Review: St. Basil's LettersAuthor(s): Robert BrowningReviewed work(s):

Saint Basile, Lettres by Yves Courtonne;Saint BasileSource: The Classical Review, New Series, Vol. 13, No. 1 (Mar., 1963), pp. 65-67Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Classical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/706807Accessed: 10/06/2009 15:11

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THE CLASSICAL REVIEW 65

confirmed both by p. 338 (D. Deorum 22 (I8). i) and by eXriqOraav in the Arrian passage (v. i8. 2) which Macleod adduces. D. Deorum 8 (5). 2: the order r6 be rovw 'IJaoav 7rrc lov is surely impossible. Read 'ISatov .ov., or (less obvious but better ?) av be for To be. D. Meretr. 7. I: the young man's first remark, which contains the euphemistic suppression of the word for 'dies', extends down to 7rcLTpctov. 'If my father-well, you know-and I come into the property ....' Whether rrdvra raa is a separate remark or not is not easy to decide. I incline to delete Kal before rdvrca and so make the phrase the apodosis to the preceding conditions. Ibid. IO. I, ov Kat{cr.' egreo&~ arroAovp,evov: the future is quite correct just above in this stereotyped phrase, but is not strictly correct here: a, ro,Av,evov would be better. Should we tidy up Lucian by crediting him with the present ? Ibid. 12. i: despite Priscian's evidence (see Aristoph. fr. 75 Kock), I do not see what the accusative IHvpaX;,1a with evevfves could mean, except something like 'the way you kept hinting "Pyrallis" ', i.e. that you wanted Pyrallis. Macleod's translation, 'you kept on making signs to Pyrallis', seems rather to require the dative, as in Luke i. 62, evevevov oe TO rra,p~ av,ov.

There have been better translations of Lucian than these; but both these volumes, especially Macleod's, make a useful contribution, and will be much used. There is still one volume to come. The completion of the set will be very welcome.

St. John's College, Oxford D. A. RUSSELL

ST. BASIL'S LETTERS

YVES COURTONNE: Saint Basile, Lettres. Texte etabli et traduit. (Col- lection Bude.) Tomes I, 2. Pp. xxiv+223 (double), 22I (double). Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1957, I961. Paper. A MAJOR Greek patristic work presents to its editor problems rather seldom met with by the editor of a classical text. There may be a multitude of manu- scripts dating from the ninth and tenth centuries, sometimes embodying several distinct recensions. Portions of the text may appear in homiletic, ascetic, canonical, and other collections whose origin and date is hard to determine. Portions may be preserved in translations long antedating the earliest of our manuscripts. There are likely to be intractable problems of disputed author- ship. There has often been little investigation of the text since the early eigh- teenth century, and hence no mass of collations and conjectures to be worked through. Lexica and indexes and concordances are, by and large, non-existent (though by the time these words appear in print the first two fascicules of the Oxford Patristic Greek Lexicon will have begun to fill this gap).

Professor Courtonne's edition of the Letters of St. Basil, of which volumes i and ii, comprising Epp. I-218, have now appeared, is the first to be based upon a complete survey of the manuscript testimony.x The ground had been well prepared for him by Bessieres,2 who examined twenty-seven manuscripts con- taining a hundred or more letters, and Rudberg,3 who added eight new manu-

' The Loeb edition by R. J. Deferrari 2 M. Bessieres, La Tradition manuscrite de and M. R. P. McGuire (4 vols., I926-34, la correspondance de S. Basile (Oxford, I923). rpd. I950-3), though most useful, did not 3 Stig Y. Rudberg, E~tudes sur la tradition represent a positive contribution towards manuscrite de saint Basile (Uppsala, I953). the establishment of the text.

