Thurii (Livy, Epit. 12). After the defeat of the Romans by Pyrrhus at Heraclea (280), Fabricius was sent to treat for the ransom and exchange of the prisoners. All attempts to bribe him were unsuccessful, and Pyrrhus is said to have been so impressed that he released the prisoners without ransom (Plutarch, Pyrrhus, 18). The story that Pyrrhus attempted to frighten Fabricius by the sight of an elephant is probably a fiction. In 278 Fabricius was elected consul for the second time, and was successful in negotiating terms of peace with Pyrrhus, who sailed away to Sicily. Fabricius afterwards gained a series of victories over the Samnites, the Lucanians and the Bruttians, and on his return to Rome received the honour of a triumph. Notwithstanding the offices he had filled he died poor, and provision had to be made for his daughter out of the funds of the state (Val. Max. iv. 4, 10). Fabricius was regarded by the Romans of later times as a model of ancient simplicity and incorruptible integrity.
FABRICIUS, GEORG (1516–1571), German poet, historian
and archaeologist, was born at Chemnitz in upper Saxony on
the 23rd of April 1516, and educated at Leipzig. Travelling in
Italy with one of his pupils, he made an exhaustive study of the
antiquities of Rome. He published the results in his Roma (1550),
in which the correspondence between every discoverable relic
of the old city and the references to them in ancient literature
was traced in detail. In 1546 he was appointed rector of the
college of Meissen, where he died on the 17th of July 1571. In
his sacred poems he affected to avoid every word with the slightest
savour of paganism; and he blamed the poets for their allusions
to pagan divinities.
Principal works: editions of Terence (1548) and Virgil (1551); Poëmatum sacrorum libri xxv. (1560); Poëtarum veterum ecclesiasticorum opera Christiana (1562); De Re Poëtica libri septem (1565); Rerum Misnicarum libri septem (1569); (posthumous) Originum illustrissimae stirpis Saxonicae libri septem (1597); Rerum Germaniae magnae et Saxoniae universae memorabilium mirabiliumque volumina duo (1609). A life of Georg Fabricius was published in 1839 by D. C. W. Baumgarten-Crusius, who in 1845 also issued an edition of Fabricius’s Epistolae ad W. Meurerum et alios aequales, with a short sketch De Vita Ge. Fabricii et de gente Fabriciorum; see also F. Wachter in Ersch and Gruber’s Allgemeine Encyclopädie.
FABRICIUS, HIERONYMUS [Fabrizio, Geronimo] (1537–1619),
Italian anatomist and embryologist, was surnamed
Acquapendente from the episcopal city of that name, where he
was born in 1537. At Padua, after a course of philosophy, he
studied medicine under G. Fallopius, whose successor as teacher
of anatomy and surgery he became in 1562. From the senators
of Venice he received numerous honours, and an anatomical
theatre was built by them for his accommodation. He died at
Venice on the 21st of May 1619. His works include De visione,
voce et auditu (1600), De formato foetu (1600), De venarum
ostiolis (1603), De formatione ovi et pulli (1621). His collected
works were published at Leipzig in 1687 as Opera omnia Anatomica
et Physiologica, but the Leiden edition, published by
Albinus in 1738, is preferred as containing a life of the author
and the prefaces of his treatises. (See Anatomy; Embryology.)
FABRICIUS, JOHANN ALBERT (1668–1736), German classical
scholar and bibliographer, was born at Leipzig on the 11th of
November 1668. His father, Werner Fabricius, director of music
in the church of St Paul at Leipzig, was the author of several
works, the most important being Deliciae Harmonicae (1656).
The son received his early education from his father, who on his
death-bed recommended him to the care of the theologian
Valentin Alberti. He studied under J. G. Herrichen, and afterwards
at Quedlinburg under Samuel Schmid. It was in Schmid’s
library, as he afterwards said, that he found the two books,
F. Barth’s Adversaria and D. G. Morhof’s Polyhistor Literarius,
which suggested to him the idea of his Bibliothecae, the works on
which his great reputation was founded. Having returned to
Leipzig in 1686, he published anonymously (two years later)
his first work, Scriptorum recentiorum decas, an attack on ten
writers of the day. His Decas Decadum, sive plagiariorum et
pseudonymorum centuria (1689) is the only one of his works to
which he signs the name Faber. He then applied himself to the
study of medicine, which, however, he relinquished for that
of theology; and having gone to Hamburg in 1693, he proposed
to travel abroad, when the unexpected tidings that the expense
of his education had absorbed his whole patrimony, and even left
him in debt to his trustee, forced him to abandon his project.
