What I read and did: week of 21 Jan 2024

More Hypatia, Epiphanius of Salamis, Anchorites, Astrolabes, Homer, Mary Sidney, Antipodes of Earthquakes

Figure 1.2 Details of the earthquake that I felt this weekend, of which I calculated the antipode and texted to my friend Maria.

Hypatia and rabbit holes thereafter

I’ve been on a real Hypatia bender lately so I re-read her wikipedia page for the 100th time and ran down even more rabbit holes than before.

After admitting I somehow had a problem that wikipedia couldn’t remedy, I started reading this book:

Hypatia: The Life and Legend of an Ancient Philosopher by Edward J Watts

but I also considered these ones (not affiliate links, should be just regular amazon links):

• Hypatia of Alexandria: Mathematician and Martyr by Michael Deakin

• Hypatia of Alexandria by Maria Dzielska

I became bizarrely intrigued by a passage in the wikipedia page (which references the two books listed above) about Hypatia’s father Theon and other information (or lack thereof) about her family.

Theon dedicates his commentary on Book IV of Ptolemy's Almagest to an individual named Epiphanius, addressing him as "my dear son",^[24][25] indicating that he may have been Hypatia's brother,^[24] but the Greek word Theon uses (teknon) does not always mean "son" in the biological sense and was often used merely to signal strong feelings of paternal connection.

A mystery! Who is this Epiphanius (a Greek name related to “epiphany”) and did he write anything himself? After perusing the disambiguation page on the name, it turns out that a famous Epiphanius of Salamis was a contemporary of Theon and lived in Egypt and visited Alexandria but it would be strange if Theon (likely a pagan and in any event probably not a very orthodox Christian) decided to name a man around his same age as his teknon much less a man who I found out was famous for his intense Christian orthodoxy. Ok so the mystery is still open, might have been another Neoplatonist scholar or mathematician if not a real son.

So on I went down a deep rabbit hole to:

Saint Epiphanius of Salamis and Epiphanius Scholasticus

Saint Epiphanius of Salamis (who is, I can only infer, the patron saint of charcuterie ) was a unique individual and it’s worth looking this guy up. You will not be disappointed. He’s like a very disorganized, rambling and zealous Pliny the Elder, and perhaps the first historically obvious case of ADD. He was famous for speaking at least 5 languages and was sainted by both the Catholic and Byzantine churches for for his commitment to orthodoxy (ok, probably not for advancement of preserved meats). He wrote a book in the late 4th century AD that was famous through the Middle Ages about all the different types of beliefs he considered heresy (a long, long list) and according to people who read The Panarion, it reads like a beastiary. He equates all types of heresies with different malicious creatures (real or imaginary) and how to defeat them. Then I had to read all about heresy in general (an important topic lately seeing as I’m reading a work of historical fiction about Giordano Bruno - more on that below). So off I went to learn generally about the questions about the nature of the Trinity in early Christianity then specifically about Apollinarism, Arianism, and Origenism. As you can see this was a particularly long rabbit hole. I knew absolutely nothing about it previously. I had vaguely heard of the First Council of Nicaea but couldn’t have told you the first thing about it. My one sentence synopsis of my current understanding of christian heresy is that people were brutally murdered for centuries for minor disagreements about things that would be impossible to prove one way or another such as, but not limited to, the precise way in which Jesus was considered divine, the nature of the afterlife, and the way to pray that best pleases God. Overall, The Mans seemed very busy for a while torturing and burning each other at the stake for the most baffling infractions. Perhaps they ran out of mouthy women/witches and got bored.

During my perusal of his portion of the internet, I ran across an academic translation of his work On Weights and Measures. It’s worth reading the foreward in this PDF version of the paper if only just to see how biting and cruel academics can be and how in particular these two University of Chicago professors satisfyingly leveraged academic prose to their purpose in 1935¹. This quote by the forward author Martin Sprengling may have been the highlight of my week.

