The two passages adduced from
Virgilius
are
both of doubtful import.
both of doubtful import.
Cambridge Medieval History - v3 - Germany and the Western Empire
They deal with all manner of subjects, religious and secular.
Intrinsically they perhaps hardly deserve mention, but there is a notable
fact about them, that they travelled far beyond Spain at an early date.
a
a
a
## p. 493 (#539) ############################################
Julian of Toledo
493
1
Aldhelm uses them in the collection of riddles which he embodied in a
grammatical tract addressed to “Acircius"i (Aldfrid of Northumbria)
before the end of the seventh century. Eugenius died in 657.
A pupil of his, who ultimately succeeded to his see (680–690), Julian
of Toledo, left works upon theology, history, and grammar. In the
first category the book called Prognosticon futuri saeculi was by far the
most celebrated. The three divisions of which it consists--on death, on
the intermediate state of souls and on the final judgment—are made up
to a very large extent of “testimonies" from Scripture and from standard
writers. Cyprian and Origen are the earliest of these, and Gregory the
latest. Augustine is naturally the principal source; Jerome, Cassian,
and Julianus Pomerius complete the list. It was to be expected that
in a country in which Priscillianism had had great currency, and roused
great opposition to the apocryphal literature, Julian should shun all
reference to these writings. As his interesting prefatory letter tells us,
his main object was to present in a collected form the opinions of Catholic
doctors upon the subject he was treating.
The three books De comprobatione sextae aetatis, directed against his
own countrymen (he was of Jewish extraction), are interesting as proving
his acquaintance with Greek patristic literature. He translates passages
from the Demonstratio Evangelica of Eusebius and from the tract of
Epiphanius on Weights and Measures; and, besides these, he makes
considerable quotations from Tertullian. The two books of artikeljeva
(a noteworthy title) consist of attempts to reconcile contradictory texts
of Scripture: they contain no very remarkable citations.
Of more direct interest to us is his history of the rebellion of Duke
Paul against King Wamba (673), written in a less conventional style at
no great length of time after the events it records. The fashion of
writing in rhymed or assonant clauses which is conspicuous in the later
chronicles, e. g. that called of “ Isidorus Pacensis," appears here possibly
for the first time to a marked extent.
The fame of this book was naturally confined to Spain. Not so that
of the Ars grammatica. Both in form and in contents it is remarkable.
The form is that of a dialogue between master and pupil; but, as in
many later grammars, it is the pupil who puts the questions, the master
,
who answers them. Traube's explanation of this fashion is interesting :
he attributes it to a misapprehension. The dialogue form was borrowed
from the Greeks, and with it the initials M and A, which stood for
μαθητής and διδάσκαλος. The accident that the Latin words Magister
and Discipulus have the same initials rendered the inversion of questioner
and answerer an easy one.
In respect of its contents, the Ars Juliani transmits much matter
from older grammarians, Victorinus and Audax, for example. The
1 The a circio of the dedication, says Mazzoni (in Didascaleion 1914), probably
+
“(to the ruler of) north-western (Northumbria). "
means
CH. XIX.
## p. 494 (#540) ############################################
494
St Valerius
illustrative quotations are drawn from secular and Christian poets;
even authorities contemporary with the writer, as Eugenius of Toledo,
are cited. If it be the fact that the grammar was extensively used by
Aldhelm within a very short time after its composition, it may be during
the lifetime of Julian, we have a striking tribute to the reputation it
enjoyed, and a yet more striking evidence of a literary commerce
between Spain and Britain : a commerce of which the traces, liturgical
and other, have yet to be collected and appreciated.
In liturgy, lastly, important reforms of the Toletan Use are attributed
to Julian by his biographer Felix. But details are wanting. In the
range of his activity, but not in the permanence of his achievement,
Julian surpasses Isidore.
An obscure but interesting figure at this period is the Abbot
St Valerius (+ 695) from whom we have some amusing autobiographical
writings. Whether by his own fault, or, as he would have us believe,
by that of his neighbours, Valerius was condemned to a very turbulent
existence. He was continually being hounded out of some retreat in
which he had settled, deceived by his favourite pupils, robbed of his
books, and generally victimised. There is a personal note in his
narratives which engages the attention. They also supply us with
evidence of the existence of at least one rare book in the writer's milieu.
In one of several visions of the next world which he records is an image
which cannot but be derived from a certain Apocalypse of Baruch, now
extant only in Greek and Old Slavonic. The seer, a youth named
Baldarius, is permitted to watch the rising of the sun from close by.
The orb comes up very swiftly and immensely bright; and it is preceded
by a huge bird, red in colour but darker towards the tail, whose function
is to mitigate the intense heat of the sun by flapping its wings. The
bird is the Phoenix, as we learn from Baruch, and, so far as is known
at present, this particular fable is peculiar to Baruch. It is fair to infer
the survival of this rare Apocalypse in Spain in the seventh century:
whether or not under Priscillianist influence, non liquet.
The chain of Spanish writers has now been traced down to the end
of the seventh century, and we have seen evidence of the preservation of
considerable collections of ancient literature, both pagan and Christian,
in the peninsula. Much of this must have had a continuous existence
in the country, but much also must have been imported from Africa
under the stress of invasion. That same stress now fell upon Spain.
The Moorish invasion, culminating in the great defeat of the Christian
arms in 711, put an end to literary enterprise for the time. Spain
dropped out of the race. But she had made one great contribution to
the equipment of European scholarship in the Etymologiae of Isidore.
What is the record of the region which we now call France during
the corresponding period ? The educational apparatus with which she
was provided at the beginning of it was as complete as any country
## p. 495 (#541) ############################################
Venantius Fortunatus
495
>
could shew. The works of an Alcimus Avitus and of a Sidonius
Apollinaris, however exiguous their intrinsic value, are the last links in
an unbroken chain reaching back to the rise of the great schools of
Gaul. After them comes the break.
The sixth century produced two writers of note who mark it in
different ways. Venantius Fortunatus, born in Italy, it is true, but for
.
the best part of his life a resident at Poitiers, is known to the generality
as the author of two hymns, the Pange lingua on the Cross, the Vexilla
regis used on Passion Sunday. We have from him, however, a very large
mass of poetry besides these. His Life of St Martin of Tours in four
books of heroic verse is for the most part merely a paraphrase of the
prose Life and Dialogues of Sulpicius Severus. But his eleven books
of miscellaneous pieces are full of originality and human interest. They
form a chronicle of his friendly relations with the widowed queen of
Chlotar I, St Radegund, and others of that house, as well as with
Gregory of Tours and many prominent churchmen of France. A
considerable number of the poems were sent as letters—thanks for
presents and the like. Others are panegyrics, others descriptions of
pleasant places : yet others are inscriptions designed for churches, such as
commonly form a large ingredient in collections of Christian Latin verse.
The best, however, and those from which we gain the most kindly impres-
sion of the personality of Fortunatus, are those which were called forth
by the deaths of the friends and kindred of Radegund. These are
uniformly entitled Epitaphs, but their length forbids us to suppose
that
they can have been inscribed on tombs. They may have been recited ;
but their real purpose is that of the Consolationes of an earlier time.
They were meant to be circulated in writing among those whom the
death had touched most nearly. These, with his hymns, constitute the
best claim of Fortunatus to be remembered as a writer. Yet his skill in
handling light verse should not pass unmentioned. His abuse of the
river Gers (Egircio, 1. 21) and of the cook who appropriated his boat at
Metz (vi. 8) are quite worth reading.
Upon the whole the notable thing about Fortunatus is his avoidance
of what was becoming a pseudo-classical vein. The form of his poems is
old (the elegiac metre predominates), and rococo ornaments in the
shape of allusions to mythology are not wanting; but we are impressed
by the absence of artificiality, and by the presence of a freshness and
simplicity which we miss in Sidonius and Avitus. The poems prepare
us for a new epoch, while they ha not lost
ach with the old.
Of Gregory of Tours († 594), the other famous writer of this century
and country, it may be said with more truth that he had lost touch with
the old. That is, at any rate, his own opinion. A well-known passage
,
A
in the Prologue to his History of the Franks represents his contempo-
raries as saying, “Alas for our days ! for the study of letters is gone
from among us. " He is, moreover, given to apologising on his own
CH. XIX.
## p. 496 (#542) ############################################
496
Gregory of Tours
account for his "rustic” and incorrect style. This, to be sure, is a
common pose, and it has been held that in Gregory's case it is but
a pose, and that the copyists of his works are responsible for many
of the monstra we encounter in them. Yet can this be so ? does not
the particularity with which he specifies mistakes-false concords, misuse
of prepositions and of cases--go to shew that he at least was in earnest ?
Certainly his self-accusations are borne out by every page of his writings.
He had read some good authors, in particular Virgil; he knew some books
which no longer exist. In a little tract which deals mainly with
astronomy he shews considerable acquaintance with that science, and
quotes a lost chronicler, Julius Titianus. He had, too, a collection of
Latin lyric poetry, which he lent to his friend Fortunatus. And it is
possible (though not very relevant to our present purpose) that he knew
some Syriac: a Syrian (there were not a few then resident in France,
and one became bishop of Paris) helped him to translate the legend of
the Seven Sleepers from Syriac into Latin. This, however, is little
more than a curiosity: Gregory certainly made no use of Syriac
literature. His lament is undoubtedly justified: “ Periit studium
litterarum a nobis. ” The gulf between him and Fortunatus, in respect
of command of correct Latin, is immense.
To dwell upon the value of the Historia Francorum would be quite
out of place here, where we are thinking of Gregory as a link in the
transmission of ancient knowledge. It is more relevant to suggest in
passing a comparison between this and the next national history that
was written-that of Bede; for the slight work of Isidore hardly comes
into consideration. In Gregory we see letters on a level confessedly
low ; in Bede a height has been reached which is rivalled only, in these
centuries, by the best work of the Carolingian Renaissance.
The popularity of Gregory's History in medieval times was far
inferior to that of his hagiological writings, which furnished much
material to the compilers of breviaries and to such writers as Jacobus de
Voragine. Besides the seven which he himself enumerates, dealing with
St Julian of Le Mans, St Martin of Tours, the Martyrs, the Confessors,
and the Anchorites, there is one—the Miracles of St Andrew—which
may be confidently assigned to him, and which is perhaps more
important than any of the others to the historian of Christian litera-
ture. It is our best source for the knowledge of a second or third
century Greek romance, the Acts of Andrew; once eagerly read, but
ultimately condemned by the Church, and only transmitted to us in
fragments, and expurgated epitomes, such as this of Gregory. Not
that Gregory read it in Greek. He had before him, no doubt, a
complete Latin version, made, it is likely, for Manichaeans to read :
since, in Manichaean circles, the apocryphal romances about the
Apostles were adopted as substitutes for the Canonical Acts. Not
long after Gregory's date—it may be even in his lifetime—a complete
## p. 497 (#543) ############################################
Decay of Latin
497
orthodox collection of abstracts of these Acts, with others added to
them, was put together, probably in France, in which the Miracles of
Andrew were incorporated. We know it under the misleading name of
the Apostolic History of Abdias. The investigation of its origin, and
the determination of its text, have not as yet been completely carried
out. As a source of inspiration for artists and romancers it deserves
(though it does not usually obtain) a special recognition among the
literary documents of its time.
