Epiphanius’ life shares similarities with that of Chrysostom in the previous chapter. Born in Palestine to Christian parents, he went to Alexandria to study rhetoric. Returning to Palestine with an enthusiasm for monasticism, he eventually founded a monastery of his own near his hometown Besanduk, near Eleutheropolis. Whilst in charge of the monastery, he affiliated with pro-Nicene bishops, including the exiled Italian Eusebius of Vercelli, and in 367 was ordained bishop of Constantia, nee Salamis.20 Over the next forty years, he travelled widely, diving into multiple theological and ecclesiastical controversies, and eventually died on a sea trip back from Constantinople to Cyprus in the early fifth century. An extensive hagiographical tradition grew up after his death, and the Piacenza pilgrim, travelling around 570, reports his tomb on Cyprus as a site of active veneration.21 His surviving works include two understudied exegetical miscellanies, On Gems and On Weights and Measures, as well as two treatises on church doctrine, the Ancoratus and a De Fide.22
But he is known best for a massive work on Christian heresies in three books, the Panarion (c.374/5-377.)
20 For these years of Epiphanius’ life, see Jon F. Dechow, Dogma and Mysticism in Early
Christianity: Epiphanius of Cyprus and the Legacy of Origen (Macon: Mercer University Press, 1988), 25-43. For a brief overview of what we know of his life as a whole see Jacobs, Epiphanius, 8- 12. Young Kim frames his work as a “critical biography” (Epiphanius, 7), but focuses on
understanding Epiphanius’ character more than reconstructing his career.
21 Jacobs, Epiphanius, 221-40.
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I begin not with the Panarion, but with On Weights and Measures (and, discussed below, On [the Twelve] Gems.) The reason for discussing this relatively short work first will become rapidly apparent; it is one of the clearest examples of the Samaritans playing a major role in Epiphanius’ organization of knowledge, specifically, knowledge about the Bible and its translators, where otherwise their role – at least amongst his Christian contemporaries – was relatively minor.
On Weights and Measures, written ca.392, survives in something resembling a complete version only in Syriac, but with substantial Greek, Armenian, and Georgian fragments.23 The text is explicitly anthological, announcing how it bundles together a disparate set of facts, figures, and traditions united only by the decision to select and
23 For the Syriac, James E. Dean (ed.), Epiphanius’ Treatise on Weights and Measures: The
Syriac Version (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1935); the relevant Greek texts can be found in Pummer, Early Christian Authors; for the Georgian, see Les versions géorgiennes d’Épiphane de Chypre Traité des poids et des mesures, ed. Michel van Esbroeck (CSCO 460-61; Leuven: Peeters, 1984); the Armenian in The Armenian Texts of Epiphanius of Salamis, De Mensuris et Ponderibus, ed. M.E. Stone and R.R. Ervine (CSCO 583; Leuven: Peeters, 2000). I cite providing Dean’s chapter numbers, page numbers for translation, and Syriac foliation. I have worked primarily from the Syriac and Greek due to the fragmented nature of the other witnesses, but with reference to the other versions when relevant, in line with van Esbroecks argument that they preserve a less muddled version than the Syriac. Aside from these editions and translations, On Weights is almost entirely unstudied, with the recent exception of Andrew Jacobs, “Epiphanius of Salamis and the Antiquarian’s Bible,” JECS 21:3 (2013): 437-64. When it does see broader use, it is as a databank of facts and figures against which to compare papyrological readings, for example Philip Mayerson, “Another Unreported Ascalonian Jar: The Sabitha/Sapation,” Israel Exploration Journal 46:3/4 (1996): 258-61; R.P. Duncan-Jones, “The Size of the Modius Castresis,” Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 21 (1976): 53-62
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collate them.24 A later preface in the Syriac version explains, whimsically, that the
tetrarchs Valentinian and Theodosius joined forces to summon Epiphanius, so that he could produce a reference work to aid understanding weights and measurements in scripture. The second half of On Weights, follows through in the most chaotically erudite sense, listing and commenting on a bundle of such terms. The first half, however, is interested not in the lexicon of biblical measurement but in scripture itself, including its divisions, its punctuation, its translation into Greek, its retranslation by Aquila, Symmachus, Theodotion, and so on.25 As Epiphanius writes
at the close of this section:
And thus far, O great lover of the good, all these things related to us must suffice; we have given an account of the translators and of those things mentioned before the subject of the translators. Hereafter we give our attention to the rest of the topics which we mentioned before, according to our promise in response to your entreaties, O man of God, concerning the weights and measures and numbers in the divine Scriptures, whence each is named, and why it is so called, and whence it gets the reason for its name, and what is the quality or the weight or the force of every one of them.26
24 On the functions of anthological genre, and a range of ways to understand the mechanics of
anthologizing, see David Stern (ed.), The Anthology in Jewish Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 5-7. Regarding the aesthetics of anthology for Epiphanius, specifically “antiquarian” anthology, see Jacobs, Epiphanius, 136-40. The terminology of anthology remains relatively underutilized by scholars of ancient Greek and Latin literature, despite the ancient etymology of anthologia. They tend to rely instead on talk of “miscellany,” or “encyclopedism”; see recently Joseph A. Howley, Aulus Gellius and Roman Reading Culture: Text, Presence, and Imperial Knowledge in the Noctes Atticae (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018) – perhaps at least in part because encyclopedism retains a much stronger sense of an author, important in Classical Studies, perhaps at least in part due to etymologically narrowing the sense of anthologia to a collection of botanical knowledge in Pliny (Hist Nat 21.13), or else a specifically poetic collection; perhap s at least in part due to an aversion to the later Byzantine Greek use for collections, as in Maximus Planudes’ (c.1260 - c.1305) Anthologia Planudea (sometimes called Ἀνθολογία διαφόρων ἐπιγραμμάτων); perhaps because, as Jacobs suggests, we have internalized prejudice against antiquarianism as “messier than philosophy” (Epiphanius, 138-39).
25 Jacobs, Epiphanius, 155-62.
26 Epiphanius, De mensuris et ponderibus 20 (Dean, Weights and Measures, 39 [Eng.] and 58d