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object:1f.lovecraft - Ibid
author class:H P Lovecraft
subject class:Fiction
genre class:Horror
class:chapter


(“. . . as Ibid says in his famous Lives of the Poets.”
—From a student theme.)
The erroneous idea that Ibid is the author of the Lives is so
frequently met with, even among those pretending to a degree of
culture, that it is worth correcting. It should be a matter of general
knowledge that Cf. is responsible for this work. Ibid’s masterpiece, on
the other hand, was the famous Op. Cit. wherein all the significant
undercurrents of Graeco-Roman expression were crystallised once for
all—and with admirable acuteness, notwithstanding the surprisingly late
date at which Ibid wrote. There is a false report—very commonly
reproduced in modern books prior to Von Schweinkopf’s monumental
Geschichte der Ostrogothen in Italien—that Ibid was a Romanised
Visigoth of Ataulf’s horde who settled in Placentia about 410 A.D. The
contrary cannot be too strongly emphasised; for Von Schweinkopf, and
since his time Littlewit^1 and Bêtenoir,^2 have shewn with irrefutable
force that this strikingly isolated figure was a genuine Roman—or at
least as genuine a Roman as that degenerate and mongrelised age could
produce—of whom one might well say what Gibbon said of Boethius, “that
he was the last whom Cato or Tully could have acknowledged for their
countryman.” He was, like Boethius and nearly all the eminent men of
his age, of the great Anician family, and traced his genealogy with
much exactitude and self-satisfaction to all the heroes of the
republic. His full name—long and pompous according to the custom of an
age which had lost the trinomial simplicity of classic Roman
nomenclature—is stated by Von Schweinkopf^3 to have been Caius Anicius
Magnus Furius Camillus Æmilianus Cornelius Valerius Pompeius Julius
Ibidus; though Littlewit^4 rejects Æmilianus and adds Claudius Decius
Junianus; whilst Bêtenoir^5 differs radically, giving the full name as
Magnus Furius Camillus Aurelius Antoninus Flavius Anicius Petronius
Valentinianus Aegidus Ibidus.
The eminent critic and biographer was born in the year 486, shortly
after the extinction of the Roman rule in Gaul by Clovis. Rome and
Ravenna are rivals for the honour of his birth, though it is certain
that he received his rhetorical and philosophical training in the
schools of Athens—the extent of whose suppression by Theodosius a
century before is grossly exaggerated by the superficial. In 512, under
the benign rule of the Ostrogoth Theodoric, we behold him as a teacher
of rhetoric at Rome, and in 516 he held the consulship together with
Pompilius Numantius Bombastes Marcellinus Deodamnatus. Upon the death
of Theodoric in 526, Ibidus retired from public life to compose his
celebrated work (whose pure Ciceronian style is as remarkable a case of
classic atavism as is the verse of Claudius Claudianus, who flourished
a century before Ibidus); but he was later recalled to scenes of pomp
to act as court rhetorician for Theodatus, nephew of Theodoric.
Upon the usurpation of Vitiges, Ibidus fell into disgrace and was for a
time imprisoned; but the coming of the Byzantine-Roman army under
Belisarius soon restored him to liberty and honours. Throughout the
siege of Rome he served bravely in the army of the defenders, and
afterward followed the eagles of Belisarius to Alba, Porto, and
Centumcellae. After the Frankish siege of Milan, Ibidus was chosen to
accompany the learned Bishop Datius to Greece, and resided with him at
Corinth in the year 539. About 541 he removed to Constantinopolis,
where he received every mark of imperial favour both from Justinianus
and Justinus the Second. The Emperors Tiberius and Maurice did kindly
honour to his old age, and contributed much to his
immortality—especially Maurice, whose delight it was to trace his
ancestry to old Rome notwithstanding his birth at Arabiscus, in
Cappadocia. It was Maurice who, in the poet’s 101st year, secured the
adoption of his work as a textbook in the schools of the empire, an
honour which proved a fatal tax on the aged rhetorician’s emotions,
since he passed away peacefully at his home near the church of St.
Sophia on the sixth day before the Kalends of September, A.D. 587, in
the 102nd year of his age.
His remains, notwithstanding the troubled state of Italy, were taken to
Ravenna for interment; but being interred in the suburb of Classe, were
exhumed and ridiculed by the Lombard Duke of Spoleto, who took his
skull to King Autharis for use as a wassail-bowl. Ibid’s skull was
proudly handed down from king to king of the Lombard line. Upon the
capture of Pavia by Charlemagne in 774, the skull was seized from the
tottering Desiderius and carried in the train of the Frankish
conqueror. It was from this vessel, indeed, that Pope Leo administered
the royal unction which made of the hero-nomad a Holy Roman Emperor.
Charlemagne took Ibid’s skull to his capital at Aix, soon afterward
presenting it to his Saxon teacher Alcuin, upon whose death in 804 it
was sent to Alcuin’s kinsfolk in England.
