Macer – perhaps last mentioned as extant by Ermoldus Nigellus, a notable court-poet. The absence of Catullus, Tibullus and Propertius is not surprising; the first and last evidently did not emerge till a good deal later: Tibullus, however, does occur in an interesting ninth-century list of books written in a grammatical manuscript at Berlin (Santen. 66).
Hadoardus gives another aspect of the picture. We know nothing of him but that he calls himself a presbyter and obviously lived in an establishment – most likely monastic – where he had a good library at command. He put together a collection of moral, religious and philosophical excerpts which has survived in one manuscript. Its distinguishing feature is that a large part consists of extracts from the philosophical writings of Cicero. Hadoardus had no more of these than we have; the Republic was not known to him. Cicero is useful to him merely as a moralist, and he expunges from his extracts the personal and historical allusions, so that what we thank him for is little more than the evidence he supplies as to the existence in his time of the collected philosophical works in very much their present shape.
It is long since I have made any reference to Spain. The little that can now be said must be confined to the Christian writers: I cannot touch on the great literary and scientific achievements of the conquering Moors. And the Christian writers were not very remarkable. A mass of matter connected with the Adoptionist heresy appeared at the end of the eighth century. The question at issue (recalled by the Filioque clause): Was the Son of God Son by adoption, as opposed to eternal generation? was affirmed by Felix of Urgel and Elipandus of Toledo and, outside Spain, denied by Alcuin. Within the country Beatus wrote against Elipandus, but he would hardly have been remembered for that alone. He is remembered, however, both by patristic students and by those interested in art, as the compiler of an immense commentary on the Apocalypse from sources which are some of them lost and valuable. Copies of this (to which Jerome on Daniel is almost always added), profusely illustrated, are the chief monuments of Spanish art for the ninth and following centuries. The designs of the pictures were transmitted with almost Chinese fidelity from one scriptorium to another: among them is a map of the world which has a special place of its own in geographical history.
In the middle of the ninth century a pair of Cordovan writers emerge to whom a few words must be devoted: Paulus Albarus, a converted Jew, and Eulogius (Eulogio), Archbishop of Toledo, who died a martyr in 859. The writings of Eulogius are chiefly concerned with the martyrs of his own time, and with polemic against the Prophet: those of Paul include a life of Eulogius and a good deal of indifferent verse. Their main importance is, no doubt, for Spanish history, and they are mentioned here principally in virtue of a passage in the life of Eulogius which bears on general literature. In 848, says Paul, Eulogius brought back
