allusions to the Holy Inquisition. Baldauf's study of the "ancient" poetry in Volume 4 demonstrates that many "ancient" poets wrote rhymed verse resembling that of the mediaeval troubadours. Baldauf is convinced that the verse of Horace is of mediaeval origin, pointing out German and Italian influences inherent in his Latin. Furthermore, Baldauf points out such pronounced parallels between the poetry of Horace and Ovid (who were presumably unaware of each other's existence) that one becomes convinced that the works of both belong to a third party – apparently, a much later author - a fact most philologists explain by the fact that Roman literature was heavily influenced by Greek models and especially Homer's writings and the motives used in the Ilias and the Odysee have marked all occidental literature until today. Baldauf sums up his research in the following words: "Our Romans and Greeks have been Italian humanists." All of them – Homer, Sophocles, Aristotle and many other "ancient" authors, so different in our perception, hail from the same century, the fourteenth and fifteenth of the Italian renaissance. Baldauf avers that the entire history of the Ancient Greeks and Romans—likewise the Biblical "history," which correlates with the above to some extent—was conceived and introduced by the Italian humanists, as well as their colleagues and followers from other countries. Humanism, he says, has given us a whole fantasy world of antiquity and the Bible, as well as the early Middle Ages, which Baldauf also considered an invention of the humanist writers. This fictional history, initially drafted on parchment, was carved in stone and cast in metal; it "has rooted itself in our perception to such an extent that no positivist criticisms can make humanity doubt its veracity." Legacy Some of his ideas have been readopted by other historians that doubt the historical chronology of the Antiquity and the Middle Ages, while all "mainstream" historians consider them valueless and argue that inventing 3000 years of history, its written accounts, literature, poetry etc. and destroying all the traces of this fraud was a work one generation of writers could never fulfill. The enormous expenditure of work this fraud would have needed makes these theories much more improbable than the coincidence in the literary works pointed out by Baldauf (according to the scientific principle of Occam's razor). Contemporaries of Baldauf Edwin Johnson contributed to the same results. Yet they only aroused some limited interest