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I
HARVARD
COLLEGE
LIBRARY
A HISTORY
OF
CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP
tlonDon: C. J. CLAY and SONS.
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS WAREHOUSE,
AVE MARIA LANE.
Clugoto: 50, WELLINGTON STREET.
lcip>ic: F. A. BROCKHAUS.
^da fork: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Vombig inn ffalnitU: MACMILLAN AND CO., Ltd.
[Ail Righli resenwt/,]
S 3
S .3-
M
is
S ;
fl
A HISTORY
OF
CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP
FROM THE SIXTH CENTURY B.C.
TO THE END OF THE MIDDLE AGES
BY
JOHN EDWIN SANDYS, LiTT.D.,
PSLLOW AND LBCTURSH OP ST JOHN'S COLLBGS,
AND POBLIC ORATOR IN THS UNIVCRStTV OP CAMBRIDGS,
HON. LtTT.O. DUBLIN
CAMBRIDGE
AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS
1903
Quid est aetas hominis^ nisi ea memorid rerum veterum
cum superiarum aetate contexituri
Cicero, Orator^ § 120.
HARVARD
UNIVERSITY
LIB^^RY
SPP 101974
PREFACE.
THE present work owes its origin to the fact that, some nine
years ago, at the kind suggestion of my friend Professor
Jebb, I was invited by the editor of Social England to prepare a
brief survey of the History of Scholarship, which was included in the
volumes published in 1896 and 1897. In course of time I formed
a plan for a more comprehensive treatment of the History of
Classical Scholarship in general, which should begin with its birth
in the Athenian age, should trace its growth in the Alexandrian
and Roman times, and then pass onwards, through the Middle
Ages, to the Revival of Learning, and to the further developements
in the study of the ancient Classics among the nations of Europe
and in the English-speaking peoples across the seas. I was already
familiar with the Outlines of the History of Classical Philology by
Professor Gudeman of Philadelphia ; and I may add that, if, in
place of the eighty pages of his carefully planned Outlines^ the
learned author of that work had produced a complete History on
the same general lines, there might have been little need for any
other work on the same subject in the English language. But, in
the absence of any such History, it appeared to be worth my
while to endeavour to meet this obvious want, and, a few years
ago, my proposal to prepare a general History of Classical
Scholarship was accepted by the Syndics of the University Press.
My aim has been, so far as practicable, to produce a readable
book, which might also serve as a work of reference. I confess
that the work has grown under my hands to a far larger bulk than
VI PREFACE.
I had ever contemplated; but, when I reflect that a German
* History of Classical Philology ', which does not go beyond the
fourth century of our era, fills as many as 1900 large octavo pages,
I am disposed to feel (like Warren Hastings) 'astounded at my
moderation '. I had hoped to complete the whole of my task in
a single volume, but this has proved impossible, owing mainly to
the vast extent and the complexity of the literature connected
with the history of classical learning in the West of Europe during
the eight centuries of the Middle Ages. In studying this part of
my subject, I have found myself compelled to struggle with a
great array of texts, in various volumes of the Rolls Series^ the
Monumenta Germamae Historica^ and Migne's Patrologia Latina\
and to master the contents of a multitude of scattered mono*
graphs in French, German and Italian, as well as English, publi-
cations. With these and other resources I have endeavoured to
trace the later fortunes of the Latin Classics, to deal with all the
more important indications of the mediaeval knowledge of Greek,
and to give an outline of the Scholastic Philosophy. Without
taking some account of the latter, it is impossible to have an
adequate understanding of the literature of the Middle Ages.
And it is a necessary part of my subject, in so far as it arose out
of the study of translations of Greek texts, and was inextricably
bound up with the successive stages in the gradual expansion of
the mediaeval knowledge of the works of Aristotle. But, in tracing
• the general course of a form of philosophy, which, however valu-
able as a kind of mental gymnastic, was on the whole unfavourable
to the wide and liberal study of the great masterpieces of Classical
Literature, I have mainly confined myself to the points of immediate
contact with the History of Scholarship ; and thus (if I may give
a new turn to a phrase in Seneca), quae philosophia fuit^ facta
philologia est^. In the work in general I have studied the History
of Scholarship in connexion with the literary, and even, to some
slight extent, the political history of each period. But the treat-
^ Ep, 108 S 33-
PREFACE. vil
merit of the principal personages portrayed in the course of the
work has not been on any rigidly uniform scale. Thus, among
the three great authors of far-reaching influence, who stand on the
threshold of the Middle Ages, there is necessarily far less to be
said about the personality of Priscian than about that of Boethius
or of Cassiodorus. Many names of minor importance, which are
only incidentally mentioned in the text, have been excluded from
the final draft of the Index, and space has thus been found for
the fuller treatment of more important names, such as those of
Aristotle and Plato, Cicero and Virgil. The study of the subject
will, I trust, be further facilitated by means of the twelve chrono-
logical tables. A list of these will be found on page xi.
Of the twelve divisions of my subject (set forth on page 14),
the first six are included in the present volume, which aims at
being complete so far as it extends, and, in point of time, covers
as many as nineteen of the twenty-five centuries, with which those
divisions are concerned. In continuation of this work, I hope to
produce, at no distant date, a separate volume on the History of
Scholarship from the time of Petrarch to the present day. The
first draft of a large part of that volume has already been pre-
pared, and, in the Easter Vacation of last year, I was engaged in
the further study of the literature of the Renaissance, as well as of
certain portions of the Middle Ages, in the hospitable libraries of
Florence. In the spring of the present year I visited the homes
of mediaeval learning on the Loire, and also studied the sculptured
and the written memorials of the mediaeval system of education,
which still survive as a visible embodiment of the influences that
moulded the mind of John of Salisbury in ' the classic calm of
Chartres *.
