Tag: Manuscripts

P.Oxy.10 – a chapter number in the margin?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The 1897 publication of the Oxyrhynchus papyri contains an interesting fragment, P.Oxy. 10.  This is third century A.D., and is in the Bodleian.  It contains parts of two consecutive columns from the lost Πεντέμυχος of Pherecydes of Syros.  The author wrote in the 6th century BC and was one of the first Greek prose writers.  A chunk of this work is preserved in Clement of Alexandria, Stromateis 6, and most of this chunk is contained, without variation, in the first column of the papyrus.  The content of the fragment seems to be a speech by Zeus from the marriage of Zeus and Hera. The work was extant at this time in full, as Diogenes Laertius tells us (Vit. Phil. i. 11. 6), and indeed he quotes its opening words. 

The interest of  this papyrus for us, however, is the presence of a numeral in the margin. 

POxy 10. Pherycedes of Syros

On this the editor comments: “The numeral in the margin probably denotes a new chapter, and indicates that this was a continuous work, not a collection of extracts.”

If so, this would be interesting as showing how a chapter was marked in an ancient prose work in the 3rd century AD.

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T. Birt in 1882 on chapter titles

Posted on by Roger Pearse

In Die antike Buchwesen T. Birt discusses the division of books into chapters.  He was to change his views, and I intend to translate his revised statements from 1923 soon.  But for now, here is what he says in 1882.  I have augmented the footnotes by looking up the reference, and placed my additions in [square] brackets.

CHAPTER IV.
The lines in the book.

If we ask antiquity, what  measure he uses for the length of his books, his answer is almost unanimous: the line.  The occasional use of different methods is easily recognised as insignificant by comparison.

Clement of Alexandria measures, as we saw (p. 148 [=Strom. II fin.], the size of his book by the “number and extent of the chapters”. From this it is already evident that the size of a chapter itself fluctuated. So they could not be used as a yardstick for comparison. Also, the concept of the chapter does not seem to be very old. In Photius this division of the text is of course commonplace, as in the scholiasts of Aristotle and Hippocrates, where it alternates with τμῆμα (1).  In the manuscripts, chapter headings appear, perhaps for the first time, in the papyrus chemicus N. 66 of the Leyden Museum; however here they seem to be added afterwards. [2] Symmachus reads Seneca in chapters [3] and Cassiodorus reads Josephus in titles [4]. Jerome’s commentaries were present to Rufinus in non-numbered chapters [5].

