Symmachus

International audienceIn the last book of his correspondence, Sidonius chooses to introduce verses exclusively in the final four letters (epist. 9, 13-16) while saying that he renounces poetry. These are both poems he has just written and which he denigrates, and poems written earlier. I will therefore analyse this poetics of contrast and paradox in order to understand the poetic and spiritual significance of this "final bouquet". On this basis, I will also try to figure out which function book IX fulfils within Sidonius' correspondence, and more broadly within his whole opus

Constantine the Great was the first Roman emperor to be a Christian. However, his ascension to the purple did not automatically make Christianity the official religion of the empire, nor did it outlaw paganism. However, Constantine’s rise did begin a process by which Christianity went from being a marginal and persecuted group to being the religion of the empire. As Christianity proceeded from outlawed, to permitted, to official, it transformed from being defined in opposition to the Roman empire to being nearly one and the same with it.
One episode in this gradual transition is the controversy in the late fourth century over the Roman Altar of Victory. As a result of the events surrounding this episode, public funding was removed from pagan cults in Rome and the senate was redefined so as to no longer be a pagan institution. As most scholars tell the story, one of the major players in this decision, and perhaps the most important player, was not the emperor, not a senator, not a court official, but a Christian bishop: Ambrose of Milan. The church became an active force in imperial politics, and in so doing, developed its own new imperialistic identity.
In this paper, we will explore the relationship between Christianity and empire in relation to the 384 CE Altar of Victory controversy. After reviewing some introductory information on the Altar of Victory and Ambrose of Milan, we will explore the details of the 384 controversy before examining more directly the two most important primary documents involved: the 3rd Relatio of Symmachus and the 17th Epistle of Ambrose. Finally, I will show how Ambrose uses the rhetoric of martyrdom and persecution in support of imperial power and Christian supremacy.

A rereading of an oft-quoted passage of Epiphanius reveals that this author miscalculated the date of the destruction of Jerusalem, assigning it wrongly to 81/82. Therefore, when placing Hadrian’s journey to the East 47 years after the destruction, he was referring to Hadrian’s well-documented long journey to the East in 128–132 and not to a putative journey in 117. This receives further confirmation in other statements Epiphanius makes on the Crucifixion, the destruction of Jerusalem, the appearance of Aquila and the geographic scope of Hadrian’s journey, and combines well with the available epigraphic evidence.

This paper continues the research by Leonard Greenspoon on the revisions of the book of Joshua. The paper examines all the preserved readings of the revision of the Old Greek translation of Joshua by Symmachus (end second century CE) in relation to the earlier revisions by Theodotion and Aquila (early second century CE). The picture that emerges from such an examination is that Symmachus took special interest in normalizing particularly Aquila's Hebraistic Greek language, restoring the corrupted toponyms in the second part of the book as well as the issue of inner-Jewish strife demonstrated exemplarily in Joshua 22.

This article investigates the language of heresy in the Liber Pontificalis (LP), a collection of papal biographies first compiled in the context of the sixth-century Symmachian/Laurentian Schism. More specifically, it considers the reported actions of the bishops of Rome in opposition to the heresy of Manicheanism, focusing on the biographies of Gelasius (492-496), Symmachus (498-514), and Hormisdas (514-523). It is argued that these accounts are best understood as a heresiological motif employed by the compiler(s) of the LP in order to emphasize and reinforce the authority and the legitimacy of those who were said to have opposed it. This conclusion is suggested by the nature of the Liber Pontificalis itself, which was only one of a set of conflicting polemical sources that debated the recent past of Rome’s episcopacy. Moreover, as it was employed by Christian controversialists, ‘Manichean’ had, by the sixth-century, become an epithetical term of approbation rather than an accurate descriptor of a particular sect or system of belief. Taken together, the depiction of the fight against Manicheanism in the LP was a small part of a larger discursive project intended to represent the Roman Church – and Gelasius, Symmachus and Hormisdas in particular – as the consummate enemies of heresy, the defenders of orthodoxy, and the locus of authentic and legitimate authority.

The present paper revisits the identification of the Jewish Greek Bible translator and revisor Symmachus (second century 2nd century C.E.) with the prominent, but problematic pupil of rabbi Meir, Sumkhos ben Joseph. Earlier objections to this identification based on considerations of date and presumed popularity of the name among Jews in the second and third century C.E. are assessed and countered on the basis of a comprehensive analysis of all the references to Sumkhos ben Joseph in all extant rabbinical sources (particularly Talmud yerushalmi) and epigraphic onomastic attestations of the name Symmachus.

