Note 2963 — Chapter XXXII · CONSTANTINUS AFRICANUS: C. 1015-1087.
Reading edition
Pagel (1902), p. 644, “Vorher soll er kurze Zeit noch in Reggio, einer kleinen Stadt in der Nähe von Byzanz, als Protosekretär des Kaisers Constantinos Monomachos sich aufgehalten und das Reisehandbuch des Abu Dschafer übersetzt haben.” But Pagel gives no source for this statement.
Apparently the notion is due to the fact that a Greek treatise entitled Ephodia, of which there are numerous MSS and which seems to be a translation of the same Arabic work as that upon which Constantinus based his Viaticum, speaks of a Constantine as its author who was proto-secretary and lived at Reggio or Rhegium.
Daremberg (1853), p. 77, held that a Vatican MS of the Ephodia was of the tenth century and therefore this Greek translation could not be the work of Constantinus Africanus in the next century, but Steinschneider (1866), p. 392, only says, “Die griechische Uebersetzung des Viaticum soll bis in die Zeit Constantins hinaufreichen.”
Another MS, Escorial &-II-9, 16th century, fol. 1-, contains a “Commeatus Peregrinantium” whose author is called “Ebrubat Zafar filio Elbazar,” which perhaps designates Abu Jafar Ahmed Ibn-al-Jezzar, whom Daremberg and Steinschneider call the author of the Arabic original of the Viaticum. The work is said to have been translated into Greek “a Constantino Primo a secretis Regis,” which suggests that Constantinus was perhaps first of the royal secretaries rather than of Reggio either in Norman Italy or near Byzantium. The translation from Greek into Latin is ascribed to Antonius Eparchus. The opening sentences of each book of this Latin version from the Greek by Eparchus differ in wording but agree in substance with those of the Viaticum of Constantinus Africanus, if we omit some transitional sentences in the latter.