C^DMON. 



C^SAR, CAIUS JULIUS. 



10 



after hia friend Ennius, that is, B.C. 168. Caecilius wrote some forty 

 comedies in the Latin language, of which only very brief fragment, 

 remain in the writings of Cicero, Aulus Gellius, and the grammarians. 

 His merit has been variously estimated by the ancients. Cicero (' A< 

 Attic.,' vii. 3) condemns his style as bad, and Quintilian (x. i.) doe 

 not assent to the praises which had been bestowed on him by others. 

 Horace (' Epist.' ii. i. 59, ' De Art. Poet.' 54), on the contrary, praisei 

 him as in some points superior to Plautus and Terence ; and Vulgatiui 

 Sedigitus (in ' AuL Gell.' xv. 24) gives him the highest rank in comedy 

 Many of his plays were imitations of Menander ; and Aulus Gellius 

 (ii. 23) says that when he read them separately they appeared rather 

 pleasing and lively, but that when compared with the Greek originals 

 they were perfectly disgusting. In the same very valuable chapter 

 Aulus Gellius givea a scene from the Plocium (ir\6Kiov, 'necklace') o 

 Csecilius with the scene of Menander from which it is copied. The; 

 differ aa much in brightness, he says, as the arms of Diomed anc 

 Glaucus. (Terence, ' Hec. Prol.' 5.) 



C^EDMON, the father of English song, or the first person of whom 

 we possess any metrical composition in our vernacular language 

 This composition is a kind of ode consisting of no more than eighteen 

 lines, celebrating the praises of the Creator. It is preserved in Alfred's 

 translation of Bede. Bede gives the following account of the pro 

 duction of it, and of the author. Caedmon was in some kind of con 

 nection with the monks of AVhitby : he seems to have had the care 

 of their cattle. It appears to have been the custom of our Saxon 

 forefathers to amuse themselves at the supper hour with improvisatore 

 descants accompanied by the harp, as is still practised at meetings ol 

 the Welsh bards. Caedmon, far from having the gift of song, when 

 the harp pished round among the gitests, was fain as it approached 

 him to shrink away from the assembly and retire to his own house. 

 Once after it had thus happened as he was sleeping at night, some 

 one seemed to say to him, " Caedmon, sing me something ? " He 

 replied, " I cannot sing ;" and he told how his inability to sing had 

 been the cause of his quitting the hall. " Yet thou must sing to me," 

 said the voice ; " What must I sing ? " saH he ; " Sing me the origin 

 of thing*." The subject thus given him, he composed the short ode 

 in question. When he awoke, the words were fast in his mind. 



C'sedmon in the morning told his vision and repeated his song. The 

 effect was that the Abbess Hilda and the learned men whom she had 

 collected round her in her monastery at Whitby believed that he had 

 received from Heaven the gift of song, and when on the morrow he 

 returned with a beautiful poetic paraphrase of a passage of Scripture 

 which they had given him to versify as a test of the reality of hia 

 inspiration, they at once acknowledged the verity, and earnestly 

 besought him to become a member of their company. He continued 

 to receive poetic inspiration, and he composed numerous poems on 

 sacred subjects, which were sung in the abbey for the edification of its 

 inhabitants. Sacred subjects were his delight, and to them he con- 

 fined himself. He continued in the monastery for the remainder of 

 his life, and there he died, as is conjectured, about 630. 



