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 invention 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 distinguishable 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[1].
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 enigmatic 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
- ↑ An abridged text of 1465 in a Bodleian MS. (D'Orville 147) is an exception.
