Tag: From my diary

Leithart’s “Defending Constantine” – an interesting idea

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Constantine gets a bad press these days.

It’s all down to the Hapsburgs and the Romanovs, really.  When you are trying to overthrow an autocrat who justifies his rule by appealing to Constantine as the source of authority, then the urge to rubbish Constantine is going to be strong.  And we find just this sequence events during the agitation of the 1840’s.  Ever since, there has been this tendency to suppose that Constantine hijacked the church.

I myself have always been rather a non-combatant on this one.  I don’t find, in the primary sources, most of the negative myths spread about him.  So I was interested to learn that IVP Academic have brought out a volume on the subject, by Peter Leithart, Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom (2010). (Amazon link)

Sadly the paperback is priced at £16, around $20, which is far too much for me to buy a book on a whim that I might never read again (and no, publishers do not send me review copies; and, most of the time, I am very grateful for that).

But if you have access to it, it may well be worth a read.  There is no reason why, in 2013, we should allow the politics of 1848 to determine how we look at one of the key figures of history.

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

There’s quite a lot going on in my world at the moment.  Too much, indeed, for me to keep on top of it all.

Firstly, I’ve been asked to write a paper for an academic volume.  As I am not an academic, this is quite unusual; the explanation, perhaps, is that the subject is an intractable one which most academics wisely stay away from.  This will involve me in some real expenditure of time, admittedly on a subject in which I am interested.  Fortunately I do have some free time upcoming.

In consequence, on Friday, I drove to Cambridge University Library and renewed my library card.  Plebs like myself are only allowed to take out a card for six months, which means you have to renew them timesomely often.  Mine had expired over a year earlier, which meant that I had to turn up with all sorts of terribly evidential documents.  While sitting there, I realised that I had sat in that office some thirty times over the last fifteen years, and been photographed by them more often than by my mother!  It’s a surreal indication of how bureaucracy loses touch with reality.

One thing I also noted was that my “letter of introduction” that I use to obtain access to manuscript collections is now really rather elderly.  I will need to get some kind scholar to write me a fresh one!

I’ve yet to process all my photographs and documents from my Rome trip into the Mithras pages.  They sit here, looking at me solemnly!

The translation of Eusebius’ Commentary on Luke has been held up by university stuff, but is still in progress.

I haven’t heard anything about the translation of a sermon by Severian of Gabala for a while… must enquire!

The translation of Leontius of Byzantium, Against the forgeries of the Apollinarists, is going well, although we’re finding that we trip up over bits of abtruse theology.  Sooner or later I shall have to get some kind of ideas together on Apollinarian theology.  Not now, tho.

I’ve also picked up various papers on ancient chapter titles, divisions and tables of contents.  A kind correspondent has been sending me details on this, from the Latin perspective, which is consequently getting much clearer in my mind.  What I don’t have, tho, is enough information on the Greek side of things.

Finally I’ve got sick again, so can’t progress a thing!  How much we depend on our health.  How easily we neglect it.

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve asked a colleague to translate for us Leontius of Byzantium, Adversus fraudes Apollinistarum (Against the forgeries of the Apollinarists) (CPG 6817, PG 86, col. 1948-1976).  This is fourteen and a half columns of Migne, and may well be interesting.  The circulation of banned works under other names was an inevitable consequence of the intolerance in the 5th century, and it will be very interesting to see what Leontius uses by way of criteria for identifying these things.

I’m preparing for my trip to Rome.  I’ve made a list of Mithraic monuments that I hope to photograph.  It looks as if I may be able to go to Ostia Antica as well!

On a less pleasant note, I’ve had to add additional security code to the Mithras site.  The incessant attempts to hack my site show up in the log, and are sobering to see.

Rather foolishly – for I don’t enjoy reviewing books – I have agreed to review Tony Burke’s, Ancient gospel or modern forgery, the volume of papers from the “Secret Mark” conference.  Wipf and Stock have started to send me stuff. 

