Product Synopsis

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated.1882 Excerpt: ... CHAPTER IV. UPON THE AGE OF THE SYNTIPAS AND OF THE HEBREW VERSION. Of all the versions, that which best and to the greatest degree represents the original is the Syntipas, with the exception of the beginning, down to where the first education of the prince is told, in which other versions, as we have seen, abridge the original text less; through almost all the remainder the Syntipas finds a counterpart in one or more versions, and the comparison shows that it follows the original with greater fidelity than any other. The Syntipas is, therefore, the most remarkable of all the texts of the Sindibdd at present known, and it is worth our while to ascertain to what age it belongs. Though, however, even without a more minute collation of the various versions, one might easily perceive the importance which this version possesses, no one till now has endeavoured to fix the age of it in a positive manner. All that has seriously been said about it reduces itself to the following words, which Dacier wrote in the year 1780: --"A l'dgard du temps auquel il faut rapporter la traduction grecque, si j'osais juger du style par celui des crivains grecs du XP siecle, je penserais qu'on peut lui assigner cette poque; mais l'expression est en g neVal assez pure (!), la phrase parait etre d'un temps ou la langue avait deg nere Quoi qu'il en soit, il est vraisemblable que ce roman fut apporte" chez nous au retour de la premiere croisade." This vague, uncertain, contradictory judgment, founded upon no reason even apparently solid, could satisfy nobody; the less could it be considered as decisive since Dacier, who knew the Syntipas only from a bad Paris manuscript of the sixteenth century, was ignorant of the prologue in verse, afterwards published by Matthae...