Procopius: Buildings

Byzantine squiggles:
a rather mild example.

Although the Buildings, in its English translation by Dewing (Loeb edition), has been on Lacus since 2003, the original Greek was not, nor was it to be found anywhere else online; and for years those who visited my orientation page have been reading there, “I have no intention of transcribing the original Greek text: the paucity of readers of ancient Greek out there make it a case of diminishing returns.”

It’s probably still true. The anecdotal evidence I have is that people who read Greek also have access to the TLG. But it recently became useful to me to run a software test on a product I’m developing, and since I’ve been unable to find the Greek text of the Buildings online, other than in a xerox of Migne (wonderful in its time but not so reliable and somewhat superseded by more recent text scholarship) the Buildings became my test document. Perseus has the Greek text of the Wars and of the Secret History, which are also reproduced in a GoogleBooks/Archive.Org xerox: ‘my’ Buildings, when complete, will put all of Procopius online.

All this by way of saying that Book I of the Greek text of the Buildings has now joined its English translation onsite, in 3 webpages. As elsewhere onsite, the text and the translation are crosslinked, if for now only rudimentarily: I’ll be putting in the chapter-by-chapter crosslinks, by and by. The other Books are on their way.

The “software product” — an overblown name for it, but hey, ya do computer stuff, ya follow da rules and give it a fancy IP-sounding moniker — may be more important than the test document. I mentioned it in an earlier post: an automatic text expander that lets you type ancient (polytonic) Greek without worrying about the breathings and accents. For those few who input even a small amount of Greek from time to time, it’s a boon; currently catching about 92% of non-technical text, and not much less even of text with high technical content. The expander, which runs on Macintosh only, takes the form of a Typinator “set” which works nicely now, but the good folks at Typinator (see their website) have asked me to hold off on releasing it until they in turn update Typinator to its next version: as a beta-tester for them I’d found some minor bugs, impacting the handling of Greek, that they’ve now fixed; but their new version is not available yet. The set will be available on their site and on mine, very likely within a coupla weeks.

At any rate, the test succeeded. I hadn’t used any of Procopius to create the expander dictionary, but my set caught about 90% of his somewhat technical text, and frankly, without it I would never have been able to input 45 pages of ancient Greek in three days; and typing in all the squiggles one by one is so depressing that I wouldn’t have tried: it’s currently the longest Greek text on my site. (Yes, you still have to proofread; but we all proofread anyway, rihgt?)

Dio, continued

Up on Lacus in the last few days, a few more of the Greek originals of the Discourses of Dio Chrysostom: 53, 56, 57, 60, 80. For a while, some of the wind was taken out of my sails when I discovered that Perseus has them all — but in fact, on closer inspection, they only have 1‑13 and 31‑35, which right now is nice complementarity, since of those I only have 5 and 9. At any rate, for the Greek originals, the situation is currently: 39 of them only on Lacus, 16 only on Perseus, and 2 on both: with 23 not online anywhere that I know of. For English translations, Dio is complete on Lacus, and as far as I can tell, neither Perseus nor anyone else has any of them.

Cures

Cures, near Fara in Sabina

Nothing earth-shaking, but at least I haven’t added Latin nonsense or falsified mileages: the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica article “Cures” — being the little town in Sabine country that Titus Tatius and Numa apparently came from, and which was deemed in Antiquity to have been the origin of the name Quirites applied to the Roman people.

A brief article cribbed from a common 101‑year‑old encyclopedia should hardly be news, but alas it is, sort of. Wikipedia too, bless ’em, reproduces the same article, making essentially no changes: but the only two significant changes it does make are both mistakes. Small ones, but mistakes none the less: the ager Sabinus becomes an “alter Sabinus“; and 26 miles has been turned into 26 km. That in turn wouldn’t be terribly interesting if it weren’t that (a) the introduction of errors into the EB articles is very common at Wikipedia, maybe more common than not; and (b) the prevailing wisdom there, usually delivered with a sniff, is that the 1911 EB is antiquated, sexist, written in stodgy old English, and generally we people can improve all that.

And so we can. Our first step though, is to introduce no mistakes of our own. The next, which I’ve attempted to do on my own page, would be to add the source citations, links to what further websites may be relevant, and in this case a GoogleMap; and the dozen or so times Cures appears elsewhere onsite are now linked to it. Nothing major, but at least it’s not nonsense.