1) Dietz, Schol. Hippokr. II 3.  Vgl. Bergk Gr. Litterat. vol. I p. 233. [Dietz is Scholia in Hippocratem et Galenum, (1834) vol.II, 3. Page 3, part of the introduction, contains mention of both 6 kephalaia and some tmh/mata (the last word on p.3). Διήρηται δὲ ἡ μὲν πᾶσα πραγματεία εἰς ἑκτὰ κεφάλαια. Ταῦτα δὲ τὰ μέρη ἐν τοῖς Ἱπποκράτους χρόνοις οὐκ ἐζητοῦτο· δυα γὰρ ἧσαν τὰ διδασκόμενα, τοσαῦτα καὶ τὰ τμήματα.]
2) See Leemans, Horapollo, p. XXII.   (1835).  [This reads: Mercerus in adnot. ad cap. 1. dixit, titulos capitum non ipsius esse Philippi, sed a diligenti postea lectore adjecta; idque patere ex MSto Cod. in quo ad marginem adscribantur. Vellem addidisset quoque, num eadem manu tituli illi scripti essent; nam illud non abhorrere a more posterioris aetatis Graecorum, ut eo modo argumentum capitis vel paragraphi uniuscujusque praemittatur, patet ex papyro Chemico n°. 66. Musei Lugduno Batavi, in quo singulis capitibus tituli, eadem manu atque reliqua, sunt superscripti. Pertinet autem MStum illud, ut ex literarum formis conjicitur, ad tempora Constantinorum. Cf. Cl. Reuvens in Epist. ad Letronnium Ep. III. pag. 65. Art. XI. in Tab. Pap. Gr. et Dem. pag. 4. Art. 40. et in Addend. pag. 162, 163. — Mercer, in a note to Ch.1. said that the titles of the chapters were not by Philip, but added later by a careful reader; and was clear from the manuscript itself, in the margin of which they were written. I would like him to have added also, whether those titles were written in the same hand; for that this does not differ from the manner of the latter age of the Greeks, where in the same way the argument was prefixed to every chapter or paragraph, is clear from the papyrus chemicus n °. 66. of the Leiden Museum, where the titles of individual chapters, in the same hand as the rest, are written over the top. However that manuscript belongs, as may be supposed from the forms of letters, to the time of Constantine.  Cl. Reuvens in Epist. ad Letronnium Ep. III. pag. 65. Art. XI. in Tab. Pap. Gr. et Dem. pag. 4. Art. 40. et in Addend. pag. 162, 163.]
3) Symm. ep. X 27.  [Possibly Q. Aurelii Symmachi quae supersunt, ed. by Otto Seeck (Berlin, 1883) , but I was unable to locate the passage, and Birt in 1882 must have used an older edition].
4) Cassiodor arithm. 1: Josephus in libro I antiquitatum titulo IX.  [i.e. Josephus in book 1 of the “Antiquities”, chapter 9.  Cassiodorus appears in Migne, Patrologia Latina, 69-70. Vol.2 containing the Institutiones is here.   But I cannot find the reference given.  In col.618, tho, in the Expositio in Psalterium, I find: “Josephus quoque … vernaculus Judaeorum in libro octavo Antiquitatum titulo tertio multa de temple constructione locutus est …”  and in col. 109 I find “De quo etiam Josephus in libro Antiquitatum tertio, titulo septimo, …”
5) As quoted by Rufinus (Jerome IV. 8. 378 ed. Mart.) in tertio commentariorum (sc. ad Ephesios) libro . . . sub eo capitulo ubi scriptum est “Qui uxorem” eqs. post aliquanta sic ait; if the chapter concerned  had been numbered, Rufinus would have found it easier to cite it by number; likewise further on (p. 380): de eo capitulo ubi dicit apostolus „Sicut elegit” eqs. ita ait; see ibid p. 402; finally on p. 405:  longum est si velim . . . propositis capitulis ad singula respondere. [not verified; these remarks are Birt’s.  From here on I have not looked up the references.]

[p.158]  In the year 114 A.D., we find from inscriptions, [1] the city journal or daily paper [2] of the country town of Caere was divided into chapters; it had both chapter numbers and page numbers; what determined the size of the chapter here is unclear; but in any case they were not of equal size [3]. Wills were also divided in this way, and a Kaput ex testamento M. Megonii M.F. Cor. Leonis is also reported in an inscription [4]. Cicero’s book of Paradoxes was divided into chapters, and the four logoi paradoxwn of Damascius may be compared with it, of which the first was divided into 352 kefalaia (Phot. cod.130). But since it is a fact to say that Epaphroditus (under Nero) was rather the first to call the books of the Odyssey ‘kefalaia’, a quite adequate explanation for this can be found in another connection.

1) Mommsen, 1 RN. 6828 (Orelli 3787; Gruter S. 214): Q. Ninnio Hasta P. Manilio Vopisco cos.
2) Commentarium cottidianum municipi Caeritum.
3) Ulpius Vesbinus has built the municipality of Caere a phetrium (φράτριον); the inscription gives first the permission of the city magistrates, descriptum et factum recognitum . . . ex commentario quem iussit proferri Cuperius Hostilianus per T. Rustium Lysiponum scribam, etc. then inde pagina XXVII Kapite VI; follows the permission to Vesbinus; followed by a copy of a second document, the request of the magistrates to Curiatius Cosanus that he make no objection to the construction; this was clearly earlier: inde pagina altera capite primo; thirdly, finally follows the undertaking of Cosanus; on pagina VIII kapite primo. So the first chapter covered the first eight pages or more; on page XXVII one was in chapter VI: on the eighteen pages that lay between pp. VIII and XXVII, at least four chapters were covered, each having an average of 4.5 pages.
4) Fleetwood, inscr. ant. sylloge (1691) S. 75.
5) See chapter 9 below.

