other · 480 · Marseille
Jerome's De Viris Illustribus made a canon by making a list, and it stopped almost a century before Gennadius sat down at Marseille to continue it. What he produced is not a work of art and was never meant to be: it is a catalogue, mostly of Gauls, Africans and easterners, chapter after chapter of who wrote what and whether it is any good. Its value is exactly its plainness. He says which books he has read himself and which he only knows of, he notes when a text is disputed, and he records small facts nobody else bothered with — that most of Vincent's second book was stolen, that Salvian was alive and old when he wrote. He is a semi-Pelagian in sympathy, and it shows in whom he praises. This dataset added him as a source at seed 170 and has leaned on him repeatedly since: four of the six people refined in this batch, including two whose only contemporary notice he is.
Jerome stopped listing Christian writers in 393. Who is worth reading since?
About a hundred chapters, by a man who had read most of them.