Someone asked me, naively, why ancient authors didn’t indicate when they were writing. Of course modern authors don’t tend to embed their names and date of completion in their works either, but this led me to wonder just how many ancient works DO indicate when they were written, in an explicit manner? Comments welcome!
Tag: Ancient world
Cicero and Caesar in Macrobius
Servilia was Caesar’s mistress, but he was also thought to be seeing her daughter Tertia (lit. “third”). At the sales of property confiscated during the proscriptions, Servilia bought a lot of property very cheaply. Cicero said, “You’ll understand better the good price that Servilia got, if you know that Caesar was knocking off a third”. — Macrobius, Saturnalia, book 2.
The signs of ruin in the Theodosian Code and Novels
For why has the spring renounced its accustomed charm? Why has the summer, barren of its harvest, deprived the laboring farmer of his hope of a grain harvest? Why has the intemperate ferocity of winter with its piercing cold doomed the fertility of the lands with the disaster of sterility? — Theodosian Novels, title 3, section 8.
In these words the emperor Theodosius II recognised that something was badly wrong in the Roman world. His remedy, unfortunately, was religious persecution. As Clyde Pharr, the translator, remarks:
Theodosius II did not, however, give soil exhaustion resulting from the inordinate requirements of the gigantic officialdom and the urban masses as the answer to these rhetorical questions. . . . The Emperors tried remedies more pragmatic than religious exhortations. Farm work was “frozen.” In the early fourth century the agricultural producer was bound to the land, forbidden to leave for the more leisurely and amusing life of the Roman proletarian. The decree which first imposed this restraint is not available. Apparently it was issued by Diocletian, and the principle is referred to in an edict of Constantine in 332.15 Thus was established in Western Europe the institution of rural serfdom, destined to last far longer than the government which originated it.
The shortage of food was reflected not only in labor policy, but also in taxation. In the later Empire no subject was more alive. Wallon sarcastically noted that Rome, “in the early times of the Republic, was chiefly preoccupied with having a numerous and strong population of freemen. Under the Empire she had but one anxiety–taxes.”
There is much of value to be learned from the legal codes of the Roman empire. The Roman state collapsed, after all. Today it is fashionable in some circles to deny that there was ever a Dark Age — a view that would have astonished Sidonius Apollinaris. It is, after all, inconvenient for the selfish to discuss what happened the last time round.
Roman attitudes to magic
There were three sets of Roman legislation relating to magic.[1] There was an edict in the Twelve Tables (ca. 451 BC); the laws of Sulla (81 BC); and the legislation of Constantine and other Christian emperors (after 312 AD).
Table VIII.9 made it a crime to move crops from someone else’s field to one’s own by magic. There is another possible prohibition of a carmen causing insult to another, where carmen may mean a spell. The emphasis is on injury to another. A trial under this law took place before the curule aedile, Spurius Albinus, in 157 BC according to Pliny the Elder NH 18-41-43. Further actions against magicians, usually their expulsion, took place during the republic.[2]
The Lex Cornelia de sicariis et veneficis (=assassins and poisoners) is quoted in the so-called Sentences of Paulus 5.23.15-18 (ostensibly ca. 210 AD; probably actually late 3rd century AD; does not seem to be online). This reads:
Persons who celebrate or cause to be celebrated impious or noctural rites so as to enchant, bewitch or bind anyone, shall be crucified or thrown to wild beasts… Anyone who sacrifices a man, or attempts to obtain auspices by means of his blood, or pollutes a shrine or a temple, shall be thrown to wild beasts, or, if he is of superior rank, shall be punished with death. … It has been decided that persons who are addicted to the art of magic shall suffer extreme punishment; that is to say, they shall be thrown to wild beasts or crucified. Magicians themselves shall be burned alive. … No-one shall be permitted to have books of magic in his possession, and when they are found with anyone they shall be publicly burned and those who have them, after being deprived of his property, if they are of superior rank shall be deported to an island, and if they are of inferior station shall be put to death; for not only is the practice of this art prohibited, but also knowledge of the same.
Digest 48.8 deals with the Cornelian law, and quotes the opinions of later jurists on it.[1] Interestingly they include (48.8.4) a quotation from book 7 of Ulpian’s De officiis proconsularis [4]. Lactantius tells us that this same volume of this same book by Ulpian contained edicts against the Christians:
Moreover, most wicked murderers have invented impious laws against the pious. For both sacrilegious ordinances and unjust disputations of jurists are read. Domitius, in his seventh book, concerning the office of the proconsul, has collected wicked rescripts of princes, that he might show by what punishments they ought to be visited who confessed themselves to be worshippers of God. – Lactantius, Div. Inst. 5, 11.