Historia Augusta

Bust of Caracalla(Musei Capitolini)

The complete Historia Augusta has been up on LacusCurtius for seven years now, and in all that time the reader going to its orientation page will have read that there was an introduction by the Loeb editor, and a little section on the manuscripts — but that I hadn’t put them up, and would do so in the fullness of time.

Of course I quickly forgot about the missing items; yesterday must have been the fullness of time, and I had occasion to discover them again. They’re now up: Introduction and Manuscripts.

David Magie’s explanation of just how people consider the Historia Augusta a pack of lies is reasonably thorough and clear. But the more useful and interesting explanation is in fact on Livius; though less complete and technically detailed, that’s still the one I recommend.

Oppian, Cynegetica

A pair of opisthuretic Dogs going at it

It’s been a long while since I’ve put up anything new on the Graeco-Roman section of my site, at least anything of any size or consequence. But American history notwithstanding, I’m still committed to providing crumbs of Antiquity to the numberless eager masses starving to feed on them.

Today’s morsel is Oppian’s Cynegetica, in both Greek original and English translation: nominally a manual on hunting, much of it is in fact a textbook on zoology, frequently cribbing from the incredible, towering genius of Aristotle, but also standing on its own as a good snapshot of what the Mediterranean world knew about animals in the early 3c AD, and so written — it’s poetry, or at least it’s in verse — as to make it a natural ancestor of all those wonderful medieval bestiaries. It’s an interesting book, and worth the trouble of putting up.

And transcribing the Cynegetica has indeed proved to be a tremendous chore, mostly because its editor and translator, the Scotsman A. W. Mair, did exemplary work, his voluminous annotations being extraordinarily thorough, as well as relevant and intelligent, which is more than can be said of some other modern editings found in the Loeb Classical Library: at any rate, Prof. Mair’s notes range from the ever seminal Aristotle of course to Sir Walter Scott; from Pliny and Ovid to Schemseddin Mohammed (16c) and Shakespeare; from Plutarch and the Bible to modern zoological works. Those copious notes are in Latin and Greek, German, French and Italian, and thank goodness there’s not very much Hebrew, since that particular language is a pain for me to transcribe. Mmm, I forgot — a smattering of English, too.

Further complicating the transcription is that Oppian — whether he or someone else by the same name, as the old saw goes — also wrote Halieutica, on fishing; and the two works are very tightly related, so that Prof. Mair’s notes constantly link from one to the other, and his 80‑page introduction covers both: this in turn means that, until I also get the Halieutica fully up (only a draft for the moment), some few of the links to it may not work; patience, folks, we’ll slay this monster yet.

Similarly, the many, many, citations of Athenaeus and Strabo and of Plutarch On the Intelligence of Animals — all three also in progress on LacusCurtius (i.e., incomplete and in their bathrobes as it were) — had me detouring thru those writers and making sure at least that they’d brushed their teeth, and fixing the worst rips in their pajamas: links to them are correspondingly incomplete and may occasionally be erratic as well, reader be warned.

Still, when I get done, taking it all together, LacusCurtius will have a solid nucleus on ancient zoology. The next step would be Aristotle; I wonder if I’ll take it.

Iphigenia in Umbria

Iphigenia being led to the sacrifice

A few weeks ago by happenstance I found myself at Under the Umbrian Sun, a site that documents the recent and ongoing excavations at Vicus ad Martis on the Via Flaminia in Umbria; and to my surprise bumped into an entry titled “Bill Thayer on Massa Martana and Umbria”, which praised me for a rather weak site on the town, although to some extent rightly: among the blind the one-eyed is king, as the proverb goes. But it was really embarrassing; all the more so that I’d been sitting on a few dozen photos of the very church that stands just 100 meters from the ad Martis digs: an interesting church that I know pretty well — and in 14 years I’d managed to avoid having a webpage on her. A 3‑page site now repairs that, with 23 of those photographs; and although it’s nominally about a medieval church, the site follows the church itself, about half of which is about Roman stone, including a carved fragment that has been identified as a Sacrifice of Iphigenia.

The process of writing up the carving also resulted in me translating the entry “Iphigenia” in Daremberg & Saglio; I wasn’t completely happy with what I’d been finding about her elsewhere online in English, so this is an additional resource.

