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 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 Aemilianus Cornelius Valerius
Pompeius Julius Ibidus; though Littlewit4 rejects Aemilianus and adds Claudius
Deciusfunianus; whilst Bêtenoir5 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
Ibid
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 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
Ibid
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
Ibid
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.
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.