Among the more peculiar literary papyri uncovered in the past century are numerous bilingual texts of Virgil and Cicero, with the Latin original and a Greek translation arranged in distinctive narrow columns.Footnote 1 These materials, variously classified as texts with translations or as glossaries, were evidently used by Greek-speaking students when they first started to read Latin literature. They thus provide a unique window into the experience of the first of many groups of non-native Latin speakers to struggle with reading the classics of Latin literature.
Discussion of these papyri has so far focussed on the light they shed on the text of Virgil and Cicero in antiquity, on their use of lectional signs, on codicological issues and on what they reveal about ancient education.Footnote 2 Little attention has been paid to the Greek translations, which in fact are often disregarded as objects of study on the grounds that they are so bad as to be positively painful to read. Not only are they all in prose, but they are very literal, have no literary or stylistic pretensions, and make no attempt to convey the beauty of the original language. Sometimes, moreover, they display serious misunderstandings of the original.
Despite these acknowledged drawbacks, the ancient translations have something important to tell us. They are among the few surviving examples of a system of exegesis that was fundamental to ancient learning and that has generally been overlooked and misunderstood in modern times, in part because it has no parallel in modern teaching or scholarship. If we wish to appreciate how Greek-speaking scholars and students approached Latin literature, an understanding of their unique translation system is essential.
COLUMNAR TRANSLATION: THE BASIC PRINCIPLES
The translation system exemplified in the Virgil and Cicero papyri may be called ‘columnar translation’, because it is based on a system of narrow columns, usually only one to three words wide but capable of containing five or six words per line when necessary.Footnote 3 The Latin is usually in the left-hand column and the Greek in the right-hand column, and each line of the Greek column translates the corresponding line of the Latin column. One can therefore read either across the lines to get a translation of a particular phrase, or down one column to get the complete text in either Greek or Latin. The goal of the translation is not only to make clear the overall meaning of the original, but also to show someone with limited knowledge of the original language how that meaning is achieved, by making it possible to identify which words and phrases of the translation correspond to particular elements of the original. The line breaks are positioned to divide up meaningful units; the translator can use them both to show the reader how the original text is to be construed and to organize groupings that can be successfully translated as a unit.
The columnar translation system works best when the two languages involved are structurally similar to one another. This is the case with Latin and Greek, but less so with either of those languages and English. To illustrate how the system works, therefore, example 1 provides an English columnar translation of a text in a language more closely related to English, namely the opening (lines 354–64) of Goethe's Faust.
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1) 354a Habe nun, I have now,
b ach! alas!
c Philosophie, philosophy,
355a Juristerey law,
b und Medicin, and medicine,
356a und leider and unfortunately
b auch Theologie! also theology
357a durchaus studirt, thoroughly studied,
b mit heißem Bemühn. with keen effort.
358a Da steh’ ich nun, There I stand now,
b ich armer Thor! poor fool I,
359a und bin and am
b so klug as clever
c als wie zuvor; as before;
360a Heiße Magister, I am called Master,
b heiße Doctor gar, am even called Doctor,
361a und ziehe schon and already I have been leading
b an die zehen Jahr, for ten years
362a herauf, herab up, down,
b und quer and sideways
c und krumm, and crookedly
363a meine Schüler my students
b an der Nase herum – around by the nose –
364a und sehe, and I see
b daß wir that we
c nichts wissen können! cannot know anything!
The English of this translation is not ideal, but it is comprehensible. Because German and English are closely related and have similar grammatical structure, in many lines of this translation the two languages would match no matter where one put the line divisions. But where German and English order differ, the flexibility of the column structure usually makes it possible to produce a translation that matches line for line without doing too much violence to English word order. Thus in lines 358a, 358b, 360b, 361a, 363b and 364c the English words are in a different order from the German ones on the corresponding line, and in lines 354a, 359c, 360a, 360b, 361a, 361b and 364a the English has more or fewer words than the corresponding German.
