V Oxford, Bodleian Library Canonici script. eccl. 96.
R Montpellier, Bibliothèque Universitaire, Section de Médecine Codex Montepessulanus H. 32.
This is not a complete list: there are said to be a hundred or so.
About this translation
This translation is the first translation of the whole work into a modern language. The portion written by Jerome himself, from 326-378, has been translated before. Malcolm Drew Donalson translated it into English with a commentary in 1996; Benoît Jeanjean published an excellent French translation and commentary in 2004, to which he added a translation of the two prefaces of Jerome and Eusebius. Most but not all of the preface of Jerome had been translated into English as part of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers series in the 19 century.
The translation came about as a result of some experiments in online collaborative translation by Roger Pearse. Andrew Smith of attalus.org had translated portions of the text of the Chronicle covering the Hellenistic era, down to the death of Tiberius, and formatted them as text keyed on Olympiad, year, and text. This provided a model for placing the text of the Chronicle online so that it could be translated, without the need to worry about the king-lists and numbers and the detailed format of the final product. This was the approach taken.
After a discussion with Steven Van Impe, in September 2004, a web page was placed online which contained on the left hand side some 160 text entries in Latin from Jerome's Chronicle, one after another, and on the right a box in which anyone might enter a translation. The text was broken down into very short sections of no more than a short sentence. The electronic Patrologia Latina Database text was used as a basis, and corrected against the edition of J. K. Fotheringham. The PL text contained a great many medieval additions which were mostly ignored, and the remainder placed in brackets.
The text was made available in weekly 'chunks' of no more than 160 sections, each being edited, uploaded and announced on a Saturday. Each chunk took around a week. The website then allowed anyone visiting the site to enter a translation or comments there and then, without the need for registration. The emphasis was on each section being so short that anyone with any knowledge of Latin would be able to do something, and thereby people of all levels of Latin would be encouraged to participate. Quality was assured by keeping the length of the chunk short, so that when a chunk was done people could then review what had been done in the remainder of the week.
The existence of each new chunk was publicised in a variety of online fora, including humanities.classics, soc.history.ancient and the LT-ANTIQ mailing list. The process took 14 weeks from September 2004 until Christmas 2004, starting with Gaius (Caligula) and proceeding to the end, then restarting with Abraham and continuing down to Tiberius; finally doing the praefationes in the same way.
After the bulk of the translation work was done, the translation had to be harmonised to try to ensure that the same words were translated the same way. This was not straightforward. The text was too large to edit in Microsoft Word or Frontpage. In the end, each sentence was placed online in a separate text file, numbered 1-2574, and a PHP script written so that the sentences could be browsed by number range (1-10, etc) or by searching for words in the text file. Using the latter approach, it was easier to display only those sections which contained a specific word to be harmonised. This process took a month.
Then the result had to be laid out in the format of the original, which took some three months until April 2004 and was very arduous. The format is 26 line pages and follows Helm's edition (1956). This proved extraordinarily difficult, involving some unusual HTML. The layout was done from the rear of the volume, and only once around 70% of the text had been formatted was a template that would work for every page successfully evolved. This process took until the end of April 2005, and around 20% had to be done again once the modus operandi had been established. However many features of the Chronicle only become clear once you actually try to lay out a copy on a page, electronic or otherwise.
The layout was done a page at a time in Dreamweaver 6. Attempts to edit larger files proved impractical. It quickly became clear that the HTML tables could not be allowed to resize as normally happens. Instead the tables were specified as fixed size and the properties of each cell specified in CSS. This ensured compatibility across browsers, such as Internet Explorer 6, Netscape 6 and Firefox.