It’s interesting to see that Christianity was grouped together with magicians by Ulpian. It may be relevant that Christians were sometimes accused of practising magic; perhaps the edicts were gathered together for this reason.
Augustus as pontifex maximus ordered all books on occult subjects to be burned, which were 2,000 in number, according to Suetonius (Aug. 31). In AD 16 yet another expulsion of magicians and astrologers from Italy took place; and further expulsions occurred during the first century.
The legislation of the Christian emperors against magic is in the Codex Justinianus 9:18 and in the Codex Theodosianus 9:16. In 312 Constantine banned a haruspex from visiting another; in 321 banned magical arts that injured others, while exempting those used for medicinal purposes or the general welfare. In 357 Constantius banned magic altogether (CJ. 9.18.5):
Chaldaei ac magi et ceteri, quos maleficos ob facinorum magnitudinem vulgus appellat, nec ad hanc partem aliquid moliantur.
Chaldeans, magicians, and others who are commonly called malefactors on account of the enormity of their crimes shall no longer practice their arts.[5]
A law of 358 called magicians “the enemies of the human race” and classified those who used magic verses, sorcerors, haruspices, soothsayers, augurs, diviners, and interpreters of dreams as magicians.
Although the Lex Cornelia involved a general prohibition, cases such as that of Apuleius show that only when harm was supposed was the law likely to become involved, and otherwise was not strictly enforced. Apuleius was accused of using magic to cause a boy to fall sick, and also to induce a wealthy widow to marry him (to the fury of her family, who raised the allegation). In his defence, Apuleius acknowledges the illegality of magic (Apology 47):
You have demanded fifteen slaves to support an accusation of magic; how many would you be demanding if it were a charge of violence? The inference is that fifteen slaves know something, and that something is still a mystery. Or is it nothing mysterious and yet something connected with magic? You must admit one of these two alternatives: either the proceeding to which I admitted so many witnesses had nothing improper about it, or, if it had, it should not have been witnessed by so many.
Now this magic of which you accuse me is, I am told, a crime in the eyes of the law, and was forbidden in remote antiquity by the Twelve Tables because in some incredible manner crops had been charmed away from one field to another. It is then as mysterious an art as it is loathly and horrible; it needs as a rule night-watches and concealing darkness, solitude absolute and murmured incantations, to hear which few free men are admitted, not to speak of slaves.
And yet you will have it that there were fifteen slaves present on this occasion. Was it a marriage? Or any other crowded ceremony? Or a seasonable banquet? Fifteen slaves take part in a magic rite as though they had been created quindecimvirs for the performance of sacrifice! Is it likely that I should have permitted so large a number to be present on such an occasion, if they were too many to be accomplices? [3]
Magic, then, was always something secret and illegal; if, in practice, tolerated so long as no scandal occurred.
1. Stephen Benko, Pagan Rome and the Early Christians, p. 128f.
2. Eugene Tavenner, Studies in magic from Latin Literature, p.13 f, usefully reviews all the data with references, and also lists Roman writers on the occult.
3. Apuleius, Apology, 47.
4. The Digest is online in Latin here.
5. Codex Justinianus 9.18.5, ed. P. Krueger, Berlin: Weidmann (1877), p.837. Online here. The Codex Justinianus is online in Latin here as part of the Corpus Juris Civilis.
Update 20 May 2024: The second reference to the “Digest” should have been to the Codex Justinianus, part of the Corpus Juris Civilis, and in vol. 2 of the Krueger edition of 1877. Slight revisions for clarity.
The grotto of the Cumaean sybil
I’ve been reading a guide-book to Naples and the Amalfi coast today, and I was struck by a photograph of the grotto of the Cumaean sybil, probably the most famous pagan prophetess of Roman Italy. This, it seems, was only discovered in the 1920’s.
I can’t find anything as evocative of Captain Kirk as the image in the book, but did find this one online:
I’ve never really paid attention to the Sybilline literature, which includes some prophecies of Christ. I understand that it has probably been tampered with both by Jewish and Christian interpolators. It would be interesting to see the manuscript tradition of the text, and what copies it exists in.
But… ancient magical stuff is always faintly disgusting, isn’t it? I recall getting a translation of the Hermetic corpus — the books supposedly by Hermes Trismegistus — while I was on holiday in Egypt, in Aboudi’s bookshop in Luxor, and feeling that it was rather creepy stuff. It’s a real element in the ancient world; but not necessarily one that deserved to live, while so much perished.
Computer analysis of inscriptions gives authorship
An interesting technology advance is reported in New Scientist, and follows. What the researchers have done is quite clever, and probably sound.
They take an inscription by a known artisan of a known date, and store each letter in it. This gives them multiple letter ‘A’, for instance. They then create an ‘average’ image of these by superimposing all the ‘A’s on top of each other.
