PROLEGOMENA.

Agrippa himself. In the Palatine codex, the Dimensuratio is said to be by Jerome the Presbyter, which, although that ecclesiastical writer occasionally turned his attention to geography, is nevertheless not worthy of belief; there also precedes in the same codex, fol. 134, 'The Description of the Provinces by Orosius the Presbyter' and fol. 123, 'Excerpt from the Cosmographer Ethicus, that is, according to Jerome': which Ethicus Hister is an example that forgers in geographical books abused the name of Jerome (from whom they falsely claimed the Ethicus was translated from Greek). And indeed, both our little works seem to be older than the fourth century. For from the poem exhibited on p. 19 sq., we know that in the year 435, when Theodosius II was consul for the fifteenth time (v. 7), the Divisio was described by the order of the emperor together with the illustrated map pertaining to it (v. 8): from which copy I know not whether the Palatine codex, in which the poem is missing, flowed; certainly from it flowed the codex which Dicuil used when, in the year 825, he was compiling his cosmographical work from Pliny and other ancients and our very own Divisio (which he calls the 'Measurement of the Earth', cf. p. 19 n.). That this is so, and that the Divisio was not drawn from Dicuil, Schweder rightly understood (learned men had previously thought that Dicuil had taken [his material] from his Dimensuratio). For how could it happen that in the age after Dicuil, someone would excerpt from Dicuil the very things that are read in the Divisio, accurately omitting those which are taken from Pliny, Solinus, and others? There are also (to add this too) things that differ so much between Dicuil and the Divisio that they could only have been changed in ancient times: thus the Divisio has c. 11 'All of Germany and Dacia' and 14 'Dacia', but Dicuil 1, 7, 1 exhibits 'All of Germany and Gothia' and 2 'Dacia and Alania'. It is clear that the older reading was preserved by the Divisio, while the other is to be referred almost to the times of the migration of peoples. Furthermore, 1) Divisio 22 (like Agrippa frag. 33) has Mesopotamia, but Dicuil 2, 4 has Mesopotamia, Babylonia, Chaldaea. Also, see if the order of the provinces in the Divisio, where the regions adjacent to the barbarians seem to follow the individual dioceses of the empire, is more genuine than in Dicuil. But what is most important: Dicuil, in the preface where he speaks of those whom Emperor Theodosius, as he thinks, 'had sent to measure the provinces', hands down very false information, and this alone shows that he did not understand those little verses by which those scribes, transcribing the Divisio in the year 435, had put an end to their labor. For these say nothing other than that the emperor (who is known to everyone to have been a great lover of what is called calligraphy) had ordered them to 'complete the work'

1. but Gaulia Dic. 3, 1 is only corrupted from Getulia (thus Div. 26).