In antiquity, of course, written texts contained many fewer of the aids that modern readers take for granted. Word division, punctuation, capitalization and diacritical signs such as accents and breathings were only rarely used.Footnote 4 Although the lack of these aids seems to have caused little difficulty for readers familiar with the language in which a text was written, those reading a foreign language would have been handicapped particularly by the lack of word division, which made it difficult even to use a glossary. In verse texts the line breaks normally occurred at the ends of verses, and therefore the reader could at least be sure of finding the beginning of a word at the start of each line, but in prose texts not even that aid was available: columns of prose normally had justified margins, so the line divisions often occurred in the middle of a word, without a hyphen or any other indication that the word had been split between lines. The columnar format would have made life easier for language learners by reducing the number of word divisions they had to locate for themselves: columnar texts only have line divisions at word breaks, and therefore in such texts almost half the word breaks are indicated by line breaks.Footnote 5
Examples 2 and 3 provide two versions of the opening of Goethe's Faust, both of which have been stripped of the aids that an ancient reader would not have had. Example 2 is arranged following the regular layout of poetry in a literary papyrus, with one verse per line.Footnote 6 Example 3 is arranged in the narrow columns associated with columnar translation. Although neither is completely straightforward to read, the second is far easier.
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2) HABENUNACHPHILOSOPHIE
JURISTEREYUNDMEDICIN
UNDLEIDERAUCHTHEOLOGIE
DURCHAUSSTUDIRTMITHEIßEMBEMUHN
DASTEHICHNUNICHARMERTHOR
UNDBINSOKLUGALSWIEZUVOR
HEIßEMAGISTERHEIßEDOCTORGAR
UNDZIEHESCHONANDIEZEHENJAHR
HERAUFHERABUNDQUERUNDKRUMM
MEINESCHULERANDERNASEHERUM
UNDSEHEDAßWIRNICHTSWISSENKONNEN
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3) HABENUN
ACH
PHILOSOPHIE
JURISTEREY
UNDMEDICIN
UNDLEIDER
AUCHTHEOLOGIE
DURCHAUSSTUDIRT
MITHEIßEMBEMUHN
DASTEHICHNUN
ICHARMERTHOR
UNDBIN
SOKLUG
ALSWIEZUVOR
HEIßEMAGISTER
HEIßEDOCTORGAR
UNDZIEHESCHON
ANDIEZEHENJAHR
HERAUFHERAB
UNDQUER
UNDKRUMM
MEINESCHULER
ANDERNASEHERUM
UNDSEHE
DAßWIR
NICHTSWISSENKONNEN
The benefits of the columnar system were therefore multiple.
ANCIENT COLUMNAR TRANSLATION UNDER OPTIMUM CONDITIONS
Columnar translation works best in texts that were bilingual from the beginning, because under such circumstances the writer can avoid constructions in either language that would cause difficulties when translated into the other. Of course, the works of Virgil and Cicero were not composed bilingually, but another set of texts for which the columnar format is normally used was indeed so composed: the colloquia of the Hermeneumata Pseudodositheana. The colloquia are a set of little dialogues and narratives designed as easy readers for ancient language learners; the oldest portions seem to have been originally composed for Latin speakers learning Greek and the more recent portions for Greek speakers learning Latin, but all parts of the text appear to have been bilingual from their inception.Footnote 7
Example 4 is an extract from one of the colloquia (Colloquium Montepessulanum 2h), with a third column added in English.
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4) duο ergo sunt δύο οὖν εἰσιν So, there are two
personae πρόσωπα persons
quae disputant, τὰ διαλεγόμενα, who converse,
ego et tu. ἐγὼ καὶ σύ. I and you.
tu es qui interrogas, σὺ εἶ ὁ ἐπερωτῶν, You are the one who asks;
ego respondeo. ἐγὼ ἀποκριθήσομαι. I (shall) answer.
