There is also in the library of the hospital of Cues (Cusa) near Trèves a manuscript of a commonplace book of his of very remarkable character. It has supplied us with pieces of Cicero's orations against Piso and for Fonteius which are wanting in our other copies, and of Vegetius, Porphyrio, and Lactantius. Partly perhaps because of the many Greek passages in his works, Lactantius was little read or copied between the ninth and the fifteenth century. To Sedulius however these were no deterrent; he collects some of them at the end of a Greek psalter which we have of his transcribing. A remark of Traube's will be in place here: "I hazard the guess," he says, "that wherever Greek passages survive in Latin works, they are to be referred to Irish influence."
The manuscripts transcribed by Sedulius and his circle remain to be noticed. Those which are most confidently ascribed to his hand are the Psalter just mentioned, which is signed by him (it is now in the Arsenal Library at Paris, and was once at St Nicholas's Abbey at Verdun), and a Graeco-Latin copy of the Pauline Epistles at Dresden, of which the Codex Augiensis at Trinity College, Cambridge, is a transcript. There are besides at St Gall a Priscian, perhaps brought from Ireland, and a Gospels in Greek and Latin (known as Δ), and there is a famous book at Berne (363) containing our oldest copy of Horace's Odes. In these we find, scribbled on margins, Irish names, and names of others, such as Hartgar of Tongres, Gunther of Cologne, Hilduin, Hincmar, etc., whom we know to have been connected with Sedulius. His own name also occurs not unfrequently.
Of the less distinguished members of the band of Irish scholars, Dunchad or Duncant has been asserted and also denied to be the author of a Comment on Martianus Capella (not printed). Common to this, and to John the Scot's comment on the same author, is a fragment of the lost Peplus of Theophrastus, which is also copied in a Laon manuscript (444) written by an Irish teacher, Martin of Laon († 875). This book contains a Graeco-Latin glossary, and, inter alia, Greek verses by Martin himself, no better and no worse than those of John.
νυν ληγε νεανισκε λεγειν, δος δεσματα χιλσιν (χείλεσιν)
is the last line, and a fair sample.
Room must be found here for a word about glossaries. They were the indispensable tool of any who aspired to a knowledge of Greek, and were used by others who had no real grasp of the language but desired to be thought Greek scholars. The two chief Graeco-Latin glossaries go by the names of Cyrillus and Philoxenus respectively. The prime authority for the text of Cyrillus is an ancient manuscript in the Harleian collection (5792) which came from the hospital of Cues. We now know that Laon 444, written by Martin, is a copy of it, and this means that in the ninth century it was at or near Laon. It was not, however, written in France, but most likely in Italy: its archetype is conjectured