The authenticity of the little poem above mentioned is perhaps 

 unquestionable. But besides this, a very long Saxon poem, which is 

 a metrical paraphrase on parts of the Scriptures, i attributed to 

 Csedmon. An edition of it wns printed at Amsterdam in 1655, under 

 the care of Junius. Hickos expresses doubts whether this poem can 

 be attributed to so early a period as the time of Ciedmon. He thinks 

 he perceives certain Dano-Saxonisms in it which would lead him to 

 refer it to a much later period. It has been again printed with a 

 much more accurate text, by Mr. Thorpe, as a publication by the 

 Society of Antiquaries, London, 8vo, 1832. Mr. Thorpe is of opinion 

 that it is substantially the work of Csedmon, but with some sophisti- 

 cations of a later period, and in this opinion our best Anglo-Saxon 

 scholars appear inclined to coincide. The poem seems to have been 

 popular, and to have been much used in later times by the makers 

 of the mysteries which furnished so much of ths amusement of our 

 ancestors. An attempt has been made to show that the parts 

 respecting the creation and our first parents had been studied by 

 Milton. 



C^ELIUS AURELIA'NUS, the only remaining writer of the sect 

 of the Methodic! in medicine, is believed to have been born at Sicca in 

 Africa. The time when he lived is uncertain ; as neither he nor Galen 

 mention each other, it has been supposed that they were contem- 

 poraries; while others have thought, from the barbarousness of his 

 style, that he must have lived as late as the 5th century. But his 

 African origin as well as the imperfect education which, in common 

 with the majority of the Methodic!, he probably received, will account 

 for his barbarous Latinity, as well as his blunders in Greek. His 

 work, which consists of eight books, three on acute and five on chronic 

 diseases, is a translation into Latin of the writings of Soranus, a Greek 

 physician, of the time of Hadrian, with additions from his own practice 

 and from other authors. 



Cselius Aurelianus appears to have been an observant practitioner, 

 and gives several original cases in medicine as well as surgery. The 

 licsj sect of the Methodic! held a middle place between the dog- 

 matists and the empirics. The dogmatists maintained that the practice 

 of physic must depend upon the theory, and that he who is ignorant 

 the origin of diseases cannot treat them with advantage. The 

 empirics, on the other hand, alleged that medicine depends on expe- 

 Bioo. DIV. VOL. ii. 



rience alone, and that the physician, like the husbandman or the 

 steersman, is formed by practice, not by discussion. The former sect 

 studied anatomy, the latter neglected it. (Celsus, 'deMed.' lib. 1.) 

 The Methodici combined something of the theoretical turn of tha 

 dogmatics with the practical simplicity of the empirics, but it must be 

 owned that they carried this simplicity too far. Thus Themison, their 

 founder, " reduced all diseases to three kinds only, the atriclum, the 

 loxum, and the mixtum ; the last consisting of the strictum in one 

 part of the body, and of the laxum in another. He maintained that 

 it was enough to refer any particular disease to one or other of these 

 three heads, in order to form the proper indications of cure. This easy 

 plan was, by way of eminence, called the Method, and the persons 

 who followed it the Methodics." (Cullen, ' Introductory Lectures, 

 History of Medicine.') 



With them, as with others, theory sometimes succeeded in stifling 

 the best-established practice. Thus the Methodici, not satisfied with 

 banishing specifies from the practice of physic, declared war even 

 against purgatives. These remedies had been denounced by Chrysip- 

 pus, Erasistratus, Asclepiades, and Thessalus ; and Caelius agrees with 

 them. On the whole however Cselius Aurelianus ranks high among 

 the second class of medical writers among those who, though not 

 great discoverers, yet hand down to posterity, with useful additions, 

 the rich inheritance of knowledge which they have received. 



The first editions of Caelius Aurelianus are that of Paris, 1529, folio, 

 containing only the three books on acute diseases, and that of Basel, 

 of the same year and size, containing only the five books on chronic 

 diseases. There is a complete edition by Dalechamp with marginal 

 notes, Lyon, 1567, 8vo. The best edition is that of Almeloveen, 

 Amsterdam, 1722 and 1755. The last complete edition is that of 

 Haller, in two volumes, Svo, 1774. 



(Sprengel, Essai d'une ffiatoire pragmatique de MSdecine; Hist. 

 tradu.it par Geiger, torn. ii. ; Le Clerc, Hittoire de la Mldecine; Haller, 

 Biblioth. Med., vol. ii.) 



