Martianus Capella
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Martianus Minneus Felix Capella was a pagan writer of Late Antiquity, whose career flourished some time during the 5th century. Martianus composed his one famous book between the sack of Rome by Alaric (410), which he mentions, but apparently before the conquest of Africa by the Vandals in 429. As early as the middle of the sixth century Securus Memor Felix, a professor of rhetoric, received the text in Rome, for he quoted it.
According to Cassiodorus, Capella was a native of Madaura—which had been the native city of Apuleius—in the Roman province of Africa, and appears to have practiced as a jurist at Carthage. His single famous encyclopedic work, Satyricon, or De Nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii et de septem Artibus liberalibus libri novem ("On the wedding of Philology and Mercury and of the Seven Liberal Arts, in nine books"), is an elaborate didactic allegory written in a mixture of prose and verse, after the manner of the Menippean satires of Varro. The style is wordy and involved, loaded with metaphor and bizarre expressions. The book was of stupendous importance in fixing the unchanging formulas of Academia from the Christianized Roman Empire of the 5th century until newly-available Arabic texts and the works of Aristotle became available in Western Europe in the 12th century. These formulas included a Medieval love for allegory (in particular personifications) as a means of presenting knowledge, and an attachment to the seven Liberal Arts. The book, which is thoroughly pagan in culture and makes no allusion to Christianity, continued to shape European education during the early Medieval period and through the Carolingian renaissance.
The book, embracing in resumé form the narrowed classical culture of his time, was dedicated to his son. Its frame story in the first two books relates the courtship and wedding of Mercury (intelligent or profitable pursuit), who has been refused by Wisdom, Divination and the Soul, with the maiden Philologia (learning, but literally "word-lore") who is made immortal, under the protection of the gods, the Muses, the Cardinal Virtues and the Graces. The title refers to the allegorical union of the intellectually profitable pursuit (Mercury) of learning by way of the art of letters (Philology). Among the wedding gifts are seven maids who will be Philologia's slaves: they are the seven Liberal Arts: Grammar, Dialectic, Rhetoric, Geometry, Arithmetic, Astronomy and (musical) Harmony. Art herself gives an exposition of the principles of the science she governs. Finally night has come. Architecture and Medicine are present at the feast, but as they care for nothing but earthly things, they are condemned to remain silent. Harmony escorts the bride to the bridal chamber, where nuptial songs are sung.
The remaining seven books contain expositions of the seven liberal arts, representing the sum of human knowledge. Book 3 deals with grammar, book 4 with dialectics, book 5 with rhetoric, book 6 with geometry, book 7 with arithmetic, book 8 with astronomy, book 9 with music. These abstract discussions are linked on to the original allegory by the device of personifying each science as a courtier of Mercury and Philologia. The work was a complete encyclopedia of the liberal culture of the time, and was in high repute during the middle ages as a school text. The author's chief sources were Varro, Pliny the Elder, Solinus, Aquila Romanus, and Aristides Quintilianus. His prose resembles that of Apuleius (also a native of Madaura), but is even more difficult. The verse portions, on the whole correct and classically constructed, are in imitation of Varro.
The eighth book contains a very clear statement of the heliocentric system of astronomy. It is possible that it inspired Copernicus, who quotes Capella.
Allegory and labored metaphor utterly dominates, and the personifications are purely mechanical. Each book is an abstract or a compilation from earlier authors. The treatment of the subjects belongs to a tradition which goes back to Varro's "Diciplinae," even to Varro's passing allusion to architecture and medicine, which in Martianus Capella's day were mechanics' arts, material for clever slaves, but not for senators. The classical Roman curriculum, which was to pass— largely through Martianus Capella's book— into the early medieval period, modified but scarcely revolutionized by Christianity, was limited to rhetoric and its accompanying arts, treating philosophy merely as a matter of dialectics, a focus which served equally in public or ecclesiastical education, which were increasingly becoming one and the same. Even Augustine mentions architecture and medicine as distinct from the other liberal arts.
In the 11th century the German monk Notker Labeo translated the first two books into Old High German. The encyclopedia of human knowledge remained in early medieval days very much as it had been represented to be by Martianus Capella, until the age of the School of Chartres, Scholasticism and the new encyclopedic knowledge of Thomas Aquinas. As early as the end of the 5th century, another African, Fulgentius, composed a work modeled on it. In the 6th century Gregory of Tours tells that it became virtually a school manual (History of the Franks X, 449, 14). It was commented upon copiously: by John Scotus Erigena, Hadoard, Alexander Neckham, and Remi of Auxerre.
The work was edited by Franciscus Vitalis Bodianus, and first printed in Vicenza, 1499.
See also
External links
- Catholic Encyclopedia: (http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/09723a.htm) Martianus Capella