His quarrels and his writings show Epiphanius to have had a crabbed old single-track mind, and the track he covers is usually a sidetrack. He clearly knew too much for his limited understanding. His style is discursive; his thought is poorly organized. Good and bad information, important and unimportant matters, stand side by side and form a rather unsavory mess. Hence the study and editing of his works, a thorny subject at best, has attracted few students and lags behind that of his contemporaries. In the case of his Άγκυρωτός, a summary of what he considered the true faith, that does not matter so much, for it is little used at any time. His Panarion, a statement about eighty heresies and the remedies for them, is another matter. Here, after all, there is much information not to be found elsewhere. No work of similar bulk and compass on the same subject was produced by any medieval Christian. Its fame, indeed, exceeds its merit.

Fantastic, but tell us what you really think, Professor.

Then of course, since I still had a mystery to solve, I went back to the disambiguation page and clicked around to the other Epiphaniuses, Epiphaniuoi?(Επιφάνιοοι?), Epiphanioi? (Επιφάνιοι?), Epiphan…nevermind, incorrectly pluralizing Greek names is for another time.

Another famous Epiphanius is Epiphanius Scholasticus. Wikipedia led me to believe that among his other achievements he might have founded a monastery in Thebes that was excavated in the early 20th century by the Metropolitan Museum of Art?? Either way, someone named Epiphanius may have founded this monastery and may have walled themselves into the building to pray all day …

Anchorites

So in short, the scraps of information I had on this monastery this led me to to fascinating topic of anchorites. These were people who walled themselves into the side of churches, prayed all day, and gave advice - which is clearly a situation even more serious than a regular cloistered monk or nun. If you didn’t like living in your studio apartment during the Covid lockdowns, I do not recommend you becoming an anchorite. If like me, you thought it wasn’t so bad because you had cats and books, then perhaps next time you don’t leave your home for too long, consider opening your street-facing window and offering your wisdom to passersby.

Antipodes and Earthquakes

My friend Maria can tell you that I’m suddenly really into calculating antipodes of certain locations. Why? Why not. I’m constantly texting her the antipode of her location or of something that happened like an earthquake or my location etc. While not always located there, she’s originally from Spain and very knowledgeable about it. As most of New Zealand (my current location) maps nearly exactly onto Spain I text her these random things and she’s got all kinds of interesting facts to tell me about this or that town I happen to be directly on the other side of the Earth from. Maria is great btw. My midlife crisis interests are just a subset of topics that Maria has always been interested in. In fact, a brief description of a regular day for Maria makes the current breadth of my new interests look boring and superficial.

To calculate the antipode of your own location, it’s easy!

Take your latitude and flip it to the other hemisphere. So if it’s 40 Degrees South, make it 40 degrees N.

Take your longitude and subtract it from 180. Then flip the hemisphere, so if you’re 174 E, make it 6 degrees W.

You can enter in coordinates of your antipode (in our example,40 S, 6 W) into google maps and it will show you that location.

Here is the NZ Earthquake that happened this week that I told Maria had its antipode in Northern Spain.

https://www.geonet.org.nz/earthquake/shaking/2024p051849

Horse riding lessons

Nothing much to say here except that reading so much about the Middle Ages has made me want to take riding lessons. There is an equestrian center not to far from my house and I’m excited to get started as dressage sounds like a jaunty phase to a midlife crisis. Plus, in the “early middle age” I got a brown belt in karate, so this seems like a good next step for the “high” phase.

Oxford Alumni Book Club - Heresy by SJ Parris

I haven’t usually participated in alumni events for any of the schools I attended for various reasons but probably just regular laziness. I’ve never even been to a reunion of any kind. But I suddenly felt compelled to join this book club because it sounded fun to chat about books about Oxford as it’s been on my mind a lot lately (which is strange bc I didn’t think about it very much over the last 15 years since I graduated). I’ve become more than a little regretful that I didn’t take advantage of all that Oxford has to offer in my zest to finish my dissertation on time. While the faculty in the astro department was world class, and I’m grateful to have spent so much time with them, I was still mostly holed up in front of a computer in a famous, functional, but joyless brutalist building that could have been located anywhere on Earth. But outside that monument to function-over-form that seemed proudly unsympathetic to its surroundings, was a whole world you can’t find anywhere else. Considering all my new interests, Oxford would be an amazing place to be right now! Since New Zealand is a little far (in fact, in the Buffy universe, they claimed the Cotswolds were the antipode of a location in New Zealand) it’s fun to run around there again in my imagination. You will see that for some reason “Oxford” keeps popping up in my searches even when I had no idea there had been a previous connection. I swear I don’t normally think about it or encounter it this much. (By the end of this post you’ll never want to hear that word again)