It is a pleasure to conclude this preface by offering the tribute
of my thanks to all who in any way have helped towards the
completion of what has unavoidably proved a very laborious
undertaking. My gratitude is due, in the first place, to the
Syndics of the University Press, and to the staff of the same,
Vlll PREFACE.
not forgetting the ever-attentive Reader, who (besides more
important corrections) has endeavoured to reduce the spelling
of mediaeval names to a uniformity little dreamt of in the
Middle Ages themselves. If, in the next place, I may here record
my thanks to those under whose influence this volume has been
prepared, I cannot forget the friend who (as I have stated in
the opening words of this preface) gave the first impulse which
led to the ultimate production of the present work. If, again, I
may give a single example of all that I owe to two other scholars —
one of whom I have happily known for forty years, the other,
alas ! for too few — a hint from the late Lord Acton gave me my
first clear impression of the erudition of Vincent of Beauvais ;
a word from Professor Mayor set me at work on Joannes de
Garlandia. Among the Fellows of Trinity, Dr Henry Jackson
has been good enough to supply me with a clear statement of
his views on Plato's Cratylus^ and Mr James Duff has kindly
tested and confirmed my opinion as to a point connected with
the mediaeval study of Lucretius \ The College catalogues and
other works of Dr James have brought to my knowledge not a
few points of interest in the mediaeval manuscripts of Cambridge.
I have thus been led to include among iht facsimiles an autograph
of Lanfranc, an extract from a copy of the works of John of
Salisbury, which once belonged to Becket, and the colophon of
an early transcript of a translation by William of Moerbeke.
Four of the facsimiles are here published for the first time. To
Sir Edward Maunde Thompson, and to his publishers, Messrs
Kegan Paul and Co., I am indebted for the use of five of the
many facsimiles which adorn his well-known Handbook of Greek
and Latin Palaeography. I have also borrowed two short extracts
from the three hundred facsimiles in Chatelain's PaUographie
des Classiques Latins^ and one from those in Wattenbach and
von Velsen's Exempla Codicum Graecorum, I have to thank
the Registrary of the University for the use of a single illustra-
* p. 515 n. 3-
PREFACE. IX
tion (and the offer of more) from his important volume on the
Care of Books ; and I gratefully recall the trouble taken on my
behalf by the Librarian and the staff of the University Library ;
by the Librarians of Peterhouse, Gonville and Caius, Corpus Christi,
Magdalene, and Trinity Colleges ; by the Librarian and Assistant
Librarian of my own College ; and by one of my former pupils,
Professor Rapson, of the British Museum. My debt to the
published works of scholars at home and abroad is fully shown
in the notes to the following pages.
J. E. SANDYS.
Merton House,
Cambridge,
October^ 1903.
S.
CONTENTS.
PAGE
List of Illustrations xii
Titles of Certain Works of Reference . . . xv
Abbreviations xviii
Addenda and Corrigenda xviii
•
Outline of Principal Contents of pp. 1--650 . xix
Index 651
Greek Index 672
CONSPECTUS OF CHRONOLOGICAL TABLES.
Greek Literature 6f'c. page
c. 840-— 300B.C 18
r. 300 — IH.C 104
1 — 30OA.D ;.«6a
300 — 600 A.D 340
600— 1000 a.d 378
1000— 1453 A.D 400
Latin Literature &*c. page
r. 300— IB.C 166
I— 300A.D 186
300 — 600 A.D ao4
600— 1000 A.D 430
1000— laoo A.D 496
laoo— 1400A.D 538
62
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
(f ) Scenes from the Schools of Athens, early in the fifth century B.C., from
a vase-painting by Duris on a Cylix with red figures on a black ground, found
at Caere in 187a and now in the Berlin Aniiquarium (no. 1385). Reproduced
partly from the large coloured copy in Monununti del InUituto^ ix (1873),
pi. 54, and partly from the small lithographed outline in the Archdohgische
Zeitungf xxxi (1874), i — 14. The central design is from the inside, the rest
from the outside of the Cylix . . Frontispiece^ described on p. 4a
(I) Masks of Comedy and Tragedy. British Museum . . 51
(3) Seated figure of * Aristotle '. SpeuUt Palace^ Rome . . ^
(4) From the earliest extant MS of the Phaedo of Plato ; Petrie papyrus
in the British Museum 87
(5) Portrait of Alexander the Great ; on a silver tetradrachm of Lysimachus,
king of Thrace. British Museum \oi
(6) Portraits of Ptolemy I and II, Founders of the Alexandrian Library ;
on a gold octadrachm of Ptolemy II and Arsinoe II. British Museum 1 43
(7) Portrait of Eumenes II, Founder of the Pergamene Library; on a
silver tetradrachm in the British Museum 164
(8) From Codex Sangallensis 1394 (Century IV or v) of Virgil.
St GalUn . . . . , 185
(9) From Codex Laurentianus XLVI 7 (Century x) of Quintilian. Laurentian
Library^ Florence 203
(10) From Codex Laurentianus LXill 19 (Century x) of Livy. Lauretitian
Library^ Florence 336
(II) From the Biblical Commentary of Monte Cassino, written before
569 B.C. Monte Cassino 360
(13) From the Codex Parisinus (914 a.d.) of Clemens Alexandrinus.
Bihliothique N^mg^i^, P<^ris 336
(13) From ark/ik manuscript (1333 A. D.) of a student's copy of David the
Armenian's Commentary on Porphyry's Introduction to Aristotle's Categories.
Bibliothique NationaU^ Paris 338
(14) Beginning of the last Dialogue in the Bodleian Plato (895 A. D.).
