sibility of Theodorian influence from Canterbury and England. What is not excluded is the possibility that the computus lay before him in a Latin version.
The Schaffhausen manuscript of Adamnan's Life of Columba, written at Iona before 714, has in it the Lord's Prayer in Greek, and in Greek letters. This is an example of importance, though, like those that follow, it is post-Theodorian in date, and is accordingly liable to a certain discount.
Sedulius Scottus had in his possession in the ninth century a collection of apophthegms called Proverbia Graecorum. We have them only in Latin, preserved in the Collectanea of Sedulius in a manuscript at Cues, quoted copiously in an English source, the tracts of the famous "Yorker Anonymus," and alluded to in a letter of one Cathvulf to Charlemagne[1]. Their Latinity is Celtic, and they may safely be regarded as a Greek collection rendered into Latin on the soil of Ireland.
To Ireland also we probably owe the excerpts we possess of Macrobius's important treatise on the differences and conformities of the Greek and Latin verb, a book for the understanding of which a knowledge of Greek is indispensable. One of our manuscripts attributes the selection of the excerpts to a Johannes, thought to be the great Eriugena (Erigena). The line of transmission has insular connexions. Similarly, quotations from the lost Peplus of Theophrastus, dealing with the origin of the alphabet, appear in a Laon manuscript of the school of Eriugena and in a commentary on Martianus Capella derived from that same school. That these imply the use of a Greek source, not necessarily of a complete text of the Peplus, cannot be doubted.
In addition to this evidence, it will be useful, I think, to consider a class of examples as yet not utilised in the investigation of this question. They consist of traits in Irish literature (principally Latin) which are drawn according to all appearance from some of the obscurer apocryphal writings – writings which are not known to have existed in Latin. This evidence, again, is not unambiguous. Some of our sources, notably the Latin Lives of Irish saints, are of late date. Yet that fact is no real bar to their testimony; for whatever they have absorbed in the way of reminiscence of old learning was acquired before the exodus of Irishmen to the Continent. In the interval between that exodus and the compilation of the Lives, Ireland, harried by the Northmen and deserted by its scholars, had ceased to be a learned country. These Lives, as their most recent editor, Dr Plummer, has shewn, contain much that is pre-Christian, and little that is characteristic of the later medieval period. This is true, also of such documents in the Irish language as will be cited.
First among the supposed sources I will place the Acts of Philip. The Western Church knew absolutely nothing of the sensational Greek
- ↑ The title occurs (crossed out) in an early catalogue of the library of Lincoln Minster.