I shall be pardoned for passing over the feeble efforts of the
continuators of Gregory's History (the so-called Fredegarius and the
rest) in favour of two writings which attest at once the survival of
a knowledge of Greek in France and an extremely low standard of
culture. The one is known as the Barbarus Scaligeri (from its style
.
and its first editor). It is a Chronicle of the world, rendered from an
almost contemporary Greek original in a fashion and in a Latin of
which it is difficult to exaggerate the badness. The other is a very
similar version, made by the aid of a glossary, of the Phaenomena of
Aratus, and of a Commentary thereon. It can be dated by the fact
that Isidore is used in it, and that Bede uses it. Did we not possess
the Greek original of this extraordinary work, many passages of it
would defy interpretation. The literalness is extreme: 'Apátou
Palvóueva appears as Arati ea quae videntur. This we might perhaps
unravel, but we should be more than ready to suspect corruption in
the phrase “ in quo apud Diodorum” which is the rendering of év tệ
Tipòs Acódwpov, or in this “nihil aliud quorum Eudoxi videntur facere,”
which is the equivalent of μηδέν έτερον των Ευδόξου φαινομένων
TOLNO avta. Nevertheless, absurd as is the interpreter's achievement,
his very attempt is creditable and interesting. We have no clue to
the identity of the man who made it, nor to the part of France in
which he lived.
It has been transmitted to us in more than one copy, as well as in a
revised form due to a scholar of the Carolingian period. The Barbarus
of Scaliger survives in but one manuscript, which is not impossibly the
autograph of the translator.
There is another writer, of southern France, who is the centre of an
unsolved problem-Virgilius Maro Grammaticus. That he must be
reckoned to France seems now to be the accepted view, though the
evidence at command is scanty. An obscure phrase in which he says
th he will set forth “bigerro sermone” the letters of the alphabet, is
taken to contain the name which survives as Bigorre, and to point to the
south-west of France: a plainer indication is his reference to the Gauls
as " nostri. ” Importance is also rightly attached to the fact that Abbo
of St Germain in the tenth century calls him Tolosanus. That he was
a Christian, and a Catholic-not an Arian-may be regarded as certain.
But, though he gives us a great many other details about himself, his
a
C. MED. H. VOL, III. CH. XIX.
32
## p. 498 (#544) ############################################
498
Virgilius Maro Grammaticus
teachers, and his contemporaries, hardly one of them can be taken
seriously.
Upon a first reading of his works (they are wholly devoted to
grammatical subjects, and consist of two series of Epitomae and
Epistles) the reader feels that he is confronted with a piece of pure mystifi-
cation. A striking, but yet fairly typical example of the extravagances
we encounter is the passage in which he describes, on the authority of a
certain Virgil of Asia, the “ twelve Latinities. " The first of these is the
usitata, that in which (ordinary) Latin writings are “inked” (atramen-
tantur). Of the eleven others, ten, it is safe to say, have never been used
either by Virgilius or anyone else. The second, called assena or notaria,
may possibly be intended to mean the Tironian notes ; it employs a single
letter for a whole word. But the lumbrosa, which expands a single word
into four or five, the sincolla, which condenses a whole line into two syl-
lables, and the rest of the series, correspond to nothing in heaven or earth'.
Not only is the vocabulary of Virgilius abnormal; the authors whom
he cites have left no trace anywhere else. There is a Cicero, and a
Horace; there are three Virgils and three Lucans, and so on : but none
of them are identical with those known to fame. There are, too,
numerous grammarians, of whom Aeneas, Galbungus, and Terrentius
are among the most prominent; but what is told of them does not
carry conviction to the mind. Galbungus and Terrentius disputed for
fourteen consecutive days and nights as to whether ego had a vocative.
Regulus of Cappadocia and Sedulius of Rome went without food and
sleep for a similar period while they were discussing the inchoative and
frequentative forms of the verb: three soldiers in the employ of each
were in attendance ready to arbitrate by force of arms if required.
In all, some ninety writers and teachers are named or quoted. Do
they correspond to anything that ever existed? Of late a suggestion
has found favour that they represent an academy which had its head-
quarters at Toulouse, and that the great names of Cicero, Lucan, Virgil
and so on, were adopted by its members, just as Charlemagne and his
friends called themselves David, Homer, Flaccus, and Naso. Perhaps,
it is added, the Carolingian fashion was a conscious imitation of the
Tolosan. If this be the truth of the matter, it is surely very strange
that while we do hear of Virgilius himself before the end of the seventh
century, no single trace of any of his "authorities” has ever been pointed
out. Moreover, he claims a high antiquity and a wide range of influence
for his school of thought: he traces his writers back to the time of
Romulus, nay, even to the days before the Flood. Some of them lived
at Troy, others in Egypt, Arabia, India. The variety, again, of books
which he quotes is large; there are poems, histories, epistles, orations,
as well as works on grammar; far too many-supposing them to be
1 A notion recently broached that Arabic influence is discernible in his nomen-
clature of metres (and numerals) has yet to be sifted.
## p. 499 (#545) ############################################
Date and use of Virgilius
499
real—to have disappeared without leaving some sign. In short, the
complete isolation of Virgilius compared with his pretensions enforces
the belief that his authorities like his Latinities are from first to last
impositions pure and simple. Such imposition—I allude to the in-
vention of authorities—was an expedient not unknown to the world
of grammarians and scholiasts. The tract of the African Fulgentius
(cent. vi. ) De dubiis nominibus contains, side by side with genuine passages
from Plautus and other early writers, quotations which, it is agreed, are
fabrications of Fulgentius's own. A scholiast on the Ibis of Ovid helps
himself over the difficulties of the poem (and they are many) by
explanatory tags which he fathers upon Propertius, Lucretius, Homer,
Callimachus, etc. , etc. The procedure in both cases is not easily dis-
tinguishable from that of Virgilius.
It is curious to find that in spite of all this he was taken seriously.
Not only does Aldhelm (+ 709) quote him, but also Bede, a man less
likely to be attracted by eccentricity, and so do almost all the Irish
grammarians of the Carolingian period—a point which will demand
further attention. To the later Middle Ages he was quite unknown ;
we have no manuscripts or quotations after the eleventh century? .
We have not yet approached the question of the date at which he
lived. Zimmer in an elaborate investigation (published posthumously)
contends for the fifth to sixth centuries. His main thesis is that western
Gaul had, both commercially and intellectually, a profound influence upon
Ireland long before the age of Patrick. He seeks to shew, in particular, ,
that the grammatical theories of Virgilius affected the language and
methods of Irish writers. He finds traces of them in the Amra or
panegyric on St Columba († 597), that obscure Irish poem by Dallan
Forgaill
, of which we have but a series of enigmatical fragments glossed
by successive commentators. He believes that he has found actual mention
of Virgilius in Irish books under the name of Ferchertne file; and he lays
stress on the undoubted fact that our manuscript authorities for the
text of Virgilius shew traces of transmission through Irish channels.
The text, long preserved in Ireland, he would suggest, passed to the
Continent in the train of the Irish missionaries. To our grammarian, ,
too, he would refer the epigrams in which Ennodius (473–521) ridicules
“ a certain foolish man who was known as Virgilius. ”
Clearly much of this argument is inappreciable by those ignorant of
Celtic languages. To the general contention one objection has been
urged which makes its appeal to a wider circle, and which, if upheld,
must do away with the greater part of Zimmer's hypothesis. It is that
Virgilius makes use of the Etymologies of Isidore of Seville (+ 636). If
so, he takes his place in the seventh century, after Isidore and before
Aldhelm. An examination of the long list of passages cited by
Manitius from the Etymologies, and supposed by him to have been
1 An abridged text of 1465 in a Bodleian MS. (D'Orville 147) is an exception.
CH, XIX.
32-2
## p. 500 (#546) ############################################
500
A Cosmography
borrowed thence by Virgilius, has failed to convince me that Virgilius,
and not Isidore, is the borrower. Practically all the passages contain
derivations of words (legitera = littera and the like). They are
thoroughly germane to the manner of Virgilius ; nor is it a consideration
of any weight that Isidore nowhere names Virgilius as his source, for
in this respect his practice is by no means consistent. In short, though
it may be shewn on other grounds that Zimmer has placed Virgilius too
early, I cannot think that his theory is invalidated by the appeal to
Isidore; and I feel justified in provisionally adopting his date.
Ireland has been named, and will for a time engage our whole
attention ; but before we leave France and Virgilius, a word must be
said of a book which has perhaps a claim to be regarded as a product
of his school. At least it reminds us of him by its language and by
its solemn absurdity. The work in question is the Cosmography of
“Aethicus Ister. ” I use inverted commas because it is not certain
that the form “ Aethicus” is what was intended by the author of the
text, who may have meant to write “ Ethicus” and have used that word
as a synonym for “philosopher. ” The Cosmography comes to us in the
shape of an abstract or series of extracts from a larger work, purporting
to have been made by St Jerome (or at least by a a “Hieronymus
presbyter”). In spite of the efforts of Wuttke to uphold this attribu-
tion and to identify the places and peoples who are mentioned, it is not
possible to regard Aethicus as anything but a romancer or to put him
earlier than the seventh century. His wild Latin, full of hapax legomena,
elaborate alliteration and short assonant clauses, his fables about
countries, tribes, and creatures, partly borrowed from Solinus and the
Alexander-romances, but largely peculiar to himself, and his display of
absurd learning (exemplified by the bogus Scythian alphabet with which
he ends his book), all stamp him as a charlatan. He probably wrote in
France: it seems that the first writer who quotes him is Frankish-one
of the continuators of the chronicler who is called Fredegarius.
At the same time, it would be no surprise to learn that he had Irish
connexions. Indeed, definite allusions to Ireland have been pointed out
in his writings and in those of Virgilius. Aethicus represents himself as
having crossed from Spain to Ireland, and having studied the books
(eorum volumina volvens) which he found there (a phrase which may
reasonably be taken to imply that Ireland enjoyed a reputation for
culture in his time)'.
