is no more than natural; the effigy on the book-case represents but a fraction of its contents.
Among the remaining writings of Isidore the books De naturis rerum and the histories merit special mention. The first is a survey of cosmical phenomena in which, besides extant sources, the Pratum of Suetonius is employed (as in the Etymologiae). The popular name of the treatise, Liber rotarum, is derived from the many circular diagrams with which it was illustrated. In some connexion with it stands an interesting little poem by the Visigoth king Sisebut (612-620) who had asked Isidore to write the treatise, and addressed the poem – chiefly dealing with eclipses – to him, very likely upon receiving the complete book. It is possible that the poem as we have it is but a fragment of a larger work. Sisebut was, we see, a patron of letters and may have been a copious writer, but all that we have from him, besides the poem, is a life of St Desiderius of Vienne, and a few epistles.
Of Isidore's two historical works the first is a Chronicle of the world, divided, in a fashion subsequently adopted and popularised by Bede, into six ages. A brief summary of it is inserted into the fifth book of the Etymologiae. For the more recent portions of it the Chronicles of Idatius, of Victor of Tonnensia in Africa, and of John of Biclarum (the last a Spanish contemporary of Isidore himself) have been utilised. The other is a sketch of the history of the Visigoths, Vandals, and Suevi. His commentaries and religious works (with the possible exception of the Synonyma, the idea of which he says was suggested to him by a treatise of Cicero) are not important to our present subject.
Isidore's principal friend, Braulio of Saragossa, has left us little besides letters and a few short biographies in the book De viris illustribus. He had, however, among his clergy one who ranks as the one considerable Spanish Latin poet of the century. This was Eugenius, who in 647, in spite of Braulio's fervent protests, was removed by King Chindaswinth to preside over the see of Toledo. Chindaswinth, like Sisebut, evidently had some feeling for literature: we find him ordering Eugenius to produce a readable and orthodox edition of the poems of the Arian Dracontius, which were then only current in Spain in a mutilated form. The edition was made, and attained a wide celebrity. Of the works which it comprised, the Laudes Dei were turned into a Hexaëmeron and somewhat shortened; the Satisfactio was abridged and provided with prefaces in prose and verse, and a conclusion: instead of Gunthamund, Theodosius the younger was made to figure as the recipient.
We have, besides this, an original work of Eugenius, which is the metrical portion of a collection of his miscellaneous short writings. The prose half is lost. The poems, in many metres, are for the most part brief. 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.