The paper explores the ideological reasons for the late-antique expansion of the imperial aristocracy. It suggests that in the fourth century the senate transformed from a Republican élite, whose legitimacy derived from the institutions of the Roman city-state, into an explicitly global class, whose authority was an emanation of the beneficence of a sacred ruler towards the human species.

The third of the Jewish revisions of the Septuagint to be included in Origen's Hexapla is that ascribed to Symmachus. Compared to the other Greek translations and revisions of Jewish Scriptures this translation has probably suffered the most from neglect. Unlike the other two revisions, those of Kaige-Theodotion and Aquila, Symmachus's translation apparently did not find acceptance in Jewish circles. Christian authors such as Eusebius of Caesarea and Jerome of Stridon were more positive about this translation and regularly quoted from it. They praise his translation for being 'more intelligible' (σαφέστερος; Eusebius, Comm. Isa. 1.85 on 25:6-8), 'more lucid' (λευκότερος; Eusebius, Comm. Isa. 1.71 on 16:6-14), 'more clearly' (manifestius) and 'more openly' (apertius) than the other revisions, which they scorn for their bad style (κακοζηλία; cf. Jerome, Comm. Am. on 3:11). Characteristics of this relatively free translation technique are variation in Greek equivalents for the same Hebrew expression, avoidance of καί for clause-initial wāw, the use of Greek idio matic expressions and greater lexical accuracy, the substitution of perfect tenses by the aorist, the addition of discourse particles, and paraphrastic renderings

Nell’ambito delle attività relative alla collana “Nuova Biblioteca di Cultura Romanobarbarica” – SISMEL Edizioni del Galluzzo, il Dipartimento di Storia, Scienze dell’Uomo e della Formazione dell’Università di Sassari e il Dipartimento di Filologia e Critica delle Letterature Antiche e Moderne dell’Università di Siena hanno organizzato un Convegno internazionale: “Metamorfosi del classico in età romanobarbarica”, che si terrà online nei giorni di giovedì 17 e venerdì 18 giugno 2021.

Per il programma si veda la locandina in allegato.

Link per seguire i lavori:
https://unisi.webex.com/meet/metamorfosidelclassico

Ille vir, qui furti condemnatus est, quod equo commodato ulteriore Ariciae clivo vectus esset, quid in ea re peccarit; atque inibi verbum Gelli fragmentum Bruti ex commentariis Labeonis tradentis sanatur, item verba Pauli apud Digesta; et praeterea locus Gai aliena coniectura et iamdudum oblita sarcitur. Anglice.

For hundreds of years scholars have debated the correct reading of Psalm 22:16. This single verse has often been used by Jews and Christians to identify the religious bias of biblical translators.The KJV rendering of Psalm 22:16 follows the Septuagint to provide the reading "they pierced my hands and feet," but the Masoretic text indicates a translation such as that provided by the Jewish Publication Society, "like a lion they were at my hands and feet." The controversy centers on one letter, a 'yod' in the majority reading of the Masoretic text, while the Greek of the Septuagint seems to indicate a 'vav' in the Hebrew text from which it was translated. In the past two centuries, more than twenty varying textual emendations or translations have been proposed, with no scholarly consensus on the correct interpretation. This paper presents an early but typically over-looked textual witness, a small Dead Sea Scrolls fragment containing Psalm 22:16 which indicates a 'vav' in the contested text, supporting the Septuagint reading. This fragment should influence all subsequent discussions and interpretations of this text.

This paper traces economic relations between emperor and senatorial aristocracy. It suggests that senators in the fourth century did not obtain more independence from the imperial court. On the contrary, for maintaining control over their far-flung properties they depended more than ever before on the cultivation of close links to the emperor and his closest advisers.

Based on the surviving copies of the Greek version of Symmachus (P.Sym.P.Vindob. G.397 77 and Ambrosian Library O 39 sup.), combined with Eusebius comment about the use of despotes (PG 23:708A), the reconstructions < ΕΙΠΕΝ yhwh / ΠΙΠΙ ΤΩ ΔΕΣΠΟΤΗ ΜΟΥ > are most probably the rendering by Symmachus of the phrase in Psalm 110|109:1. Thus, Isho'dad’s comment is further confirming the conclusion that “Symmachus continued the Jewish practice of writing the Hebrew Tetragrammaton within the Greek text.”