It will be interesting to see if any substantive reply has emerged to Stephen C. Carlson’s crushing demolition of the book.  Carlson suggested that the book was a scholarly hoax rather than a forgery; a distinction of real importance, but not always noted by either his supporters or opponents.

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Off to Rome

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’m off to Rome for a few days in a couple weeks.  Just a long weekend — boy are those hotels expensive! — but nice all the same.

I’m travelling independently with a friend who hasn’t been to Rome before.  I’d rather like to spend some time in museums; my friend, however, is not an ancient history buff.

What should we go and look at, do you think?

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Eusebius book – doing the money

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A day that I have long dreaded has arrived – the day on which I have to work out just what it cost to make the translation of Eusebius of Caesarea’s, Gospel Problems and Solutions.

Why now?  Well, it’s the end of the financial year.  The company has been selling copies of the book for the last two years and, unless I want to pay tax on non-existent profits, I need to book the costs incurred in making the thing in the first place.

Trouble is, the payments went out in small lumps.  There was twenty pounds here, and fifty pounds there, over quite a long period.  I did keep track of a lot of it, initially, in a spreadsheet.  But then I succumbed and stopped being so meticulous.  Which meant, of course, that today I had to go back through emails looking for the ones where I said, “the cheque is on the way” and things like that.

Realistically I cannot hope to have covered them all.  I know that there are more costs that I have been unable to find.  But everything I have billed is certainly a real expenditure.

There are also costs connected with the Origen, Homilies on Ezekiel book, which still languishes unpublished but still cost a lot (I need to hire a typesetter and get it out there).  These I have included, since they are part of the expense.  But even so, I spent quite a bit more than I thought.

The bill for translating and reviewing and editing and transcribing is a little more than five thousand two hundred pounds; around $8,000 dollars.  That, to put it mildly, is quite a sum.  Revenues from sales, which exclude the physical cost of manufacture, have been only around 60% of that.  The cost of manufacture and postage drives that revenue figure down further – I have not calculated quite how, since I charged for those costs separately.  So it looks as if I will end up with a loss of around $4,000 on the project, assuming I don’t sell many more copies (which is likely).

I don’t complain, mind you!  The costs came in, little by little, so I hardly noticed them.  I can afford the loss, spread over four years as it was.  And, heck, it’s not a huge sum, really!  A foreign holiday would often cost more, and leave nothing behind.

The great positive is that the job is done!  For a small sum, as most people count these things, a translation of this highly interesting work now exists.  Once sales cease — there is still a trickle of these — I shall place the translation on the web, just as I promised.  We shall all be the better for it.

And I will bring out the Origen book too.  All the main costs are already paid, so why not?

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’m afraid the sickliness of the current season has interfered quite a bit with my ability to do anything other than work and sneeze!

But I still have several projects going forward.  Eusebius’ Commentary on Luke is progressing – a third chunk arrived this week and I reviewed it yesterday.  Likewise the translation of a homily by Severian of Gabala is in progress.  I need to chase up the translation of another chunk of John the Lydian, tho, which should also be in-flight.

I have obtained a rather interesting dissertation via a correspondent.  This is an MA thesis by Kevin R. Cole, Ritual and belief in the mysteries of Mithras.[1]  It contains a discussion of some of the literary passages.  This includes one by Tertullian, from De praescriptione haereticorum.  Yet I recall that a paper casting doubt on the word “Mithras” in that exists.  It is infuriating not to be able to locate it!

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  1. [1]Boise State University, 1998.↩

From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A virus has left me stuck at home, and I am therefore in need of  the less taxing kind of literature to pass the time.  I have fallen back on Cicero’s Letters to his friends, in the two volume Penguin edition from 1978, translated by D. R. Shackleton Bailey.[1]

Letters are a strange form of literature to peruse, and require a certain state of mind to read with enjoyment.  They are usually short, which makes them slip down easily.  At the same time they are inevitably very “bitty”.  Each is a short piece of this, a short piece of that.  There is a correspondent whom we will not know and who needs to be identified by a brief well-considered footnote.  This may not be an end-note, under any circumstances, for the reader will die of flipping to and fro very quickly.  But it may be supplemented by a longer end-note for important personages now known only to specialists.

