Page:EB1911 - Volume 18.djvu/672

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642
MODERATOR—MODJESKA
  

is some 15 to 20 ft. below the modern town. Its vineyards and potteries are mentioned by Pliny, the latter doing a considerable export trade. Its territory was coterminous with that of Bononia and Regium, as its diocese is now, and to the south it seems to have extended to the summit of the Apennines. During the civil wars Marcus Brutus, the lieutenant of Lepidus, held out within its walls against Pompeius in 78 B.C., and in 44 B.C. the place was successfully defended by D. Brutus against Mark Antony for four months. The 4th century found Mutina in a state of decay; the ravages of Attila and the troubles of the Lombard period left it a ruined city in a wasted land. In the 7th century, perhaps owing to a terrible inundation[1] its exiles founded, at a distance of 4 m. to the north-west, a new city, Città Geminiana (still represented by the village of Cittanova); but about the close of the 9th century Modena was restored and refortified by its bishop, Ludovicus. When it began to build its cathedral (A.D. 1099) the city was part of the possessions of the Countess Matilda of Tuscany; but when, in 1184, the edifice was consecrated by Lucius III., it was a free community. In the wars between Frederick II. and Gregory IX. it sided with the emperor, though ultimately the papal party was strong enough to introduce confusion into its policy. In 1288 Obizzo d’Este was recognized as lord of the city; after the death of his successor, Azzo VIII. (1308), it resumed its communal independence; but by 1336 the Este family was again in power. Constituted a duchy in 1452 in favour of Borso d’Este, and enlarged and strengthened by Hercules II., it became the ducal residence on the incorporation of Ferrara with the States of the Church (1598). Francis I. (1629–1658) erected the citadel and commenced the palace, which was largely embellished by Francis II. Rinaldo (ob. 1737) was twice driven from his city by French invasion. To Francis III. (1698–1780) the city was indebted for many of its public buildings. Hercules III. (1727–1803) saw his states transformed by the French into the Cispadine Republic, and, having refused the principality of Breisgau and Ortenau, offered him in compensation by the treaty of Campo Formio, died an exile at Treviso. His only daughter, Maria Beatrice, married Ferdinand of Austria (son of Maria Theresa), and in 1814 their eldest son, Francis, received back the Stati Estensi. His rule was subservient to Austria, reactionary and despotic. On the outbreak of the French Revolution of 1830, Francis IV. seemed for a time disposed to encourage the corresponding movement in Modena; but no sooner had the Austrian army put an end to the insurrection in Central Italy than he returned to his previous policy. Francis Ferdinand V., who succeeded in 1846, followed in the main his father’s example. Obliged to leave the city in 1848, he was restored by the Austrians in 1849; ten years later, on the 20th of August 1859, the representatives of Modena declared their territory part of the kingdom of Italy, and their decision was confirmed by the plebiscite of 1860.

See Vedriani, Storia di Modena (1666); Tiraboschi, Mem. storiche modenesi (1793); Scharfenberg, Gesch. des Herzogth. Modena (1859); Oreste Raggi, Modena descritta (1860); Baraldi, Storia di Modena; Valdrighi, Diz. Storico, &c., delle contrade di Modena (1798–1880); Crespellani, Guida di Modena (1879); Cavedoni, Dichiarazione degli antici marmi Modenesi (1828).


MODERATOR (from Lat. moderare, to impose a modus, limit), a judge or umpire, one who acts the part of mediator, and so a term used of the person chosen to be president of a meeting (as in America, of a town meeting). In academic use, the word was formerly applied to the public officer who presided over the exercises, &c., prescribed for candidates for degrees in the university schools; it is now used at Cambridge of one or two officers who are appointed each year to preside over the examination for the mathematical tripos, at Oxford of an examiner in the first public examination, known as “moderations,” and at Dublin of a candidate for honours in the examination for degree of Bachelor of Arts. In the Presbyterian churches the name is applied to the minister elected to preside over ecclesiastical meetings or assemblies, as the synod, presbytery or general assembly (see Presbyterianism). The name was historically given to a party of people who joined together to oppose the “Regulators,” another party who professed to administer justice in the Carolinas (1767–1771). Technically, the word is also used of a particular form of lamp, in which the flow of oil from the reservoir to the burner is regulated by a mechanical arrangement to which the name is applied.