Another term is related to this, and perhaps identical with it, pars libri and μέρος βιβλίου. When Jerome writes [6]: undecimus liber . . . facilior erit in principiis et usque ad duas sui partes reliqua simili more dictanda sunt, this presupposes that after two partes of his book, more follow and that each pars [p.159] was clearly delineated in appearance [p.159] for the reader, presumably by paragraphing in that contexts. A book of Hippocrates was similarly divided for Galen (1): τούτου τοῦ βιβλίου τὸ μὲν κατὰ τὸ ἕν γράμμα μέρος τὸ πρῶτον εἰς σμ’ στίχους ἐξήκει.  And a “part” does not mean any particular length, because its number of stichoi must be counted first.  In Hippocrates a μέρη was however a different unconnected treatise.  Asconius cited at least one of the speeches of Cicero, the Scauriana, in such “parts”; his first quotation from it is in fact circa ver (a) prim. XXXX, the next ibidem, but the fourth circa tertiam partem α primo, the following is interpolated with statim, then is paulo post, then circa medium, then post dum partes orationis, post tres partes orationis α primo, finally ver.α nov. . . and ver. α novis. CLX. Again, the partes here are not of equal size (2).  All the more must they somehow have been distinguished in the text, since the usual citation by lines was not carried out.

6) Hieron. comm. Jesai. XI praef.
1) Galen in Hippokr. de nat. hom. XV S. 9.
2) The second half of the oration after the medium holds the rest of pars II and pars III and IV; so pars I must been have completed with the entire first half of pars II; so circa tertiam partem primo α is incomprehensible to me, as one would expect circa alteram.

Something that is indeed a measurement of space is the sheet, σελίς, pagina. To determine the size of the book from the number of pages appears to be obvious, and in fact in the above-mentioned commentarius of the city of Caere the pages were numbered, so that it almost quotes by them. This happened here, however, probably only because counting the verses in a miscellaneous text like this was not really possible.  Otherwise they are quoted, – though rarely – only by verses, and counting the sheets seems never really to have become a common practice.  We can quote here especially the fourth Philodemus roll περὶ ῥητορικῆς (3), whose columns of text from sheet VIII onwards (4) are provided with numbers underneath: ΡΛΖ is on p. VIII, ΡΛΘ on XI, again PM, ΡΜΛ etc until PMZ on sheet XIX; so apparently the roll was of 147 sheets. More often we find the number of selides [p.160] given in the subscription at the end of book; this was done mostly on the Eschatocoll beneath the more important number of stichoi, as in the Herculaneum rolls N. 105, 106, 109, 111, 115 in the listing following the stichometry, with which N. 103 is to be compared. Occasionally in these only the selides are recorded: so Vol. Herc. ed. Oxon. index N. 1414: Φιλοδήμου περὶ χάριτος, κολλήματα CEΔΙΟΗ (1). However, they are never found, like the stichoi, written in the old decade numerals and counting them so proves that they were in principle different from the stichoi, as not really belonging to the bibliometric Usus. – A Greek epigram designates at the end an indeterminate mass of poetry books as μυριάδες βυβλιανῶν σελίδων (2), similar to what Juvenal (VII 100) states about historians: Nullo quippe modo millesima pagina surgit omnibus. Martial speaks of a hundred paginae once (VIII 44). That the sheet in ancient times was still not used as a measurement of the size of a book, can only be explained on the theory that using verses was possible, and allowed an even greater accuracy to appear desirable, than pages could provide: because, in fact, the length of a column of  text was inconstant and could vary between 20-50 lines (3).

