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 ΓΡΑΘΥΑΟ of a Breton monk in 952, and the like. Yet as a fact they probably do mean more. 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 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-