Unrelated to the book club, I just recently finished reading all four of the All Souls Trilogy books (plus the extra one) by Deborah Harkness (I’ll spare you my varied review on those) and wouldn’t you know it, the book that comes up next for the OU bookclub is Heresy by SJ Parris which features none other than a fictionalized Giordano Bruno.

What both the All Souls Trilogy and Heresy have in common is they both are set partially in Oxford, are both at least partially set around the turn of the 17th century England (Elizabethan) and both mention Phillip Sidney.

So it was time I looked him up properly…

Phillip and Mary Sidney

Phillip Sidney was a gentleman poet, soldier, and courtier in the court of Elizabeth I. He even attended Christ Church, Oxford (the college I attended as it happens) although when he was there it couldn’t have been more than a few decades old. One of his most famous works is called The Arcadia which was published after his death. There is some confusion as to which version he may have preferred to be published since there was a simpler complete version but he put that aside to work on a much more ambitious complicated version which he never finished.

So his sister, famous in her own right, Mary Sidney, the Countess of Pembroke assembled a version that was partly the more expanded “New” Arcadia then finished with chapters from the “Old Arcadia” : The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia.

In the early 20th century an antiquarian found three copies of the full Old Arcadia and published that as well which maybe I’ll try to read someday.

I could really go on an on about Mary Herbert née Sidney, but I may need to make a whole separate post about this lady. She’s very interesting. She had several houses and in one of them she had her own chemistry lab. And lest you were worried this topic was safely unconnected to Oxford, there is a statue of her son outside the Bodleian Library as he was a chancellor of the University.

Duolingo and all the languages I’ve decided to learn better

I’ve re-started Modern Greek lessons in person with a real life teacher again. After 12 years I’m only still sort of at the B2 level because 1) I’m very lazy. And 2) every single Greek teacher I’ve ever studied with has had to leave the country and move back to Greece within 6 months of starting lessons me. Every single one has fled the country and I’ve had many. And guess what I found out this week? Yes, my newest teacher - even though I took every precaution: she owns her own house and had been here for over a decade - is leaving in June. Of course the obvious conclusion is that I’m such an awful student that they have no choice but to leave, and this very well could be true. I can listen to documentaries in Greek and get about 60% of it. I can listen and participate in my husband’s phone conversations with his family even if I can only hear one side of it. I can read fairly well and know unhelpful words like προπαραλήγουσα and ξενιτιά but if you asked me a basic question, I’d have huge trouble replying. That’s just not something one can fix for $50 an hour. In the beginning, they all believe they can, however, and then presumably they feel defeated by my lack of progress and then spiral into an identity crisis that only a return to the motherland can fix.

In other news, I’m re-starting Hebrew! Duolingo has been great for this as I’m still a beginner. If you turn off the animations and the chirpy game sounds, the platform is actually pretty great. I spent about 30 minute doing lessons every morning this week which made me feel proud of myself for once.

I also added Spanish to my duolingo this week. I’m at around a C1 level in Spanish (I used to live in Chile when I worked at a telescope there over a decade ago) but since I have very few ppl to speak with here in NZ, it’s great to spend 30mins on this technicolor game and tell an animated owl that Diego había sido casado por el cura con la Pamela so as to better remember all those verb forms I never use.