Reproduced firom a photograph taken from the Leyden Facsimile of the
original MS in the Bodleian Library ^ Oxford 376
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. Xlll
( 1 5) End of Scholia on Hesiod's Works and Days by Manuel Moschopulus,
in the handwriting of Demetrius Triclinius, finished on Aug. ao, IpdncriQwot
Id', frovt fS'iaxd' (6834 A.M. of the Byzantine erasi5i6 A.D.). Biblioteca
Marciana, Venice 438
(16) From Cambridge University MS (Century xi) of i'Elfric's Latin
Grammar. Reproduced from a photograph taken from the original in the
University Library, Cambridge 495
(17) Specimens of Christ Church, Canterbury, hand (r. 1070-84) from
near the end of a Ms of Decretals and Canons bought by Lanfranc from the
abbey of Bee and given by him to Christ Church, Canterbury. The first of
the two specimens is almost certainly in the hand-writing of Lanfranc: — Hutu
iibrum dato preeio emptum ego Lan/rancus arehiepiseopus de Beeeensi eenobio
in Anglieam terram deferri feci et Ecclesiae Christi dedi. Si quis eum de iure
praefatae Ecclesiae absttilerit, ancUhema sii» The second is a copy of the first
of five letters addressed to Lanfranc by the Antipope 'Clement III* (1084 —
1 101), beginning Clemens episcopus, servus servorum Dei, Lanfranco Cantuar-
beriensi archiepiscopo salutem et apostolicam benedictianem, and txi^ingomnesque
coepiscopos fratres nostras ex nostra parte saluta, et ad honorem et utilitatem
sanctae Romanae Ecclesiae stttdio sanctitaiix frateme hortare (in line 4 there
must be a laatna after exoptamus). Reproduced from a photograph taken
from the original in Trinity Coll^ Library, Cambridge . . . 503
(18) From a MS of John of Salisbury's Poltcraticus and Metalogicus ( 1 1 59)*
formerly in the possession of Becket. Reproduced from a photograph taken
from the original in the Library of Corptis Christi College, Cantbridge .• 516
(19) Philosophy and the Liberal Arts, versus the Poets. From the
Hortus Deliciarum of Herrad von Landsperg (d. 1 195), destroyed at Strassburg
in 1870. The inscriptions are as follows. On the outer circle : — Haec exercicia
quae mundi philosophia \ investigavit, investigata notavit, \ scripto firmavit
et cUumnis insinuavit* |t Septem per studia docet artes philosophia. \ Haec
elementorum scrutatur et abdita rerum, H On the inner circle : — Arte regent
omnia quae sunt ego philosophia \ subjected artes in septem divido partes.
Above the Seven Arts (Grammar with scopae). Per me quivis discit, vex,
littera, syllaba, quid sit, (Rhetoric with stilus and tabula) Causarum vires
per me, rhetor alme, requires. (Dialectic with caput cants) Argumenta sine
concurrere more canino. (Music with organistrum, cithara and lira) Musica
sum late doctrix artis varicUae. (Arithmetic) Ex numeris consto, quorum
discrimina monstro. (Geometry) Terrae mensuras per multas dirigo curas,
(Astronomy) Ex astris nomen traho, per quae discitur omen. In the upper
half of the inner circle: — Philosophia, with her triple crown of Ethica, Logica
and Physica, displays a band, bearing the inscriptior -Jmnis sapientia a
Domino Deo est; soli quad cUsiderant facere possunt sapientes. Below this are
the words : — Septem fontes sapientiae fluunt de philosophia, quae dicuntur
liberates artes. Spiritus Sanctus inventor est septem liberalium artium, quae
sunt Grammatica, Rhitorica, Dialectica, Musica, Arithmetica, Geometria^
Astronomia. In the lower half of the same circle and above the philosopM,
xiv LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
Socrates and Plato, runs the line: — Naturam unwersae ret qtum docuit
Philosophia* To the left of Socrates : — Phihsophi primum Ethica^ postea
Physica^ deindi RKeUtricam doaurunt^ and to the right of Plato : — Philosophi
sapienUs mundi et gentium cierici fuerunt. Outside and below the two circles
are four Poitae vel Magi^ spirUu immundo instmctit with the following ex-
planation:— IsH immundis spiriiibus insptrati scribunt artem magieam et
poitriam i.#. fabulosa eontmenta 537
(10) Altar-piece by Francesco Traini (1345) in the Church of S. Caterina,
Pisa. From the * Christ in Glory ' a single ray of light falls on each of the six
figures of Moses and St Paul and the four Evangelists, here represented as
bending forward from the sky, and holding tablets inscribed with passages
from the books of the Scriptures which bear their names. In addition to the
rays that proceed from each of these figures, three from the * Christ in Glory '
may be seen descending on the head of the seated form of St Thomas Aquinas,
who displajrs an open book with the first words of his Summa contra
Gentiles: — Veritatem meditabitur guttur pteum, et labia mea detestahuntur
impium (Proverbs, viii 7), while some of his other works are lying on his lap.