The sign of Socrates

 

Yet another chunk of Plutarch: the De Genio Socratis; just in English, since the Greek text, along with a French translation, is already available at Philippe Remacle’s site.

We need not be misled by the title, “On the Genius (Sign, Daemon) of Socrates”; maybe a third of it discusses in what his guardian voice might have consisted, and it is embedded in a typically Greek matrix of (1) moral concerns, (2) mysticism, and (3) murder — this last, the Theban uprising of 379 BC, forming the unlikely setting and in fact the main topic: after a spirited discussion of Buddhist reincarnation, virtue and the paths of the planets thru the Milky Way, the philosophers run off to assassinate the heads of their government.

Samples of (1), (2), and (3), in order:

For if it is a noble act to benefit friends, it is no disgrace to be benefited by them; for the favour, requiring a recipient no less than a giver, needs both to be made perfect in nobility. He who refuses to accept the favour, like the man who refuses to catch a well-directed ball, disgraces it, allowing it to fall to the ground without achieving its end. For what target is so delightful to hit and so painful to miss, as a man deserving kindness at whom we aim a favour? Yet in the case of the target the man who misses has only himself to blame, as the mark is fixed; whereas with favours, the man who declines and moves aside is guilty of an offence against the favour, allowing it to fall short of its goal.

Some of it was of the pure hue of the high seas, while elsewhere the colour was not unmixed, but turbid and like that of a pool. As they crested the surge the islands came back, without, however, returning to their point of departure or completing a circle; but with each new circuit they advanced slightly beyond the old, describing a single spiral in their revolution. The sea containing these was inclined at an angle of somewhat less than eight parts of the whole toward the midmost and largest portion of the surrounding envelope, as he made out; and it had two openings receiving rivers of fire emptying into it across from one another, so that it was forced far back, boiling, and its blue colour was turned to white. All this he viewed with enjoyment of the spectacle. But looking down he saw a great abyss, round, as though a sphere had been cut away; most terrible and deep it was, and filled with a mass of darkness that did not remain at rest, but was agitated and often welled up. From it could be heard innumerable roars and groans of animals, the wailing of innumerable babes, the mingled lamentations of men and women ….

[W]hen Melon, the first to make a move, set out through their midst, his hand on his sword hilt, Cabirichus, the magistrate appointed by lot, caught his arm as he passed and shouted: “Isn’t this Melon, Phyllidas?” Melon, however, disengaged himself, drawing his sword as he did so, and rushing at Archias, who was having trouble getting to his feet, did not slacken his blows until he had killed him. Philippus was wounded by Charon near the neck, and as he defended himself with the goblets set before him, Lysitheüs threw him from his couch to the ground and dispatched him. We endeavoured to quiet Cabirichus, adjuring him not to lend aid to the tyrants but help us set his country free, as his person was sacred and consecrated to the gods in that country’s behalf. But as he was not easily to be won over to the wiser course by an appeal to reason, the wine also having its effect, but was getting to his feet, excited and confused, and couching the spear our magistrates are accustomed to keep always with them, I seized it in the middle and raising it above my head shouted to him to let go and save himself, as he would otherwise be cut down; but Theopompus came up at his right and struck him with his sword, saying: “Lie there with these you toadied to: may you never wear the chaplet when Thebes is free and never sacrifice again to the gods before whom you have invoked so many curses on your country in your many prayers for her enemies.” When Cabirichus had fallen, Theocritus (who was standing near) caught up the sacred spear from the blood, while we dispatched the few servants who had ventured to fight back and locked up the rest ….

There’s still a lot of Plutarch left: right now, only 45% of the Moralia are onsite.

Firmicus Maternus

An astrological chart redrawn from Firmicus II.29.10

A work in progress, but enough of it to report here: Firmicus Maternus’ Mathesis — his textbook on astrology. As noted on my orientation page, the same edition is already online, as flat photostatic copies, divided between two places, so rekeying all that Latin may be looked at as totally superfluous or useful, depending on one’s point of view. In progress, because of the 8 Books only five are available right now, of which only two are fully proofread.

No English, but the Latin is very easy, especially if you’re conversant with astrology; and why else would anyone read this stuff?

