403), a summary of sacred history from the beginning of the world to his own times, with the omission of the events recorded in the Gospels and the Acts, "lest the form of his brief work should detract from the honour due to those events". It is a source of primary importance for the history of Priscillianism and contains considerable information respecting the Arian controversy. The book was a textbook, and was used as such in the schools of Europe for about a century and a half after the editio princeps was published by Flacius Illyricus in 1556. Severus nowhere clearly points to the class of readers for whom his book is designed. He disclaims the intention of making his work a substitute for the actual narrative contained in the Bible. "Worldly historians" had been used by him, he says, to make clear the dates and the connexion of events and for supplementing the sacred sources, and with the intent at once to instruct the unlearned and to "convince" the learned. Probably the "unlearned" are the mass of Christians and the learned are the cultivated Christians and pagans alike, to whom the rude language of the sacred texts, whether in Greek or Latin, would be distasteful. The literary structure of the narrative shows that Severus had in his mind principally readers on the same level of culture with himself. He was anxious to show that sacred history might be presented in a form which lovers of Sallust and Tacitus could appreciate and enjoy. The style is lucid, almost classical. In order that his work might fairly stand beside that of the old Latin writers, Severus ignored the allegorical approach to interpreting sacred history that had been favoured by both heretics and the orthodox of his age. As an authority on the period prior to his own, Severus offers few guarantees and rarely corrects or supplements the historical record transmitted thanks to other sources. Jakob Bernays suggested that he based his narrative of the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus on the account given by Tacitus in his Histories, a portion of which has been lost. In his allusions to the Gentile rulers with whom the Jews came into contact from the time of the Maccabees onwards, Severus discloses some points which are not without importance. The real interest of Severus' work lies, first, in the incidental glimpses it affords all through