Ibid

Начало книги

– From a student theme.

The erroneous idea that Ibid is the author of the Lives is so frequently met with, even among those pretending to a degree of culture, that it is worth correcting. It should be a matter of general knowledge that Cf. is responsible for this work. Ibid's masterpiece, on the other hand, was the famous Op. Cit. wherein all the significant undercurrents of Graeco-Roman expression were crystallised once for all – and with admirable acuteness, notwithstanding the surprisingly late date at which Ibid wrote. There is a false report– very commonly reproduced in modern books prior to Von Schweinkopf's monumental Geschichte der Ostrogothen in Italien– that Ibid was a Romanised Visigoth of Ataulf's horde who settled in Placentia about 410 A . D. The contrary cannot be too strongly emphasised; for Von Schweinkopf, and since his time Littlewit and BГЄtenoir, have shewn with irrefutable force that this strikingly isolated figure was a genuine Roman– or at least as genuine a Roman as that degenerate and mongrelised age could produce– of whom one might well say what Gibbon said of Boethius, "that he was the last whom Cato or Tully could have acknowledged for their countryman." He was, like Boethius and nearly all the eminent men of his age, of the great Anician family, and traced his genealogy with much exactitude and self-satisfaction to all the heroes of the republic.

Читать дальше →