1) Which Spengel and also later Cobet rightly read as 78 Selides (σελι οη’  or rather perhaps σελι. οη’).
2) Julianus Aegyptius to Theodorus, Anthol. Pal. VII 594.
3) Within a single book it can be constant, as in the Bankesianus, ca. 43 lines.  But Philodemus περὶ κακιῶν (ed. Oxford) varies between 36, 37, 38; the same p. 83-105 freely between 37 and 46. Vol. Oxon. II p. 1-45 has 25-27, p. 46-116 instead 35.  (See Cobet Mnemos. 1878 p. 262).

Aside from Clement, we find in Cornificius and Cicero that the size of a book is counted from the number of letters it contains …

I hope to add tomorrow the couple of pages in which Birt revises his opinion.  But these pages, elderly as they are, are fundamental for all subsequent work on the question and so well worth reading even as they stand.

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A 12th century trilingual Arabic, Greek and Latin psalter

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A correspondent tells me about this post at Arab Orthodoxy:

On the website of the British Library they’ve posted images of a Psalter dated to 1153 written in parallel Greek, Latin, and Arabic. The Arabic translation of the Psalms is that of Abdallah ibn al-Fadl al-Antaki, the famous 11th century deacon and translator from Antioch. You can turn to all the pages and zoom in. Take a look, it’s beautiful.

Here.

In St. Petersburg they’ve recently published a two-volume facsimile and study of a 17th century illuminated Arabic Psalter based on Abdallah ibn al-Fadl’s translation. I’ll get around to writing a review of that at some point…..

I wonder where on earth that was written.  My guess, considering that it dates to the crusader period, is in Syria.  Just before the crusades the Byzantines had conquered the area, bringing Greek; then the crusaders come in, with Latin; and the local Christians speaking Arabic.  Where else would you have this kind of tri-lingualism?

What a wonderful thing to have online!

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Early opinions on chapter divisions

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I have been reading an article about the history of scholarship on the subject of chapter titles, from 1962-3, by Diana Albino.(1)  It begins with some interesting remarks.

In modern printed editions the surviving works of the Graeco-Latin civilization are published divided into books and in chapters.  But the scholar who wants to restore the original reading and that therefore examines the manuscript tradition, finds that in the codices few works are distributed in chapters, differing among themselves in various ways and very rarely supplied with titles and numeration. The problem arises therefore as to whether the ancients used the system of division into chapters and whether, therefore, they cited literary works in the way we are accustomed to for modern works, or whether instead such a method was introduced only in a more recent age.

The first scholars who addressed themselves to this issue (1) asserted that the distribution into chapters of literary works was unknown to the ancients, that they would have only known the use of summaries, and they attributed them to later editing; above all to the librari of the Middle Ages. In fact they were of the opinion that the division documented for some works from manuscripts and incunabuli also need not  necessarily be thought to be derived from the author.  This was because many were often clearly in contrast to the general design of the work or quite were made in an awkward and approximate way; that the titles of the chapters, they found, did not perform the function of indicating the content with sufficient clarity and precision.

(1) V.I. Matthaeus GESNER: Scriptores rei rusticae veteres Latini, Biponti, 1787, vol. 1°, pp. 48-53.

Interesting stuff.  But in these blessed days, we can wonder whether Gesner’s book is online.  And thanks to the generosity of the Americans, who have placed their libraries online and made them freely available to those of us living in less liberal lands, we find that it is!  In fact I find that Albino got the page number wrong.  It is, in fact, p.xlviii-liii!

 The remarks of Gesner quote various authors.  It is too late tonight for me to work on this much, but I see at a glance on p.xlix a discussion of indexes or summaries.

