Progress on Hippolytus’ Chronicon has been very good the past two weeks.  I am about 650 lines in and have completed the last section in Greek and have now begun the final section, which only survives in an ancient Latin and Armenian translation.  I am using the Latin and comparing it with a German translation of the Armenian.  My German is pretty terrible, but the Latin and Armenian seem quite similar.  My hope is to complete the rough draft of the translation before the end of june and then have a final copy ready by the end of summer.  I have not done any serious latin work for a couple years so I’ve been shaking off the rust as I go, but the Latin is fairly easy, so it is not difficult.  As I have mentioned before the hardest part is figuring out the proper names of individuals, in this case, or the names of people groups and countries in the case of the portion of the Chronicon which is in Greek.

The translation has been coming along well, I am about 360 ”verses” into it which is well over half way.  Once I am done I need to revise and correct it.  I have made the decision to only transliterate the names of the hundreds of cities and towns mentioned by Hippolytus in the second section of the “Chronicon” in which he enumerates the distances between various locations.  I did this for several reasons:

1. It would take an enormous amount of time to look up all the place names.
2. Many of the place names are either unique, and I would have to transliterate them anyway or only mentioned in one or two other ancient authors, meaning that by “looking them up” I would actually be looking at various translations of Strabo, Ptolemy, etc.  and not in a lexicon.
3. The different English editions of the ancient authors would likely have different ways of spelling the same place which would render “looking them up” fairly pointless, at least as far as finding an agreed upon spelling goes.
4. Transliterating the place names will give the reader a window into the Greek spelling, which may reduce the need to obtain a Greek text.

I hope to continue translating at a quicker pace this summer.  Once I am done I will post the final translation for you all to see.