H.P. Lovecraft - Ibid

H.P. LOVECRAFT

IBID

Written Summer 1928
First published in The O-Wash-Ta-Nong, January 1938

IBID

"... 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
crystallized 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 Romanized Visigoth of
Ataulf's horde who settled in Placentia about 410 A. D. The contrary cannot be
too strongly emphasized; for Von Schweinkopf, and since his time Littlewit [1]
and Bętenoir, [2] have shown with irrefutable force that this strikingly
isolated figure was a genuine Roman—or at least as genuine a Roman as that
degenerate and mongrelized 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 Aemilianus
Cornelius Valerius Pompeius Julius Ibidus; though Littlewit [4] rejects
Aemilianus and adds Claudius Deciusfunianus; whilst Bętenoir [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 honor 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 honors. 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 favor both from Justinianus and
Justinus the Second. The Emperors Tiberius and Maurice did kindly honor 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 honor
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 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, recognizing 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 recognized its value from the half-effaced inscription
carved in Lombardic minuscules (paleography, 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 recognized 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
recognizing 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,
favorite 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!

THE END

Notes

1. Rome and Byzantium: A Study in Survival (Waukesha, 1869), Vol. XX, p. 598.
2. Influences Romaines dans le Moyen Age (Fond du Lac, 1877), Vol. XV, p. 720.
3. Following Procopius, Goth. x.y.z.
4. Following Jornandes, Codex Murat. xxi. 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.