4598.1 F

THE CLASSICAL REVIEW 65

confirmed both by p. 338 (D. Deorum 22 (I8). i) and by eXriqOraav in the Arrian passage (v. i8. 2) which Macleod adduces. D. Deorum 8 (5). 2: the order r6 be rovw 'IJaoav 7rrc lov is surely impossible. Read 'ISatov .ov., or (less obvious but better ?) av be for To be. D. Meretr. 7. I: the young man's first remark, which contains the euphemistic suppression of the word for 'dies', extends down to 7rcLTpctov. 'If my father-well, you know-and I come into the property ....' Whether rrdvra raa is a separate remark or not is not easy to decide. I incline to delete Kal before rdvrca and so make the phrase the apodosis to the preceding conditions. Ibid. IO. I, ov Kat{cr.' egreo&~ arroAovp,evov: the future is quite correct just above in this stereotyped phrase, but is not strictly correct here: a, ro,Av,evov would be better. Should we tidy up Lucian by crediting him with the present ? Ibid. 12. i: despite Priscian's evidence (see Aristoph. fr. 75 Kock), I do not see what the accusative IHvpaX;,1a with evevfves could mean, except something like 'the way you kept hinting "Pyrallis" ', i.e. that you wanted Pyrallis. Macleod's translation, 'you kept on making signs to Pyrallis', seems rather to require the dative, as in Luke i. 62, evevevov oe TO rra,p~ av,ov.

There have been better translations of Lucian than these; but both these volumes, especially Macleod's, make a useful contribution, and will be much used. There is still one volume to come. The completion of the set will be very welcome.

St. John's College, Oxford D. A. RUSSELL

ST. BASIL'S LETTERS

YVES COURTONNE: Saint Basile, Lettres. Texte etabli et traduit. (Col- lection Bude.) Tomes I, 2. Pp. xxiv+223 (double), 22I (double). Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1957, I961. Paper. A MAJOR Greek patristic work presents to its editor problems rather seldom met with by the editor of a classical text. There may be a multitude of manu- scripts dating from the ninth and tenth centuries, sometimes embodying several distinct recensions. Portions of the text may appear in homiletic, ascetic, canonical, and other collections whose origin and date is hard to determine. Portions may be preserved in translations long antedating the earliest of our manuscripts. There are likely to be intractable problems of disputed author- ship. There has often been little investigation of the text since the early eigh- teenth century, and hence no mass of collations and conjectures to be worked through. Lexica and indexes and concordances are, by and large, non-existent (though by the time these words appear in print the first two fascicules of the Oxford Patristic Greek Lexicon will have begun to fill this gap).

Professor Courtonne's edition of the Letters of St. Basil, of which volumes i and ii, comprising Epp. I-218, have now appeared, is the first to be based upon a complete survey of the manuscript testimony.x The ground had been well prepared for him by Bessieres,2 who examined twenty-seven manuscripts con- taining a hundred or more letters, and Rudberg,3 who added eight new manu-

' The Loeb edition by R. J. Deferrari 2 M. Bessieres, La Tradition manuscrite de and M. R. P. McGuire (4 vols., I926-34, la correspondance de S. Basile (Oxford, I923). rpd. I950-3), though most useful, did not 3 Stig Y. Rudberg, E~tudes sur la tradition represent a positive contribution towards manuscrite de saint Basile (Uppsala, I953). the establishment of the text.

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66 THE CLASSICAL REVIEW

scripts to Bessieres's list. Both these scholars agreed in dividing the manuscripts of the Letters into two great classes, which in their turn fall into three and four families respectively; and both believed that a sound text could be constructed mainly upon the testimony of the first family of the first class (Aa). Courtonne subscribes to their view, and his text is based upon six manuscripts, four of family Aa and two of family Bo, dating from the tenth to the twelfth century, each of which must really be regarded as an independent witness. The result is something very like the text of Garnier and Maran, first pub- lished in I730, and reprinted by Migne. The reason is that though Garnier and Maran did not themselves use any manuscripts of the Aa family, the text against which they collated their manuscripts, Morel's Paris edition of i618, was based in large part on manuscripts of this family.I As so often happens, the labour of the modern editor confirms the sound judgement and linguistic sense of his seventeenth-century predecessor. But every page includes one or

two improvements upon the Garnier-Maran text, and they add up to a formidable total. We are nearer to what Basil wrote. Courtonne prints only a handful of emendations of his own, mostly of manifestly corrupt passages.

