed to come up with a similar and slightly higher price. It makes you look differently at each PDF on Google Books, doesn’t it?

I was searching for a copy of Hart’s 1749 translation of Herodian to buy, rather than pay $200+ for a photocopy, when I stumbled across a modern translation by Edward Echols, published in 1961.  Something made me look at the copyright, and lo! it is out of copyright and in the public domain in the USA.  I promptly purchased a copy online, and this should be a better choice to scan than Hart.  If I had access to JSTOR, I could even read the reviews and see what people thought of it.  The Loeb translation is in copyright, and anyway I dislike scanning material from Loebs, since I think the series should be encouraged.

Ipswich Library have confirmed that the only copy in the UK in COPAC of the second edition of Alice Zimmern’s translation of Porphyry to Marcella has got lost in the ILL process.  Fortunately it should be possible to purchase one. I will consider donating it to Glasgow University Library, in recognition that they would still have the book, had they not been willing to lend it to me; and I hardly want them to lose out from their generosity.  GUL have lent me a lot of books down the years, and even photocopied some for me at a very reasonable price.  They are probably the most public spirited library in Britain, and I feel indebted to them.

Alice Zimmern herself turns out to have been an early advocate of voting rights for women, according to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.  She graduated from Girton college, Cambridge. She died in 1939.  It is a pity that Phanes Press, when they reprinted her work, chose to remove all her own comments from it.

I’ve also started thinking about how to do the collaborate translation project of Eusebius’ Chronicle, book 1, and I’ve finished OCR’ing the Latin.  It consists of around 2,000 lines in the HTML file.  I shall divide the text into single-sentence sections, and each week we will work on perhaps 150 sections at a go, depending on whether they are trivial or not.  I think that I will hold these in a mySQL database, if I can get it to work.  One problem is how to enter the German translation, and whatever partial English translations exist, in parallel, without cutting and pasting 2,000 times.  The answer, I think, is to load a table with sentences, and then be able to move chunks of sections up and down, until they all match.  So I will need to write a little bit of software to allow me to do this, probably in PHP.

It’s the Easter Monday bank holiday here, and this somewhat self-indulgent series comes to an end. Tomorrow real life is put on hold, and I must go back to work.

I picked up the Sources Chrétiennes edition and translation of Cyril of Alexandria Against Julian the Apostate, although only books 1 and 2 were done.  The French translation is lively and easy to read, and this impelled me to translate some more of book 2.  In it Cyril makes some interesting statements about what Genesis does NOT contain, and for whom Moses was writing.  It’s an interesting work.  Sadly the translator Prof. Paul Burguière passed on in 2000, so we need expect no more.

The other thing that I did today was address the Google Books problem.  This is where out of copyright material is invisible to people in the United Kingdom, purely because Google bars access.  But the problem can be circumvented if you can anonymise your web connection.  Indeed the techniques are just the same as those for getting past web censorship.  However I have now raised the issue in a couple of fora; who, precisely, benefits from UK readers being unable to see stuff in Google Books?  Senior academics regularly dine with government ministers, so this is a problem that can be fixed.  I’ve had a bit of a go, anyway!

Well I woke up aching from working so hard yesterday, but I did get away from the screen for the morning.  This afternoon was spent on Ammianus.  It’s done, and it’s here:

http://www.tertullian.org/fathers/index.htm#Ammianus_Marcellinus

The text etc is all public domain everywhere in the world, so go ahead, take copies, use it as you see fit with my blessing. That’s what it’s for. I had to omit footnotes, as I said, and probably there are typos. If you see the latter, and feel like sending them to me, I will fix them, sometime.

This morning a copy of Porphyry’s Letter to Marcella arrived on the mat.  This was translated by Alice Zimmern and is out of copyright.  A look at COPAC tells me that she did a second, revised edition, which only Glasgow University Library holds.  I made an ILL for that back in February, but it hasn’t arrived and Ipswich County Library, in addition to charging me $10, seem to have lost the plot on ILLs.  All the reprint versions are from the first edition, including the copy I now have.  Another text to go online (now done!), and I’ll fix it if the second edition ever arrives here.

Tomorrow is Sunday. You can see from this blog just how much time I can spend in front of the screen when I’m not at work; my work involves sitting in front of a screen also. So Sunday is my “sanity day”: I don’t use, read or think about computers, patristics, antiquity, work, chores, or anything that I do in the rest of the week. I try to get outdoors, and walk down by the coast. It’s also Easter Sunday, the anniversary of the Resurrection and the beginning of hope for mankind. So expect no entry tomorrow. Here in the UK everything closes, thankfully, and the low-paid wage slaves working in supermarkets get, like the heroine in Browning’s Pippa Passes, their one day off a year. I wish you all a happy Easter, and many Easter eggs!