MODERATUS OF GADES, a Greek philosopher of the Neo-Pythagorean school, contemporary with Apollonius of Tyana. He wrote a great work on the doctrines of the Pythagoreans, and tried to show that the successors of Pythagoras had made no additions to the views of their founder, but had merely borrowed and altered the phraseology. He has been given a fictitious importance by recent commentators, who have regarded him as the forerunner of the Alexandrian School of philosophy. Zeller has shown that the authority on which this view is based is entirely unsound. Moderatus is thus left as an unimportant though interesting representative of a type of thought which had almost disappeared since the 5th century B.C.

Stobaeus, Eclogae, p. 3, preserves a fragment of his writings.


MODESTINUS, HERENNIUS, a celebrated Roman jurist, who flourished about 250 B.C. He appears to have been a native of one of the Greek-speaking provinces, probably Dalmatia, and was a pupil of Ulpian. In Valentinian’s Law of Citations he is classed with Papinian, Paulus, Gaius and Ulpian. He is mentioned in a rescript of Gordian in the year 240 B.C. in connexion with a responsum which he gave to the party to whom the rescript was addressed. No fewer than 345 passages in the Digest are taken from his writings.


MODICA, a town of Sicily, in the province of Syracuse, 57 m. W.S.W. of Syracuse by rail and 33 m. direct. Pop. (1901), 48,962. It lies on a hill between two valleys; the hill, crowned by the church of S. Giorgio, reconstructed in the 17th century, was the site of the Sicel town of Motyca, while the modern part of the town extends along the river Mauro, an inundation of which did much damage in September 1902. Remains of megalithic buildings, apparently, however, houses of the Byzantine period, are described in Notizie degli Scavi, 1896, 242 seq. Six miles to the south-east is the valley known as the Cava d’Ispica, with hundreds of grottoes cut in its rocky sides; of these only a few are Sicel tombs, the majority being catacombs or open tombs of the early Christian and Byzantine periods, or even cave-dwellings of the latter age.

See P. Orsi in Notizie degli Scavi (1905), 431.


MODILLION (a French word, probably from Lat. modulus, a measure of proportion), a term in architecture for the enriched block or horizontal bracket generally found under the cornice and above the bedmould of the Corinthian entablature. It is probably so called because of its arrangement in regulated distances.


MODJESKA, HELENA (1844–1909), Polish actress, was born at Cracow on the 12th of October 1844. Her father, Michael Opido, was a musician, and her tastes soon declared themselves strongly in favour of a dramatic career; but it was not until after her marriage in 1861 that she first attempted to act, and then it was with a company of strolling players. Her husband (whose name, Modrzejewski, she simplified for stage purposes) died in 1865. In 1868 she married Count Bozenta Chlapowski, a Polish politician and critic, and almost immediately afterwards received an invitation to act at Warsaw. There she remained for seven or eight years, and won a high position in her art. Her chief tragic rôles were Ophelia, Juliet, Desdemona, Queen Anne in Richard III., Louisa Miller, Maria Stuart, Schiller’s Princess Eboli, Marion Delorme, Victor Hugo’s Tisbé and Slowacki’s Mazeppa. In comedy her favourite rôles were Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing, and Donna Diana in the Polish translation of an old Spanish play of that name. Madame Modjeska was also the Polish interpretress of the most prominent plays of Legouvé, Dumas, father and son, Augier, Alfred de Musset, Octave Feuillet and Sardou. In 1876 she went with her husband to California, where they settled on a ranch. This new career, however, proved a failure, and Madame Modjeska returned to

  1. Some authorities (of whom Tiraboschi was the first) attribute its desertion entirely to a succession of inundations, denying that it was even among the cities destroyed by Attila.