A couple of hours after posting, on second thought: Actually, since the delineations cover everything that could come to mind to a 4c Roman as possibly happening to a human being, attentive reading — such as required in proofreading — brings out a full picture of life in those times: certain diseases rather than others, a lot about frittering away or losing one’s inheritance, a lot about violent death, an undercurrent of fearing the rulers (not made any better by the pointed instruction to avoid so much as looking at the horoscope of the emperor, with the specious intellectual rationale given that He Isn’t Subject To The Law Of The Heavens, Since He’s Above Them And Is A Very God).

The chart I show here by the way is a rare thing in the work, Firmicus doesn’t give many, maybe only this one: but he needed to spell it all out in order to show how someone with such a good chart on the surface can in fact have a much worse destiny, because hey you gotta look at the antiscia too. It is in fact an example of “fudging” by piling on complexities, so that indications of just about anything can be found in a chart if you only look hard enough: something that astrologers still do today.

Lacus back up

LacusCurtius is back up today. There may be one or two further disruptions this week, but maybe not; at any rate, if there are any, I don’t expect them to be more than about 12 hours long. (Recabling and installing new jacks at the office where the server is housed, etc.)

LacusCurtius is now briefly offline

Artist's conception of no LacusCurtius

As of 1:30pm Chicago time today (Nov. 21, 2010) the entire server at penelope.uchicago.edu — including my site, James Eason’s site on Sir Thomas Browne and 17c sources, and Jim Grout’s Encyclopaedia Romana — has been taken offline for a short while. The offices in which the server is housed are moving to a new building; the disruption may last a couple weeks, although I hope not. It may come in two phases, each a brief offline period of a day or two. I don’t know. At any rate this is an expected event, after which everything will again be exactly as it is now, except that the underlying numerical address will be different. Further delays will occur for some, depending on how efficient your own server is in updating domain-name tables, so there may be a brief period during which some will be able to access the sites, and others not; that too is normal.

It also means that my e-mail is knocked out. This will give me a nice rest. Mind you if some dreadful emergency attending the Cynegeticon of Nemesianus or the church of S. Maria del Verde in Rocchetta has you panicking to reach me, I’m not totally incomunicado; witness this post.

Jona likes to illustrate each blog item with a pretty picture when I don’t do it myself: I’m just dying to see what he comes up with for this one.

Appian

Legionary eagle

To fill up the slight lull — Jona must be busy these days — and taking the title of this blog literally: a note is in order that I’m finally getting around to proofreading Appian’s Civil Wars, with two of the five Books now in theory made ‘perfect’ in the last coupla weeks. Dull as ditchwater (I’m not interested in warfare and even less in the interminable treacheries of the Roman civil wars), but it’s getting done; things eventually do, although it may take several years, as here. The good news, though, is that there were very few typos: about one every twenty printed pages; only two changed the sense, and of those, only one could not be rectified by the reader on their own (a number).

Cooking utensils

 

Romano-Egyptian strainer

And Jona missed one; the reason for my translation of the tiny gridiron article in Daremberg was that it was cited in a journal article I put up, Roman Cooking Utensils in the Royal Ontario Museum of Archaeology. Why one should care about pots and pans in Toronto in 1921 is — well, the editors of the American Journal of Archaeology felt as I do: the paper’s descriptions and good drawings of them are worth having to put up with the rather obtrusive shill for the young Museum. Among the items salvaged from these Roman cooks in Egypt, a ladle with an extension handle; I’m a fair cook myself and have never seen one, ancient or modern.

New at LacusCurtius (8)

LacusCurtius‘ Bill Thayer has resumed putting online the Greek texts of Dio Chrysostom, the complete English being already up. Here are Discourse 25 (English), Discourse 43 (English), Discourse 45 (English) and Discourse 48 (English), which Bill summarizes as:

The new proconsul is coming to see us; for Heaven’s sake, people, let’s not embarrass ourselves in front of him by airing our dirty laundry right off — we can always do that later.

In the Daremberg & Saglio, the craticula, the gridiron, and in the Antiquaries’ Shoebox the ‘bridge’ at Aricia, and a series of three pieces on ancient Privernum (1, 2, 3).