Then they take an unknown inscription, and create the same average image from the same letter. Then they compare how close it is. There’s probably a mathematical “index of similarity” function being used to decide this.
Apparently it works. They tried it out in a blindfold test on some known inscriptions, and it identified the artisan and the date correctly.
Computer reveals stone tablet ‘handwriting’ in a flash
18:00 02 July 2009 by Ewen Callaway
See a gallery of images showing the tablet-reading process
You might call it “CSI Ancient Greece”. A computer technique can tell the difference between ancient inscriptions created by different artisans, a feat that ordinarily consumes years of human scholarship.
“This is the first time anything like this had been done on a computer,” says Stephen Tracy, a Greek scholar and epigrapher at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, who challenged a team of computer scientists to attribute 24 ancient Greek inscriptions to their rightful maker. “They knew nothing about inscriptions,” he says.
Tracy has spent his career making such attributions, which help scholars attach firmer dates to the tens of thousands of ancient Athenian and Attican stone inscriptions that have been found.
“Most inscriptions we find are very fragmentary,” Tracy says. “They are very difficult to date and, as is true of all archaeological artefacts, the better the date you can give to an artefact, the more it can tell you.”
Just as English handwriting morphed from ornate script filled with curvy flourishes to the utilitarian penmanship practiced today, Greek marble inscriptions evolved over the course of the civilisation.
“Lettering of the fifth century BC and lettering of the first century BC don’t look very much alike, and even a novice can tell them apart,” Tracy says.
But narrowing inscriptions to a window smaller than 100 years requires a better trained eye, not to mention far more time and effort; Tracy spent 15 years on his first book.
“One iota [a letter of the Greek alphabet] is pretty much like another, but I know one inscriber who makes an iota with a small little stroke at the top of the letter. I don’t know another cutter who does. That becomes, for him, like a signature,” says Tracy, who relies principally on the shape of individual letters to attribute authorship.
However, these signatures aren’t always apparent even after painstaking analysis, and attributions can vary among scholars, says Michail Panagopoulos , a computer scientist at the National Technical University of Athens, who led the project along with colleague Constantin Papaodysseus.
“I could show you two ‘A’s that look exactly the same, and I can tell you they are form different writers,” Panagopoulos says.
Panagopoulos’ team determined what different cutters meant each letter to look like by overlaying digital scans of the same letter in each individual inscription. They call this average a letter’s “platonic realisation”.
After performing this calculation for six Greek letters selected for their distinctness – Α, Ρ, Μ, Ν, Ο and Σ – across all 24 inscriptions, Panagopoulos’ team compared all the scripts that Tracy provided.
The researchers correctly attributed the inscriptions to six different cutters, who worked between 334 BC and 134 BC – a 100-per-cent success rate. “I was both surprised and encouraged,” Tracy says of their success.
“This is a very difficult problem,” agrees Lambert Schomaker,
a researcher at University of Groningen, Netherlands, who has developed computational methods to identify the handwriting of mediaeval monks, which is much easier to link to a writer compared with chisel marks on stone.Although Panagopoulos’ team correctly attributed all the inscriptions to their rightful chiseller, Schomaker worries that shadows could distort the digital photographs used in the analysis. Three-dimensional lasers scans of the inscriptions may offer more precision, he says.
Panagopoulos says his team is looking to use 3D images in the future.
The Greek computer scientists would also like to build a comprehensive database of digital inscriptions and attributions, so any newly discovered or analysed inscription could be quickly attributed and dated.
Journal references: Panagopoulos’ study – *IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence*(DOI: 10.1109/TPAMI.2008.201); Tracy’s report – *American Journal of Archaeology* (Vol 113 (2009), No 1, p 99-102)
EThOS – still impressed
An email from the British Library EThOS service popped into my inbox a couple of days ago. It told me that a PDF of a PhD thesis was now available online for free download. I’d “placed an order” (free) for this some time back, and here it was.
The thesis was The indica of ctesias of cnidus : text (incl. MSS monacensis gr. 287 and oxoniensis, holkham gr. 110), translation and commentary by Stavros Solomou, London 2007. This link should find it. The quality is excellent – far better than the scans at the Bibliotheque Nationale Francais.
It would help if the site gave permalinks to theses. Likewise, when an order is available, a link to the thesis details would help.
But I’m still dead impressed. Whoever could have accessed something like this, before EThOS came along? I have some slack time today; I would never have hunted this out, but now… here it is. I get to read it, the author gets read, everyone benefits.
Well done the British Library.
The thesis itself is of considerable interest. The Indica of Ctesias was used widely in ancient times, until John Tzetzes; and then suddenly is no longer mentioned. This leads us to suppose that the last copy or copies perished in the sack of Constantinople in 1204 by the renegade army originally hired for the Fourth Crusade.