XXI. Sed exortum tamen mature est genus quoddam, unde gradus ad capitum, quae vocant divisiones factus est. Nimirum qui de rebus diversis scriberent, quas non omnes omnis palati esse praeviderent, ii solebant indices quosdam, lemmata, summaria (his enim utuntur unius ejusdemque rei nominibus auctores idonei) apponere libris suis, sed non partibus eorum, quas ita distrahere & lacerare nolebant, verum uno in loco sub conspectum legentis ponebant uniuscujusque argumentum libri. Hoc Valerius Soranus fecerat, cujus se exemplum secutum ait Plinius in ipso praefationis fine, cui indicem illum subjungit, quo liber totus primus impletur. Hoc Gellius, hoc Solinus fecit, de quorum summariis plenissime, ut solet, disputat in praefatione ad opus magnum Claudius Salmasius. Quod vero ait, ab initio tantum operis, & post praefationem positos id genus indices, oblitus est credo Columellae nostri, qui diserte docet in ipso fine libri, qui undecimus nobis est, se illo loco “omnium librorum suorum argumenta subjecisse, ut, cum res exegisset, facile reperiri possit, quid in quoque quaerendum, & qualiter quidque faciendum sit.” & habet in eo ipso loco lemmata Lipsiensis Codex & Goesianus, nec ipsa tamen multum editis meliora, aut talia, qualia a Columella scripta jure putes. Quin Martialis quibusdam epigrammatibus, v. g. Xeniis, nisi tamen aenigmata voluit scribere, plerisque, apposita lemmata fuisse, nec aliter potuisse, res ipsa loquitur. Alia quaestio est, utrum ea, quae habemus, sint Martialis, quod de toto hoc genere merito negat Sanctius Minervae 3, 14, p. 507. Sed illud plane diversum scriptionis genus est, & a nostro proposito alienum.

A very hasty translation, mostly wrong in detail but getting the message over:

XXI. But we have entered prematurely on the subject of how chapters, which they call “divisions” were made.  Obviously anyone who writes on diverse subject, which not everyone has foreseen, will be accustomed to prefix to his books some indices, lemmata, summaria (both terms are used by competent authors), but not in bits, which they were unwilling to tear into chunks, but in one place as the argument of the book.  This Valerius Solanus did, whose example was followed by Pliny at the end of his preface, who added an index to it, filling the entirety of book 1.  This Gellius, this Solanus did, whose summaries Claudius Salmasius discusses very fully, as it is his custom, at the start of his great work.  …??… I think he forgot Columella, who eloquently teaches at the very end of the book which is our book 11, that in that place he “appended the arguments of all his books, so that, at need, it would be easy to discover what was also being sought, and to do so.”  And in that place the Lipsiensis and Goesianus manuscripts have lemmata, which …??… you may think written by Columella.  In fact Martial in some epigrams, i.e. the Xeniis (=’Gifts’) unless he was writing riddles, has added lemmata to many of them, which talk about the gift itself.  The other question is whether the ones we have are by Martial, which is denied by the most holy of Minerva (?), 3, 14, p.507.   But this is a different kind of writing and obviously alien to our subject. 

I’d like to get all those paragraphs of Gesner in English.  If this really is the start of all the thinking on the subject, it would be good to understand the argument clearly.

1. Diana Albino, La divisione in capitoli nelle opere delle antichi, Annali della facoltà di lettere e filosofia, Napoli, vol. 10 (1962-3) pp. 219-234

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Some notes on chapter divisions in ancient books

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve always been interested in the question of when chapter divisions and chapter titles arrived in ancient books.  Various articles on the subject have passed through my hands in recent days as I converted photocopies to PDF’s, and again I found them interesting.  But in those days the German sources, Birt and Bergk, were inaccessible to me, being large books in large libraries, not to be borrowed and scarcely to be photocopied.  I wonder if they have made it onto the web?

Quite by chance I found this material online in V. H. Stanton’s The Gospels as Historical Documents, Cambridge, 1903, p.22f (here). 

THE FORM OF ANCIENT BOOKS AS AFFECTING HABITS OF QUOTATION.