Not all are convincing, and those in the first volume have been critically examined by Rudberg.2 Human life is short, and one cannot demand the impossible. But something more might have been done about the many letters which survive singly or in small groups in other collections. An exhaustive survey of the evidence would be neither practicable nor likely to contribute much. But three of the letters (Epp. 2, I50,

I73) are preserved in the collections of Basil's ascetic works, whose history has been studied in great detail by DomJ. Gribomont.3 Rudberg published a critical edition of these letters, based upon collations of the ascetic

as well as the epistolary manuscripts.4 His text differs in a number of passages ( 17

in Ep. 2, 4 in Ep. 150, I in Ep. 173, omitting orthographic trivialities) from that of

Courtonne, usually for the better. This is an indication of what might be done.5

Courtonne does not mention the fifth-century papyrus (P. Berol. 6795)6 con- taining portions of four of the letters, nor does he discuss the Syriac version of

manuscripts used by Courtonne, and which has the remotest possibility of being right. Ep. 45 showed a rather eclectic text agreeing now with A, now with B. Ep. 46 appeared in a text so trivialized and interpolated that I had not the patience to complete the collation. Ep.

I I5 showed a B-type text, very close to that of Coislin. 237. These letters were all in the fourteenth-century portion of the manuscript. Ep. 93, in the

twelfth-century portion, appeared in an A- type text very close to that of Vatopedinus 72, one of the new manuscripts discovered by Rudberg. M. Richard, in an admirable article on 'Florileges spirituels grecs', points out that many excerpts from Basil's letters are preserved in the Sacra Parallela attri- buted to John Damascene (Dictionnaire de Spiritualite , fasc. xxxiii-xxxi v [ 1962], 47 7). 6 Cf. C. Schmidt and W. Schubart, Ber- liner

Klassikertexte, vi. 21-37.

1Courtonne does not mention D. Amand de Mendieta's 'Essai d'une histoire critique des editions generales grecques et greco- latines de S. Basile de Cesaree', Rev. Ben. lii (I94o), 14-6I; liii (I94I), I19--5; liv ( 1942) , 124--4 4;

li ( I (945--), I 26-73, which firmly established the sources used by the earlier editors.

2 Gnomon xxxi (i959), 126-8. 3 j. Gribomont, Histoire du texte des Asce-

tiques de saint Basile (Bibliotheque du Museon, vol. 32), 1953. 4

Stig Y. Rudberg, Etudes, pp. I56-68, 95-200, 205-7.

s Out of curiosity I collated the four letters of Basil contained in B.M. Add. MS. 34o60, a canonical collection written partly in the twelfth and partly in the fourteenth century; the fourteenth-century portion is of Cretan provenance. In no case was any reading found which was unattested in the

THE CLASSICAL REVIEW THE CLASSICAL REVIEW 67 67

Ep. 2, the oldest witness to which is a British Museum manuscript of the seventh or eighth century (B. M. Add. MS. I4617).

The translation is accurate, clear, and, so far as a foreigner can judge, pleasing. This is a considerable achievement, as Basil is not always easy. Minor slips noted are in Ep. 3. I, where 'ov tx,r8?v aKovaom vEJrepov does not mean 'parce que je n'apprenais rien de nouveau' but 'because I got no bad news', and Ep. IO4, where 3lamoXovs are not 'heritiers' but 'successors in office' (on this point cf. C. Th. I6. 2. 6).

There are a number of notes appended to the translation. Some supply back- ground information, but too many are exclamatory rather than informative: vol. i, p. 77, n. 2, 'I1 est difficile de ne pas partager l'emotion qui etreint Basile dans tout le debut de cette lettre', is only too typical of the former category. Too often this is what the reader finds when he wants historical commentary: e.g. at Ep. I I 0, on the iron-tax paid by the free peasants of Cappadocia, where one would like to see a reference to C. Th. IO. 22. 2 =- C.J. I I. IO. I and to modern discussions, one gets a woolly note about the severity of taxation in the late empire; at Ep. 142-4, on the exemption from taxation of a 7rroxorpoeetov, where one looks for some discussion of the administrative problems involved,1 one finds the observation that Basil often supports the poor and weak.

Courtonne does not use the same sigla as Bessieres and Rudberg, nor does he indicate the pages and divisions of Garnier-Maran, reproduced by Migne, to which reference is usually made. And his notes on those letters whose author- ship is disputed sometimes fail to take account of the latest investigations, particularly those of Cavallin.2 But let us put first things first; a properly constituted text and a scholarly translation are something to be thankful for.

University College, London ROBERT BROWN ING

A LATIN VERSE ANTHOLOGY

FREDERICK BRITTAIN: The Penguin Book of Latin Verse. Pp. lxv+-38 i. West Drayton: Penguin Books, I962. Paper, 7s. 6d. net.