He therefore remained at Hamburg in the capacity of librarian
to J. F. Mayer. In 1696 he accompanied his patron to Sweden;
and on his return to Hamburg, not long afterwards, he became
a candidate for the chair of logic and philosophy. The suffrages
being equally divided between Fabricius and Sebastian Edzardus,
one of his opponents, the appointment was decided by lot in
favour of Edzardus; but in 1699 Fabricius succeeded Vincent
Placcius in the chair of rhetoric and ethics, a post which he held
till his death, refusing invitations to Greifswald, Kiel, Giessen
and Wittenberg. He died at Hamburg on the 30th of April 1736.
Fabricius is credited with 128 books, but very many of them were only books which he had edited. One of the most famed and laborious of these is the Bibliotheca Latina (1697, republished in an improved and amended form by J. A. Ernesti, 1773). The divisions of the compilation are—the writers to the age of Tiberius; thence to that of the Antonines; and thirdly, to the decay of the language; a fourth gives fragments from old authors, and chapters on early Christian literature. A supplementary work was Bibliotheca Latina mediae et infimae Aetatis (1734–1736; supplementary volume by C. Schöttgen, 1746; ed. Mansi, 1754). His chef-d’œuvre, however, is the Bibliotheca Graeca (1705–1728, revised and continued by G. C. Harles, 1790–1812), a work which has justly been denominated maximus antiquae eruditionis thesaurus. Its divisions are marked off by Homer, Plato, Christ, Constantine, and the capture of Constantinople in 1453, while a sixth section is devoted to canon law, jurisprudence and medicine. Of his remaining works we may mention:—Bibliotheca Antiquaria, an account of the writers whose works illustrated Hebrew, Greek, Roman and Christian antiquities (1713); Centifolium Lutheranum, a Lutheran bibliography (1728); Bibliotheca Ecclesiastica (1718). His Codex Apocryphus (1703) is still considered indispensable as an authority on apocryphal Christian literature.
The details of the life of Fabricius are to be found in De Vita et Scriptis J. A. Fabricii Commentarius, by his son-in-law, H. S. Reimarus, the well-known editor of Dio Cassius, published at Hamburg, 1737; see also C. F. Bähr in Ersch and Gruber’s Allgemeine Encyclopädie, and J. E. Sandys, Hist. Class. Schol. iii. (1908).
FABRICIUS, JOHANN CHRISTIAN (1745–1808), Danish
entomologist and economist, was born at Tondern in Schleswig
on the 7th of January 1745. After studying at Altona and
Copenhagen, he was sent to Upsala, where he attended the
lectures of Linnaeus. He devoted his attention professionally
to political economy, and, after lecturing on that subject in 1769,
was appointed in 1775 professor of natural history, economy
and finance at Kiel, in which capacity he wrote various works,
chiefly referring to Denmark, and of no special interest. He
also published a few other works on general and natural history,
botany and travel (including Reise nach Norwegen, 1779), and,
although his professional stipend was small, he extended his
personal researches into every town in northern and central
Europe where a natural history museum was to be found.
It is as an entomologist that his memory survives, and for many
years his great scientific reputation rested upon the system of
classification which he founded upon the structure of the mouth-organs
instead of the wings. He had a keen eye for specific
differences, and possessed the art of terse and accurate description.
He died on the 3rd of March 1808.
A complete list of his entomological publications (31) will be found in Hagen’s Bibliotheca Entomologiae; the following are the chief:—Systema Entomologiae (1775); Genera Insectorum (1776); Philosophia Entomologica (1778); Species insectorum (1781); Mantissa Insectorum (1787); Entomologia Systematica (1792–1794), with a supplement (1798); Systema Eleutheratorum (1801), Rhyngotorum (1803), Piezatorum (1804), and Antliatorum (1805). Full particulars of his life will be found, with a portrait, in the Transactions of the Entomological Society of London (1845), 4, pp. i-xvi, where his autobiography is translated from the Danish.
FABRIZI, NICOLA (1804–1885), Italian patriot, was born at
Modena on the 4th of April 1804. He took part in the Modena
insurrection of 1831, and attempted to succour Ancona, but was
arrested at sea and taken to Toulon, whence he proceeded to
Marseilles. Afterwards he organized with Mazzini the ill-fated
Savoy expedition. Taking refuge in Spain, he fought against the
Carlists, and was decorated for valour on the battlefield (18th
July 1837). At the end of the Carlist War he established a
