Aethicus Ister

Aethicus Ister (Aethicus of Istria) was the protagonist of the 7th/8th-century Cosmographia written by a man of church Hieronymus. It describes the travels of Aethicus around the world, and includes descriptions of foreign peoples in usually less than favourable terms. There are also numerous passages which deal directly with the legends of Alexander the Great.

In terms of sources, the Bible and Isidore of Seville (d. 636) form the lion's share of Pseudo-Jerome's allusions. It was once argued that Hieronymus work had provided source material for Isidore, but this was disproven by Dalche (1984). These sources, and the others, are presented in a very paraphrased form and are rarely made reference to directly. The work is also filled with many fictional sources, which makes Hieronymus similar to Virgilius Maro Grammaticus, an Irish pseudo-grammarian of the 7th century. Whether there is any relationship between the two has been considered by Herren (1994) but the evidence is not conclusive in proving a certain, direct connexion between the authors.

The title "Aethici Cosmographia" was first incorrectly given a work published 1575 by Josias Simmler and later by Grovonis 1696. The text has some identical geographic observations but the framing is completely different, in this case more of name in lists. It has been supposed that the writer is Julius Honores (even later called Psudeo-Aethicus) mentioned by Cassiodorus in "Institutiones divinarum et saecularium litterarum(25)" as Julius Honorius Crator.

The Latin of the work is sometimes vulgar and facile, other times cryptic and opaque, owing in part to Hieronymus's extremely difficult vocabulary of Graecisms and Latin/Greek compounds. (See Herren, 2001). Anagram games, and etymological 'jokes' (e.g. using the verb 'monstrare' followed by the noun 'monstrum', then the verb 'demonstrare') and other ludic elements are found throughout. The Latin spelling of the work seems to suggest also that the author was a Merovingian Frank (Prinz, 1993), but the idea of "Merovingian" spellings has recently been attacked as an unreliable measure of origin. Furthermore, only one manuscript of the work appears to have been written in Tours, while the majority can been traced to centres in what is now Germany (Prinz, 1993).

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