An epitome exists in Photius. But the author has obtained two additional unpublished mss, and edited these also.
Divus and Deus in Varro and Servius
Hans Dampf has made a series of very interesting and learned comments on a post of mine about an inscription calling Julius Caesar god. If you haven’t seen these, you probably want to.
In particular he has tracked down and translated two statements by Servius, the 5th century commentator on Vergil, which illuminate the way in which the Latin terms deus (god) and divus (divinity) diverged in meaning as emperors were deified.
I won’t repost all of Hans’ comments, which can be read there. But I will repost what he gives from Servius, discussing “deus/dii” against “divus/divi”, as I think it will be of general interest. The works by Varro etc are lost.
(1) Servius, Ad Ad Aeneidem 12.139 (= Varro, De Lingua Latina fragment 2, edition Goetz-Schoell)
Deus autem vel dea generale nomen est omnibus: nam quod graece δέος, latine timor vocatur, inde deus dictus est, quod omnis religio sit timoris. Varro ad Ciceronem tertio: “ita respondeant cur dicant deos, cum [de] omnibus antiqui dixerint divos”.
Translation: “Deus or dea is the general term for all [gods]. […] Varro to Cicero in the third book [of De lingua Latina]: ‘That is the reply they would give as to why they say dii, when the ancients said divi about them all.’”
(2) Serv. Ad Aen. 5.45 (= Varro fr. 424, Grammaticae Romanae fragmenta, ed. Funaioli)
divum et deorum indifferenter plerumque ponit poeta, quamquam sit discretio, ut deos perpetuos dicamus, divos ex hominibus factos, quasi qui diem obierint; unde divos etiam imperatores vocamus. Sed Varro et Ateius contra sentiunt, dicentes divos perpetuos deos qui propter sui consecrationem timentur, ut sunt dii manes.
Translation: “The poet [Virgil] usually employs ‘of the divi‘ [divum] and ‘of the dii‘ [deorum] indifferently, although there should be a distinction in that we call the immortals dii, whereas divi are created from men, inasmuch as they have ended their days; from which we likewise call [dead] emperors divi. But Varro and Ateius hold the opposite opinion, claiming that divi are eternal, whereas dii are such as are held in honour because they have been deified, such as is the case with the dii manes.
Magnetic images at Caistor St. Edmunds
Nottingham University have done a geophysical survey of the Roman town of Caistor St. Edmunds. The images are splendid, and confirm the town plan.
The town lies outside modern Norwich, in a large field grazed by sheep. The Roman walls rise around it, battered but still impressive. A church stands in one corner. The site is visible from the A140 Ipswich to Norwich road, and is well worth a visit. There are no tourist amenities there, no tickets to buy. I always walk a circuit around the Roman walls — it isn’t that far!
Reference to Mithras in the Commentary of Servius?
A strange Jewish anti-Christian site here has the following claim:
Plutarch (Pompey, 24, 7) and Servilius (Georgics, 4, 127) say Pompey imported Mithraism into Rome after defeating the Cilician pirates around 70 BCEE.
This is starting to circulate around the web, and caught my eye. We all know the Plutarch reference, and it says only that the Cilician pirates worshipped Mithras (which may be a mistake anyway). But the “Servilius” reference is new to me. This, I presume, is Servius, the 4th century commentator on Vergil?
The commentary of Servius on the Georgics is online at Google books here. The comment on the Georgics 4, 127 is on p.354 of the PDF, p.329 online. So, what does it say?
127. CORYCIVM Vidisse SENEM Cilica: Corycos enim civitas est Ciliciae, in qua antrum illud famosum est, paene ab omnibus celebratum. et per transitum tangit historiam memoratam a Suetonio. Pompeius enim victis piratis Cilicibus partim ibidem in Graecia, partim in Calabria agros dedit: unde Lucanus <I 346> an melius fient piratae, magne, coloni? male autem quidam ‘Corycium’ proprium esse adserunt nomen, cum sit appellativum eius, qui more Corycio hortos excoluit: quod etiam Plinii testimonio conprobatur. Vidisse Senem ordo est ‘memini vidisse’. dicimus autem et ‘memini videre’: Terentius memini videre, quo aequior sum Pamphilo, si se illam in somnis. Relicti deserti atque contempti; quis enim agrum non sperneret nulli rei aptum, non vitibus aut frumentis vel pascuis? et aliter: ‘Corycium’ autem Cilicia, a monte et civitate Cïliciae Coryco. alii Corycium non natione, sed peritia, quod haec gens studiose hortos colat. et sic dictum est, ut Arcades ambo.
No mention of Mithras. But this states that Pompey settled the Cilician pirates, partly in Greece and partly in Calabria.
I wonder what Servius’ source was?