The wording is idiomatic in both original languages; it is possible to read either column in isolation and get a perfectly coherent text. The two columns match perfectly line for line (apart from the difference in tense in the last line). But they do not match word for word, because the constructions used are not simply identical: in lines 3 and 5 Greek uses a participle with an article while the Latin uses a relative clause. Latin could not have used the construction employed here in the Greek; Greek could have used the one employed in the Latin, but the participle is more idiomatic. The columnar translation has therefore allowed the writer the freedom to use the most idiomatic construction in each language while still making the two languages correspond closely.
In example 5 (Colloquium Harleianum 1h) the constructions are the same in Latin and Greek, but the word order in the first line is different, and in the last line Greek has an article where Latin does not. Again, therefore, the columnar translation allows both languages to be idiomatic while still making it easy to find the translation of a particular phrase.
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5) si quis autem tibi ἐὰν δέ τίς σοι But if anyone hassles you,
molestatur, ἐνοχλήσῃ,
indica μήνυσον tell
praeceptori. τῷ διδασκάλῳ. the teacher.
In this example the English does not work as well as in the first one, because English requires objects to follow verbs and the placement of the verb on a line by itself after the object makes that impossible without altering the line divisions of the original. This problem, however, arises only because the English has been added after the line divisions were fixed; the original writers did not consider the needs of English translators when dividing up the lines. If we had the same freedom as ancient writers, we could alter the first line division by one word and produce the version in example 6, which would work in all three languages.
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6) si quis autem ἐὰν δέ τίς But if anyone
tibi molestatur, σοι ἐνοχλήσῃ, hassles you,
indica μήνυσον tell
praeceptori. τῷ διδασκάλῳ. the teacher.
In example 7 (Colloquia Monacensia–Einsidlensia 8a) the word order of the Latin and Greek is exactly the same, and the constructions are closely parallel. Nevertheless, the grammar is far from identical: in the fourth line the Greek has a dative and the Latin an ablative, and in the fifth and sixth lines the Greek has a genitive absolute surrounding a dative (as the object of ἀκολουθοῦντος, since ἀκολουθέω takes a dative), while the Latin has an ablative absolute surrounding an accusative (as the object of sequente, since sequor takes an accusative).
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7) paratus ergo ἑτοιμασθεὶς οὖν So having been prepared
in omnia, εἰς πάντα, for everything,
processi προῆλθον I went forth
bono auspicio, καλῇ κληδόνι, with a good omen,
sequente me ἀκολουθοῦντός μοι followed by my
paedagogo. παιδαγωγοῦ. paedagogue.
THE COLUMNAR FORMAT COMPARED TO MODERN BILINGUAL FORMATS
Nowadays there are two common formats for bilingual texts. Facing-page translations are generally fairly idiomatic and therefore make the overall meaning of the passage clear, but they often provide little help to the reader who wants to understand exactly what the original text says. Interlinear translations, by contrast, usually tell the reader what the text says but not what it means; it is common for the English of an interlinear translation to make no sense at all when taken as a whole. The contrast is illustrated below in examples 8 and 9, of which the first provides an interlinear translation of the first line of the Iliad and the second a translation that one might find on a facing page.
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8) wrath sing goddess son of Peleus Achilles
μῆνιν ἄειδε, θεά, ∏ηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος
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9) Sing, goddess, the wrath of Achilles, son of Peleus.
Neither of these systems is entirely satisfactory, for the reader of a bilingual text is very often someone who wants to understand the original language and needs help to do so. Such a person usually needs help both to find out what the text means and to learn what it says, and neither of the usual modern translation systems offers such help. This problem is particularly acute in the field of linguistics, where research frequently involves presenting very specific information about the workings of languages with which readers are largely or even wholly unfamiliar; the writer's entire argument often rests on examples that very few of the readers can understand without help. For this reason linguists usually provide first an interlinear translation in the form of word-by-word glosses containing both lexical and grammatical information, and then a freer translation to give the overall meaning of the sentence. So a linguist might render the first line of the Iliad as in example 10. This solution makes it clear to the reader both what the line means and how and why it means that, but it is very cumbersome: the original five-word line has now acquired twenty-six words of translation and explanation.