Athenaeus Online

FISH: Roman mosaic, Emporiae

Yesterday, having an 83-year-old friend to lunch, I had the opportunity to do a thorough scrub of my downstairs guest bathroom. Now I’m not overly addicted to cleaning house; I do it once a year on December 31st, whether it needs it or not, and usually catch a few nests of dog fur and a pocket or two of old catfood or spilled coffee. Nevertheless, yesterday I spent an hour at it in that one little room, spraying everything with bleach, scrubbing such things as the upper, lower, and hinge-side edges of the door just like I was back at the U. S. Air Force Academy many years ago (failing inspections, by the way, no matter what I did). Dunno how good it all was, but I did get the house to smell like a public swimming pool.

Yet finally I was surprised to find it was satisfying: I could see the result. Cleaning a whole house, on the other hand, is deadly: it’s just too much.

Inspired, I went on and cleaned one small room of a huge project long underway at LacusCurtius – to put onsite the complete Loeb edition’s English translation of the Deipnosophistae by Athenaeus: several thousand pages of Greek blather, mostly about FISH; although here and there he also talks about Homer, wine, whores, fish, music, religion, fish, the palaestra, literary conundrums, India, fish, spices, plants, etc. It’s a whole depressing houseful, and it’s been hanging undone for years, on my site, but not quite. I don’t normally like doling things out piecemeal, but in this particular case if I follow my usual practice and prepare all of it together, it’ll never get done at all. So now, then, one little room of it is done, and any ichthyophilous octogenarian out there with a hankering to read this stuff can now at least get a start: Book 1, in three webpages. The other 14 Books will stagger in over time, competing with other smaller and thus more satisfying projects, like tuna fighting the currents in the Bosporus.

Moral duty

Cicero

This morning, I’ve put a text onsite, in English translation, that is already online in at least ten places: Cicero’s de Officiis.

Normally I’d never do such a thing, and I’m quite happy to link to existing online material, especially if it’s something like philosophy in which I have very little interest. And if that other site has a few typos, well I’m sure my own stuff does too — in fact, I’m reminded so about twice a week, when my e‑mail brings me (welcome) notice of them in my own house — and if they don’t slavishly reproduce the Loeb edition, well there’s no harm in that, and often enough that’s even an improvement.

But when on a rare foray into the meat of what it was Cicero might have said, I discovered that these Ten Sites — all, as far as I can tell, cribs of one single scan — print such things as this:

The pirates’ sense of can be expedient?

and find that the Loeb edition actually has:

The pirates’ sense of honour is higher than the senate’s. “But,” someone will say, “the revenues were increased, and therefore it was expedient.” How long will people venture to say that a thing that is not morally right can be expedient?

— I draw the line. (Go ahead, Google that phrase, in quotes: you’ll find 8 pages with that nonsensical line. One of them is brought to us by the “Britannica Online Encyclopedia”, actually hosted by http://www.britannica.com; and another is apparently a printed book.)

This passage, mind you, is not the isolated accident. It’s just one of about 20 such passages of nonsense, all of them involving the mindless skip of two to six lines at the bottom of the page being scanned: except for two inexplicable skips of fully three-quarters of a page each. All of them make it quite clear that the perpetrator didn’t read what they were throwing online. Here are two more, and notice how insidious the first one, which appears to make a sort of sense:

One’s purse, then, should not be closed so tightly that a generous impulse should be observed and that limit should be determined by our means.

where the correct text is:

One’s purse, then, should not be closed so tightly that a generous impulse cannot open it, nor yet so loosely held as to be open to everybody. A limit should be observed and that limit should be determined by our means.

and

It is their teachings that I am following in these books, and for these problems, if conducted by those who consider whatever is morally right also expedient and nothing expedient that is not at the same time morally right, will be more illuminating than if conducted by those who think that something not expedient may be morally right and that something not morally right may be expedient.

where the correct text is:

It is their teachings that I am following in these books, and for this reason: the older Academicians and your Peripatetics (who were once the same as the Academicians) give what is morally right the preference over what seems expedient; and yet the discussion of these problems, if conducted by those who consider whatever is morally right also expedient and nothing expedient that is not at the same time morally right, will be more illuminating than if conducted by those who think that something not expedient may be morally right and that something not morally right may be expedient.

