Shifting Cultural Frontiers in Late Antiquity explores the transformation of classical culture in late antiquity by studying cultures at the borders - the borders of empires, of social classes, of public and private spaces, of literary genres, of linguistic communities, and of the modern disciplines that study antiquity. Although such canonical figures of late ancient studies as Augustine and Ammianus Marcellinus appear in its pages, this book shifts our perspective from the center to the side or the margins. The essays consider, for example, the ordinary Christians whom Augustine addressed, the border regions of Mesopotamia and Vandal Africa, 'popular' or 'legendary' literature, and athletes. Although traditional philology rightly underlies the work that these essays do, the authors, several among the most prominent in the field of late ancient studies, draw from and combine a range of disciplines and perspectives, including art history, religion, and social history. Despite their various subject matters and scholarly approaches, the essays in Shifting Cultural Frontiers coalesce around a small number of key themes in the study of late antiquity: the ambiguous effects of 'Christianization, ' the creation of new literary and visual forms from earlier models, the interaction and spread of ideals between social classes, and the negotiation of ethnic and imperial identities in the contact between 'Romans' and 'barbarians.' By looking away from the core and toward the periphery, whether spatially or intellectually, the volume offers fresh insights into how ancient patterns of thinking and creating became reconfigured into the diverse cultures of the 'medieval.'
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Chapter1 "It Is Not the Custom of Our Syriac Language ... ": Reconsidering the Role of Translation in the Polemics of Philoxenos of Mabbug
David A. Michelson
Introduction
The chapters in this volume examine the period of late antiquity by turning our attention to the peripheries of its intellectual, social, and literary domains. This exploration of the margins and borderlands of culture can offer a new perspective on the cultural transformations of the late ancient world, in part by allowing a glimpse of how boundaries were circumnavigated or even redrawn.1 This present chapter considers one such linguistic and geographic boundary, the divide between Greek and Syriac cultures in late antiquity. Between the Aramaic cultures of Mesopotamia and the Greek world of the Eastern Mediterranean, a new hybrid Syriac intellectual community developed west of the Euphrates in the fourth through seventh centuries.2 Fergus Millar, Dan King and others have argued that this new west Syrian intellectual community should be properly understood as the product of the mixing of Christian, Greek, and regional Semitic cultures of the Roman Near East.3 The cultural hybridity of the nascent west Syrian community is particularly evident in its ecclesiastical literature, which proliferated and became increasingly Hellenized in the fifth through seventh centuries. By the time this process of Hellenization reached its apex, west Syrian authors had developed an elaborate system of "mirror-style of translation" which was used not only to translate Greek texts into Syriac but also to allow the literal reproduction in Syriac of Greek philosophical and theological concepts and syntax.4
Recent scholarly attention has turned to the questions of why this "mirror-style" developed and what its development can tell us about the relationship between Syriac and Greek cultures in late antiquity,5 Some evidence can be found in the work of the miaphysite Bishop Philoxenos of Mabbug (d. 523), a productive Syriac author who sponsored translation projects from Greek to Syriac including a revision of the Nicene Creed and the New Testament. Philoxenos, who has long been noted as a representative midpoint in the development of this "mirror-style." is a useful entry point into an examination of the Hellenization of west Syrian literature because he provides some of the earliest comments in defense and explanation of the development. Accordingly, this chapter inquires into Philoxenos' own attitudes with regard to crossing between the linguistic domains of Greek and Syriac. Specifically, this chapter poses a new question: what was Philoxenos' attitude toward translation as an intellectual endeavor? The answer, as I will argue below, is an ironic and surprising one. Although Philoxenos was an ardentâeven polemicalâpromoter of the need for new translation techniques and of the use of new translations, his own attitude toward translation per se was in fact ambivalent and even in a certain sense negative. This begs the question, given Philoxenos' hostility to commentary and translation, what did he intend his readers to do with his revision of the New Testament? An investigation of his intentions and of his ironic ambivalence can shed further light on a pivotal moment in the history of Syriac/Greek translation and give us a glimpse into late-antique awareness of cultural transfer and its limitations.