The two passages adduced from Virgilius are
both of doubtful import. One says that in the composition and elocu-
tion of the. . . . the verb holds the first place. The statement is true of
Irish, and the word represented by dots is given in the manuscripts as hi
bonorum, hiborum, in iborum, respectively. The conjecture Hibernorum
lies ready to hand; yet the possibility of Hiberorum or Iberorum must
1 For all that, he says of the island "Inperitos habet cultores, et instructoribus
habet destitutos habitatores. ” (p. 19, Wuttke. )
## p. 501 (#547) ############################################
Irish learning
501
be considered, especially as we have seen that Virgilius elsewhere
mentions the speech of his neighbours, the Basques. The other passage, ,
in which he quotes a verse by one Bregandus Lugenicus, has been
thought to contain an Irish tribal name. But strong collateral evidence
is needed to bring this out of the category of Virgilius's ordinary
mystifications.
We now approach the problem of the classical culture of Ireland.
How, when, and whence did it come into being ? Many generations of
scholars have been contented to regard the mission of Patrick (in 430-460)
as marking the accession of Ireland to the world of learning. It has
been realised, indeed, that Patrick himself was no scholar, but he has
been thought of as the parent of scholars, the progenitor of the great
monastic schools which sprang up all over Ireland in the sixth century-
Clonard (520), Clonmacnois (544), Clonfert (c. 550), Bangor (c. 560).
Before Patrick (or at least before Palladius), it has been commonly
believed, Ireland, lying outside the sphere of Roman political influence,
was also untouched by Roman culture. A readjustment of this view
has become necessary. Patrick was not the Apostle of Ireland in the
sense that before he landed there were no Christians in the island.
Apart from such results as may have attended the obscure mission
of Palladius (whom Zimmer would identify with Patrick), there were
pre-Patrician churches and pre-Patrician saints. It would indeed be
strange, if at a time when Christianity was highly organised and
flourishing both in Britain and in western Gaul—countries in active
intercourse with Ireland—there had been no sporadic evangelisation, no
formation here and there of small Christian communities, As a matter
of fact there are in the undoubted writings of Patrick allusions to
existent Christianity, and in particular to men who, we gather from
Patrick's language, possessed a higher degree of culture than he did.
There is, too, a persistent tradition (though the documents which
contain it are not of the earliest) that certain saints, Ailbe, for instance,
and Declan, were in Ireland before Patrick.
Into the precise value of this tradition I cannot attempt to in-
quire; to do so would be to exaggerate its importance for our purpose.
I should be giving the impression that missionary enterprise was the
sole factor in bringing the learning of the Continent into Ireland. This
would be a mistake. We have seen that stress has been laid in recent
years by Zimmer upon the commercial relations which undoubtedly
linked the island with Gaul, as well as with Britain ; while yet more
recently, attention has been called to a definite statement by an
anonymous writer, evidently of Gaul, such as has not been hitherto
producible: to the effect that in the early years of the fifth century
an exodus of scholars from the Continent took place under the pressure
of barbarian invasion, which affected the area under consideration.
The Huns, says our new authority, began that devastation of the whole
а
CH, XIX.
## p. 502 (#548) ############################################
502
Greek in Ireland
Empire which was carried on by the Vandals, Goths, and Alani; “and
owing to their ravages, all the learned men on this side the sea fled, and
in the countries beyond sea, namely, Ireland, and wherever else they betook
themselves, brought to the inhabitants of those regions an enormous
advance in learning. ” This statement, printed from a Leyden manuscript
as long ago as 1866, was, it seems, only noticed by Zimmer at the end
of his life. The importance of it may be over-estimated, but cannot be
denied. For the first time we have definite testimony that the culture
of Bordeaux, Toulouse, Autun, Lyons--in other words, the best learning
attainable in the West—did actually make its way in some shape into
Ireland. And we have, besides, the reminder which was needed, that the
missionaries were not solely or primarily the channels by which it came.
The words throw light upon Patrick's own challenge to the rhetorici who
knew not the Lord; but, more than all, they supply an explanation of the
undoubted presence in Ireland in the sixth century of a certain type of
learning. The fact that that learning was widely and rapidly diffused
over the country was due in no small degree to this, that it went hand
in hand with evangelisation. Had missionary effort not been there to
prepare the soil, it is impossible to suppose that men would have been
found so ready to study the grammar and rhetoric of Latin, or the
elements of Greek. But when these were presented to them as part of
the apparatus of the new faith, they were assured of a reception, and
subsequently gained citizenship by their own merits.
It will not be possible to call attention to every indication of higher
learning in Ireland; but it will be worth while to devote some space
to the vexed question, how far this learning included a knowledge of
Greek.
The question is not, it must be premised, a simple one. We must
remember, on the one hand, that some of the most striking specimens of
Irish Greek learning were produced on the Continent, and on the other,
that, in and after the lifetime of Theodore and Hadrian (668-690) when
Greek was made accessible to the English, there is a possibility of
English influence upon Ireland. In any case it remains the most
reasonable account of the knowledge of Greek on the part of a Johannes
Eriugena or a Sedulius Scottus, that it was acquired in Ireland and
transferred thence to the Continent.
In the first place, we can hardly doubt that Graeco-Latin glossaries
had made their way to Ireland in very early times. The occurrence of
Greek words in Irish writings of the sixth century is best accounted for
on this hypothesis. We meet with such Greek words in the hymn Altus
prosător of Columba, in that of St Sechnall on Patrick and in more than one
of those in the Bangor Antiphonary. Their raison d'être from the point of
view of the writers of these compositions is to deck the page. They are the
spangles on the cloak, no essential part of the fabric, and they do not by
themselves necessarily imply a knowledge of the structure of the Greek lan-
## p. 503 (#549) ############################################
Traces of Greek learning
503
mean more.
a
guage on the part of those who use them. They may mean little more than
does the use of Greek letters for colophons- the ΦΙΝΙΘ ΔΕΩ ΓΡΑΘΥAC
of a Breton monk in 952, and the like. Yet as a fact they probably do
It seems likely that with the glossaries (taking the word
glossary as the equivalent of a bare vocabulary) there came to Ireland
a more valuable guide to the Greek language, in the shape of a manual
containing conversations and narratives, fables of Aesop, dicta of the
Emperor Hadrian, stories of the Trojan war, compiled as far back as
the year 207. We have it under the formidable modern title of
Hermeneumata Pseudo-Dositheana. It has been transmitted through
“insular” channels, and was in the hands of Sedulius Scottus in the
ninth century, as is thought, before he left Ireland for the Continent.
The suggestion has been made that this and other Greek writings were
brought to Ireland by Byzantine
by Byzantine monks taking refuge from the
Iconoclastic persecution about the middle of the eighth century: but of
such refugees there is small trace. Certain entries in Martyrologies, and
the existence of a “ Greek church” at Trim in Meath, have been adduced
in favour of the hypothesis, but no such evidence as can be called
conclusive. There seems, moreover, no reason why a monk should have
brought the Hermeneumata with him, whereas it is just the book that is
likely to have formed part of the equipment of a fifth century rhetorician
from Gaul.
Instances have been brought forward of Irishmen who were clearly
acquainted with Greek. We will examine them briefly. Pelagius is the
foremost, both in date and in eminence. He came to Italy about the year
400, and it is on record that in 415 he took part in a controversy at
Jerusalem which was carried on in Greek. It will be allowed that, even
granting that Pelagius was Irish and not British by extraction, he had
every opportunity of acquiring Greek after he had left Ireland.
We find, next, that the commentary of Theodore of Mopsuestia
upon the Psalms was preserved and transcribed in a revised and shortened
Latin form at Bobbio. The actual work of translation and revision has
been ascribed to St Columban. That point is doubtful: but the
commentary was certainly studied by Irish writers on the Continent, and
it is possible that the translation was actually made upon Irish soil. It
had a wide influence. The researches of Dr Robert M. L. Ramsay and
Dr J. Douglas Bruce have demonstrated the use of it by English
glossators of the Psalter (perhaps by Bede himself) down to the
eleventh century.
In a gospel book of the eighth century at Würzburg is a note to
the effect that Mosuin Mac Armin (Abbot of Bangor, who died in 610)
learned by heart a Paschal computus drawn up by a Greek sage-
probably Theophilus of Antioch. " Coupled with the presence of Greek
words in the antiphonary of Bangor, this statement has a certain force,
and it should be noticed that the date of Mosuin excludes the pos-
CH. XIX.
## p. 504 (#550) ############################################
504
Traces of Greek Apocrypha
1
sibility of Theodorian influence from Canterbury and England. What
is not excluded is the possibility that the computus lay before him in
a Latin version.
The Schaffhausen manuscript of Adamnan's Life of Columba, written
at Iona before 714, has in it the Lord's Prayer in Greek, and in Greek
letters. This is an example of importance, though, like those that
follow, it is post-Theodorian in date, and is accordingly liable to a
certain discount.
Sedulius Scottus had in his possession in the ninth century a collection
of apophthegms called Proverbia Graecorum. We have them only in Latin,
preserved in the Collectanea of Sedulius in a manuscript at Cues, quoted
copiously in an English source, the tracts of the famous “Yorker
Anonymus," and alluded to in a letter of one Cathvulf to Charlemagne!
Their Latinity is Celtic, and they may safely be regarded as a Greek
collection rendered into Latin on the soil of Ireland.
To Ireland also we probably owe the excerpts we possess of Macrobius's
important treatise on the differences and conformities of the Greek
and Latin verb, a book for the understanding of which a knowledge of
Greek is indispensable. One of our manuscripts attributes the selection
of the excerpts to a Johannes, thought to be the great Eriugena (Erigena).
The line of transmission has insular connexions. Similarly, quotations
from the lost Peplus of Theophrastus, dealing with the origin of the
alphabet, appear in a Laon manuscript of the school of Eriugena and in
a commentary on Martianus Capella derived from that same school.
That these imply the use of a Greek source, not necessarily of a complete
text of the Peplus, cannot be doubted.
In addition to this evidence, it will be useful, I think, to consider a
class of examples as yet not utilised in the investigation of this question.
They consist of traits in Irish literature (principally Latin) which are
drawn according to all appearance from some of the obscurer apocryphal
writings—writings which are not known to have existed in Latin. This
evidence, again, is not unambiguous. Some of our sources, notably the
Latin Lives of Irish saints, are of late date. Yet that fact is no real
bar to their testimony; for whatever they have absorbed in the way of
reminiscence of old learning was acquired before the exodus of Irishmen
to the Continent. In the interval between that exodus and the com-
pilation of the Lives, Ireland, harried by the Northmen and deserted by
its scholars, had ceased to be a learned country. These Lives, as their
most recent editor, Dr Plummer, has shewn, contain much that is pre-
Christian, and little that is characteristic of the later medieval period.
This is true also of such documents in the Irish language as will be cited.
First among the supposed sources I will place the Acts of Philip.
