Bishop Idatius, the celebrated author of the earliest chronicles of Spanish history, was born in Galicia, in a town, now non-existent, which took its name from the river Limia, and was called _civitas Limicorum_, or “the city of the Limicos.” Very little was known about this city till an eminent local archæologist, Dr. Marcelo Macias, began to devote time and study to the deciphering of some inscriptions that had been found upon certain stones on the shores of the lake of Antela close to the spot where the Limia rises. Dr. Macias has recently found the site of the city, and is now convinced that it was once populous and wealthy, not a Roman but a Gallegan town, and the birthplace of eminent men--a city respected and feared during the later centuries of the Roman Empire.[40] Until Dr. Macias discovered the site, the Portuguese were in the habit of claiming that Portuguese soil had given birth to the famous Idatius, who in his youth had visited Jerusalem and knew St. Jerome, and who in his old age wrote the famous _Chronicles_--a priceless treasure as regards the early history not only of Spain but also of Spanish Catholicism. Ptolemy mentions this city as φορος λιμιχῶν, and the _Ravenate_ calls it Limia or Limæa, and mentions it as the first halting-place on the road leading from Braga to Lugo, by way of Tuy. Dr. Macias has satisfactorily proved that this city once stood in the province of Orense, near what are now the little towns of Lodoselo and Nocela de Pena, two miles to the south-east of Ginzo de Limia; he has proved this from inscriptions discovered in that neighbourhood in the middle of the eighteenth century, which are dedications, the one to Hadrian and the other to Antoninus Pius, by the city of the Limicos (_Civitas Limicorum_). Till now, most Spanish writers, confounding the Forum Limicorum of Ptolemy with the Limia of the Itinerary, have asserted erroneously that it was the Ponte de Lima in the neighbouring kingdom of Portugal. Florez and Hübner both helped to make the inscriptions known, but it was left to Dr. Macias to interpret their significance to students of Spanish history. They now stand in the museum of local antiquities at Orense.