William the Conqueror, finding it in an abbey niche where the pious
family of Alcuin had placed it (believing it to be the skull of a
saint^6 who had miraculously annihilated the Lombards by his prayers),
did reverence to its osseous antiquity; and even the rough soldiers of
Cromwell, upon destroying Ballylough Abbey in Ireland in 1650 (it
having been secretly transported thither by a devout Papist in 1539,
upon Henry VIII’s dissolution of the English monasteries), declined to
offer violence to a relic so venerable.
It was captured by the private soldier Read-’em-and-Weep Hopkins, who
not long after traded it to Rest-in-Jehovah Stubbs for a quid of new
Virginia weed. Stubbs, upon sending forth his son Zerubbabel to seek
his fortune in New England in 1661 (for he thought ill of the
Restoration atmosphere for a pious young yeoman), gave him St.
Ibid’s—or rather Brother Ibid’s, for he abhorred all that was
Popish—skull as a talisman. Upon landing in Salem Zerubbabel set it up
in his cupboard beside the chimney, he having built a modest house near
the town pump. However, he had not been wholly unaffected by the
Restoration influence; and having become addicted to gaming, lost the
skull to one Epenetus Dexter, a visiting freeman of Providence.
It was in the house of Dexter, in the northern part of the town near
the present intersection of North Main and Olney Streets, on the
occasion of Canonchet’s raid of March 30, 1676, during King Philip’s
War; and the astute sachem, recognising it at once as a thing of
singular venerableness and dignity, sent it as a symbol of alliance to
a faction of the Pequots in Connecticut with whom he was negotiating.
On April 4 he was captured by the colonists and soon after executed,
but the austere head of Ibid continued on its wanderings.
The Pequots, enfeebled by a previous war, could give the now stricken
Narragansetts no assistance; and in 1680 a Dutch fur-trader of Albany,
Petrus van Schaack, secured the distinguished cranium for the modest
sum of two guilders, he having recognised its value from the
half-effaced inscription carved in Lombardic minuscules (palaeography,
it might be explained, was one of the leading accomplishments of
New-Netherland fur-traders of the seventeenth century).
[ibid.gif]
From van Schaack, sad to say, the relic was stolen in 1683 by a French
trader, Jean Grenier, whose Popish zeal recognised the features of one
whom he had been taught at his mother’s knee to revere as St. Ibide.
Grenier, fired with virtuous rage at the possession of this holy symbol
by a Protestant, crushed van Schaack’s head one night with an axe and
escaped to the north with his booty; soon, however, being robbed and
slain by the half-breed voyageur Michel Savard, who took the
skull—despite the illiteracy which prevented his recognising it—to add
to a collection of similar but more recent material.
Upon his death in 1701 his half-breed son Pierre traded it among other
things to some emissaries of the Sacs and Foxes, and it was found
outside the chief’s tepee a generation later by Charles de Langlade,
founder of the trading post at Green Bay, Wisconsin. De Langlade
regarded this sacred object with proper veneration and ransomed it at
the expense of many glass beads; yet after his time it found itself in
many other hands, being traded to settlements at the head of Lake
Winnebago, to tribes around Lake Mendota, and finally, early in the
nineteenth century, to one Solomon Juneau, a Frenchman, at the new
trading post of Milwaukee on the Menominee River and the shore of Lake
Michigan.
Later traded to Jacques Caboche, another settler, it was in 1850 lost
in a game of chess or poker to a newcomer named Hans Zimmerman; being
used by him as a beer-stein until one day, under the spell of its
contents, he suffered it to roll from his front stoop to the prairie
path before his home—where, falling into the burrow of a prairie-dog,
it passed beyond his power of discovery or recovery upon his awaking.
So for generations did the sainted skull of Caius Anicius Magnus Furius
Camillus Æmilianus Cornelius Valerius Pompeius Julius Ibidus, consul of
Rome, favourite of emperors, and saint of the Romish church, lie hidden
beneath the soil of a growing town. At first worshipped with dark rites
by the prairie-dogs, who saw in it a deity sent from the upper world,
it afterward fell into dire neglect as the race of simple, artless
burrowers succumbed before the onslaught of the conquering Aryan.
Sewers came, but they passed by it. Houses went up—2303 of them, and
more—and at last one fateful night a titan thing occurred. Subtle
Nature, convulsed with a spiritual ecstasy, like the froth of that
region’s quondam beverage, laid low the lofty and heaved high the
humble—and behold! In the roseal dawn the burghers of Milwaukee rose to
find a former prairie turned to a highland! Vast and far-reaching was
the great upheaval. Subterrene arcana, hidden for years, came at last
to the light. For there, full in the rifted roadway, lay bleached and
tranquil in bland, saintly, and consular pomp the dome-like skull of
Ibid!
[NOTES]
^1 Rome and Byzantium: A Study in Survival (Waukesha, 1869), Vol. XX,
p. 598.
^2 Influences Romains dans le Moyen Age (Fond du Lac, 1877), Vol. XV,
p. 720.
^3 Following Procopius, Goth. x.y.z.
^4 Following Jornandes, Codex Murat. xxj. 4144.
^5 After Pagi, 50–50.
^6 Not till the appearance of von Schweinkopf’s work in 1797 were St.
Ibid and the rhetorician properly re-identified.
Return to “Ibid”


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