PROLEGOMENA.

instituted the other recension 1), although they do not cohere in any way with the work of Honorius himself, not even by the quadripartition, he described quite accurately (if you except that error noted on p. 22, 4, into which he seems to have been led when he was looking negligently at the consular annals of the years 4—5 AD), but from where, I do not know. But I also attribute it to his fault that, when he had read that the matter had been entrusted through the provinces to those four men, imprudently recalling to his mind that quadripartition of Honorius, he wrongly opined that they had been sent individually to the east, west, north, and south.

We are led, look, to the quadripartition of Honorius himself and his sphere, that quite marvelous one. For he does not constitute the four parts of the earth with two lines, one drawn from east to west, the other from north to south, as Eratosthenes and other geographers did, but he arranged these four parts themselves toward the four cardinal points of the sky. Nor is it less strange that the 'northern part' comprises not only the land of the Scythians but also of the Macedonians and even the Greeks and all of Asia Minor. Looking around for the causes of these things, I understood that they could not be referred to Eratosthenes (which was once the opinion of Muellenhoff p. 46 sqq.) — for the fact that with him too Rhodes holds the middle place of the earth, and with ours Carpathus occurs in the eastern, the Carpathian sea in the eastern and southern, and Rhodes in the eastern and northern part, that by itself is not worth much (for the western part is missing), and since so many more serious matters and those principal lines are in contradiction, and the island of Cythera, which is situated west of Rhodes, is even named in the eastern part, it is worth nothing at all — nor indeed that the matter should be measured by the standard of Agrippa (who no one reports divided the earth into four parts) nor by the standard of the ancients at all. It must rather be referred to the opinion of the Christians of that age. I do not want this to be taken as if I think it was formed according to the distribution of patriarchates, whose metropolitan sees Honorius did not distinguish nearly enough, nor indeed (to say nothing of the dioceses of the empire) do I compare it with Muellenhoff IX 193 to the Christian pamphlet Διαμερισμὸν γῆς Distribution of the Earth (cf. p. 160 sqq.) for which not Rhodes but Rhinocorura is in the middle of the earth; but I say that the sphere of Honorius followed the faith of the Old Testament. For what the prophet Daniel says in ch. 7 about the four beasts that come from the four corners of the sky, the lioness, and the bear, and the leopard, and the beast marked with ten horns (7, 2 sqq.): 'these four beasts are four kingdoms that will arise upon the earth' (7, 17), and what the same reports about the empire of the Medes and Persians and of the Greeks

1) But not the one who is called Aethicus, as Partsch wrongly says p. 76, who similarly to Muellenhoff IX 183 considers all these things as mere trifles.