Note 145 — GOMES EANNES DE AZURARA; (continued 3)

(p. 183). Paulus Orosius.—[Here we must note the omission of the name of Diodorus Siculus among the authors cited by Azurara, especially as he is, among all the ancient historians, the one who has left us the most important and circumstantial account of the Nile. The first Latin version of Diodorus by Poggio only appeared in 1472, nineteen years after Azurara had finished this chronicle. The works of Orosius were held in high estimation among the learned of the Middle Ages. This writer was born at Braga in Lusitania, agreeably to the opinion of some authors. (See Fr. Leam de St. Thomas, bened. lusit. I, ii, p. 308; and Baronius, an. 414.) His work, Historiarum adversus Paganos, which begins with the creation of the world and comes down to the year 316 of Jesus Christ, was printed for the first time in 1471, that is, eighteen years after Azurara had finished his Chronicle, but during the Middle Ages copies of this work were so multiplied that even in England the book was to be found in the hands of the Anglo-Saxon people (see Wright, Essay on the State of Literature and Learning under the Anglo-Saxons, p. 39), a detail which affords one proof the more of the literary relations between the Spanish peninsula, and the peoples and nations of the North in the first centuries of the Middle Ages.]—S. See Dawn of Modern Geography, pp. 353-5.