The figure is stated by Vasari to have been copied from a portrait lent by the
abbey of Fossanuova (North of Terracina), where Thomas Aquinas died in
1374. Two other rays are represented as coming from the open books dis-
played by Aristotle on the left and Plato on the right, and described by Vasari
as the Etfucs and Timaeus respectively. Another ray, not a beam of illumina-
tion, but a lightning-flash of refutation, falls firom the Summa contra Gentiles^
striking the edge of a book lying on the ground beside the writhing form of its
author, Averroes. Many other rays may be seen descending from the several
works of St Thomas on the two crowds of admiring and adoring Dominicans
below. In the original, among the rays on the left, may be read the text, hie
adinvenit omnetn viam disciplinae {B».tuch, iii 31), and, among those on the
right, doctor gentium in fide d veritate (i Tim. ii 7). Cp. Vasari, Vite, Orgagna,
ad fin., i 6ia f Milanesi; Rosini, Storia delta Pittura Italiana (1840), ii 86 f, 93 ;
Renan, Averrois, 305-8*; Hettner, Italienische Studien (1879), ioa-8; and
Woltmann and Woermann, History of Painting, i 459 E.T. facing p. 560
(11) Colophon of the 'Theological Elements' of Proclus, from a xiii
century copy of the translation finished at Viterbo by William of Moerbeke,
18 May, 1168. Procli Dyadochi Lycii, Platonici philosophi, eUmentatio theo-
logtca explicit capitulis 3 11. Completa fuit translatio hujus operis Viterbii a
fratre G, de Morbecoa ordinis fratrum praedicatorum xv JCcUmdas Junii Antio
Domini M^:*^ sexagesimo octauo. Reproduced from a photograph taken from
the original in Peterhouse Library, Cambridge 566
(12) Grammar and Priscian, from the figures of the Seven Liberal Arts
and their ancient representatives in the right-hand doorway of the West Front
of Chartres Cathedral 645
For the sources from which this and certain of the other cuts are derived,
see letterpress under the several cuts.
TITLES OF CERTAIN WORKS OF REFERENCE.
The following list is limited to those works of reference which
are most frequently quoted in the present volume, either by the
author's name alone, or by a much abbreviated title. It has no
pretensions to being a complete bibliography of the subject, or
indeed of any part of it. The leading authorities on all points of
importance are cited in the notes, e.g. on pp. 504, 64a For the
bibliography in general, the best book of reference is that of
Hiibner, which is placed at the head of the list. In the case of
literature later than 1889, this may be supplemented from other
sources, such as I^vlx^vbji's Jahresbericht^ the Bibliotheca PhilologUa
Classica^ and the summaries in the principal Classical periodicals
of Europe or the United States of America.
HOBNBR, E. Bibliographii der klassischen AUerthumswissenschaft ;
Grundriss tu Vorlesungm iibfr dU GeschichU und Etuyklopadie der klassischen
Philologies ed. 3, 8vo, Berlin, 1889.
On the Athenian^ Alexandrian or Roman Ages.
Christ, W. Geschichte der grieehischen Litteratur bis auf die Zeit Jus*
tinians (1889s 1890*); ed. 3, pp. 944; large 8vo, Mttnchen, 1898.
Croiset. Histoire de la Utiirature Grecque^ in five vols. (1887-99), esp.
vol. V pp. I — 314 (Piriode Alexandrine) by Alfred Croiset; and pp. 315 — 1067
(Phriode Pomaine) by Maurice Croiset ; 8vo, Paris, 1899.
Egger, t.. Essai sur F Histoire de la Critique cheu la Grecs (1849);
ed. 3, pp. 588; small 8vo, Paris, 1887.
Grafbnhan, a. Geschichte der klassischen Phihlogie im Alterthnm^ to
400A.D.; four vols., pp. 1909; large 8vo, Bonn, 1843-50.
Nbttleship, n. (i) Lectures and Essays on subjects connected with Latin
Literature and Scholarships pp. 381; and (ii) Lectures and Essc^s, pp. 169;
crown 8vo, Oxford, 1885-95.
xvi TITLES OF CERTAIN WORKS. OF REFERENCE.
Saintsbury, G. a History of Criticism and Literary Taste in Europe
from the earliest texts to the present day^ vol. I pp. xv + 499 (Classical and
Mediaeval Criticism) ; 8vo, Edinburgh and London, 1900.
ScHANZ, M. Gachichte der Romischen Litteratur bis %um Gtsetngebung
des Kaisers Justinian ; two editions of parts i and ii, in three vols., and one ed.
of part iii, large 8vo, ending (at present) with 334 a.d. MiiDchen, 1890— 1901.
Stbinthal, H. Geschichte der Spraehwissenschaft bei den Griechen und
RSmem (1863), ^ '^^'^ %so\ ed. a, Berlin, 1890-1.
SUSBMIHL, F. Geschichte der griechischen Litteratur in der Alexandriner'
%eit, two vols. 8vo, pp. 907 + 771 ; Leipzig, 189 1-3.
Tbuffel, W. S. History of Roman Literature (to about 800 A.D.), revised
and enlarged by L. Schwabe, translated from the fifth German ed. (1890) by
G. C. W. Warr, 1 vols. 8vo, pp. 577 + 615; London and Cambridge, 1900.
On the Middle Ages,
BURSIAN, C. Geschichte der classischen Philologie im Deutschtand^ 1 vols.
8vo, vol. I pp. I — 90, MUnchen, 1883.
Cramer, < Joannes > Fredericus. De Graecis Medii Aevi Studiis^ sc.
De Graecis per Occidentem Studiis (i) usgue ad Carolum Magnum ^ pp. 44;
(a) usque ad expeditiones in Terram Sanctam susceptast pp. 65 (the pages in
both cases are those of the complete editions), small 4to pamphlets, Sundiae
(Stralsund), 1849-53.
Ebert, a. Geschichte der Literutur des MitteUUters im Ahendlande bis
tum Beginne des XI Jahrhunderts\ 3 vols. 8vo, 1874-87; ed. 1 of vol. I,
Leipzig, 1889.
GiDEL, C. Les £tudes grecques en Europe (fourth cent. — 1453)1 PP* ' —
389 of Nouvelles ^ludes^ 8vo, Paris, 1878.
Gradenigo, G. Ragionamento Istorico-Critico intomo alia Letteratura
GrecO'Italiana^ pp. 176, 8vo. Brescia, 1759.
Graf, Arturo. Roma nella Memoria e nelle Immaginationi del Medio
Evo, two vols, small 8vo; esp. vol. 11 153 — 367 (quoted in notes to pp. 606-
17); Torino, 1 883-3.