The Western Church knew absolutely nothing of the sensational Greek
1 The title occurs (crossed out) in an early catalogue of the library of Lincoln
Minster.
a
## p. 505 (#551) ############################################
Instances of use of Apocrypha
505
а
romance which passes under that name. According to the Latins, Philip
,
died a peaceful death like John the Evangelist. In Ireland we find
traces of a different tradition. The Passion in the Leabhar Breac inter-
polates the martyrdom into a version of the Latin Acts. The Irish writing
called the Evernew Tongue' is a kind of apocalypse in which the tongue
of the Apostle, cut out nine times by his persecutors, discourses to
assembled multitudes. In the life of St Boece is an incident strongly
reminiscent of the Greek Acts: a wolf brings a kid to the saint, as a
leopard does to the Apostle. In Muirchu's life of St Patrick (not
later than 699) is another possible reminiscence. A magician is whirled
up into the air and dashed on the ground. It may be a version of the
fate of Simon Magus, but it does rather strikingly resemble passages in
the Eastern Acts of Philip and of Peter and Andrew? .
In the life of St Berach there is a story of a druid killed at the
window of his cell by the arrow of a hunter. Pilate, in an exclusively
Greek legend, meets his end in precisely the same way. The climax of
the Greek book known as the Rest of the words of Baruch is that when
the Jews have resolved to stone the prophet to death, a stone pillar is
made to assume his form, and their attacks are directed against it until
Jeremiah has finished his last directions to his disciples. In the Irish
life of St Brendan, a follower of the saint is attacked : a stone is made
to put on his appearance, and the man escapes. In the Greek Testament
of Abraham a striking incident is that a tree utters words of praise to
God and prediction of Abraham's death. In the life of St Coemgen
.
a tree sings to him. In the same Testament is the story of a calf,
slaughtered at Mamre for the entertainment of the three angels, being
restored to life and running to its mother. This miracle figures in
several of the Lives, e. g. that of St Ailbe.
Evidence that apocryphal literature unknown to the rest of Europe
was read in Ireland is furnished by the Irish Vision of Adamnan, which
quotes a form of the story of the death of Mary only found now in
Syriac. The same Vision makes use of an apocalypse, as yet not
identified, which is also quoted in a (Latin) Reichenau manuscript of
Irish connexion now at Carlsruhe. The Irish tale of the Two Sorrows
of Heaven is another document based on an apocryphon which it is safe
to say belongs to Eastern Christendom. In it Enoch and Elias prophesy
to the souls of the blessed, which (as in certain Greek apocalypses) are
in the form of birds, the terrors of the end of the world.
Of the writings I have mentioned so far, the literature of the
:
1 Eriu, 1905, p. 96.
2 Other traces of reading have been pointed out in Muirchu, which may be
mentioned here: an allusion to Abraham's conversion to a belief in the true God,
possibly derived from Josephus; and an apparent reminiscence of a line of Valerius
Flaccus, as well as clear evidence of a knowledge of Virgil. The occasional use of
Greek words (e. g. antropi) may be merely "glossarial” learning.
a
CH, XIX,
## p. 506 (#552) ############################################
506
Latin writers known in Ireland
English Church of the seventh and eighth centuries betrays no know-
ledge. There are others, now to be noticed, for example, the Book of
Enoch, of which this cannot be said. A non-Irish insular manuscript of
.
the eighth century has preserved a fragment of a Latin version of Enoch.
In Ireland we find, in the Saltair na Rann, a number of names of angels
which are pretty certainly derived from the same book. There, too, are
episodes taken from a Life of Adam, but whether they are to be traced
to a Western or to an Eastern text has not as yet been made clear. In
the “Gelasian” list of apocryphal books the Testament of Job is mentioned,
which probably implies the existence of a Latin version. An unpleasing
trait which occurs in this Testament is adopted in the Life of St Mochua.
It would not be difficult to shew by examples from the Irish Lives of
Saints that the legends of the Infancy of our Lord were familiar in the
country; but these were so widely diffused that the demonstration would
add nothing to our present purpose. Let it be recorded, lastly, that
the Reichenau manuscript cited above shews, in one of the fragmentary
Homilies which it contains, undoubted knowledge of the obscure
Apocalypse of Thomas, and that a fragment of an Irish service-book
in the Vatican Library presents us with a Lection from a Gospel
attributed to James the Less. Both Apocalypse and Gospel are con-
demned in the “Gelasian” decree.
It has seemed worth while to set forth this class of evidence in some
detail. Without detail, indeed, its force is inappreciable. The upshot
of it is that the Eastern legendary literature was domiciled in Ireland to
such an extent that it coloured the imaginations and contributed to the
stock-in-trade of hagiologists and seers; and this familiarity with a
branch of Eastern literature is not negligible as a confirmation of
other indications that in the sixth and seventh centuries a knowledge
of Greek was far from uncommon in Ireland.
Apart from Greek, which after all must be regarded as the fine
flower of their learning, what did the normal culture of Irish scholars
amount to ? The scanty list of their Latin writers between the end of
the sixth and the beginning of the eighth century-between Columba
(+ 597) and Adamnan (+ 704)—includes besides penitentials, lives of
saints, and hymns of no very marked excellence, several writings which
are without rival in their time. The Altus prosător, Columba's great
alphabetic hymn, and the playful poem in short Adonic lines by
Columban, cannot fail to impress the reader, the former in virtue of
its achievement, the latter by the background of learning which it
implies. The Altus has something of the learnedness and intricacy of
Celtic decorative art: Columban's poem, with its allusions to Sappho
and Danaë, is the work of a man who merits the name of scholar. The
1 This is true also of the Anglo-Saxon Homilists. What is practically a version
of the Apocalypse is contained in the Vercelli Book ; and two other Homilies, in a
Blickling and a Hatton MS. respectively, make copious use of it.
a
## p. 507 (#553) ############################################
Adamnan
507
a
second half of the seventh century gives us a treatise—that known as
Augustine De mirabilibus Scripturae—which, alike for its Latinity and
for the wide reading of its author, deserves respect. “ Augustine" has
some acquaintance with ancient history, gathered from such sources as
the Eusebian Chronicle and from Josephus; he is a student of Jerome,
and seems to have read books on medicine and natural history. His
allusions to Ireland, fewer in number than we could have wished, add a
pleasant flavour to his book. Aileran the Wise, not far from this author
in date, has left a tract on the interpretation of the names of our Lord's
ancestors according to the flesh, in which there is not much sound philo-
logy.
At the end of the same century we have Adamnan. His two un-
doubted works, the account of Arculf's pilgrimage to Palestine, and the
Life of Columba, are intrinsically two of the most precious books of their
time. The value of the tract on the Holy Places to the archaeologist
and topographer needs no exposition. It is worth much, also, as
exemplifying the interest in all sorts of knowledge which characterised
the Irish scholars of the day. The Life of Columba--less a biography
than a collection of anecdotes-preserves a picture of that saint and
seer which will never lose its charm. Evidence of Adamnan's gram-
matical studies, and of his knowledge of Greek (or at least of Greek
words), abounds in this book ; but there is a third work, a set of notes on
a
the Bucolics and Georgics of Virgil, which, if it could be proved to be
his, would be plain evidence of his distinction as student and as teacher.
It is in the form of excerpts from three earlier commentaries, those of
Philargyrius, Titius Gallus, and Gaudentius, which seem to have been
written down by a class at the dictation of Adananus. Whether or not
this Adananus was the Abbot of Hy, this work is an undoubted product
of Irish scholarship. It witnesses to these facts: that the scientific
study of “grammar," as the Romans understood it, was carried on by
the Irish at a time when it was dead in continental Europe: and that
complete texts of ancient commentaries on Virgil had made their way
into the hands of an Irishman.
Exaggerated language has no doubt been used about the learning of
the Irish, and about their share in the preservation of classical literature.
When allowance has been made for this, it remains incontestable that,
during the latter part of the seventh century, it was in Ireland that the
thirst for knowledge was keenest, and the work of teaching was most
actively carried on. There the Latin language (and in a less degree
the Greek) was studied from the scholar's point of view. To the Irish,
we must remember, Latin was no inheritance: they had not heard it
commonly spoken among them: their knowledge of it was book-know-
ledge. They had to treat it very much as we do now-more nearly,
perhaps, as it was treated in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
when it was the recognised medium of communication for scholars of
CH. XIX.
## p. 508 (#554) ############################################
508
British writers
99
8
all countries. We need not, however, insist that the great body of
the classical Latin literature which we now possess was preserved to us
by the exertions either of the Irish or of the English, to whom the
lamp of learning passed next in order. No doubt, whatever the Irish
came across in the way of ancient literature they welcomed and treasured,
but it is not to be supposed that they ever acquired in their native land
a very large mass of such writings. It was when, impelled in the
first instance by missionary zeal, and later by troubled conditions at
home, they passed over in large numbers to the Continent, that they
became instrumental in rescuing fragments of the literature which they
had already learned to value. It is reserved for the palaeographers of the
next few decades to shew how many of our Latin classics betray the
existence of an “insular” stage in the line of their transmission. An
important class of scribal errors is due to the fact that a copyist of
the Middle Ages or of the Renaissance was using an archetype in
Scriptura Scottica,” in the insular script, in which the peculiar forms,
say, of r and s misled him. Sometimes these errors affect the whole body
of manuscripts of a given author, and in these cases it is obvious that
we owe the preservation of the text to an insular scribe. A leading
instance, as Traube has shewn, is furnished by the History of Ammianus
Marcellinus.
We shall have occasion to revert to the work of the Irish on the
Continent. The time has now come for us to pass from Ireland to
Great Britain. It will be worth while to inquire what, apart from
vague modern panegyric, is to be known of the state of learning in the
British Church before the coming of Theodore.
The small tract of the British bishop Fastidius is the only monument
assignable to the fifth century. In the sixth we have the writings
ascribed to Gildas, the Epistle, undoubtedly his, the Lorica, and the
penitential Canons. We have, too, the Hisperica Famina.
, Little, if
anything else, has been credited to Britons of this period. For any
further information about the leading lights of the British Church we
have to depend upon traditions committed to writing at a far later
time, and in particular upon the lives of the saints, which are of
exactly similar complexion with those of the Irish; embodying a
modicum of fact wrapped in a sparkling tissue of wonders.
Fastidius may
be dismissed with a word : he has no trait that can be
identified as British. Gildas, as his Epistle attests, was a man of educa-
tion. The writers whom we may credit him with having known are,
indeed, not recondite, but they are of good quality: Virgil, Persius,
Claudius (? Claudian), Jerome, Orosius, Rufinus. Such books as these,
then, were accessible in Britain ; was there more than this? The Epistle
affords no evidence of the study of languages other than Latin ; Greek
and Hebrew words occur in the Lorica, but-whether this be of Gildas's
composing or no—they need imply no more than the use of a glossary.
## p. 509 (#555) ############################################
Early British learning
509
The same is true of the Hisperica Famina. Whoever were the authors
of that strange and attractive farrago, glossarial learning was to them
synonymous with culture. Literary success meant the forging of phrases
that should only just not defy interpretation. When, however, we find
in a Bodleian manuscript (Auct. F.
