to have been a papyrus book. Philoxenus depends upon a ninth century manuscript at Paris, and this too is referred to the neighbourhood of Laon, or at least to the north of France.
Fergus was another of the Irish circle; he was the writer of part of the St Gall Gospels (Δ). Yet another, of whom we know little more than the name, was Elias, a connecting link between the Irish and their most distinguished continental pupil, Heiric of Auxerre.
Heiric learned what Greek he knew from an Irish teacher or teachers at Laon; he also sat under Lupus of Ferrières, and at his lectures took down excerpts from Valerius Maximus and Suetonius. Elias supplied him with the text of two collections of apophthegms, one current under the name of Caecilius Balbus. A manuscript now at the abbey of Melk in Austria preserves (with autograph notes by Heiric) another set of extracts which is particularly interesting as including some from Petronius. The copy from which these were taken is now divided between the libraries of Berne and Paris.
His own works are not epoch-making: commentaries on some of the poets, which supplied material to his pupil Remigius, and a long life of St Germanus of Auxerre in verse. In this he makes considerable parade of his Greek, intercalating into his dedications many words which he got from the works of Dionysius the Areopagite. He makes such experiments in lyric metres as shew him to have been a student of the Odes and Epodes of Horace, and he is credited with being the first of his time to pay much attention to these poems, which were always far less popular than the Satires and Epistles.
Those who have studied the commentaries of Heiric award to them higher praise for real soundness of learning than to those of Remigius. But the name of the latter lived on, and Heiric's did not. Remigius learnt of Dunchad as well as of Heiric, and taught at Rheims for Archbishop Fulk, and at Paris. He lived on into the tenth century, and, it is said, had Odo of Cluny among his pupils. The tale of his writings is a long one, consisting almost entirely of commentaries upon grammarians, poets, and books of the Bible. A tract on the Mass and a glossary of proper names in the Bible, both ascribed to him, went on being copied down to the end of the Middle Ages. Few of the many Bibles of the thirteenth century are without the Interpretationes Nominum.
This is perhaps the place to mention the mythographers. Two anonymous collections of stories of the ancient gods and heroes, very baldly told, were printed by Mai from Vatican manuscripts of the tenth and eleventh centuries, along with a later one which does not concern us. The second of these mythographers copies a good deal of matter from the first, and has been, not quite certainly, identified with Remigius. The first quotes authors as late as Orosius, and mingles tales from Roman history with his mythology. Neither attained a wide circulation, but they deserve a word in virtue of their attempts to hand on the
