9. ... [The hexameter] excels the rest of the metres in authority, being alone of them all fitted as well to the greatest tasks as to the small, and with an equal capacity for sweetness and delight.... It is also older than the other metres. It is proved that Moses was the first to use it in the song of Deuteronomy, long before Pherecydes and Homer. Whence also it is evident that the making of poems was older among the Hebrews than among the nations. Since Job, too, who goes back as far as Moses, sang in hexameter verse, [using] the dactyl and the spondee.
12. Hecataeus of Miletus is said to have been the first among the Greeks to compose this metre; or, as others think, Pherecydes of Syros, and this metre before Homer was called Pythian, after Homer, heroic.
17. It is manifest that David the prophet was the first to compose and sing hymns in praise of God. Later among the nations Timothoe who (quae) lived in the time of Ennius, long after David, wrote the first hymns in honor of Apollo and the Muses. Hymni is translated from the Greek to the Latin as laudes.
25. Among grammarians they are wont to be called centones who [take] from the poems of Homer and Virgil with a view to their own works, and put together in patchwork fashion many bits found here and there to suit each subject.
26. Proba, wife of Adelphos, composed at great length a cento from Virgil about the structure of the universe and the gospels,[189] the subject-matter being made up verse by verse, and the verses being arranged appropriately to suit the subject-matter. And a certain Pomponius, among other poems (otia) of his own pen, wrote Tityrus from the same poet in honor of Christ.
Chapter 41. On history.
1. History is the story of what has been done, and by its means what has taken place in the past is perceived. It is called in the Greek historia, ἀπὸ τοῦ ἱστορεῖν, that is from seeing (videre) and learning (cognoscere). For among the ancients no one wrote history unless he had been present and witnessed what was to be described. For we understand what we see better than we do what we gather by hearsay.
2. For what is seen is told without lying. This discipline belongs to grammar because whatever is worth remembering is entrusted to letters....
Chapter 42. On the first writers of history.
1. Moses was the first among us to write a history of the beginning of the world. Among the nations Dares Phrygius was the first to publish a history of the Greeks and Trojans, which they say was written by him on palm-leaves.