Intrinsically they perhaps hardly deserve mention, but there is a notable
fact about them, that they travelled far beyond Spain at an early date.
a
a
a
## p. 493 (#539) ############################################
Julian of Toledo
493
1
Aldhelm uses them in the collection of riddles which he embodied in a
grammatical tract addressed to “Acircius"i (Aldfrid of Northumbria)
before the end of the seventh century. Eugenius died in 657.
A pupil of his, who ultimately succeeded to his see (680–690), Julian
of Toledo, left works upon theology, history, and grammar. In the
first category the book called Prognosticon futuri saeculi was by far the
most celebrated. The three divisions of which it consists--on death, on
the intermediate state of souls and on the final judgment—are made up
to a very large extent of “testimonies" from Scripture and from standard
writers. Cyprian and Origen are the earliest of these, and Gregory the
latest. Augustine is naturally the principal source; Jerome, Cassian,
and Julianus Pomerius complete the list. It was to be expected that
in a country in which Priscillianism had had great currency, and roused
great opposition to the apocryphal literature, Julian should shun all
reference to these writings. As his interesting prefatory letter tells us,
his main object was to present in a collected form the opinions of Catholic
doctors upon the subject he was treating.
The three books De comprobatione sextae aetatis, directed against his
own countrymen (he was of Jewish extraction), are interesting as proving
his acquaintance with Greek patristic literature. He translates passages
from the Demonstratio Evangelica of Eusebius and from the tract of
Epiphanius on Weights and Measures; and, besides these, he makes
considerable quotations from Tertullian. The two books of artikeljeva
(a noteworthy title) consist of attempts to reconcile contradictory texts
of Scripture: they contain no very remarkable citations.
Of more direct interest to us is his history of the rebellion of Duke
Paul against King Wamba (673), written in a less conventional style at
no great length of time after the events it records. The fashion of
writing in rhymed or assonant clauses which is conspicuous in the later
chronicles, e. g. that called of “ Isidorus Pacensis," appears here possibly
for the first time to a marked extent.
The fame of this book was naturally confined to Spain. Not so that
of the Ars grammatica. Both in form and in contents it is remarkable.
The form is that of a dialogue between master and pupil; but, as in
many later grammars, it is the pupil who puts the questions, the master
,
who answers them. Traube's explanation of this fashion is interesting :
he attributes it to a misapprehension. The dialogue form was borrowed
from the Greeks, and with it the initials M and A, which stood for
μαθητής and διδάσκαλος. The accident that the Latin words Magister
and Discipulus have the same initials rendered the inversion of questioner
and answerer an easy one.
In respect of its contents, the Ars Juliani transmits much matter
from older grammarians, Victorinus and Audax, for example. The
1 The a circio of the dedication, says Mazzoni (in Didascaleion 1914), probably
+
“(to the ruler of) north-western (Northumbria). "
means
CH. XIX.
## p. 494 (#540) ############################################
494
St Valerius
illustrative quotations are drawn from secular and Christian poets;
even authorities contemporary with the writer, as Eugenius of Toledo,
are cited. If it be the fact that the grammar was extensively used by
Aldhelm within a very short time after its composition, it may be during
the lifetime of Julian, we have a striking tribute to the reputation it
enjoyed, and a yet more striking evidence of a literary commerce
between Spain and Britain : a commerce of which the traces, liturgical
and other, have yet to be collected and appreciated.
In liturgy, lastly, important reforms of the Toletan Use are attributed
to Julian by his biographer Felix. But details are wanting. In the
range of his activity, but not in the permanence of his achievement,
Julian surpasses Isidore.
An obscure but interesting figure at this period is the Abbot
St Valerius (+ 695) from whom we have some amusing autobiographical
writings. Whether by his own fault, or, as he would have us believe,
by that of his neighbours, Valerius was condemned to a very turbulent
existence. He was continually being hounded out of some retreat in
which he had settled, deceived by his favourite pupils, robbed of his
books, and generally victimised. There is a personal note in his
narratives which engages the attention. They also supply us with
evidence of the existence of at least one rare book in the writer's milieu.
In one of several visions of the next world which he records is an image
which cannot but be derived from a certain Apocalypse of Baruch, now
extant only in Greek and Old Slavonic. The seer, a youth named
Baldarius, is permitted to watch the rising of the sun from close by.
The orb comes up very swiftly and immensely bright; and it is preceded
by a huge bird, red in colour but darker towards the tail, whose function
is to mitigate the intense heat of the sun by flapping its wings. The
bird is the Phoenix, as we learn from Baruch, and, so far as is known
at present, this particular fable is peculiar to Baruch. It is fair to infer
the survival of this rare Apocalypse in Spain in the seventh century:
whether or not under Priscillianist influence, non liquet.
The chain of Spanish writers has now been traced down to the end
of the seventh century, and we have seen evidence of the preservation of
considerable collections of ancient literature, both pagan and Christian,
in the peninsula. Much of this must have had a continuous existence
in the country, but much also must have been imported from Africa
under the stress of invasion. That same stress now fell upon Spain.
The Moorish invasion, culminating in the great defeat of the Christian
arms in 711, put an end to literary enterprise for the time. Spain
dropped out of the race. But she had made one great contribution to
the equipment of European scholarship in the Etymologiae of Isidore.
What is the record of the region which we now call France during
the corresponding period ? The educational apparatus with which she
was provided at the beginning of it was as complete as any country
## p. 495 (#541) ############################################
Venantius Fortunatus
495
>
could shew. The works of an Alcimus Avitus and of a Sidonius
Apollinaris, however exiguous their intrinsic value, are the last links in
an unbroken chain reaching back to the rise of the great schools of
Gaul. After them comes the break.
The sixth century produced two writers of note who mark it in
different ways. Venantius Fortunatus, born in Italy, it is true, but for
.
the best part of his life a resident at Poitiers, is known to the generality
as the author of two hymns, the Pange lingua on the Cross, the Vexilla
regis used on Passion Sunday. We have from him, however, a very large
mass of poetry besides these. His Life of St Martin of Tours in four
books of heroic verse is for the most part merely a paraphrase of the
prose Life and Dialogues of Sulpicius Severus. But his eleven books
of miscellaneous pieces are full of originality and human interest. They
form a chronicle of his friendly relations with the widowed queen of
Chlotar I, St Radegund, and others of that house, as well as with
Gregory of Tours and many prominent churchmen of France. A
considerable number of the poems were sent as letters—thanks for
presents and the like. Others are panegyrics, others descriptions of
pleasant places : yet others are inscriptions designed for churches, such as
commonly form a large ingredient in collections of Christian Latin verse.
The best, however, and those from which we gain the most kindly impres-
sion of the personality of Fortunatus, are those which were called forth
by the deaths of the friends and kindred of Radegund. These are
uniformly entitled Epitaphs, but their length forbids us to suppose
that
they can have been inscribed on tombs. They may have been recited ;
but their real purpose is that of the Consolationes of an earlier time.
They were meant to be circulated in writing among those whom the
death had touched most nearly. These, with his hymns, constitute the
best claim of Fortunatus to be remembered as a writer. Yet his skill in
handling light verse should not pass unmentioned. His abuse of the
river Gers (Egircio, 1. 21) and of the cook who appropriated his boat at
Metz (vi. 8) are quite worth reading.
Upon the whole the notable thing about Fortunatus is his avoidance
of what was becoming a pseudo-classical vein. The form of his poems is
old (the elegiac metre predominates), and rococo ornaments in the
shape of allusions to mythology are not wanting; but we are impressed
by the absence of artificiality, and by the presence of a freshness and
simplicity which we miss in Sidonius and Avitus. The poems prepare
us for a new epoch, while they ha not lost
ach with the old.
Of Gregory of Tours († 594), the other famous writer of this century
and country, it may be said with more truth that he had lost touch with
the old. That is, at any rate, his own opinion. A well-known passage
,
A
in the Prologue to his History of the Franks represents his contempo-
raries as saying, “Alas for our days ! for the study of letters is gone
from among us. " He is, moreover, given to apologising on his own
CH. XIX.
## p. 496 (#542) ############################################
496
Gregory of Tours
account for his "rustic” and incorrect style. This, to be sure, is a
common pose, and it has been held that in Gregory's case it is but
a pose, and that the copyists of his works are responsible for many
of the monstra we encounter in them. Yet can this be so ? does not
the particularity with which he specifies mistakes-false concords, misuse
of prepositions and of cases--go to shew that he at least was in earnest ?
Certainly his self-accusations are borne out by every page of his writings.
He had read some good authors, in particular Virgil; he knew some books
which no longer exist. In a little tract which deals mainly with
astronomy he shews considerable acquaintance with that science, and
quotes a lost chronicler, Julius Titianus. He had, too, a collection of
Latin lyric poetry, which he lent to his friend Fortunatus. And it is
possible (though not very relevant to our present purpose) that he knew
some Syriac: a Syrian (there were not a few then resident in France,
and one became bishop of Paris) helped him to translate the legend of
the Seven Sleepers from Syriac into Latin. This, however, is little
more than a curiosity: Gregory certainly made no use of Syriac
literature. His lament is undoubtedly justified: “ Periit studium
litterarum a nobis. ” The gulf between him and Fortunatus, in respect
of command of correct Latin, is immense.
To dwell upon the value of the Historia Francorum would be quite
out of place here, where we are thinking of Gregory as a link in the
transmission of ancient knowledge. It is more relevant to suggest in
passing a comparison between this and the next national history that
was written-that of Bede; for the slight work of Isidore hardly comes
into consideration. In Gregory we see letters on a level confessedly
low ; in Bede a height has been reached which is rivalled only, in these
centuries, by the best work of the Carolingian Renaissance.
The popularity of Gregory's History in medieval times was far
inferior to that of his hagiological writings, which furnished much
material to the compilers of breviaries and to such writers as Jacobus de
Voragine. Besides the seven which he himself enumerates, dealing with
St Julian of Le Mans, St Martin of Tours, the Martyrs, the Confessors,
and the Anchorites, there is one—the Miracles of St Andrew—which
may be confidently assigned to him, and which is perhaps more
important than any of the others to the historian of Christian litera-
ture. It is our best source for the knowledge of a second or third
century Greek romance, the Acts of Andrew; once eagerly read, but
ultimately condemned by the Church, and only transmitted to us in
fragments, and expurgated epitomes, such as this of Gregory. Not
that Gregory read it in Greek. He had before him, no doubt, a
complete Latin version, made, it is likely, for Manichaeans to read :
since, in Manichaean circles, the apocryphal romances about the
Apostles were adopted as substitutes for the Canonical Acts. Not
long after Gregory's date—it may be even in his lifetime—a complete
## p. 497 (#543) ############################################
Decay of Latin
497
orthodox collection of abstracts of these Acts, with others added to
them, was put together, probably in France, in which the Miracles of
Andrew were incorporated. We know it under the misleading name of
the Apostolic History of Abdias. The investigation of its origin, and
the determination of its text, have not as yet been completely carried
out. As a source of inspiration for artists and romancers it deserves
(though it does not usually obtain) a special recognition among the
literary documents of its time.
