Foreword

Summary

Having produced an annotated translation of Themistius' private orations in 2000 and then of the Himerian corpus in 2007, I was eager to move on to other genres of scholarship; at the same time, I did have an interest in advancing to the School of Gaza and making a translation of Choricius' preliminary talks and declamations, a project which, if undertaken by myself alone, and given my other commitments, would have required close to ten years to complete. I decided to go forward with this new translation project, but to make it a collaborative effort. I must begin, then, by thanking my collaborators: sine quibus nihil. Their effort has been pioneering, the texts they have translated often difficult. New too is Eugenio Amato's study of the reception of Choricius in Byzantium, both broad and in-depth.

Not all translation projects are well served by collaboration: a new English Homer, for example, requiring a consistent style and striving for poetic merit in its own right, obviously needs a single and literarily gifted translator. But a corpus of discrete prose texts primarily of specialized interest, being translated for the first time, may be entrusted to a committee of scholars: if they produce accurate versions that can be easily read on their own and also be used as a vade mecum to the Greek text, the translators will have accomplished something useful.