Finally a question arose about colours in the text. Jerome's original text had the columns of kings coloured alternately red and black, in order to avoid confusion. This has been followed in the online text. There are no indications in either Helm or Fotheringham of the colour system. The Merton College manuscript is online, but since this has additional colours it could not be used without reservation. A colour strip of 27 pictures of the Bodleian manuscript was bought and used as a guide, but this mainly contained items from the latter portion of the Chronicle. The Assistant Librarian of the Bodleian, Dr. Bruce Barker-Benfield, kindly agreed to allow access to this treasure. A visit during May 2005 allowed the production of a marked up print-out of the translation which indicated which portions of the text were in which colour. In the process he found that the facsimile really was an extraordinarily accurate reproduction of the look and feel of the codex, colour aside. However the first original page was page 69. The colour on the pages before this point is therefore a reconstruction. The last page of the codex was also lost in late antiquity; again a guess has been made on the correct colours.
One problem that was encountered in the translation was a portion in Jerome's introduction. The original text was laid out in a specific tabular format by Eusebius, and following him, by Jerome. However at some time during the Dark Ages, a scribe chose to reformat the document by placing all of the columns of kings on the left, and all the text on the right. The first letter of the text was colour-coded to indicate to which column of numbers - up to nine - it related. To explain this, the scribe interpolated a short passage into Jerome's introduction. Unfortunately this passage is extremely terse and difficult to understand in the absence of a manuscript formatted and coded in this way. A manuscript of this family does exist in the British Library. Permission to view this manuscript has been granted but the opportunity to view it has not yet arrived. Until this can be checked, the translation of the interpolated passage must be considered provisional.
Translators and helpers
Around 25 people participated at various points during the 14 weeks of the experiment, and I would like to thank everyone who did so. In no particular order, the main translators and problem-solvers were: Roger Pearse (RP), Andrew S. Jacobs (ASJ), José Miguel Blasco Ibáñez (JMB), Jacob Wainwright Love (JWL), and an anonymous contributor known as '...'; together with contributions large and small by Argyros George Argyrou (AGA), Steven Van Impe (SVI), Benôit Jeanjean (BJ: whose splendid French translation of the last portion of the Chronicle appeared as our project was drawing to a close), Frank Gay (FG), Frank Van Heden (FVH), Mark DelCogliano (MD), Andrew Smith (AS), Michael Kuettner (MK), James Hannam (JH), DSV, TV, GAC, MDM, M. Guy, Kevin O'Donnell, Ayse Tuzlak (AT), FM, RAK, JWS, tks, EL, SJJC, DH, KS, Pe, AC, RIP and others who chose to remain entirely anonymous. (If anyone for whom I only have initials would like to contact me, I'd be glad to add your names). Many, many thanks to you all!
All errors of translation, revision and layout are solely the responsibility of Roger Pearse, of course. The translation does not pretend to be what it is not, and doubtless contains errata and corrigenda. All such will be gratefully received. The object of the translation was to explore the possibilities and limitations of online translation of works never before translated by a mixture of professionals and people not professionally involved in such activity, and in the process to make this fascinating work available to the general public, and thereby to encourage interest in ancient chronography. It is hoped that this will now occur.
Thanks are due to Dr. Bruce Barker-Benfield of the Bodleian Library, Oxford, who made it possible for the manuscript 'O' -- one of the treasures of that library -- to be consulted.
Key to codes used in the translation
The double-page openings of Jerome's copy are represented on-screen by the white rectangles. Areas in yellow indicate material not part of Jerome's text. The spine of the book is represented by a yellow column down the middle. Page numbers (a later addition) are indicated in square brackets at the top -- [220/221] is pages 220 and 221. These page numbers appear in Helm and Fotheringham.
A few things in the text may be obscure. These have been transcribed from the edition of Helm (1956).
g An entry -- The italic letter is not present in Jerome's text, but is a code devised by Rudolf Helm. All the text entries can be referenced by page number and letter, e.g. 303a.
* -- When an entry is marked with an asterisk in Helm's edition, it is supposedly not present in the Armenian translation of the original work by Eusebius. This means that it must be an entry added by Jerome. However Burgess states (p.24) that these are not very accurate. After some hesitation, I have transcribed them.
(*) -- Helm's code for an entry which is present in the Armenian, but in a somewhat shorter or different form.
*? -- Helm's code for another possible modification; I am unclear in what way.