I shall be pardoned for passing over the feeble efforts of the
continuators of Gregory's History (the so-called Fredegarius and the
rest) in favour of two writings which attest at once the survival of
a knowledge of Greek in France and an extremely low standard of
culture. The one is known as the Barbarus Scaligeri (from its style
.
and its first editor). It is a Chronicle of the world, rendered from an
almost contemporary Greek original in a fashion and in a Latin of
which it is difficult to exaggerate the badness. The other is a very
similar version, made by the aid of a glossary, of the Phaenomena of
Aratus, and of a Commentary thereon. It can be dated by the fact
that Isidore is used in it, and that Bede uses it. Did we not possess
the Greek original of this extraordinary work, many passages of it
would defy interpretation. The literalness is extreme: 'Apátou
Palvóueva appears as Arati ea quae videntur. This we might perhaps
unravel, but we should be more than ready to suspect corruption in
the phrase “ in quo apud Diodorum” which is the rendering of év tệ
Tipòs Acódwpov, or in this “nihil aliud quorum Eudoxi videntur facere,”
which is the equivalent of μηδέν έτερον των Ευδόξου φαινομένων
TOLNO avta. Nevertheless, absurd as is the interpreter's achievement,
his very attempt is creditable and interesting. We have no clue to
the identity of the man who made it, nor to the part of France in
which he lived.
It has been transmitted to us in more than one copy, as well as in a
revised form due to a scholar of the Carolingian period. The Barbarus
of Scaliger survives in but one manuscript, which is not impossibly the
autograph of the translator.
There is another writer, of southern France, who is the centre of an
unsolved problem-Virgilius Maro Grammaticus. That he must be
reckoned to France seems now to be the accepted view, though the
evidence at command is scanty. An obscure phrase in which he says
th he will set forth “bigerro sermone” the letters of the alphabet, is
taken to contain the name which survives as Bigorre, and to point to the
south-west of France: a plainer indication is his reference to the Gauls
as " nostri. ” Importance is also rightly attached to the fact that Abbo
of St Germain in the tenth century calls him Tolosanus. That he was
a Christian, and a Catholic-not an Arian-may be regarded as certain.
But, though he gives us a great many other details about himself, his
a
C. MED. H. VOL, III. CH. XIX.
32
## p. 498 (#544) ############################################
498
Virgilius Maro Grammaticus
teachers, and his contemporaries, hardly one of them can be taken
seriously.
Upon a first reading of his works (they are wholly devoted to
grammatical subjects, and consist of two series of Epitomae and
Epistles) the reader feels that he is confronted with a piece of pure mystifi-
cation. A striking, but yet fairly typical example of the extravagances
we encounter is the passage in which he describes, on the authority of a
certain Virgil of Asia, the “ twelve Latinities. " The first of these is the
usitata, that in which (ordinary) Latin writings are “inked” (atramen-
tantur). Of the eleven others, ten, it is safe to say, have never been used
either by Virgilius or anyone else. The second, called assena or notaria,
may possibly be intended to mean the Tironian notes ; it employs a single
letter for a whole word. But the lumbrosa, which expands a single word
into four or five, the sincolla, which condenses a whole line into two syl-
lables, and the rest of the series, correspond to nothing in heaven or earth'.
Not only is the vocabulary of Virgilius abnormal; the authors whom
he cites have left no trace anywhere else. There is a Cicero, and a
Horace; there are three Virgils and three Lucans, and so on : but none
of them are identical with those known to fame. There are, too,
numerous grammarians, of whom Aeneas, Galbungus, and Terrentius
are among the most prominent; but what is told of them does not
carry conviction to the mind. Galbungus and Terrentius disputed for
fourteen consecutive days and nights as to whether ego had a vocative.
Regulus of Cappadocia and Sedulius of Rome went without food and
sleep for a similar period while they were discussing the inchoative and
frequentative forms of the verb: three soldiers in the employ of each
were in attendance ready to arbitrate by force of arms if required.
In all, some ninety writers and teachers are named or quoted. Do
they correspond to anything that ever existed? Of late a suggestion
has found favour that they represent an academy which had its head-
quarters at Toulouse, and that the great names of Cicero, Lucan, Virgil
and so on, were adopted by its members, just as Charlemagne and his
friends called themselves David, Homer, Flaccus, and Naso. Perhaps,
it is added, the Carolingian fashion was a conscious imitation of the
Tolosan. If this be the truth of the matter, it is surely very strange
that while we do hear of Virgilius himself before the end of the seventh
century, no single trace of any of his "authorities” has ever been pointed
out. Moreover, he claims a high antiquity and a wide range of influence
for his school of thought: he traces his writers back to the time of
Romulus, nay, even to the days before the Flood. Some of them lived
at Troy, others in Egypt, Arabia, India. The variety, again, of books
which he quotes is large; there are poems, histories, epistles, orations,
as well as works on grammar; far too many-supposing them to be
1 A notion recently broached that Arabic influence is discernible in his nomen-
clature of metres (and numerals) has yet to be sifted.
## p. 499 (#545) ############################################
Date and use of Virgilius
499
real—to have disappeared without leaving some sign. In short, the
complete isolation of Virgilius compared with his pretensions enforces
the belief that his authorities like his Latinities are from first to last
impositions pure and simple. Such imposition—I allude to the in-
vention of authorities—was an expedient not unknown to the world
of grammarians and scholiasts. The tract of the African Fulgentius
(cent. vi. ) De dubiis nominibus contains, side by side with genuine passages
from Plautus and other early writers, quotations which, it is agreed, are
fabrications of Fulgentius's own. A scholiast on the Ibis of Ovid helps
himself over the difficulties of the poem (and they are many) by
explanatory tags which he fathers upon Propertius, Lucretius, Homer,
Callimachus, etc. , etc. The procedure in both cases is not easily dis-
tinguishable from that of Virgilius.
It is curious to find that in spite of all this he was taken seriously.
Not only does Aldhelm (+ 709) quote him, but also Bede, a man less
likely to be attracted by eccentricity, and so do almost all the Irish
grammarians of the Carolingian period—a point which will demand
further attention. To the later Middle Ages he was quite unknown ;
we have no manuscripts or quotations after the eleventh century? .
We have not yet approached the question of the date at which he
lived. Zimmer in an elaborate investigation (published posthumously)
contends for the fifth to sixth centuries. His main thesis is that western
Gaul had, both commercially and intellectually, a profound influence upon
Ireland long before the age of Patrick. He seeks to shew, in particular, ,
that the grammatical theories of Virgilius affected the language and
methods of Irish writers. He finds traces of them in the Amra or
panegyric on St Columba († 597), that obscure Irish poem by Dallan
Forgaill
, of which we have but a series of enigmatical fragments glossed
by successive commentators. He believes that he has found actual mention
of Virgilius in Irish books under the name of Ferchertne file; and he lays
stress on the undoubted fact that our manuscript authorities for the
text of Virgilius shew traces of transmission through Irish channels.
The text, long preserved in Ireland, he would suggest, passed to the
Continent in the train of the Irish missionaries. To our grammarian, ,
too, he would refer the epigrams in which Ennodius (473–521) ridicules
“ a certain foolish man who was known as Virgilius. ”
Clearly much of this argument is inappreciable by those ignorant of
Celtic languages. To the general contention one objection has been
urged which makes its appeal to a wider circle, and which, if upheld,
must do away with the greater part of Zimmer's hypothesis. It is that
Virgilius makes use of the Etymologies of Isidore of Seville (+ 636). If
so, he takes his place in the seventh century, after Isidore and before
Aldhelm. An examination of the long list of passages cited by
Manitius from the Etymologies, and supposed by him to have been
1 An abridged text of 1465 in a Bodleian MS. (D'Orville 147) is an exception.
CH, XIX.
32-2
## p. 500 (#546) ############################################
500
A Cosmography
borrowed thence by Virgilius, has failed to convince me that Virgilius,
and not Isidore, is the borrower. Practically all the passages contain
derivations of words (legitera = littera and the like). They are
thoroughly germane to the manner of Virgilius ; nor is it a consideration
of any weight that Isidore nowhere names Virgilius as his source, for
in this respect his practice is by no means consistent. In short, though
it may be shewn on other grounds that Zimmer has placed Virgilius too
early, I cannot think that his theory is invalidated by the appeal to
Isidore; and I feel justified in provisionally adopting his date.
Ireland has been named, and will for a time engage our whole
attention ; but before we leave France and Virgilius, a word must be
said of a book which has perhaps a claim to be regarded as a product
of his school. At least it reminds us of him by its language and by
its solemn absurdity. The work in question is the Cosmography of
“Aethicus Ister. ” I use inverted commas because it is not certain
that the form “ Aethicus” is what was intended by the author of the
text, who may have meant to write “ Ethicus” and have used that word
as a synonym for “philosopher. ” The Cosmography comes to us in the
shape of an abstract or series of extracts from a larger work, purporting
to have been made by St Jerome (or at least by a a “Hieronymus
presbyter”). In spite of the efforts of Wuttke to uphold this attribu-
tion and to identify the places and peoples who are mentioned, it is not
possible to regard Aethicus as anything but a romancer or to put him
earlier than the seventh century. His wild Latin, full of hapax legomena,
elaborate alliteration and short assonant clauses, his fables about
countries, tribes, and creatures, partly borrowed from Solinus and the
Alexander-romances, but largely peculiar to himself, and his display of
absurd learning (exemplified by the bogus Scythian alphabet with which
he ends his book), all stamp him as a charlatan. He probably wrote in
France: it seems that the first writer who quotes him is Frankish-one
of the continuators of the chronicler who is called Fredegarius.
At the same time, it would be no surprise to learn that he had Irish
connexions. Indeed, definite allusions to Ireland have been pointed out
in his writings and in those of Virgilius. Aethicus represents himself as
having crossed from Spain to Ireland, and having studied the books
(eorum volumina volvens) which he found there (a phrase which may
reasonably be taken to imply that Ireland enjoyed a reputation for
culture in his time)'.
The two passages adduced from Virgilius are
both of doubtful import. One says that in the composition and elocu-
tion of the. . . . the verb holds the first place. The statement is true of
Irish, and the word represented by dots is given in the manuscripts as hi
bonorum, hiborum, in iborum, respectively. The conjecture Hibernorum
lies ready to hand; yet the possibility of Hiberorum or Iberorum must
1 For all that, he says of the island "Inperitos habet cultores, et instructoribus
habet destitutos habitatores. ” (p. 19, Wuttke. )
## p. 501 (#547) ############################################
Irish learning
501
be considered, especially as we have seen that Virgilius elsewhere
mentions the speech of his neighbours, the Basques. The other passage, ,
in which he quotes a verse by one Bregandus Lugenicus, has been
thought to contain an Irish tribal name. But strong collateral evidence
is needed to bring this out of the category of Virgilius's ordinary
mystifications.