Haur£au, B. La Philosophic Scolcutique (1850); ed. 3, vols. I, and 1 1
(parts i and ii), 8vo, Paris, 1873-80.
Heeren, a. H. L. Geschichte der classischen LittercUur im Mittelalter^
1 vols, small 8vo; vol. I, Book i, pp. 10 — 170 (c, 330— 900 A. D.); Book ii,
pp. 171 — 376 (900 — 1 400 A. D.), Gottingen, 1831.
Histoire Litirairt de la France^ begun at Saint-Germain-des-Pr^s by the
Benedictines of the Congregation of Saint-Maur (vols. I — xii, 1733-63); and
continued, as the Hist, Littiraire etc. (vols. Xili — XXXII, 1814-98) by the
Institut of France. (Victor Le Clerc's survey of cent, xiv in vol. xxiv i — 6oa
is quoted from the separate 8vo ed. of 1865.) 4to, Paris, 1733 — 1898.
JoURDAiN, Amable. Recherches critiques sur tAge et torigine des traduc-
tions latines d^Aristott^ et sur les commentaires grecs ou arabes employis par
les docteurs scolastiques (18 19); ed. a (Charles Jourdain), 8vo, Paris, 1843.
TITLES OF CERTAIN WORKS OF REFERENCE. xvil
KoRTiNG, G. Die Anfangt der Renatssantg-litteraiur in Itaiien^ nominally
▼ol. Ill but really introductory to vols, i (Petrarch) and ii (Boccaccio) in the
unfinished Geschichie der Litleraiur Italiem im Zeitalter der Renaissance
(1878-80); 8vo, Leipzig, 1884.
Krumbacher, K. Geschichte der bytantinischen LiUeratur von Justinian
bis mm Ende des Ostromischen Reiches (537 — 1453 A.D.), ed. f, pp. 495, 1890;
ed. 3, pp. 1193; large 8vo, Miinchen, 1897.
Lbysbr, Polycarp (of Helmstadt). Historia Pdtarum et Pdmaium Medii
Aevi (400— f400A.D.)« pp. 11 39; small 8vo, Halle, 1731 and (with new title-
page) 1741.
Maitland, S. R. The Dark Ages (1844), ^- 3* ^^o* London, 1853.
Maitrb, L^n. Lts £coles £piscopaIes et Afonastigues (768 — 1180A.D.);
8vo, Paris, 1866.
MiGNB, L* Abbe J. P. Patrologiae Cttrsus Computus; Series Latina; 317
▼ols. royal 8vo, including a large part of the poetic, epistolary, historical and
philosophical (as well as the * patristic ') Latin literature of the aooo years from
Tertullian (d. 340) to Innocent III (d. 1116), Paris, 1844-55; followed by four
vols, of Indices, 1863-4.
Monumenta Germaniae Historical folio series of Scriptores etc, edited by
Pertz and others (Hanover), 1836-91; continued in quarto series, the latter
including (for the later Roman Age) the best editions of Ausonius, Symmachus,
Sidonius, and the Variae of Cassiodorus, and (for the Middle Ages) Gregory
of Tours, the Letters of Gregory the Great, and the works of Venantius
Fortunatus, with four vols, of Poitae Latini^ vols. I and II edited by Dtimmler,
III by Traube, and iv i by Winterfeld. Berlin, 1877- (in progress).
MULLINGER, J. B. The Schools of Charles the Great (quoted mainly in
chap, xxv), pp. XX +193; 8vo, London, 1877.
Mullingbr, J. B. History of the University of Cambridge^ vol. I, esp.
pp. I — 1X1 (containing the introductory chapters on the Middle Ages);
pp. 686; 8vo, Cambridge, 1873.
NoRDEN, E. Die Antike Kunstprosa vom VI Jahrhundert v. Chr, bis in
die Zeit der Renaissance ; two vols. 8vo, pp. 969 ; esp. pp. 657 — 763 {Das
Mittelalter...). Leipzig, 1S98.
Poole, Reginald Lane. Illustrations of the History of Medieval Thought ^
PP* 37^1 8vo, London, 1884.
Prantl, Carl von. Geschichte der Logik im Abendlande^ esp. vol. II (1861) ;
ed. 3, Leipzig, 1885; four vols. Leipzig, 1855-70.
Rashd\LL, Hastings. Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages^ vol. I,
and II (in two Parts); 8vo, Oxford, 1895.
Renan, E. Ai/errois et VAverroisme (185a); ed. 4; 8vo, pp. 486, Paris,
i88j.
* Rolls Series'" ; Rerum Britannicarum Medii Aevi Scriptores^ or Chronicles
and Memorials of Great Britain and Ireland during the Middle Ages^ published
under the direction of the Master of the Rolls, 344 vols, royal 8vo. The vols,
quoted are mainly those containing the works of William of Malmesbnry,
xviii ABBREVIATIONS. ADDENDA AND CORRIGENDA.
Alexander Neckam, Giraldus Cambrensis, Grosseteste, Mktthew Paris,
Roger Bacon and the * Satirical Latin Poets of cent, xii', i and ii. London,
1858-96.
TiRABOSCHi, G. Storia delta Letieratura Italiana(td, i, Modena, 177a- );
esp. vols. HI — V (476-1400 A. D.) of ed. 3, Modena. 1787-94.
ToUGARD, L'Abb^ A. VHellinisme dans Us £crivains du Moyen^Age du
septihnt au doutiinu siicie, PP*'7o; l<urge 8vo, Paris, 1886.
Ueberweg, F. Grundriss der GeschichU der Philosophies vol. I (1864);
ed. 8 Heinze, 1894; E. T. London, 1873 etc.
Wattenbach, W. Das Schriftwesen im Mittelalter (1871); ed. 1 (used
in this vol.), 1875; ed. 3, Leipzig, 1896.