Continuous space representations of words are currently at the core of many state-of-the-art approaches in computational linguistics. The distributional hypothesis, summarised as: ‘You shall know a word by the company it keeps’ [Firth, 1957] is the basis of many such methods. In this paper we use this type of representation, which has seen little to no use in digital humanities, to rethink the concept of intertextuality. We present and use an alternative conceptual concept of intertextuality to ascertain how different persons are portrayed in a late antique letter collection, the Variae of Cassiodorus (ca. 485–585 AD). We combine this approach with the well-explored method of network analysis.

‘The study of intertextuality is the study of a certain kind of relation between texts: One text quotes another or others.’ [Edmunds, 2001]. Until recently, intertextuality has been pictured as an interaction between different texts, which has been restricted to the surface forms. We want to transcend this rather limited, one-dimensional concept of intertextuality by using high-dimensional word representations which effectively abstract away from such surface forms. Instead of conceptualising, e.g. Vergil, as the sum of his transmitted oeuvre, we represent him both as a node in a network, and a vector in high-dimensional space. In this way we overcome the border between text and historical person; a border which impedes the ascertaining of the intertextual impact of authors which are partially or not at all preserved. We create word-space representations based on the letters in the Variae, using methods based on distributional semantics [Mikolov et al., 2013a, Levy et al., 2015].

In antiquity, the editing and publication of letter collections was a fundamental tool for literary and cultural self-representation. Late antiquity witnessed the zenith of this practice with the publication of several such collections, both in Latin and in Greek. The Variae of Cassiodorus are an excellent example of this practice of self-representation [Bjornlie, 2012, Gillett, 1998]. In this paper, we will represent Cassiodorus, his contemporaries, and influential authors of the literary canon, such as Vergil, in one and the same network. This form of visualisation can generate a more nuanced view on how Cassiodorus constructs a cultural profile for himself and his peers. Indeed, the letters of Cassiodorus act as a meeting ground in which both the contemporaries of Cassiodorus, as well as the authors who shaped the intellectual outlook of Cassiodorus and his peers, interact with each other.

Traditionally, critical approaches to Late Antique literature have focused on the study of works either of Christian themes, or of pagan themes. However, Dracontius’ poems face us with the particularity of an author who, for having developed both types of creations, has been studied by researchers from either of those fields, although for purposes rather unrelated to each other. In this paper, through the analysis of some verses from "Medea", a poem written by Dracontius in the 5th century, we intend to prove that the dichotomy between "pagan literature" and "Christian literature", which is regularly used to approach the study of Late Antique literary works, in this case hinder the comprehension of the author’s poetics.

This paper examines the vocabulary, theology and political ideas of Symmachus' translation of the prophetical books. In line with idead current in Palestine after the devastating Bar-Kochba revolt, Symmachus viewed the promised land as a treasure for which God alone would wage war.

Este trabajo analiza los informes enviados por Quinto Aurelio Símaco a los emperadores, de Oriente y Occidente, durante su mandato como Praefectus Vrbis Romae. El estudio de este corpus nos permitirá demostrar que, en el registro escrito formal de este autor, la oscilación en el uso de formas de tratamiento plurales o singulares depende de la focalización de su discurso en ambos emperadores o sólo en uno de ellos, pero no constituye aún un rasgo de mayor cortesía para dirigirse hacia las personas de mayor estatus.

The present research analyzes the formal letters addressed by Quintus Aurelius Symmachus to the emperors of East and West, during his tenure as Praefectus Vrbis Romae. The study of this corpus shows that, in the written formal register of this author, the oscillation in the use of plural or singular forms of address depends on the focus of his speech, in both emperors or only in one of them, but is still not a feature of courtesy to address to people of greater status.

This paper outlines the significant dynamics of the classical masoretic text of the Bible as demonstrated in early rabbinic texts, Qumran pesharim and the teachings of Jesus.

This paper was presented at the Twenty-First Congress of the International Organization for Masoretic Studies in conjunction with the 2008 Annual Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature in Boston, MA on November 24, 2008.