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↳ Photius: The Bibliotheca

Originally Published: 2020-02-10

Update: I’ve started making English translations of some previously-untranslated entries here.

Photius’ (or Photios’) Bibliotheca is a gigantic 9th century CE collection of notes on some 280 books (many of which have since been lost). The modern edition of the Greek text runs to some 1,600 pages, and most translations into modern languages have been selective or partial:

Of note is that Wilson selected the passages which Bevegni translated, so both selections are the same for those translations. Unfortunately, as noted by Wilson and most reviewers, Henry’s translation into French “is marred by a fair number of errors” (Wilson, p.20). Some of Henry’s translations have, however, been translated into English by Roger Pearse and put online with the permission of the copyright holder.

The table of contents for Wilson’s translation is online here, but it seems to be inaccurate and incomplete because it cuts off after the first print page of the table of contents (which ends at 186). As a result, I thought it would be useful to collect together those entries which are translated by Wilson, but not by Henry/Pearse or Freese:

This leaves the following 87 entries which have no easily-available English translation at the original time of this writing (of these entries, numbers 213, 242, 244, & 250 are among the Italian entries in Compagnoni). I’ve started my own effort at translating some of these, available here and linked in the list when possible. Titles are available from Henry/Pearse, which I’ve combined with some of the titles and subject classifications from the “Annotated Table of Contents” in Warren T. Treadgold’s The Nature of the Bibliotheca of Photius (titles in bold are classified as “unattested” or “lost” by Treadgold, CPG = M. Geerard’s Clavis Patrum Graecorum, BHG = F. Halkin’s Bibliotheca Hagiographica Graeca, FGrHist = F. Jacoby’s Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker):

Also of note is that the Bibliotheca included its own table of contents or pinax, which is omitted from the editions of Bekker and Henry, and also seemingly untranslated. You can find an edition of it at pp.297-318 here.