I. The only kind of division of the subject-matter which was ever common in Greek and Roman Literature even to the sixth century A.D. was “the book,” in the sense of a portion of a larger work. The book in this sense, as the names for it in Greek and Latin (bi/bloj and bi/blion, volumen, also later and more rarely to/moj) imply, corresponded originally and normally with the contents of a roll. (See Birt, Antike Buckwesen esp. chh. 3, 5 and 7, comparing Bergk, Griechische Literaturgeschichte I. p. 226 f.) For the most part works which could be comprised within a roll of moderate proportions — as for example most of Plato’s Dialogues and even the longer writings of the New Testament could be — had no divisions, and larger works no lesser ones.

Only in the case of works of a few authors do we hear of chapters or headings (kefa/laia, capita, also called ti/tloi) which served to break up the text into portions. The scholiasts and commentators upon Aristotle speak of such in his treatises. In the main this evidence belongs to the third and following centuries A.D.; but the divisions in question may, at least in some instances, have been early introduced and traditionally preserved.

Yet they do not seem to have been employed in all his works. The Constitution of Athens, in the recently recovered papyrus MS. of it, is without them (see Kenyon’s ed. p. xviii.). Moreover, so far as I have observed, the scholiasts and commentators themselves, though they mention chapters when discussing the question how a treatise should be analysed, rarely refer to statements, opinions or words as contained in such and such a chapter. Commonly they give only the philosopher’s name, or the treatise, or book of the treatise, with an indication sometimes that the passage will be found near the beginning, or the end, of a treatise, or book. In writers earlier than the fourth century A.D. this vague mode of reference is, I believe, universal.

Moreover, the works other than those of Aristotle, which were divided into chapters, seem to have been chiefly those which consisted of a series of articles, such as collections of marvellous stories, books on Natural History and Botany, medical, and probably also legal, books. Clement of Alexandria (circ. A.D. 200) also seems to have divided his Miscellanies into chapters. “Let this second Miscellany,” he writes at the close of the second book, “here terminate on account of the length and number of the chapters.”

The only instance of a reference to a numbered chapter appears to be that in Cassiodorus (Lib. Lit. ch. 3, Migne, voL LXX. col. 1204) to “the ninth chapter of the first book of the Antiquities of Josephus.” These numbers may have been inserted in the Latin translation which Cassiodorus himself caused to be made (Div. Lit. ch. 17, Migne, ib. col. 1133). [For the instances given, see Bergk, ib. p. 233, Birt, ib. p. 157.

To the examples of works with headings quoted by these writers, Dioscorides on Plants and Roots may be added, see Palaeographical Society’s Publications, I. plate 177. On the other hand, they are both, I believe, in error when they state that Symmachus’ copy of Seneca had chapters. The reference to Seneca by Migne (ap. Symm. Ep. x. 27), or some other editor, introduced within a bracket, has, it would seem, been mistaken for part of Symmachus’ text. Of the employment of any subdivisions of chapters there is no trace whatever. The word tmh~ma (section) is indeed used, but only as an equivalent for kefa/laion].

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284 Greek manuscripts online at the British Library

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I learn from here via here that Juan Garces, the go-ahead curator of Greek manuscripts at the British Library, has got 284 manuscripts online.  It’s well worth browsing the four pages of the list.  There’s a manuscript of Zosimus New History in there, for instance.  Despite pleas from Biblical people, it’s mostly classical or patristic or bits and pieces, which is all to the good.  Synesius is well-represented too.

Note that the short list in the browse is not everything.  If you click on one of the text links you get a break down of all that the manuscript contains.  Works in the TLG are given the TLG reference too.

Turning the pages is quick and easy, thankfully, unlike early and very clunky online interfaces.  This one is almost usable!

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Manuscripts of the history of John bar Penkaye

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The seventh century Syriac writer John bar Penkaye wrote various works, according to Ebed-Jesu, most of which have perished or are extant still only in manuscript.  One that has attracted attention is a chronicle in fifteen chapters.  The last of these deals with the rise of Islam, and, since it was written within the century, is nearly contemporaneous.