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10) μῆνιν ἄειδε θεά
wrath.acc.sg. sing.imperat.2nd.sg. goddess.voc.
∏ηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος
son of Peleus.gen.sg. Achilles.gen.sg.
‘Sing, goddess, the wrath of Achilles, son of Peleus.’
The columnar translation, like the linguists' solution, can be regarded as a compromise between the interlinear and the facing-page systems. Because a line-for-line equivalence offers the translator more flexibility than word-for-word equivalence, it is possible to produce a translation that conveys the meaning of the original. At the same time a columnar translation also gives a language learner a good understanding of what the individual words of the original actually say. As example 11 shows, a columnar translation of the first line of the Iiad offers all the benefits of the facing-page translation together with many of the benefits of the interlinear version, and it does so with only nine words, in contrast to the twenty-six words of the linguists' combined version.
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11) μῆνιν ἄειδε, Sing the wrath,
θεά, goddess,
∏ηληϊάδεω of Peleus' son
Ἀχιλῆος Achilles
COLUMNAR TRANSLATION IN THE VIRGIL AND CICERO PAPYRI
If we take a fresh look at the bilingual Virgil and Cicero papyri in light of an understanding of the nature and purpose of a columnar translation, those translations suddenly appear far better than they did when implicitly compared to our facing-page translations. Sometimes the Greek is not idiomatic, but this is a small price to pay for a translation that efficiently clarifies both what the original means and what it says. Occasionally the translation is not accurate, but that is a problem with execution rather than principle, and is not surprising if some of the translations were done by learners.
Example 12 comes from a columnar version of Cicero's First Catilinarian,Footnote 8 with the spelling corrected and diacritics added to make the text legible by modern readers. The two versions are essentially the same except in the fourth line, where the Latin gender-neutral parens has been rendered in Greek (which lacks an equivalent gender-neutral term) with μήτηρ; as the word for ‘fatherland’ is feminine in both languages, the use of a feminine word for ‘parent’ is an obvious choice.
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12) nunc te νῦν σε Now of you
patria ἡ πατρὶς the homeland,
quae communis est ἥτις κοινή ἐστιν which is the common
parens μήτηρ mother
omnium πάντων of all
nostrum ἡμῶν of us,
metuit. δέδοικε. has conceived a fear.
Example 13 provides another extract from the same text (section 19 of Cicero's oration). Here the English cannot be made to fit the columnar format completely, but nevertheless the Latin and the Greek work very well; note, in particular, the genitive absolute in Greek corresponding to the Latin quae cum ita sint.
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13) sed quam ἀλλὰ πῶς But how
longe μακρὰν far away
uidetur δοκεῖ does it seem that he ought to be
a carcere ἀπὸ φρουρᾶς from prison
atque a uinculis καὶ ἀπὸ δεσμῶν and from bonds,
abesse ἀπεῖναι
debere ὀφείλειν
hic qui se οὗτος ὅστις ἑαυτὸν he who himself has judged
ipse αὐτὸς himself
iam dignum ἤδη ἄξιον already worthy
custodia φυλακῆς of confinement?
iudicauerit? ἔκρινεν;
quae cum ita sint, τῶν οὕτως ἐχόντων, Since these things are thus,
Catilina, Κατιλίνα, Catiline,
debebas ὤφειλες you should have …
THE HISTORY OF COLUMNAR TRANSLATION
Columnar translation probably developed from columnar glossaries, for the format is common for certain types of glossary, and a columnar translation is in effect one that treats a continuous text like a glossary. Columnar glossaries were used in ancient Mesopotamia,Footnote 9 and it is tempting to try to connect the Latin–Greek columnar translations with the Mesopotamian glossaries, but such a connection is unconvincing. The chronological and geographical gaps between the two groups of columnar texts are enormous, for there is clear evidence that Roman Egypt received the columnar translation format from Latin speakers, not from speakers of Greek or Egyptian. It is most unlikely that the Romans would have borrowed anything from the Mesopotamians directly, without going via either of those other cultures. Moreover, the columnar glossary is an idea that two cultures could easily have had independently.
