I have slowly been translating the first 150 lines of Hippolytus’ Chronicon. Work is hard going, mostly because there are hundreds of proper names of people groups in the ancient world. These names are not listed in the principle Greek lexicons. So I have been using William Smith’s two volume epic “Dictionary of Greek And Roman Geography” which was published more than 150 years ago. It took me a bit, but I found a digital copy of the dictionary online and have  assembled it in Microsoft Word and am using Word’s Find function to look for the names of the people groups in the original Greek. According to Microsoft Word the dictionary contains 2.7 million words and over 5000 pages! As of now I have essentially finished Hippolytus’ discussion on the division of the earth to the first two sons of Noah and am about to begin the section on the third son, Shem. After that begins the second section, a rather long list of the distances between cities in the mediteranean. And then there is the third and last section which is a chronology of world history.

So far Hippolytus does not seem to be following Josephus’ account of the division of the earth.  For example, Josephus says that biblical Magog (Genesis 10) begot the Scythians, Hippolytus says Magog begot the Celts and the Galatians.  I have not yet compared Hippolytus’ account to that found in Jubilees.

I have noticed that section 15 of the “Chronography of 354 AD“  (Liber Generationis 1) seems to be a complete Latin translation of the first and third parts of Hippolytus’ Chronicon. Much thanks is due to Roger Pearse for placing the “Chronography of 354″ online.  It was actually quite a frustrating thing to see a Latin translation of this Greek work.  As a former Latin teacher I find it much easier to read the Latin translation than the original Greek!

I am really questioning whether or not it is wise for me to translate the second part of the Chronicon.  How many people are interested in how many stades separate an ancient city?  I am also worried that many of the ancient cities will not be listed anywhere and I will simply transliterate the name.  But I suppose that the translation does need to be done at some point.  I’m sure it would be an invaluable resource to someone out there(like an archaeologist).  Anyone have advice or thoughts on the matter?

This entry was posted on Monday, March 30th, 2009 at 6:07 pm and is filed under Hippolytus, Translation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.