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St Photius the Great, tr. Freese, 1920; selections

d1

IT is proposed to issue the present translation of the Bibliotheca of Photius in five volumes; a sixth will contain an account of his life and works, a Bibliography, and a General Index to the whole.

A translator of the Bibliotheca has apparently an open field. So far as can be ascertained, no complete version exists in English or any other modern language, although there are English translations or editions of some of the longer extracts (e.g. Ctesias’ Indica), of some of the literary criticisms,1 of selected codices (chiefly on profane authors) in Italian by G. Compagnoni,2 a well-known Milanese literary man and statesman (1754-1834), and of the whole in Latin by the learned Jesuit Andreas Schott3 in Migne’s Patrologia Graeca (vol. ciii.).

The text4 is unfortunately in many places unsatisfactory, and no critical edition has been attempted for nearly a hundred years—since 1824, the date of Immanuel Bekker’s edition. The nature of the work, a sort of enlarged table of contents, often leaves the meaning and connexion obscure, when there exist no complete texts5 or other means of supplementing it. The present translator, in the endeavour to obtain as satisfactory a rendering as possible, has constantly consulted the most important literary, theological, and historical works and encyclopaedias bearing on the wide field covered by the extensive reading of Photius. Naturally, there is little scope for elegance of translation, and in the literary criticisms it is by no means easy to find a correct and adequate English equivalent for the terms used.

In the matter of notes, the number of personal and geographical names, of historical allusions, is so large that any attempt to deal with them at length would have swamped the text and reduced it to a kind of peg on which to hang a miniature encyclopaedia. In the case of persons familiar to all only a brief note has been given, sufficient for the purposes of identification (often necessary where there are several persons of the same name), so that those desirous of further information should know for whom to look in the usual biographical and other dictionaries. In the case of names less familiar and points arising directly from the text, the details given are somewhat fuller. In the Bibliography a list of the most useful general works of reference and of special editions or accounts of the authors criticised in the Bibliotheca will be given. The present work makes no claim to contain a complete exegetical or critical commentary, but is a somewhat free translation intended to give the ordinary reader an idea of the literary activity of the chief representative of the so-called Byzantine Renaissance.

J.H.FREESE.
1920

Notes

  1. G. Saintsbury, History of Criticism, i.176; La Rue van Hook in Transactions of the American Philological Association (xxxviii. 1907) and Classical Philology (iv. Chicago, 1909), and here and there in books such as Hodgkin’s Italy and her Invaders, Bury’s Later Roman Empire.
  2. Vols. xlv. xlvi. of Biblioteca Scelta di opere greche e latine.
  3. Born and died at Antwerp (1552-1629). After a wandering life he finally settled down as professor of Greek at the Jesuit college in his native city. He was an indefatigable translator and editor. The translation of Photius is of unequal merit, and it is supposed that in parts it is the work of a young and less competent colleague.
  4. See E. Martini, Textgeschichte der Bibliothek des Patriarchen Photios (1911).
  5. It would be difficult, for instance, to get a clear idea of the story of Heliodorus’s Theagenes and Chariclea from Photius’s abstract alone.

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