LAMBINUS, DIONYSIUS, the Latinized name of Denis Lambin (1520-1572), French classical scholar, born at Montreuil-sur-mer in Picardy. Having devoted several years to classical studies during a residence in Italy, he was invited to Paris in 1650 to fill the professorship of Latin in the Collège de France, which he soon afterwards exchanged for that of Greek. His lectures were frequently interrupted by his ill-health and the religious disturbances of the time. His death (September 1572) is said to have been caused by his apprehension that he might share the fate of his friend Peter Ramus (Pierre de la Ramée), who had been killed in the massacre of St Bartholomew. Lambinus was one of the greatest scholars of his age, and his editions of classical authors are still useful. In textual criticism he was a conservative, but by no means a slavish one; indeed, his opponents accused him of rashness in emendation. His chief defect is that he refers vaguely to his MSS. without specifying the source of his readings, so that their relative importance cannot be estimated. But his commentaries, with their wealth of illustration and parallel passages, are a mine of information. In the opinion of the best scholars, he preserved the happy mean in his annotations, although his own countrymen have coined the word lambiner to express trifling and diffuseness.
His chief editions are: Horace (1561); Lucretius (1564), on which see H. A. J. Munro’s preface to his edition; Cicero (1566); Cornelius Nepos (1569); Demosthenes (1570), completing the unfinished work of Guillaume Morel; Plautus (1576).
See Peter Lazer, De Dionysio Lambino narratio, printed in Orelli’s Onomasticon Tullianum (i. 1836), and Trium disertissimorum virorum praefationes ac epistolae familiares aliquot: Mureti, Lambini, Regii (Paris, 1579); also Sandys, Hist. of Classical Scholarship (1908, ii. 188), and A. Horawitz in Ersch and Gruber’s Allgemeine Encyclopädie.
LAMBOURN, a market town in the Newbury parliamentary division of Berkshire, England, 65 m. W. of London, the terminus of the Lambourn Valley light railway from Newbury. Pop. (1901) 2071. It lies high up the narrow valley of the Lambourn, a tributary of the Kennet famous for its trout-fishing, among the Berkshire Downs. The church of St Michael is cruciform and principally late Norman, but has numerous additions of later periods and has been considerably altered by modern restoration. The inmates of an almshouse founded by John Estbury, c. 1500, by his desire still hold service daily at his tomb in the church. A Perpendicular market-cross stands without the church. The town has agricultural trade, but its chief importance is derived from large training stables in the neighbourhood. To the north of the town is a large group of tumuli known as the Seven Barrows, ascertained by excavation to be a British burial-place.
LAMECH למך, the biblical patriarch, appears in each of the antediluvian genealogies, Gen. iv. 16-24 J., and Gen. v. P. In the former he is a descendant of Cain, and through his sons the author of primitive civilization; in the latter he is the father of Noah. But it is now generally held that these two genealogies are variant adaptations of the Babylonian list of primitive kings (see [Enoch]). It is doubtful whether Lamech is to be identified with the name of any one of these kings; he may have been introduced into the genealogy from another tradition.
In the older narrative in Gen. iv. Lamech’s family are the originators of various advances in civilization; he himself is the first to marry more than one wife, ‘Adah (“ornament,” perhaps specially “dawn”) and Zillah (“shadow”). He has three sons Jabal, Jubal, and Tubal, the last-named qualified by the addition of Cain (= “smith”[1]). The assonance of these names is probably intentional, cf. the brothers Hasan and Hosein of early Mahommedan history. Jabal institutes the life of nomadic shepherds, Jubal is the inventor of music, Tubal-Cain the first smith. Jabal and Jubal may be forms of a root used in Hebrew and Phoenician for ram and ram’s horn (i.e. trumpet), and underlying our “jubilee.” Tubal may be the eponymous ancestor of the people of that name mentioned in Ezekiel in connexion with “vessels of bronze.”[2] All three names are sometimes derived from יבל in the sense of offspring, so that they would be three different words for “son,” and there are numerous other theories as to their etymology. Lamech has also a daughter Naamah (“gracious,” “pleasant,” “comely”; cf. No’mân, a name of the deity Adonis). This narrative clearly intends to account for the origin of these various arts as they existed in the narrator’s time; it is not likely that he thought of these discoveries as separated from his own age by a universal flood; nor does the tone of the narrative suggest that the primitive tradition thought of these pioneers of civilization as members of an accursed family. Probably the passage was originally independent of the document which told of Cain and Abel and of the Flood; Jabal may be a variant of Abel. An ancient poem is connected with this genealogy:
| “Adah and Zillah, hear my voice; Ye wives of Lamech, give ear unto my speech. I slay a man for a wound, A young man for a stroke; For Cain’s vengeance is sevenfold, But Lamech’s seventy-fold and seven.” |