THE LIFE OF SOLINUS EDITED

BY IOANNES CAMERS.

In what age Julius Solinus flourished, nothing certain has been handed down by the more expert. I would believe that this happened because the monuments of those who wrote after him perished almost entirely, as barbarians laid waste to everything. I marvel that the obscure writer of the Supplement to the Chronicles has otherwise claimed that this Solinus flourished in the times of Augustus Caesar, to whom he also records that he dedicated his Polyhistor. For it is established that Solinus mentions the Emperor Vespasian in this work. Moreover, from the calculation of the years between the two Caesars, it is evident that Solinus could not have dedicated his work to Augustus and reported the deeds of Caesar Vespasian. Furthermore, Solinus mentions Suetonius Paulinus, whom Pliny testifies he saw. Added to this is the fact that Solinus drew almost everything from the Plinian fount, yet when writing these things, he asks his friend for pardon for his infancy at the beginning of the work. But since he nowhere mentions Pliny, through whom he thrived, I suspect that Solinus wrote this little work while Pliny was still alive; from this it perhaps happened that he did not mention the living author. By a similar reasoning, it could have happened that Pliny never recounted the name of Dioscorides, a writer of the same time as himself, although it is known that Pliny transferred countless things from him into his own work. The same fault could be imputed to Dioscorides (for which of the two stole from whom could be found in Ammonius) if he, having suppressed the mention of Pliny, had pilfered so much from him. Those who have written most exquisitely about the life and morals of Xenophon and Plato, and many other things about them, report that neither Plato inserted the name of Xenophon, nor conversely Xenophon that of Plato, into the many volumes of either, although both were disciples of Socrates.

These are, believe me, the ways of envy,
That a reader so rarely loves his own times.

The true sentiment of Naso (Ovid).

Envy feeds upon the living, it rests after death.

What of Macrobius, who often [copied] entire pages from Gellius: of Placidus, who [copied] from Servius: of Acron, who [copied] from Porphyrio? What of six hundred others who attributed everything to themselves word-for-word in long commentaries, suppressing the authors from whom they had taken them? No one doubts that Aulus Gellius, the delight of the Latin language, profited greatly from the reading of Livy, yet he did not wish Titus Livius, by far the prince of Latin historians, to be a participant in his Attic Nights. Nor do I agree with the opinion of some who think that Solinus had no mention of Pliny in the hope that Pliny's copies would perish utterly, and thus his own collectanea would stand alone, and in time his thefts could not be discerned by anyone—the mind with which Florus and Justin are believed to have labored. Would that this were the only cause of the loss of so many good authors; there would exist today the monuments of Cato (not to mention the Greeks for the moment), Varro, Nigidius, Sallust, Hyginus, Celsus, Ennius, Furius, Varius, Actius, Ne-