In spite of his influence in his own lifetime, Philoxenos of Mabbug is not sufficiently well known to scholars.6 Born to Syriac-speaking parents in Persia in the mid 400s and dying under imperial exile in Thrace in 523, Philoxenos' life spanned remarkably varied geographic, political, and religious environments. Perhaps trained as a dyophysite in the School of Edessa, Philoxenos eventually adopted the miaphysite Christology and became a monastic organizer and agitator in Antioch during the Patriarchal squabbles of the 470s. During the brief miaphysite ascendency under Zeno and Anastasius, Philoxenos' dedication to the one nature theological party was rewarded by appointment to the metropolitan see of Mabbug/Heirapolis in Euphratensis. Strategically positioned on the Euphrates, Philoxenos was involved in ecclesiastical politics in both Persia and Antioch and even before his elevation had occasion to travel to Constantinople to plead the miaphysite cause. Indeed in his collaborations with Severus, Patriarch of Antioch, and his missionary interests in Arabia and Perse-Armenia. Philoxenos saw himself as part of the broad swath of late-antique Christianity stretching from north Africa to east of the Tigris.
In his role as senior leader of the opposition to Chalcedon in Syria and Mesopotamia. Philoxenos became a prolific author. Besides monastic sermons and letters. Philoxenos wrote or sponsored lengthy works of Christological polemic, including miaphysite creedal statements. Of particular note for the present study are Philoxenos' revised version of the Nicene Creed in Syriac, his gospel commentaries on Matthew. Luke and the prologue of John, and perhaps most importantly, his sponsored revision of the Syriac New Testament (the version now referred to as the Philoxenian).7
Philoxenian Translation Projects
Philoxenos' translation projects developed out of his involvement in Christological disputes. Over time he had begun to distance himself from traditional Syriac terminology for the incarnation, including the expressions of Ephrem and the earlier Peshitta translation of the New Testament, because of imprecision and "Nestorian" tendencies. In order to supersede these two pillars of Syriac theology. Philoxenos assembled a scriptorium of sorts in Mabbug in the early 500s.8 As De Halleux has shown. Philoxenos' efforts to import Greek theological idioms into Syriac most likely began with his commissioning of a retranslation of the Nicene and Constantinopolitan creeds (the Antiochene Synodicon) into a more literal rendering and then moved to a re-translation of the New Testament.9
The New Testament revision, the work of certain Polycarp, a chorepiscopus of Mabbug. was finished in 507/508. Writing perhaps just before that moment. Philoxenos gave this brief justification of the project in his Commentary on the Prologue to the Gospel of John:
Those of old who translated
these scriptures erred in many things, whether willfully or out of ignorance. These errors were not only in what is taught about the oikonomia which is in the flesh, but also in the rest of what is written about other doctrines. For this reason we have now taken the trouble to have the holy scriptures of the New Testament translated
anew from Greek into Syriac.10
This new translation, like the Philoxenian revision of the Creed, sought to mirror the Greek text even to the extent of abandoning traditional Syriac idioms.
Scholarly accounts of Philoxenos' translation projects, such as those of Brock and Van Rompay. have summed up Philoxenos' stance on Greek versus Syriac by pointing to a series of retrospective comments made very near the end of his life in 523 .11 There Philoxenos distanced himself from even the most revered of Syriac fathers. Ephrem, lamenting the imprecise language used by Ephrem and others (such as speaking of mixing): " ... it is not the custom of our Syriac language to express itself in the strict phrases which are spoken among the Greeks concerning the divine inhomination and the incomprehensible union."12 As Brock has aptly put it, this sentiment is exemplary of a broader shift from "antagonism to assimilation" in Syriac attitudes toward Greek learning.13
Philoxenos' role in this larger shift has been treated most recently in a detailed study by King.14 King traces the development of the mechanical "mirror-style" translation from Greek which over three centuries came to dominate Syriac translation-texts. King notes that over time translation from Greek became "the principal input mechanism for Syriac theology and for the inner development of Syriac religion and culture."15 King situates Philoxenos chronologically as a midway point of this trend, a "vital period of development" at the beginning of the sixth century.16 The push toward philological accuracy intensified across the sixth century as Syriac translators produced even more literal translations into the early seventh century, eventually producing the Harclean New Testament. Aland and others have characterized this movement as a broad "Philoxenian-Harclean translation tradition."17 While the contribution of the Philoxenian to the development of the mirror-style translation tradition is readily apparent, Aland has also rightly pointed out that Philoxenos' desire for philological...
