I’m busy still with translating Eutychius. We’re nearly at the end of the raw translation work. Once that is done, then I need to go through the material, add a minimum number of footnotes, assemble it into a single file and write some kind of introduction. I also need to indicate the relationship to a manuscript which may be the autograph, discovered in Sinai some years ago.
I’ve been purging my books. This evening I discovered one of the hazards of this. I wanted to consult Albrecht Berger’s Accounts of Medieval Constantinople: The Patria. I couldn’t remember the name or title. It did not seem to be on my shelves, although I knew that I had once owned a copy. Nor could I find it on my disk. Nor could I even find the book using Google, nor was it in Wikipedia. Eventually I found it in Amazon, and, once I knew what the cover looked like, I saw it in a pile of books intended for disposal to charity. I have no idea why it was there.
It would be more useful in PDF form, in truth. I wanted to search through it for references to a statue of Hera that once stood in the Forum of Constantine, and was melted down for cash by the renegade army originally hired for the Fourth Crusade. But in paper form this is impossible.
I still have lots of books that I never read. Novels that once meant much, but that now I may never read again. I can’t dispose of them – especially those I knew as a child – but I don’t need to fill my shelves with them. I shall store them in a cupboard, I think.
I’ve also been taking part in some discussions on the date of Minucius Felix in the comments for a blog, of a kind that hardly exists any more. This has been very pleasant to do, even if many of the other commenters are somewhat eccentric. It has been interesting to discover that a German monograph in 1967 has completely settled the date as post-dating Tertullian. I ought to write all this up some time.
Two translation projects are still happening, somewhere. Some selections from Eusebius’ Commentary on the Psalms are nearly done. A translation of an early Life of St George is still in progress. I have had no time to attend to either, however.
Onward!
