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: Ἀράτου Φαινόμενα 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 ἐν τῷ πρὸς Διόδωρον, or in this "nihil aliud quorum Eudoxi videntur facere," which is the equivalent of μηδὲν ἕτερον τῶν Εὐδόξου φαινομένων ποιήσαντα. 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 that 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