Homer

Every now and then I tell myself: to hell with Modern Greek! Just learn Ancient Greek and read Homer in the original! The problem here is that there is more than one “Ancient Greek” and afaik there are more resources to learn Koine Greek than Homeric Greek. So every few months for the last 20 years I tend to wonder if I should try to learn at least some late Roman Koine Greek from say, Alexandria. At least I could then read some Marcus Aurelius and other interesting things. I guess this therefore doesn’t so much qualify as a MLC related event, but the other topics brought to me by the ol’ MLCrisis² have definitely put me more into contact with Koine Greek than usual so my desires along this path have become significantly elevated. But I always long to read the Odyssey in Greek and pretend like even at 40, I could do my own interesting translation like Emily Wilson. So that feels very midlife cris-y. Are there enough years left in my life to become an expert in something else? To make a major contribution in another field? (not sure what I’m worried about, I didn’t make any major contributions in my first field of astronomy, but I did make a lot of friends!)

But something new I did learn this week is that there are a range of YouTube videos of people who are proud to tell you how to pronounce Ancient Greek but don't always make a great distinction on which time period or region they are teaching about. People seem to love heavy breathings, long vowel sounds, and pitch accents though which is always interesting and really sounds funny.

So my hopes of reading HHHHHHhhhhomer like Homer might have pronounced his work are dashed again but I live in HHHHHHHhhhope. I should just focus on Modern Greek and I’ll be 70% of the way there.

Astrolabes

Oh wow do I love THIS topic. This isn’t the first time I’ve looked these up, but as I learn more late Roman and medieval history, the more context I get and the more interesting these devices become. Never sure where the MLCrisis is going to take me but if it can take me further down this path, I’d be thrilled. This has everything I’ve ever previously been interested in (mostly astronomy and celestial navigation — I have my own sextant and have used it once with much joy on the high seas) plus most of all the new topics I’m interested in like the Middle Ages, early modern notions of witchcraft, Jewish medieval history, women doing science things and getting accused of witchcraft…on and on). Lord, sometimes I’m terrified of this topic it’s just so fun. I worry I might have to do a whole new PhD on this fucking topic it’s so great. Actually Hypatia was known for using astrolabes and even making her own planar astrolabes.

If I end up doing a dissertation-worthy journey down this route, I would like to declare for posterity that the inciting incident was reading this quote in translation by John of Nikiu in his Chronicle:

And in those days there appeared in Alexandria a female philosopher, a pagan named Hypatia, and she was devoted at all times to magic, astrolabes and instruments of music, and she beguiled many people through her Satanic wiles. And the governor of the city honoured her exceedingly; for she had beguiled him through her magic. And he ceased attending church as had been his custom... And he not only did this, but he drew many believers to her, and he himself received the unbelievers at his house.

Other interesting links I came across this week (I could fill a whole book with links about this):

https://warburg.sas.ac.uk/research-projects/archived-research-projects/astrolabes-medieval-jewish-culture

https://www.hsmt.ox.ac.uk/people/dr-stephen-johnston

Along the same lines as my previous sentiment “all roads lead back to OX1 this week” and “I should have left the Denys Wilkinson Building more,” apparently the History of Science Museum in Oxford has the world’s largest collection of Astrolabes? I only found out this week even though I’ve been looking these things up for ages and I lived there for nearly 4 years.

Things I got up to that were not as normal as usual

Running isn’t an unusual activity but I did it much more consistently this week which is great. It’s summer here in New Zealand and it’s been really hot. So I’ve enjoyed running around late in the evening to avoid people and sunburn down along the beach road. The mosquitoes have also been thrilled by my punctuality.

I also did a better job staying away from pointless and “trance” activities like my Facebook feed or LinkedIn or just staring into space. I guess this can be seen in the sheer number of things I looked up this week (I only wrote about 3/4 of it!). So even just writing this post made me realize just how much time I had been wasting before just mindlessly doing random pointless things that didn’t improve my life at all.

I started this substack! I have started so many before and never ever got around to actually publishing anything. Maybe finally I feel like I have something worth saying.

1. Dean, James Elmer (1935). Epiphanius' Treatise on Weights and Measures: The Syriac Version. The University of Chicago Press. OCLC 912074

2. MLC is The Entity currently in charge of my life, because all I know for sure is that it sure as hell isn’t me.