Wattenbach, W. Deutschlands Geschiehtsquellen im Mittelalter^ ending
r. 1350 (ed. I, 1858); ed. 6, Berlin, 1893-4.
The latest survey of Mediaeval Latin Literature from 550 to 1350 A. D. is
to be found in Grober's Grundriss der Ronianischen Philoloxie^ ii 97 — 433,
Strassburg, 1909. That of Italy is very briefly sketched in Gaspary's Italian
Literature f i 1 — 49, E.T. 1901.
ABBREVIATIONS.
In the notes and index MA stands for Mittel- Alter ^ and for Middle Ages.
A smaller numeral added to that of the volume or page, e.g., ii' or 133*,
denotes the edition to which reference is made.
ADDENDA AND CORRIGENDA.
p. 349 1. 35 and n. 7 ; for Einsiedlen, read Einsiedeln.
p. 2ffi n. 3 1. 5; for 1800, read 1880.
p. 303, head-line; for aurbli, read aurblius.
p. 334 n. 3 (Alexander of Aphrodisias on Aristotle De Sensu) ; add ed.
Wendland (1901).
p. 341 n. I ; after Fotheringham, add announced, but not yet published,
n. 3; after E. H. Giflbrd, add published in 1903.
p. 346 n. a; add Themistius on Aristotle, De Caelo^ ed. Landauer (1909).
p. 365 n. 1 (Syrianus on the Metaphysics) \ add ed. KroU (1902).
p. 403 n. 7 (Michael of Ephesus); add, on Ethics v, ed. Hayduck (1901).
p. 430 col. 4; add Ekkehard II d. 990; and, in col. 5, for 65i--90 Aidan
(where -90 is accidentally repeated from next item), read 65 1 d. Aidan.
p. 46a L 3 ; for Osnabruck, read Osnabrttck, and see Index.
p. 465 1. 18; for (emp. Lothair) d. 869, read d. 855.
p. 507 n. 5 1. 3; for 1 81 7, read 1819.
OUTLINE OF PRINCIPAL CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I. Dcfinidonof 'Scholar* and 'Scholarship*; 'Scholarship'
and 'Philology'. ^1X6X0701, ypafifiaruc^, «pcrc«6t. Modern 'Philology'.
General plan of proposed work i — 15
BOOK I. THE ATHENIAN AGE, c. 600—^. 300 B.C. 17—103
Chronological Tahle^ c. 840— 300 B.C. ... 18
CHAPTER II. The Study of Epic Poetry. Homer and the rhapsodes.
Solon, Peisistratus and Hipparchus. Early interpolations. Influence of
Homer on early Greek poets. Homer and the Sophists. Allegorical inter-
pretation of Homeric mythology. Homer in Plato, Aristophanes and
Isocrates. Quotations from, and early 'editions* of. Homer. Aristotle on
Homer. The Study of Hesiod, Antimachus and Choerilus . 19 — 40
CHAPTER III. The Study of Lyric Poetry. Plato on the study of
poetry ; vase-painting by Duris. ' Lyric * and ' melic ' poets. The study of
the 'melic', elegiac, and iambic poets 41 — 51
CHAPTER IV. The Study and Criticism of Dramatic Poetry. Literary
criticism in Attic Comedy. The text of the Tragic Poets. Quotations from
the dramatists. Dramatic criticism in Plato and Aristotle . . 53 — 66
CHAPTER V. The theory of poetry in Homer, Democritus, Plato and
Aristotle. Aristotle's treatise on Poetry 67 — 75
CHAPTER VI. The Rise of Rhetoric, and the Study of Prose. Plato's
Gorgias and Phaedrus. Aristotle's Rfutoric. Aristotle's relations to Isocrates
and Demosthenes. Literary criticism a branch of Rhetoric Place of Prose
in Athenian education. Early transmission of the works of Plato and
Aristotle. Libraries in the Athenian age 76 — 87
CHAPTER Vn. (1) The Beginnings of Grammar and Etymology.
Early speculations on the origin of language. Plato's Cratylus* Grammar
in Aristotle, (a) History and Criticism of Literature in the Peripatetic
School. Theophrastus, Praxiphanes and Demetrius of Phaleron 88 — los
XX OUTLINE OF PRINCIPAL CONTENTS.
BOOK II. THE ALEXANDRIAN AGE, c, 300— x B.C. 103 -164
Chronological Table, y^o—i B.C. . . . 104
CHAPTER VIII. The School of Alexandria. The Library and the
Librarians. Philetas. 2^nodotus. Alexander Aetolus. Lycophron. Calli-
machus. Eratosthenes. Aristophanes of Byzantium. Aristarchus. Calli-
stratus. Hermippus. Apollodorus of Athens. Ammonius. Dionysius Thrax.
Tyrannion. Didymus ........ 105 — 143
CHAPTER IX. The Stoics and the School of Pergaroon. The Grammar
of the Stoics. The Pergamene Library. Polemon of Ilium. Demetrius of
Scepsis. Crates of Mallos. Pergamon and Rome . . . 144 — 164
BOOK III. THE ROMAN AGE OP LATIN
SCHOLARSHIP, c, 168B.C.— <•. 530 A.D. . 165—160
Chronological Table^ 300 — I B.C. . . . 166
CHAPTER X. Latin Scholarship from the death of Ennius (169 B.C.)
to the Augustan Age. Greek influence before 169 B.C. The battle of Pydna
and Crates of Mallos (168 B.C.). Accius. Lucilius. Aelius Stilo. Varro.