C.ESAH (Kaiaap), the cognomen or distinctive family name of a 

 branch of the illustrious Julian gent or house. Various etymologies 

 of the name have been given by Roman writers, but they all seem 

 unsatisfactory, and some of them ridiculous, except that which con- 

 nects it with the word casaries, properly ' the hair of the head.' It 

 was not unusual for the family names among the Romans to be derived 

 from some personal peculiarity : examples of this are Naso, Fronto, 

 Calvus, &c. The Julian gens was one of the oldest patrician houses 

 of Rome, and the branch of it which boro the name of Cuesar deduced 

 its origin from lulus, the son of -<Eneas, and consequently claimed a 

 descent from divine blood. (Sueton. 'Csesar.') The Julian gens is 

 traced back historically to A.U.C. 253, or B.C. 501, but the first person 

 who bore the distinctive family name of Caesar is probably Sextus 

 Julius Caesar, who was quaestor A.u.C. 532, and from Caius Julius 

 Caesar, the dictator, may be traced through five descents. (' Transactions 

 of the Royal Society of Literature,' vol. i. pt. 2.) 



In pursuance of the will of C. J. Caesar, the dictator, Octavius, 

 afterwards the Emperor Augustus, who was the grandson of the 

 dictator's sister, Julia, took the family name of Coesar. Tiberius Nero 

 who was adopted by his stepfather Augustus, also took the name of 

 Caesar. Caligula and Claudius, his successors, were descended from 

 Julia, the dictator's sister ; and in the person of Nero, the successor 

 of Claudius, the family of Caesar became extinct. Nero was removed 

 five descents from Julia, the dictator's sister. [AUGUSTUS.] 



When Hadrian adopted .-Elius Verus, who was thus received into 

 the imperial family, Verus took the name of Caesar. Spartiauus, in 

 bis life of ,/Klius Verus, remarks, " Verus was the first who received 

 the name of Caesar only, and that not by will, as before, but pretty 

 nearly in the same way as in our times (the reign of Diocletian) 

 Uaximianus and Constantius were named Csesars, and thus designated 

 as heirs to the empire." Thus the term Augustus under the later 

 emperors signified the reigning prince, and Csesar or Ca^ares denoted 

 ;he individual or individuals marked out by the emperor's favour as 

 }eing in the line of succession. 



CJ33AR, CA'IUS JU'LIUS, the son of C. J. Cfcsar and Aurelia, was 

 x>rn B.C. 100, on the 12th of Quintilis, afterwards called Julius from 

 .he name of the person of whom we are speaking. His aunt Julia was 

 ;he wife of Caius Marius, who was seven times consul. lu his seven- 

 enth year he married Cornelia, the daughter of China, by whom he 

 lad a daughter, Julia. This connection with Marius and Cinua, the 

 ;wo great opponents of the dictator Sulla, exposed him to the resent- 

 ment of the opposite faction. By Sulla's orders he was deprived of 

 lis wife's dowry and of the fortune which he had inherited by descent, 

 stripped of his office of priest of Jupiter (Flamen Dialis) and 

 compelled to seek safety by flight. (Plut, 'Csesar,' i.; Suetonius, 

 ' Caesar.') Sulla is said to have spared his life with great reluctance, 

 bserving to those who pleaded his cause, that the youth " would be 

 .he ruin of the aristocratic party, for there were many Marii in Csesar." 

 ie first served under M. Thermus in Asia, and distinguished himself 

 it the capture of.Mitylene (B.C. 80 or 79) ; but his reputation suffered 

 >y a report (possibly an unfounded one) of scandalous profligacy 

 luring a visit which he paid to Nicomedes, the king of Bithynia. In 

 he following year he served under Servilius Isauricus in Cilicia. The 

 iew< of Sulla's death soon brought him back to Rome, but ho took 

 o part in the movements of M. ^Emilius Lepidus, who made u 







