When he was not at the blackboard, Carl Frick, a provincial German schoolteacher, studied the tangled world of Late Antique chronography. In 1892 he published
Chronica Minora. This book was denoted volume one on the title page, indicating it was planned as the start of a series, but there was never any follow-up.
In a field where three celebrity scholars were at work, Frick (1848-?) was at a disadvantage, working without a place in the academic mill. He had the added misfortune to bring out the first volume in the same year as editions of
chronica were also published by the legal historian Theodor Mommsen and by Paul de Lagarde.
Of
Mommsen, the most eminent scholar in Germany in his own lifetime, and
Lagarde, an unpleasant anti-Semite, we know a great deal. The story of another key scholar of chronography, Heinrich Gelzer, was recovered by Martin Wallraff in a
book article in 2006. Frick however was largely forgotten.
Even the German national bibliography research unit with its vast documentary resources seems to have lost
Chronica Minora and is apparently
not aware of his date of death.
One might note that here in Germany's second city, there appears to be only
a single copy of Frick's main work in any Hamburg library today.
This week,
Richard Burgess, the most eminent contemporary historian of Late Antique chronography, placed online an article which goes a considerable way to rehabilitating Frick and his achievements. The article seems to have been issued in print last month in the journal
Traditio and is now also available via Burgess'
repository on Academia.edu.
Professor Burgess's article acutely dissects a mysterious document, the
Excerpta Latina Barbari, which forms codex Paris. Lat. 4884, now
digitized at the BNF website (
Catalog). He backs the BNF catalogers' view that it dates from about 780 CE, making it about a century later than supposed by some other authors, and that it was made at Corbie in France as a "perfect replica" (in Latin translation) of a "mass-produced" Greek codex which is now lost but was then in the possession of Bishop George of Amiens. His principal thrust is an argument, which is very much in the Frick tradition, in mitigation of the translator's so-called barbarian aptitude and a robust rejection of two recent alternative theses about the
Excerpta from
Benjamin Garstad and Pier Franco Beatrice.
Frick, who probably did not even see this Latin manuscript in Paris,
tells us he borrowed in 1883 a sixteenth-century handwritten copy by Joseph Justus Scaliger from the Hamburg State Library. (This was in the day when the postman still brought thousand-year-old manuscripts to scholars' front doors.) Frick did not edit the text anew: he simply copied from a predecessor. But he had the creative idea of drafting up his own Greek version of the document. This was a central feature of
Chronica Minora.
Burgess calls this (note 2) "still the most important study, which includes a surprisingly useful and insightful back-translation into Greek on facing pages" and praises (note 69) the "sensible comments of Frick in defense of the translator, whose Latin he says is no worse than that of Gregory of Tours (sixth century) or Virgilius Maro grammaticus (seventh century)." He also ridicules (note 10) Mommsen's claim to have personally examined the Paris manuscript, suggesting the polymath instead "had a student transcribe Schoene's text and add the entry numbers (for even they suffer from corruptions)."
In conclusion he states:
Carl Frick's 1892 introduction and edition should have resulted in an intensified study of the Chron. Scal. But the earlier appearance that year of Theodor[e] Mommsen's own Chronica minora volume in the massive and authoritative Monumenta Germaniae Historica series, which has never gone out of print, meant that Frick's volume one was the last of the series, went out of print, and was on the whole forgotten ..." (page 43)
My own interest in chronography studies grew from the possibility that the evolution of chronicles might provide a key to date a fifth-century historical diagram, the Great Stemma, and a chronological text of perhaps the sixth century, the
Ordo Annorum Mundi, which is transmitted with it. The
Excerpta, or
Chronographia Scaligeriana, as Burgess proposes it should be called, is not of direct assistance, since it is of a later date (Burgess proposes the final version in Greek cannot have dated any earlier than the 530s). However the
chronographia comes from the same general culture as the Great Stemma and
Liber Genealogus, where the uncanonical
Protevangelium of James was regarded as a source of valid historical information.
In his volume, Frick has nothing to say about either the Great Stemma (imperfectly edited by me) or the
Ordo Annorum Mundi (soon to be
published by Brepols) and we cannot know what he planned to include in any later volumes, since his project collapsed.
One is naturally curious about deserving figures who die in obscurity, so I find it touching that Burgess has now elevated Frick above Mommsen in his assessment.
It is Frick's modesty and dogged work which makes him an appealing figure (see my
previous post). Whether any of Frick's papers survive at Höxter, where he ran a well-provided school library, I do not know. I once emailed the school but got no reply. At least one of his Latin textbooks remained
in use for a century.
In Frick's further defence, I would also stress that his employment as a schoolmaster (see his Prussian education ministry
file) should not be taken as a sign that he had a markedly lower academic standing than his professorial contemporaries. We judge this from a 21st century perspective at our peril. He worked in schools in a period when secondary education attracted many superb scholars.
The more conservative sort of German schoolteacher today still joins a union known as the Philologenverband. In the nineteenth century, many of its members really were philologists.
Teachers of Latin and Greek in Frick's day were often first-class scholars or writers, as I can attest from the example of my cousin
John Henry Fowler, an Oxford graduate and talented writer who earning his living as a rather dour Bristol boarding-school master. But the profession has come down in the world. Andreas Schleicher of the OECD
warned only last week that the demotion and reduced professionalism of teachers is the central problem in the steady decline of many western education systems.