The columnar translation format is by far the most common one for Greek–Latin bilingual papyri (a term that will here be restricted to papyri containing the same material in both languages, excluding those in which the two languages say different things and those in which one language provides only a partial translation of the other, for example via occasional glosses). To illustrate the popularity of the format and the other possibilities available, all the bilingual Greek–Latin papyri whose formats I can ascertain are listed in the table below.Footnote 10 Although our main concern here is with continuous texts rather than with glossaries, all relevant glossaries are included here as well because of their probable role in the development of columnar translations of continuous texts.
Columnar format
Virgil:
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1) P.Ryl. III.478 + P.Mil. I.1 + P.Cairo inv. 85644 A–BFootnote 11 (fourth century a.d., containing parts of Virgil, Aeneid 1 with Greek translation)
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2) BKT IX.39Footnote 12 (fourth century a.d., containing parts of Virgil, Aeneid 1 and 2 with Greek translation)
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3) Ambrosian PalimpsestFootnote 13 (fourth or fifth century a.d., containing parts of Virgil, Aeneid 1 with Greek translation)
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4) P.Fouad 5Footnote 14 (fourth or fifth century a.d., containing parts of Virgil, Aeneid 3 with Greek translation)
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5) P.Oxy. L.3553Footnote 15 (fifth century a.d., containing parts of Virgil, Aeneid 1 with Greek translation)
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6) P.Vindob. inv. L 24Footnote 16 (fifth century a.d., containing parts of Virgil, Aeneid 5 with Greek translation)
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7) A papyrus edited originally by HusselmanFootnote 17 (fifth century a.d., containing parts of Virgil, Georgics 1 with Greek translation)
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8) P.Ness. II.1Footnote 18 (sixth century a.d., containing portions of Virgil, Aeneid 1 and 2 with Greek translation)
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9) P.Vindob. inv. L 62Footnote 19 (sixth century a.d., containing parts of Virgil, Aeneid 2 with Greek translation)
Cicero:
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10) P.Rain.Cent. 163Footnote 20 (fourth or fifth century a.d., containing parts of Cicero, In Catilinam 1 with Greek translation)
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11) PSI Congr.XXI 2Footnote 21 (fifth century a.d., containing parts of Cicero, In Catilinam 1 with Greek translation)
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12) P.Ryl. I.61Footnote 22 (fifth century a.d., containing parts of Cicero, In Catilinam 2 with Greek translation)
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13) P.Vindob. inv. L 127Footnote 23 (fifth century a.d., containing parts of Cicero, In Catilinam 3 with Greek translation)
Colloquia:
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14) P.Berol. inv. 21860Footnote 24 (fourth century a.d., containing phrases from an otherwise unknown bilingual colloquium mixed with glossary material)
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15) P.Prag. II.118Footnote 25 (fourth or fifth century a.d., containing a bilingual colloquium closely related to the Colloquium Harleianum)
Other continuous texts:
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16) BKT IX.149Footnote 26 (fourth century a.d., containing Isocrates with Latin translation)
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17) PSI VII.848Footnote 27 (fourth century a.d., containing Aesop fable 264 with Latin translation; format not quite certain owing to small size of surviving fragment)
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18) P.Bon. 5Footnote 28 (third or fourth century a.d., containing model epistles in Latin and Greek)
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19) CLA Footnote 29 II.251 (sixth or seventh century a.d., containing part of the Bible with Latin translation)
Glossaries:Footnote 30
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20) P.Oxy. LXXVIII.5162 (first or second century a.d.)