Today I had an email from a researcher working for the BBC asking about the manuscripts of the work.  I must say that I don’t know!

At BYU there is a copy of Mingana’s edition of the last 5 chapters, in Sources Syriaques.  From this I learn that Mingana edited the text with French translation from two manuscripts, one in his own collection, truncated at the end, which he labelled M; and one from the Chaldean Patriarchate in Mosul, written in 1840 but copied from a manuscript written in 1262.  

Searching for “John bar Penkaye” in vol. 1 of the catalogue of the Mingana collection, I find that his copy is now Mingana Syriac 179, completed 22nd September 1928 and written at Alkosh.  In the catalogue the text is called The beginning of words, but Mingana refers to the Sources Syriaques publication.

Apparently there is a review of the manuscripts in T. Jansma, “Projet d’edition du ktaba dres melle de Jean bar Penkaye”, OS 8 (1963) p.96-100.  (I would imagine that “OS” is “L’Orient Syrien”!) Sebastian Brock translated the end of book XIV and most of book XV into English.

Steven Ring has a list of manuscripts here:

  • Baghdad, formerly Moṣul Chaldean Patriarchate Ms 26 dated 1875 AD from an exemplar dated AG 1573 = 1261 or 1262 AD, [74], p. 13
  • Alqosh Ms 25 dated 1882, [66], p. 489
  • Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vatican Syr 497
  • Birmingham University Library, Mingana Ms 179 dated 1928
  • Manchester, Rylands 43, a fragment c. 1915, [56], p. 167 f.

He adds: “See also, Anton Baumstark 1922, pp. 210 – 211 who lists other Mss in note 14 on p. 210.”

kjhkhk

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How the works of the elder Seneca get to us

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Seneca the elder has left us two works, the Controversiae in 10 books and the Suasoriae in 2 books.  Both are textbooks on how to address a Roman court.  A supposed case is proposed: e.g. a priest is burned rescuing the image of Minerva from a burning temple.  Now because a priest must be whole in body, some say he cannot be a priest.   Seneca states the case, and then gives arguments that an orator might make, first for one side, then for the other.  He isn’t concerned with the “right” answer, so much as showing how to argue the case.  Each book of cases is given a preface, in which Seneca talks about orators of the past.

The works do not reach us intact, although they travelled down the centuries together.  In fact we have two kinds of manuscript.

Firstly there are manuscripts which contain the complete text of the Controversiae, plus the two books of the Suasoriae.  Unfortunately none of these manuscripts gives all ten books of the Controversiae.  They give books 1, 2, 7, 9 and 10, complete.  And they only include the prefaces to books 7, 9 and 10.

Three manuscripts are important for this form of the text.  First there is Antwerp 411 (=A), from the end of the 9th or start of the 10th century, and written in eastern France.  Brussels 9594 (=B) is slightly earlier, from the third quarter of the 9th century and north-eastern France.  Both manuscripts have suffered damage, and contain superficial corruptions but a basically sound text.  Then there is Vatican latin. 3872 (=V), of the same date as B and from Corbie, which is independent of A and B.  The text seems to be the result of ‘correction’, either in late antiquity or the middle ages.

Fortunately we have another line of transmission.  At some point down the years, probably in the 5th century, someone made extracts from all ten books of the Controversiae, and included the prefaces.  We have manuscripts of this edited version, although once again prefaces have been lost.  But this gives us prefaces for books 1-4, 7 and 10, filling the gap for prefaces in the first family. 

The most important manuscript of this family is Montpellier 126 (=M), again written in the third quarter of the 9th century, partly in hands with the distinctive letter-forms of the abbey of Reims.  There are numerous later manuscripts, all derived from M.  But there are also four leaves of a manuscript written around 800 AD, Bamberg Msc. Class. 45m, which is close in type to M.

