The story of Samothes, presented here as taking the earliest history of Britain back to a period well before that of the imaginings of Geoffrey of Monmouth, was the invention of Annius of Viterbo, elaborated upon by John Bale. Annius' commentary on Berosus was essentially concerned to explain the population of the earth after the Flood, attributing that of Europe to the descendants of Japhet, whose fourth son Samothes was. Bale, in the first centuria of his Catalogus, brought precision, and a specifically British dimension, to Annius' inventions. See T.D. Kendrick, British Antiquity (1950), chapter 5.