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21) P.Oxy. LXXVIII.5163 (first or second century a.d.)
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22) P.Oxy. XLIX.3452Footnote 31 (second century a.d.)
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23) P.Lund I.5Footnote 32 (second century a.d.)
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24) Kramer (n. 28), no. 12Footnote 33 (second or third century a.d.)
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25) P.Oxy. XXXIII.2660aFootnote 34 (third century a.d.)
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26) P.Laur. IV.147Footnote 35 (third century a.d.)
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27) Kramer (n. 24), no. 4Footnote 36 (third or fourth century a.d.)
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28) Kramer (n. 24), no. 6Footnote 37 (third or fourth century a.d.)
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29) Kramer (n. 24), no. 3Footnote 38 (third or fourth century a.d.)
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30) P.Oxy. LXXVIII.5161 (third or fourth century a.d.)
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31) Kramer (n. 28), no. 10Footnote 39 (fourth century a.d.)
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32) P.Fay. 135v descr.Footnote 40 (fourth century a.d.)
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33) P.Lond. II.481Footnote 41 (fourth century a.d.)
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34) PSI VII.756Footnote 42 (fourth or fifth century a.d.)
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35) P.Oxy. VIII.1099Footnote 43 (fifth century a.d.)
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36) Fragmenta Helmstadiensia + Folium WallraffianumFootnote 44 (sixth century a.d.)
Facing-page format
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37) PSI XIII.1306 (LDAB 3024, fourth or fifth century a.d., containing parts of the Bible with Latin translation): format is not completely certain because of the small size of the fragment, but probably facing pages with Greek on the left.
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38) Codex Bezae (LDAB 2929, fifth century a.d., containing parts of the Bible with Latin translation): Greek on the left
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39) CLA (n. 29), V.521 (LDAB 3003, sixth century a.d., containing parts of the Bible with Latin translation): Greek on the left
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40) CLA (n. 29), IV.472 (LDAB 3344, sixth or seventh century a.d., containing parts of the Bible with Latin translation; the Greek is in the Latin alphabet): Greek on the left
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41) CLA (n. 29), V.520 (LDAB 3403, seventh century a.d., containing parts of the Bible with Latin translation): Latin on the left
The translation follows the original in the same column
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42) P.Yale II.104 + P.Mich. VII.457Footnote 45 (third century a.d., containing Aesop with Latin translation)
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43) P.Amh. II.26Footnote 46 (third or fourth century a.d., containing Babrius with Latin translation)
Other formats
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44) BKT IX.150Footnote 47 (first century b.c., containing a glossary): a single column, in which each Latin gloss is underneath the corresponding Greek lemma and slightly indented.
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45) P.Sorb. inv. 2069 versoFootnote 48 (third century a.d., containing glossary with grammatical explanations in continuous text): an originally columnar text has been copied in long lines, so that short Latin and Greek phrases alternate; the languages are divided by spaces, and new lemmata do not necessarily begin new lines.Footnote 49
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46) Chester Beatty codex AC 1499Footnote 50 (fourth century a.d., containing among other things a glossary to the Pauline epistles): in the glossary section each Greek word is followed by its Latin translation(s), with double points separating lemma from gloss and multiple glosses from each other, while a unique symbol like a modern double quotation mark (“) separates the different entries. Line breaks are irrelevant to the arrangement of the text and often occur in the midst of words. This format may, but does not have to, result from re-arranging a text that originally used the columnar layout.
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47) P.Berol. inv. 10582Footnote 51 (fifth or sixth century a.d., containing a trilingual colloquium in Latin, Greek and Coptic): an originally columnar text has been put into the usual format for Coptic glossaries (see below) by replacing the intercolumnar spaces with double points, so that each line has three short units (one in each language) separated by punctuation.Footnote 52
Thus the evidence consists of thirty-six columnar papyri (nineteen containing continuous text and seventeen glossaries) and eleven others (nine of which contain continuous text). The distribution of material into these two categories is not random: when a continuous literary text originally composed in one language has been provided with a translation in the other language, the format is always columnar if the original language was Latin, and usually non-columnar if the original language was Greek. Within this latter group there appear to be subdivisions connecting genre and format, for facing-page translations are used only for Biblical texts and translations that follow the original only for fables.