We now approach the problem of the classical culture of Ireland.
How, when, and whence did it come into being ? Many generations of
scholars have been contented to regard the mission of Patrick (in 430-460)
as marking the accession of Ireland to the world of learning. It has
been realised, indeed, that Patrick himself was no scholar, but he has
been thought of as the parent of scholars, the progenitor of the great
monastic schools which sprang up all over Ireland in the sixth century-
Clonard (520), Clonmacnois (544), Clonfert (c. 550), Bangor (c. 560).
Before Patrick (or at least before Palladius), it has been commonly
believed, Ireland, lying outside the sphere of Roman political influence,
was also untouched by Roman culture. A readjustment of this view
has become necessary. Patrick was not the Apostle of Ireland in the
sense that before he landed there were no Christians in the island.
Apart from such results as may have attended the obscure mission
of Palladius (whom Zimmer would identify with Patrick), there were
pre-Patrician churches and pre-Patrician saints. It would indeed be
strange, if at a time when Christianity was highly organised and
flourishing both in Britain and in western Gaul—countries in active
intercourse with Ireland—there had been no sporadic evangelisation, no
formation here and there of small Christian communities, As a matter
of fact there are in the undoubted writings of Patrick allusions to
existent Christianity, and in particular to men who, we gather from
Patrick's language, possessed a higher degree of culture than he did.
There is, too, a persistent tradition (though the documents which
contain it are not of the earliest) that certain saints, Ailbe, for instance,
and Declan, were in Ireland before Patrick.
Into the precise value of this tradition I cannot attempt to in-
quire; to do so would be to exaggerate its importance for our purpose.
I should be giving the impression that missionary enterprise was the
sole factor in bringing the learning of the Continent into Ireland. This
would be a mistake. We have seen that stress has been laid in recent
years by Zimmer upon the commercial relations which undoubtedly
linked the island with Gaul, as well as with Britain ; while yet more
recently, attention has been called to a definite statement by an
anonymous writer, evidently of Gaul, such as has not been hitherto
producible: to the effect that in the early years of the fifth century
an exodus of scholars from the Continent took place under the pressure
of barbarian invasion, which affected the area under consideration.
The Huns, says our new authority, began that devastation of the whole
а
CH, XIX.
## p. 502 (#548) ############################################
502
Greek in Ireland
Empire which was carried on by the Vandals, Goths, and Alani; “and
owing to their ravages, all the learned men on this side the sea fled, and
in the countries beyond sea, namely, Ireland, and wherever else they betook
themselves, brought to the inhabitants of those regions an enormous
advance in learning. ” This statement, printed from a Leyden manuscript
as long ago as 1866, was, it seems, only noticed by Zimmer at the end
of his life. The importance of it may be over-estimated, but cannot be
denied. For the first time we have definite testimony that the culture
of Bordeaux, Toulouse, Autun, Lyons--in other words, the best learning
attainable in the West—did actually make its way in some shape into
Ireland. And we have, besides, the reminder which was needed, that the
missionaries were not solely or primarily the channels by which it came.
The words throw light upon Patrick's own challenge to the rhetorici who
knew not the Lord; but, more than all, they supply an explanation of the
undoubted presence in Ireland in the sixth century of a certain type of
learning. The fact that that learning was widely and rapidly diffused
over the country was due in no small degree to this, that it went hand
in hand with evangelisation. Had missionary effort not been there to
prepare the soil, it is impossible to suppose that men would have been
found so ready to study the grammar and rhetoric of Latin, or the
elements of Greek. But when these were presented to them as part of
the apparatus of the new faith, they were assured of a reception, and
subsequently gained citizenship by their own merits.
It will not be possible to call attention to every indication of higher
learning in Ireland; but it will be worth while to devote some space
to the vexed question, how far this learning included a knowledge of
Greek.
The question is not, it must be premised, a simple one. We must
remember, on the one hand, that some of the most striking specimens of
Irish Greek learning were produced on the Continent, and on the other,
that, in and after the lifetime of Theodore and Hadrian (668-690) when
Greek was made accessible to the English, there is a possibility of
English influence upon Ireland. In any case it remains the most
reasonable account of the knowledge of Greek on the part of a Johannes
Eriugena or a Sedulius Scottus, that it was acquired in Ireland and
transferred thence to the Continent.
In the first place, we can hardly doubt that Graeco-Latin glossaries
had made their way to Ireland in very early times. The occurrence of
Greek words in Irish writings of the sixth century is best accounted for
on this hypothesis. We meet with such Greek words in the hymn Altus
prosător of Columba, in that of St Sechnall on Patrick and in more than one
of those in the Bangor Antiphonary. Their raison d'être from the point of
view of the writers of these compositions is to deck the page. They are the
spangles on the cloak, no essential part of the fabric, and they do not by
themselves necessarily imply a knowledge of the structure of the Greek lan-
## p. 503 (#549) ############################################
Traces of Greek learning
503
mean more.
a
guage on the part of those who use them. They may mean little more than
does the use of Greek letters for colophons- the ΦΙΝΙΘ ΔΕΩ ΓΡΑΘΥAC
of a Breton monk in 952, and the like. Yet as a fact they probably do
It seems likely that with the glossaries (taking the word
glossary as the equivalent of a bare vocabulary) there came to Ireland
a more valuable guide to the Greek language, in the shape of a manual
containing conversations and narratives, fables of Aesop, dicta of the
Emperor Hadrian, stories of the Trojan war, compiled as far back as
the year 207. We have it under the formidable modern title of
Hermeneumata Pseudo-Dositheana. It has been transmitted through
“insular” channels, and was in the hands of Sedulius Scottus in the
ninth century, as is thought, before he left Ireland for the Continent.
The suggestion has been made that this and other Greek writings were
brought to Ireland by Byzantine
by Byzantine monks taking refuge from the
Iconoclastic persecution about the middle of the eighth century: but of
such refugees there is small trace. Certain entries in Martyrologies, and
the existence of a “ Greek church” at Trim in Meath, have been adduced
in favour of the hypothesis, but no such evidence as can be called
conclusive. There seems, moreover, no reason why a monk should have
brought the Hermeneumata with him, whereas it is just the book that is
likely to have formed part of the equipment of a fifth century rhetorician
from Gaul.
Instances have been brought forward of Irishmen who were clearly
acquainted with Greek. We will examine them briefly. Pelagius is the
foremost, both in date and in eminence. He came to Italy about the year
400, and it is on record that in 415 he took part in a controversy at
Jerusalem which was carried on in Greek. It will be allowed that, even
granting that Pelagius was Irish and not British by extraction, he had
every opportunity of acquiring Greek after he had left Ireland.
We find, next, that the commentary of Theodore of Mopsuestia
upon the Psalms was preserved and transcribed in a revised and shortened
Latin form at Bobbio. The actual work of translation and revision has
been ascribed to St Columban. That point is doubtful: but the
commentary was certainly studied by Irish writers on the Continent, and
it is possible that the translation was actually made upon Irish soil. It
had a wide influence. The researches of Dr Robert M. L. Ramsay and
Dr J. Douglas Bruce have demonstrated the use of it by English
glossators of the Psalter (perhaps by Bede himself) down to the
eleventh century.
In a gospel book of the eighth century at Würzburg is a note to
the effect that Mosuin Mac Armin (Abbot of Bangor, who died in 610)
learned by heart a Paschal computus drawn up by a Greek sage-
probably Theophilus of Antioch. " Coupled with the presence of Greek
words in the antiphonary of Bangor, this statement has a certain force,
and it should be noticed that the date of Mosuin excludes the pos-
CH. XIX.
## p. 504 (#550) ############################################
504
Traces of Greek Apocrypha
1
sibility of Theodorian influence from Canterbury and England. What
is not excluded is the possibility that the computus lay before him in
a Latin version.
The Schaffhausen manuscript of Adamnan's Life of Columba, written
at Iona before 714, has in it the Lord's Prayer in Greek, and in Greek
letters. This is an example of importance, though, like those that
follow, it is post-Theodorian in date, and is accordingly liable to a
certain discount.
Sedulius Scottus had in his possession in the ninth century a collection
of apophthegms called Proverbia Graecorum. We have them only in Latin,
preserved in the Collectanea of Sedulius in a manuscript at Cues, quoted
copiously in an English source, the tracts of the famous “Yorker
Anonymus," and alluded to in a letter of one Cathvulf to Charlemagne!
Their Latinity is Celtic, and they may safely be regarded as a Greek
collection rendered into Latin on the soil of Ireland.
To Ireland also we probably owe the excerpts we possess of Macrobius's
important treatise on the differences and conformities of the Greek
and Latin verb, a book for the understanding of which a knowledge of
Greek is indispensable. One of our manuscripts attributes the selection
of the excerpts to a Johannes, thought to be the great Eriugena (Erigena).
The line of transmission has insular connexions. Similarly, quotations
from the lost Peplus of Theophrastus, dealing with the origin of the
alphabet, appear in a Laon manuscript of the school of Eriugena and in
a commentary on Martianus Capella derived from that same school.
That these imply the use of a Greek source, not necessarily of a complete
text of the Peplus, cannot be doubted.
In addition to this evidence, it will be useful, I think, to consider a
class of examples as yet not utilised in the investigation of this question.
They consist of traits in Irish literature (principally Latin) which are
drawn according to all appearance from some of the obscurer apocryphal
writings—writings which are not known to have existed in Latin. This
evidence, again, is not unambiguous. Some of our sources, notably the
Latin Lives of Irish saints, are of late date. Yet that fact is no real
bar to their testimony; for whatever they have absorbed in the way of
reminiscence of old learning was acquired before the exodus of Irishmen
to the Continent. In the interval between that exodus and the com-
pilation of the Lives, Ireland, harried by the Northmen and deserted by
its scholars, had ceased to be a learned country. These Lives, as their
most recent editor, Dr Plummer, has shewn, contain much that is pre-
Christian, and little that is characteristic of the later medieval period.
This is true also of such documents in the Irish language as will be cited.
First among the supposed sources I will place the Acts of Philip.
