Vintage canada edition, 1998 Copyright 1996 by Alberto Manguel

Pensée encyclopédique au Moyen Age (Paris, 1966).
2. Voluspa, ed. Sigurdur Nordal, trans. Ommo Wilts (Oxford, 1980).
3. Virgil, Aeneid, ed. H.R. Fairclough (Cambridge, Mass., & London), VI: 48–49.
4. Petronius, Satyricon, ed. M. Heseltine (Cambridge, Mass., & London, 1967), XV. 48.

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5. Aulus Gellius, Noctes Atticae, ed. J.C. Rolfe (Cambridge, Mass., & London, 1952).
6. Pausanias, Description of Greece, ed. W.H.S. Jones (Cambridge, Mass., & London, 1948), X. 12–1;
Euripides, prologue to Lamia, ed. A.S. Way (Cambridge, Mass., & London, 1965).
7. In The Greek Myths (London, 1955), II. 132.5, Robert Graves notes that “the whereabouts of Erytheia,
also called Erythrea or Erythria, is disputed.” According to Graves, it might be an island beyond the
ocean, or off the coast of Lusitania, or it might be a name given to the island of Leon on which the earliest
city of Gades was built.
8. Pausanias, Description of Greece, X. 12.4–8.
9. Aurelian, Scriptores Historiae Augustae, 25, 4–6, quoted in John Ferguson, Utopias of the Classical
World (London, 1975).
10. Eusebius Pamphilis, Ecclesiastical History: The Life of the Blessed Emperor Constantine, in Four
Books (London, 1845), Ch. XVIII.
11. Ferguson, Utopias of the Classical World.
12. Bernard Botte, Les Origines de la Noël et de l’Épiphanie (Paris, 1932). Despite a reference in the
Liber pontificalis indicating that Pope Telesphorus initiated the celebration of Christmas in Rome between
127 and 136, the first certain mention of December 25 as the date of Christ’s birthday is in the Deposito
martyrum of the Philocalian Calendar of 354.
13. The Edict of Milan, in Henry Bettenson, ed., Documents of the Christian Church (Oxford, 1943).
14. The English novelist Charles Kingsley made the Neoplatonic philosopher the heroine of his now
neglected novel Hypatia, or New Foes with an Old Face (London, 1853).
15. Jacques Lacarrière, Les Hommes ivres de Dieu (Paris, 1975).
16. C. Baur, Der heilige Johannes Chrysostomus und seine Zeit, 2 vols. (Frankfurt, 1929–30).
17. Garth Fowden, Empire to Commonwealth: Consequences of Monotheism in Late Antiquity (Princeton,
1993). Also, see the remarkable Jacques Giès & Monique Cohen, Sérinde, Terre de Bouddha. Dix siècles
d’art sur la Route de la Soie. Catalogue of the exhibition at the Grand Palais, Paris, 1996.
18. J. Daniélou & H.I. Marrou, The Christian Centuries, Vol. I (London, 1964).
19. Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History.
20. Cicero, De Divinatione, ed. W.A. Falconer (Cambridge, Mass., & London, 1972), II. 54.
21. Saint Augustine, The City of God, Vol. VI, ed. W.C. Greene (London & Cambridge, Mass., 1963).
22. Lucien Broche, La Cathédrale de Laon (Paris, 1926).
23. Virgil, “Eclogue IV”, as quoted in Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History.
24. Salman Rushdie, The Wizard of Oz, British Film Institute Film Classics (London, 1992).
25. Anita Desai, “A Reading Rat on the Moors”, in Soho Square III, ed. Alberto Manguel (London, 1990).
26. Aelius Lampridius, Vita Severi Alexandri, 4.6, 14.5, quoted in L.P. Wilkinson, The Roman Experience
(London, 1975).
27. Cf. Helen A. Loane, “The Sortes Vergilianae”, in The Classical Weekly 21/24, New York, Apr. 30, 1928.
Loane quotes De Quincey, according to whom tradition held that the name of Virgil’s maternal
grandfather was Magus. The people of Naples, says De Quincey, mistook the name for a profession and
held that Virgil “had stepped by mere succession and right of inheritance into his wicked old grandpapa’s
infernal powers and knowledge, both of which he exercised for centuries without blame, and for the
benefit of the faithful.” Thomas De Quincey, Collected Writings (London, 1896), III. 251–269.
28. Aelius Spartianus, Vita Hadriani, 2.8, in Scriptores Historiae Augustae, quoted in Loane, “The Sortes
Vergilianae”. Not only Virgil was consulted in this manner. Cicero, writing in the first century BC (De