The apparent connection between an originally Latin text and columnar format is reinforced by the fact that papyri not containing Latin almost never use this format. Of course, monolingual Greek papyri by definition do not contain translations of continuous text, but we have numerous Greek–Greek glossaries (mostly Homer lexica, but occasionally lexica of other types), and these normally use a format in which the gloss follows immediately after the lemma, separated by a space (or sometimes by punctuation, or occasionally not separated at all) rather than by the start of a new column. If the gloss is longer than average, it usually continues on a second line, which begins under the lemma but slightly indented. Of the thirty-nine Greek–Greek glossaries whose formats I have been able to verify, thirty-four use this format,Footnote 53 three a different non-columnar formatFootnote 54 and only two the columnar format.Footnote 55
Bilingual Greek–Demotic and Greek–Coptic texts seem never to use the columnar format at all, at least not during antiquity.Footnote 56 I can find only one bilingual Greek–Demotic text, a glossary, and this uses the same format as the majority of the Greek–Greek glossaries.Footnote 57 Greek–Coptic glossaries also use this format, the only difference being that, whereas Greek–Greek glossaries usually have a space after the lemma, or failing that a high point, Greek–Coptic glossaries tend to divide the lemma from the gloss with a double point (like a modern colon).Footnote 58 Greek–Coptic continuous bilingual texts use a variety of formats, of which the most common during antiquityFootnote 59 is for the translation to follow the text in the same column;Footnote 60 other formats include having the text on one side of a page and the translation on the other,Footnote 61 the facing-page format,Footnote 62 and parallel columns in which the two languages do not match line for line.Footnote 63
The obvious inference from the connection between Latin language and columnar format is that the columnar translation format originated in the Latin-speaking areas of the empire. Latin speakers had been learning Greek for centuries before Greek speakers began to learn Latin on any comprehensive scale;Footnote 64 therefore, it is inherently likely that some of the Latin–Greek bilingual materials (especially glossaries and colloquia) originated in the West for use by Latin speakers and were later adapted for use by Greek speakers. Some texts show positive evidence of a Western origin and later Eastern adaptation.Footnote 65 If the materials themselves migrated across the empire, it is not surprising that their format came with them.
The colloquia are among the materials that probably originated in the West, and it is notable that they are universally found in columnar format, not only in papyri but also in medieval manuscripts; only in the Renaissance do colloquium manuscripts with other formats start to appear. But the bilingual texts of Virgil and Cicero cannot have originated in the West: those are clearly designed for Greek speakers learning Latin. The first teachers who produced such texts were probably expatriate Latin speakers teaching Greek in the East; they would have used the columnar format they knew and appreciated from their own studies to help their students with Latin texts.
Our understanding of the mechanics of teaching and scholarship in the ancient West is limited, especially in comparison with the vast resources the papyri provide for understanding the education system of the Greek East.Footnote 66 Apart from a few rather sparse descriptions in literary texts, all we can do to understand what sort of materials teachers, students and scholars used in the Western empire is to extrapolate from the materials we have from Greek-speaking Egypt. Given the Romans' respect for Greek literature, culture and scholarship, the traditional assumption that Roman education was modelled largely on Greek education has not been an unreasonable one. But in the case of columnar translation the influence seems to have gone the other way: a technique developed in the West was borrowed by teachers in the East.
If this technique had not happened to involve Greek as well as Latin, it would not have been borrowed by people living in a climate that preserves writing materials, and we would not now know about it at all. Under these circumstances it is perhaps worth considering whether there are other respects in which Western education may have been less similar to that in the East than we normally suppose.