THE general editor of the Penguin books of verse, Mr. J. M. Cohen, says in his foreword: 'The selections in each book have been made by the anthologist alone. But all alike reflect contemporary trends in taste, and include only poetry that can be read for pleasure. No specimens have been included for their historical interest, or to illustrate some particular school or phase of literary history.' The choice of Dr. Frederick Brittain, an authority on medieval and church Latin, to make this anthology was bound to give it a bias. Out of 360 pages only some 80 are allowed to classical Latin; only 40 lines are given from Lucretius, as against 36 from Ermoldus Nigellus' elegiac poem on the siege of Barcelona 'full of phrases borrowed from Virgil, Ovid and other writers'. Not that Dr. Brittain really under-estimates the classics: he quotes with apparent assent (p. li) the view that the De Rerum Natura is the greatest philosophical poem in any language, and calls Catullus 'one of the greatest lyrical poets of all time'. But the bulk of this book, about 200 pages, is devoted

I Cf. B. Treucker, Politische und sozial- 2 A. Cavallin, Studien zu den Briefen des hl. geschichtliche studien zu den Basilius-Briefen Basilius (Lund, I944). (Bonn, I961), pp. 79 ff.

Ep. 2, the oldest witness to which is a British Museum manuscript of the seventh or eighth century (B. M. Add. MS. I4617).

The translation is accurate, clear, and, so far as a foreigner can judge, pleasing. This is a considerable achievement, as Basil is not always easy. Minor slips noted are in Ep. 3. I, where 'ov tx,r8?v aKovaom vEJrepov does not mean 'parce que je n'apprenais rien de nouveau' but 'because I got no bad news', and Ep. IO4, where 3lamoXovs are not 'heritiers' but 'successors in office' (on this point cf. C. Th. I6. 2. 6).

There are a number of notes appended to the translation. Some supply back- ground information, but too many are exclamatory rather than informative: vol. i, p. 77, n. 2, 'I1 est difficile de ne pas partager l'emotion qui etreint Basile dans tout le debut de cette lettre', is only too typical of the former category. Too often this is what the reader finds when he wants historical commentary: e.g. at Ep. I I 0, on the iron-tax paid by the free peasants of Cappadocia, where one would like to see a reference to C. Th. IO. 22. 2 =- C.J. I I. IO. I and to modern discussions, one gets a woolly note about the severity of taxation in the late empire; at Ep. 142-4, on the exemption from taxation of a 7rroxorpoeetov, where one looks for some discussion of the administrative problems involved,1 one finds the observation that Basil often supports the poor and weak.

Courtonne does not use the same sigla as Bessieres and Rudberg, nor does he indicate the pages and divisions of Garnier-Maran, reproduced by Migne, to which reference is usually made. And his notes on those letters whose author- ship is disputed sometimes fail to take account of the latest investigations, particularly those of Cavallin.2 But let us put first things first; a properly constituted text and a scholarly translation are something to be thankful for.

University College, London ROBERT BROWN ING

A LATIN VERSE ANTHOLOGY

FREDERICK BRITTAIN: The Penguin Book of Latin Verse. Pp. lxv+-38 i. West Drayton: Penguin Books, I962. Paper, 7s. 6d. net.

THE general editor of the Penguin books of verse, Mr. J. M. Cohen, says in his foreword: 'The selections in each book have been made by the anthologist alone. But all alike reflect contemporary trends in taste, and include only poetry that can be read for pleasure. No specimens have been included for their historical interest, or to illustrate some particular school or phase of literary history.' The choice of Dr. Frederick Brittain, an authority on medieval and church Latin, to make this anthology was bound to give it a bias. Out of 360 pages only some 80 are allowed to classical Latin; only 40 lines are given from Lucretius, as against 36 from Ermoldus Nigellus' elegiac poem on the siege of Barcelona 'full of phrases borrowed from Virgil, Ovid and other writers'. Not that Dr. Brittain really under-estimates the classics: he quotes with apparent assent (p. li) the view that the De Rerum Natura is the greatest philosophical poem in any language, and calls Catullus 'one of the greatest lyrical poets of all time'. But the bulk of this book, about 200 pages, is devoted

I Cf. B. Treucker, Politische und sozial- 2 A. Cavallin, Studien zu den Briefen des hl. geschichtliche studien zu den Basilius-Briefen Basilius (Lund, I944). (Bonn, I961), pp. 79 ff.