Jona rails, and does well to do so, at certain academics who are slovenly and untrustworthy in their facts and interpretations; but what are we to say of people, including publishers of printed books and that first line of defense against ignorance, the Encyclopedia Britannica, who throw up nonsense like this? Clearly, without reading it. The first of these two slovenlinesses is tragedy; the second is just plain farce.

And why would anyone put stuff like this online? This to my mind is where farce, like all really good farce, falls back into tragedy, and it’s also what gets me downright angry. Putting Cicero online is a sort of decoration: it’s like decorating one’s house with a piece of art bought somewhere because it goes with your sofa. It doesn’t really matter whether you’ve read it, or whether you expect anyone else to; it doesn’t matter what it says, whether it’s true or not, or hell, whether it even makes sense. What matters is the façade. These are the same people, the same mentality, that say “amphitheatre” for “theatre” because the longer word sounds cool; that toss out as a decorative tag Wotton’s 1624 translation of a sentence in Vitruvius, “Well building hath three conditions: firmness, commodity, and delight” — then to talk about commodities (this bizarre interpretation on an academic webpage!), or Wotton’s “quaintness” — rather than read Vitruvius in modern English and actually understand him.

I’m not a thinker or a philosopher, and can’t hold a candle to Jona or much of anyone else when it comes to historiography or archaeological evidence; but I can understand that the truth starts with plain facts, and behind that, with an attitude that things matter, and that getting them right matters. Caring for Truth is, to coin a phrase, a moral duty.

Greek and Roman Household Pets

A cat from Side

One of the gems in Bill Thayer’s LacusCurtius is the Antiquary’s Shoebox, a collection of articles – 153 if I counted correctly – from old scholarly journals. This stuff is often still valuable, but usually hidden for you and me in pay sites like JSTOR. It remains inexplicable and unacceptable that people have to pay taxes to allow scholars to do their work, and that they have to pay another time to have access to the results.

Today’s addition is Francis Lazenby’s piece on “Greek and Roman Household Pets“, from the Classical Journal 44 (1949). Enjoy!

A Life of Maimonides

Moshe ben Maimun

Today’s new item on my site is medieval rather than my usual haunts of Antiquity and American history — but I’m not too old to learn new tricks, even if my Dog has to teach them to me. It’s in fact such a departure for me that I have no commentary and no context for it, and those who find it useful will just have to enjoy it: David Yellin and Israel Abrahams’ elegant, streamlined little book, Maimonides.

Smith’s Dictionary Again

Smith's Dictionary

As the readers of this little blog will know by now, LacusCurtius’ Bill Thayer is making William Smith’s Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities available online. Often, archaeological research has improved our understanding of ancient realia, but Smith’s articles are still useful because they collect all written sources.

A week ago, he wrote me that the job was almost finished; only some 25 articles were missing. Today, he added four new articles:

• Ephebus (a young man)
• Tragoedia (tragedies, of course; a very long article)
• Tribula (the corn drag)
• Tripos (the tripod)

So, the work is almost finished!

Plutarch, Progress in Virtue

Plutarch, bust from the museum of Delphi.

LacusCurtius’ Bill Thayer is now especially occupied with making available the biographies of a long series of nineteenth-century American officers (here), but in the meantime also continues to put online some ancient stuff.

Today’s contribution came, to me, as a pleasant surprise: Plutarch’s essay How We may Become Aware of Our Progress in Virtue, one of my favorite texts from Antiquity. It’s polemical: the Stoics had argued that only wise people can be virtuous, and Plutarch shows that this is absurd. Admittedly, Plutarch’s suggestions on how we realize that we’re becoming more virtuous/wise, is rather commonplace. Yet, it is a good question – perhaps one of the best questions we may expect from philosophers.

Smith’s Dictionary

Smith's Dictionary

William Smith’s Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities was published several times between 1842 and 1891, and resembles other dictionaries/encyclopaedias like the Realenzyclopädie by Pauly and Wissowa and the Dictionnaire des Antiquités Grecques et Romaines by Daremberg and Saglio. The books were published and republished at about the same time; an article on their mutual influence might be interesting.

LacusCurtius’ Bill Thayer recently informed me that his online publication of Smith’s dictionary is almost complete, missing only something like 25 articles. That was after he had added Cyma, Discus, and Vis, but before he added (on the first of April) Comoedia. Often, archaeological research has improved our understanding of ancient realia, but Smith’s articles are still useful because they collect all written sources.