The Western Church knew absolutely nothing of the sensational Greek
1 The title occurs (crossed out) in an early catalogue of the library of Lincoln
Minster.
a
## p. 505 (#551) ############################################
Instances of use of Apocrypha
505
а
romance which passes under that name. According to the Latins, Philip
,
died a peaceful death like John the Evangelist. In Ireland we find
traces of a different tradition. The Passion in the Leabhar Breac inter-
polates the martyrdom into a version of the Latin Acts. The Irish writing
called the Evernew Tongue' is a kind of apocalypse in which the tongue
of the Apostle, cut out nine times by his persecutors, discourses to
assembled multitudes. In the life of St Boece is an incident strongly
reminiscent of the Greek Acts: a wolf brings a kid to the saint, as a
leopard does to the Apostle. In Muirchu's life of St Patrick (not
later than 699) is another possible reminiscence. A magician is whirled
up into the air and dashed on the ground. It may be a version of the
fate of Simon Magus, but it does rather strikingly resemble passages in
the Eastern Acts of Philip and of Peter and Andrew? .
In the life of St Berach there is a story of a druid killed at the
window of his cell by the arrow of a hunter. Pilate, in an exclusively
Greek legend, meets his end in precisely the same way. The climax of
the Greek book known as the Rest of the words of Baruch is that when
the Jews have resolved to stone the prophet to death, a stone pillar is
made to assume his form, and their attacks are directed against it until
Jeremiah has finished his last directions to his disciples. In the Irish
life of St Brendan, a follower of the saint is attacked : a stone is made
to put on his appearance, and the man escapes. In the Greek Testament
of Abraham a striking incident is that a tree utters words of praise to
God and prediction of Abraham's death. In the life of St Coemgen
.
a tree sings to him. In the same Testament is the story of a calf,
slaughtered at Mamre for the entertainment of the three angels, being
restored to life and running to its mother. This miracle figures in
several of the Lives, e. g. that of St Ailbe.
Evidence that apocryphal literature unknown to the rest of Europe
was read in Ireland is furnished by the Irish Vision of Adamnan, which
quotes a form of the story of the death of Mary only found now in
Syriac. The same Vision makes use of an apocalypse, as yet not
identified, which is also quoted in a (Latin) Reichenau manuscript of
Irish connexion now at Carlsruhe. The Irish tale of the Two Sorrows
of Heaven is another document based on an apocryphon which it is safe
to say belongs to Eastern Christendom. In it Enoch and Elias prophesy
to the souls of the blessed, which (as in certain Greek apocalypses) are
in the form of birds, the terrors of the end of the world.
Of the writings I have mentioned so far, the literature of the
:
1 Eriu, 1905, p. 96.
2 Other traces of reading have been pointed out in Muirchu, which may be
mentioned here: an allusion to Abraham's conversion to a belief in the true God,
possibly derived from Josephus; and an apparent reminiscence of a line of Valerius
Flaccus, as well as clear evidence of a knowledge of Virgil. The occasional use of
Greek words (e. g. antropi) may be merely "glossarial” learning.
a
CH, XIX,
## p. 506 (#552) ############################################
506
Latin writers known in Ireland
English Church of the seventh and eighth centuries betrays no know-
ledge. There are others, now to be noticed, for example, the Book of
Enoch, of which this cannot be said. A non-Irish insular manuscript of
.
the eighth century has preserved a fragment of a Latin version of Enoch.
In Ireland we find, in the Saltair na Rann, a number of names of angels
which are pretty certainly derived from the same book. There, too, are
episodes taken from a Life of Adam, but whether they are to be traced
to a Western or to an Eastern text has not as yet been made clear. In
the “Gelasian” list of apocryphal books the Testament of Job is mentioned,
which probably implies the existence of a Latin version. An unpleasing
trait which occurs in this Testament is adopted in the Life of St Mochua.
It would not be difficult to shew by examples from the Irish Lives of
Saints that the legends of the Infancy of our Lord were familiar in the
country; but these were so widely diffused that the demonstration would
add nothing to our present purpose. Let it be recorded, lastly, that
the Reichenau manuscript cited above shews, in one of the fragmentary
Homilies which it contains, undoubted knowledge of the obscure
Apocalypse of Thomas, and that a fragment of an Irish service-book
in the Vatican Library presents us with a Lection from a Gospel
attributed to James the Less. Both Apocalypse and Gospel are con-
demned in the “Gelasian” decree.
It has seemed worth while to set forth this class of evidence in some
detail. Without detail, indeed, its force is inappreciable. The upshot
of it is that the Eastern legendary literature was domiciled in Ireland to
such an extent that it coloured the imaginations and contributed to the
stock-in-trade of hagiologists and seers; and this familiarity with a
branch of Eastern literature is not negligible as a confirmation of
other indications that in the sixth and seventh centuries a knowledge
of Greek was far from uncommon in Ireland.
Apart from Greek, which after all must be regarded as the fine
flower of their learning, what did the normal culture of Irish scholars
amount to ? The scanty list of their Latin writers between the end of
the sixth and the beginning of the eighth century-between Columba
(+ 597) and Adamnan (+ 704)—includes besides penitentials, lives of
saints, and hymns of no very marked excellence, several writings which
are without rival in their time. The Altus prosător, Columba's great
alphabetic hymn, and the playful poem in short Adonic lines by
Columban, cannot fail to impress the reader, the former in virtue of
its achievement, the latter by the background of learning which it
implies. The Altus has something of the learnedness and intricacy of
Celtic decorative art: Columban's poem, with its allusions to Sappho
and Danaë, is the work of a man who merits the name of scholar. The
1 This is true also of the Anglo-Saxon Homilists. What is practically a version
of the Apocalypse is contained in the Vercelli Book ; and two other Homilies, in a
Blickling and a Hatton MS. respectively, make copious use of it.
a
## p. 507 (#553) ############################################
Adamnan
507
a
second half of the seventh century gives us a treatise—that known as
Augustine De mirabilibus Scripturae—which, alike for its Latinity and
for the wide reading of its author, deserves respect. “ Augustine" has
some acquaintance with ancient history, gathered from such sources as
the Eusebian Chronicle and from Josephus; he is a student of Jerome,
and seems to have read books on medicine and natural history. His
allusions to Ireland, fewer in number than we could have wished, add a
pleasant flavour to his book. Aileran the Wise, not far from this author
in date, has left a tract on the interpretation of the names of our Lord's
ancestors according to the flesh, in which there is not much sound philo-
logy.
At the end of the same century we have Adamnan. His two un-
doubted works, the account of Arculf's pilgrimage to Palestine, and the
Life of Columba, are intrinsically two of the most precious books of their
time. The value of the tract on the Holy Places to the archaeologist
and topographer needs no exposition. It is worth much, also, as
exemplifying the interest in all sorts of knowledge which characterised
the Irish scholars of the day. The Life of Columba--less a biography
than a collection of anecdotes-preserves a picture of that saint and
seer which will never lose its charm. Evidence of Adamnan's gram-
matical studies, and of his knowledge of Greek (or at least of Greek
words), abounds in this book ; but there is a third work, a set of notes on
a
the Bucolics and Georgics of Virgil, which, if it could be proved to be
his, would be plain evidence of his distinction as student and as teacher.
It is in the form of excerpts from three earlier commentaries, those of
Philargyrius, Titius Gallus, and Gaudentius, which seem to have been
written down by a class at the dictation of Adananus. Whether or not
this Adananus was the Abbot of Hy, this work is an undoubted product
of Irish scholarship. It witnesses to these facts: that the scientific
study of “grammar," as the Romans understood it, was carried on by
the Irish at a time when it was dead in continental Europe: and that
complete texts of ancient commentaries on Virgil had made their way
into the hands of an Irishman.
Exaggerated language has no doubt been used about the learning of
the Irish, and about their share in the preservation of classical literature.
When allowance has been made for this, it remains incontestable that,
during the latter part of the seventh century, it was in Ireland that the
thirst for knowledge was keenest, and the work of teaching was most
actively carried on. There the Latin language (and in a less degree
the Greek) was studied from the scholar's point of view. To the Irish,
we must remember, Latin was no inheritance: they had not heard it
commonly spoken among them: their knowledge of it was book-know-
ledge. They had to treat it very much as we do now-more nearly,
perhaps, as it was treated in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
when it was the recognised medium of communication for scholars of
CH. XIX.
## p. 508 (#554) ############################################
508
British writers
99
8
all countries. We need not, however, insist that the great body of
the classical Latin literature which we now possess was preserved to us
by the exertions either of the Irish or of the English, to whom the
lamp of learning passed next in order. No doubt, whatever the Irish
came across in the way of ancient literature they welcomed and treasured,
but it is not to be supposed that they ever acquired in their native land
a very large mass of such writings. It was when, impelled in the
first instance by missionary zeal, and later by troubled conditions at
home, they passed over in large numbers to the Continent, that they
became instrumental in rescuing fragments of the literature which they
had already learned to value. It is reserved for the palaeographers of the
next few decades to shew how many of our Latin classics betray the
existence of an “insular” stage in the line of their transmission. An
important class of scribal errors is due to the fact that a copyist of
the Middle Ages or of the Renaissance was using an archetype in
Scriptura Scottica,” in the insular script, in which the peculiar forms,
say, of r and s misled him. Sometimes these errors affect the whole body
of manuscripts of a given author, and in these cases it is obvious that
we owe the preservation of the text to an insular scribe. A leading
instance, as Traube has shewn, is furnished by the History of Ammianus
Marcellinus.
We shall have occasion to revert to the work of the Irish on the
Continent. The time has now come for us to pass from Ireland to
Great Britain. It will be worth while to inquire what, apart from
vague modern panegyric, is to be known of the state of learning in the
British Church before the coming of Theodore.
The small tract of the British bishop Fastidius is the only monument
assignable to the fifth century. In the sixth we have the writings
ascribed to Gildas, the Epistle, undoubtedly his, the Lorica, and the
penitential Canons. We have, too, the Hisperica Famina.
, Little, if
anything else, has been credited to Britons of this period. For any
further information about the leading lights of the British Church we
have to depend upon traditions committed to writing at a far later
time, and in particular upon the lives of the saints, which are of
exactly similar complexion with those of the Irish; embodying a
modicum of fact wrapped in a sparkling tissue of wonders.
Fastidius may
be dismissed with a word : he has no trait that can be
identified as British. Gildas, as his Epistle attests, was a man of educa-
tion. The writers whom we may credit him with having known are,
indeed, not recondite, but they are of good quality: Virgil, Persius,
Claudius (? Claudian), Jerome, Orosius, Rufinus. Such books as these,
then, were accessible in Britain ; was there more than this? The Epistle
affords no evidence of the study of languages other than Latin ; Greek
and Hebrew words occur in the Lorica, but-whether this be of Gildas's
composing or no—they need imply no more than the use of a glossary.
## p. 509 (#555) ############################################
Early British learning
509
The same is true of the Hisperica Famina. Whoever were the authors
of that strange and attractive farrago, glossarial learning was to them
synonymous with culture. Literary success meant the forging of phrases
that should only just not defy interpretation. When, however, we find
in a Bodleian manuscript (Auct. F.
