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 during that Caesar's reign, especially as no trace is found of his work later. Kornemann then invents a new name for our old friend Marius Maximus, and calls him, with some further show of scholarship, one Lollius Urbicus, a theory which still only interests Kornemann. Heer in 1901 had given him a certain support, however, in refusing to believe that any one could have credited Maximus with any part in the chronological side of the lives, and Schulz in his Life of Hadrian adopted the same view, assigning the references to Maximus to a later hand. It was Peter who, in 1905, asked pertinently why Maximus should be ousted from the authorship of the chronological source in favour of an unknown contemporary, though he admitted, with some freedom, that many of the citations from Maximus stood in passages of questionable value, or seem to have been thrust into the text.

In 1899 Tropea of Padua published a treatise on the general literature of the S.H.A., in which he shows that the aim of the collection was political, and in the interest of the reigning house; in consequence of which he postulates that it is either falsified in fact, or wholly fabricated in the sense that Czwalina had already suggested. Tropea was followed by his pupil Pasciucco, who examined the life of Elagabalus in detail in 1905. The result of this examination was to show that Lampridius had not only failed to examine his sources of information, but had exhibited a singular lack of order and