The end result is that we get the prefaces for books 1 and 2, which we have in the full text form, plus prefaces for books 3 and 4, where the text is extracts; books 5 and 6 and 8 just the extracts; and books 7, 9 and 10 complete.

When  thinking about how manuscripts reach us, it is  always useful to see what is normal.   Most of the general public are not familiar with this, and consequently invent their own imaginary standards of “reliable transmission of texts”.  It is unfortunate that a professional text critic, Bart Ehrman, has published several books which encourage this tendency to suppose that books do not reach us from antiquity.  Only this weekend I had to respond to a post by one of his idiot disciples, who had decided that the bible could not possibly reach us because … there are different textual families!  It is difficult not to feel that Ehrman deserves such an audience, the natural consequence of publishing books that lead the public to suppose that textual criticism is pointless.

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Downloading the Iliad

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve pointed some mirroring software at the Centre for Hellenic Studies site where they have online some high-resolution images of the Venetus A manuscript of the Iliad.  It’s been downloading images for the last three hours, and has managed a princely 37 files so far.   It might take a while, methinks!

The reason is that the images are around 17mb each.  They’re splendid, make no mistake.  I opened one using the Windows browser and zoomed in, and quite by accident got text reading “ILIADOS A” – the start of the Iliad.  The commentary in the margin is clearly visible, although a bit faded, but no doubt some graphics manipulations — perfectly possible with such high-resolution images — would make them all brilliantly clear.

But I doubt many people will download a copy.  Broadband technology just is not up to it yet. 

It reminds me of the late 90’s, when we all wanted to put images online but all we had was dial-up connections.  A few things did make their way online, but were painful to get hold of.  It required a step-change in internet access speeds before multimedia and PDF’s and such like could become commonplace.

Similarly mss photographed like this will remain limited in number for now.  But their time will come!

We can only congratulate the CHS for their foresight in making these available.   These are treasures, and signal the next stage of the development of the web.

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More on the ancient Greek and Latin at Google

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A few days ago I gave a link to 500 ancient Greek and Latin texts at Google.  What I had not realised was that this list was not just a bunch of pointers, but a new set of scans, done at high resolution specifically to aid OCR.  A reader has emailed me a link to an article on the Inside Google Books blog — itself new to me. This states, after an intro:

I’m pleased to announce that Google Books is now assisting this work by sharing high-resolution digital scans of over 500 volumes of Ancient Greek and Latin, dating from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries. (Of course, downloadable versions of over a million volumes in all fields are available from books.google.com, in a more compressed form.) Jon Orwant and I created this collection using a list of several thousand important Classics volumes identified by our collaborators Professor Gregory Crane and Alison Babeu of Tufts University. We are analyzing additional volumes and expect to be able to release more high-resolution scans in the future.

These scans will aid the development of accurate OCR (Optical Character Recognition) algorithms for Ancient Greek, and provide the basis for electronic versions of important editions of these Classics texts; but perhaps their greatest value will be for the development of new methods in this emerging field. We’re honored that Professor Crane called this donation “a major contribution to what scholars can do.”

It also mentions something equally interesting:

… scholars around the world can now consult a high-resolution digital scan of Venetus A, one of the best manuscripts of the Iliad, at the Center for Hellenic Studies.

Mind you, I find on linking to it that someone at the website decided to block people using Internet Explorer.  That’s strange, but a minor thing.  The great thing is to get the thing online.

Among the manuscripts of the Iliad, one of the oldest and most important is the manuscript in the Biblioteca Marciana, shelfmark gr. 822.  This is given the reference letter (=siglum) “A” in the editions.  It is not merely a very important copy, beautifully written, nor merely one of the oldest outside of the very extensive papyrus fragments.  It also contains the ancient scholia to the text, originating in the text critical school at the Museum in Alexandria ca. 150 BC.   I have yet to manage to see any of the pages, thanks to the quirk above, but it can only be a very good thing indeed!

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