Cicero’s letters were collected in antiquity, probably by Tiro his secretary.  He kept copies of his letters — I have just read one where a correspondent had torn up a letter and then apologised for doing so, and Cicero replies that he need not worry, “I have it here”, and that a fresh copy can be sent.  Books of letters addressed to particular recipients circulated.  These included great men of the late Republic, like Cato and Julius Caesar, which have not come down to us.  But sixteen books of letters have reached us, so it makes for a lengthy correspondence even so.  Thankfully the Penguin translation reordered the letters into roughly chronological sequence.

In a separate volume are the great mass of letters to Cicero’s friend and publisher, Atticus.  I confess that I have always found this very hard to read, partly because Penguin issued it in a single monster volume, rather than splitting it into two.  I could wish that some publisher took the obvious step and combined the two sets of letters, producing a  set of four volumes in chronological order.

For the “story” of the book is the story of Cicero’s life.  That is what unites the letters, and makes it possible for the reader to read such a mass of short pieces.  In two separate series it is quite difficult to do.

The Roman attitudes expressed in these volumes can sometimes be quite alien.  In one case Cicero writes to ask a friend to hunt down an escaped library slave of his own named Dionysius and return him, evidently for punishment.  In a later letter Vatinius, then on campaign in Dalmatia, writes to say he has heard that the slave is hiding among a local tribe, and states his intention of ferretting him out, wherever he goes, in order to please Cicero.  The idea that Dionysius should be left alone occurs to neither.  Their own advantage is all.

Likewise there is a casual indifference to marriage and divorce.  The noble Romans of this period dumped their wives at their pleasure, while the abuse of their slaves in every household was taken for granted.  Meanwhile their cradles were empty and their lineages perished.  Their society was morally bankrupt.  Tyranny followed.

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  1. [1]Pleasingly this is currently available from Oxford University Press repackaged into a single volume, here, ISBN13: 9781555402648, for a mere $32.  The translation is also in the current Loeb edition.↩

From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I have been collecting images of Mithraic monuments from the web and identifying them, and adding them to my Mithras site.  It’s fun; and there are more to do.

I’ve also written a short section in the site on Mithras and the Taurobolium.  Did the cultists of Mithras perform the taurobolium, a ceremony of being washed in bull’s blood?  No, they didn’t.  Or, if they did, no evidence records it.  It’s a ritual of Cybele, not Mithras.

Jolly useful to find that I had a PDF of Duthoy’s monograph on the taurobolium on disk when I needed it!

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Last week and this I have been staying in two different hotels in neither of which it is easy to sleep.  How great the noise is, in our society!  It does make it difficult to do anything else.

Last night there were a couple of comments on the post in which I ask whether there is any actual ancient evidence that Pythagoras went to India.  I ended up looking up and posting here all the passages in which it is mentioned that Pythagoras studied under the Brahmins; but none confirm the story of actually going to India. 

The general quality of the passages is low; the whole story looks legendary.  Fragments of Alexander Polyhistor, at second and third hand in Clement of Alexandria and Eusebius’ Praeparatio Evangelica; a statement in Apuleius’ Florida; a statement in the largely legendary Life of Apollonius of Tyana by Philostratus … this is not the stuff of good history.

I’m still working on the Mithras pages.  I’ve created a page which lists all the inscriptions which mention a “pater patrum” of Mithras.  It probably refers to a senior priest in a Mithraeum, but we don’t know for sure.  Last night I also came across and read most of an article by Richard Gordon in the Blackwell Companion to Roman Religion, which gave a very nice overview of Mithraic studies.

A couple of translation projects are going forward as well. 

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