Ibid by H.P. Lovecraft — Read

(". 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 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 Schweinkopf3 to have been Caius Anicius Magnus Furius Camillus Æmilianus Cornelius Valerius Pompeius Julius Ibidus; though Littlewit4 rejects Æmilianus and adds Claudius Decius Junianus; whilst Bêtenoir5 differs radically, giving the full name as Magnus Furius Camillus Aurelius Antoninus Flavius Anicius Petronius Valentinianus Aegidus Ibidus.