'Analogy' and 'Anomaly' from Varro to Quintilian. Literary Criticism in
Varro, Cicero and Pollio. Atticus and Tiro. Nigidius Figulus. L. Ateius
Praetextatus. Valerius Cato. Grammatical Terminology. Literary Criticism
in Horace. Early Study of Virgil and Horace . . . 167 — 185
Chronological Table, x— 300A.D. . . . 186
CHAPTER XI. Latin Scholarship from the Augustan Age to 300 a.d.
Hyginus. Fenestella. Verrius Flaccus. Palaemon. The two Senecas.
Petronius. Persius. Asconius. Pliny the elder. Probus. Quintilian.
Tacitus. Pliny the younger. Martial. Juvenal. Statius. Suetonius.
Grammarians. Fronto. Gellius. Terentianus Maurus. Pompeius Festus.
Aero and Porphyrio. Censorinus 187 — 203
Chronological Table, 300— 600 A.D. . . , 204
CHAPTER XII. Latin Scholarship from 300 to 500 a.d. Nonius.
Ausonius. Paulinus. Symmachus. The Study of Virgil. Victorinus. Aelius
Donatus. Charisius and Diomedes. Servius. St Jerome and St Augustine.
Macrobius. Martianus Capella. Recensions of Solinus, Vegetius and Pom-
ponius Mela ; and abridgement of Valerius Maximus. ApoUinaris Sidonius.
Schools of learning in Gaul. Grammarians and Commentators. Recension
of Virgil by Asterius (494) 105 — 136
CHAPTER XIII. Latin Scholarship from 500 to 530A.D. Boethius.
Cassiodorus. Benedict and Monte Cassino. Priscian . . 337 — a6o
OUTLINE OF PRINCIPAL CONTENTS. xxi
BOOK. IV. THE ROMAN AGE OP GREEK
SCHOLARSHIP, (, x—^. 530 A.D. . 161—375
Chronological Table^ z — 300 A.D. . . 161
CHAPTER XIV. Roman Study of Greek between 164 B.C. and 14A.D.
Histories of Rome written by Romans in Greek. The influence of Greek
studies on Varro and Cicero; on Lucretius, Catullus, Cinna and Varro Atacinus;
on Caesar, Nepos and Sallust; on Virgil, Horace, Gallus, Propertius and
Ovid; and on Pompeius Trogus and Livy .... 963 — 171
CHAPTER XV. Greek Literary Criticism in the First Century of the
Empire. Dionysius of Halicamassus. Caecilius of Cajacte. The Treatise
on the Sublime 173 — 186
CHAPTER XVI. Verbal Scholarship in the First Century of the Empire.
Juba, Pamphilus and Apion. Minor Grammarians . . 987—190
CHAPTER XVil. The Literary Revival at the end of the First Century.
Dion Chrysostom. Plutarch. Favorinus 191 — 301
CHAPTER XVIII. Greek Scholarship in the Second Century. Hadrian.
Herodes Atticus. M. Aurelius. Arrian and other historians. Philon of
Byblus, Phlegon of Tralles and Ptolemaeus Cbennus. Pausanias. Literary
rhetoricians : — Aristides and Maximus Tyrius ; Lucian and Alciphron.
Technical rhetoricians: — Aelius Theon, Hermogenes and Demetrius. Gram-
marians : — ApoUonius Dyscolus, Herodian and Nicanor. Lexicographers
and * Atticists*: — Phrynichus, Moeris, Harpocration and Pollux. Hephaestion.
Symmachus on Aristophanes. Commentators on Plato. Galen. Sextus
Empiricus. Clement of Alexandria 301 — 396
CHAPTER XIX. Greek Scholarship in the Third Century. The
Phtlostrati and Callistratus. Aelian. Athenaeus. Rhetoricians: — Apsines,
Minucianus, Menander and Longinus. Diogenes Laertius. Alexander of
Aphrodisias. Rise of Neo-Platonism. Origen. Plotinus and Porphyry.
Aristides Quintilianus 397 — 338
Chfonologual Table ^ 300— '600 A.D. . 340
CHAPTER XX. Greek Scholarship in the Fourth Century. Eusebius.
Dexippus, Himerius, Themistius, Libanius and Julian. Quintus Smymaeus.
Theodosius, Ammonius and Helladius 341 — 355
CHAPTER XXI. Greek Scholarship from 400 to 530 A.D. Poets,
Historians and Philosophers. Hypatia, Synesius and Palladas. Neo-
Platonists: — Plutarchus, Hierocles, Syrianus, Proclus, Hermeias, Ammonius
and Damascius. The School of Athens closed by Justinian (519). Simplicius
and Oljrmpiodonis II. ' Dionysius the Areopagtte '. Grammarians, Lexico-
graphers, Authors of Chrestomathies and Rhetoricians. Schools of learning
in the East. The end of the Roman Age (599) . . 356-— 375
XXli OUTLINE OF PRINCIPAL CONTENTS.
BOOK V. THE BYZANTINE AGE,
€, 530— r. 1350 A. D. . 376—418
Chronological Table^ 600 — 1000 A.D. . . 378
CHAPTER XXII. Byzantine Scholarship from 519 to 1000 A.D.
Period I (599—641). Choeroboscus. Stephanus of Alexandria. The
Chronicon PaschaU and Malalas.
Period II (641 — 850). John of Damascus. Theognostus. The study of
Aristotle among the Syrians and Arabians.
