Project

Paeanius’s Metaphrasis (“Translation”) of Eutropius’s Roman History (Breviarium ab urbe condita, a short history of the Roman Empire from the foundation of the city in 753/2 BC to the death of Emperor Jovian in 364 AD) provides a rare example of a work of Latin literature translated into Greek. Written circa 379 AD, only ten years after the Latin original, it is – unlike the two other translations whose fragments are preserved in the works of John of Antioch (6th/7th cent.) and Theophanes the Confessor (9th cent.) – transmitted almost in its entirety by several manuscripts. As a witness to 4th century Greek-Latin bilingualism, the Metaphrasis has great potential for philological, linguistic, stylistic and translatological research.

However due to the lack of a reliable edition and philological commentary, this potential has not been fully realized. This 3-year project, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG project no. 555897292), addresses this by producing a critical edition with introduction, critical apparatus, German translation, notes and indices, as well as a comprehensive study on Paeanius’s language, style, translation methods and authorship. These studies will for the first time make use of the full manuscript tradition of the Metaphrasis as well as analyse it within its cultural, lingustic and literary environment.

The critical edition of Paeanius’s Metaphrasis, accompanied by a German translation and select notes, is being prepared by the principal investigator Jonathan Groß, while Alex Savinelli, the research associate funded by the DFG, will be writing a philological study of the Metaphrasis (with a translation into Italian). These are the first translations of this work into any modern language (not counting Dukas’s translation into Katharevousa Greek from 1807).