H.P. Lovecraft. Ibid
Ibid
by H. P. Lovecraft
"...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 Littlewit1 and Betenoir,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 Schweinkopf3 to have been Caius Anicius Magnus Furius Camillus
Aemilianus Cornelius Valerius Pompeius Julius Ibidus; though Littlewit4
rejects Aemilianus and adds Claudius Deciusfunianus; whilst Betenoir5
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 after- ward 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 saint6 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 VII'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 furtrader 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).
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 Aemilianus 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 clans le Moyen Age (Fond du Lac, 1877), Vol. XV, p.
720.
3Following Procopius, Goth. x.y.z.
4Following Jornandes, Codex Murat. xxj. 4144.
5After Pagi, 50-50.
6Not till the appearance of von Schweinkopf's work in 1797 were St. Ibid
and the rhetorician properly re-identified.