Period III (850—1350). The Classics in the Ninth Century. Photius and
Arethas. The encyclopaedias of Constantine Porphyrogenitus. The Anthology
of Cephalas. The lexicon of Suldas . . . . . 379 — 399
Chronological TabU^ xoco — c, 1453 A.D. 400
CHAPTER XXin. VfstitAlW continued, Byzantine Scholarship, 1000—
1350 A.D. and after. Psellus. Commentators on Aristotle. Etymological and
other Lexicons. Tzetzes. Theodorus Frodromus. Eustathius. Gregorius
Corinthius. The Latin conquest of Constantinople (1904). Constantinople
and the West. Scholars under the Palaeologi: — Planudes, Moschopulus,
Thomas Magister, Triclinius and Chrysoloras. Characteristics of Byzantine
Scholarship. The Greek Classics in and after Century ix. Their preser-
vation in the Byzantine Age. The Turkish conquest of Constantinople
('453) • 401—418
BOOK VL THE MIDDLE AGES IN THE WEST,
c, 530 — c, 1350 A.D. . . 499 — 650
Chronological Table^ 600 — 1000 A.D. . . . 430
CHAPTER XXIV. Gregory the Great. Gregory of Tours. • Virgilius
Maro', the Grammarian. Columban and Bobbio; Gallus and St Gallen.
Isidore of Seville. Greek in Spain, Gaul, Italy, and Ireland. Theodore of
Tarsus. Aldhelm. Bede. Boniface and Fulda . . . 431 — 454
CHAPTER XXV. Charles the Great and Alcuin. Theodulfus of
Orleans. The Irish monks, Clement, Dungal and Donatus. Einhard.
Rabanus Maurus. Walafrid Strabo. Servatus Lupus and the Classics.
Joannes Scotus. Eric and Remi of Auxerre. The Classics at Pavia,
Modena and St Gallen. *The monk of Einsiedeln*. Ecclesiastical use
of Greek. Hucbald and Abbo 'Cemuus*. Alfred the Great and his
translations 455 — 481
CHAPTER XXVI. The Tenth Century. Regino of PrUm and Ratherius
of Li^ge. Gesta Bertngarii* Odo of Cluni. Bruno. Gunzo. Hroswitha.
Hedwig and Ekkehard II. Walther of Speier. Gerbert, Fulbert and Richer.
Luitprand. Abbo of Fleury. i^lfric of Eynsham . . 483 — 495
OUTLINE OF PRINCIPAL CONTENTS. XXlll
Chrofiological Table ^ xooo— zaoo A.D. . 496
CHAPTER XXVII. ITie Eleventh Century. Chartres, St Avroult
and Bee. Bamberg and Paderbom. Lambert of Hersfeld and Adam of
Bremen. Notker LaIico and Ilermannus 'Contractus*. Anselm of BiMite.
Desiderius, Alfanus and Petrus Damiani. Greek in the eleventh century.
Greek Lectionary of St Denis. Dudo of St Quentin. Carthusians and
Cistercians 497 — 503
CHAPTER XXVIII. The Twelfth Century. The early Schoolmen and
the Classics. The Scholastic Problem ; Realism and Nominalism. Mediaeval
knowledge of Plato; and of Aristotle prior to iiiSa.d. Lanfranc and
Anselm. Abelard. Bernard of Chartres, William of Conches, Adelard of
Bath, Gilbert de la Porr^. Otto of Freising. Theodoric of Chartres.
Bernard Silvester of Tours 504 — 516
CHAPTER XXIX. The Twelfth Century continued. John of Salisbury.
Peter of Blois. Giraldus Cambrensis. Natives of England, who wrote
historical Latin Prose in Centuries xii — xtv. Latin Verse in Centuries
XII — XIII, in Italy, England, France and Germany. Greek in France,
Germany, Italy and England 517 — 536
ChronclogUeU Tablt, xaoo — 1400 A. D.. 538
CHAPTER XXX. The Thirteenth Century. The new Aristotle.
Arabian and Jewish exponents of Greek philosophy. Latin translations from
the Arabic. Early study of Aristotle in Paris. Alexander of Hales. Edmund
Rich. William of Auvergne. Grosseteste. Vincent of Beauvais. Albertus
Magnus. Thomas Aquinas. William of Moerbeke. Siger of Brabant. Gilles
de Paris. Geoffrey of Waterford 539 — 566
CHAPTER XXXI. The Thirteenth Century and after, (i) Roger
Bacon. Raymundus Lullius. Duns Scotus. William Shirwood. William of
Ockham. Walter Burley. Bradwardine. Richard of Bury. Buridan. Jean
de Jandun. (9) Imerius and Accursius at Bologna; Balbi of Genoa; Petrus
of Padua. The teaching of Greek, and the study of the Latin Aristotle, in
Paris. Precursors of the Renaissance in Northern Italy. The Latin studies
of Dante 5^7—593
CHAPTER XXXII. The mediaeval copyists and the Oassics. Survival
of the Latin Classics in France, Germany, Italy and England. Rise of the
mediaeval Universities. Survey of the principal Latin Classics quoted or
imitated in the Middle Ages, recorded in mediaeval Catalogues, and preserved
in mediaeval Manuscripts. Gramnur in the Middle Ages. The study of the
mediaeval 'Arts* versus the study of the Classical Authors. The conflict
between the grammatical and literary School of Orleans and the logical School
of Paris. TAe Battle of the Seven Arts [e, 1170). The prophecy of the author
of that poem fulfilled by the birth (in 1304) of Petrarch, the morning-star of
the Renaissance 594 — 650
Es tu scolaris t Sum, Quid est scoiaris t Est homo discens
virtutes cum solicitudine.,,.Qualis substantia est scoiaris 1 Est
substantia animatd sensitiva scientiae et virtutum susceptibilis.
From Es tu scolaris f^ a mediaeval
catechism of Grammar printed in
Bkbler's Beitrdge {\%%^^ pp. 190 f.
CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTORY.
The term 'scholar', in its primary sense a * learner', is applied
in its secondary sense to one who has learned
thoroughly all that * the school ' can teach him, one Pschiilr" **'
who through his early training and his constant
self-culture has attained a certain maturity in precise and accurate
knowledge. Thus Shakespeare says of Cardinal Wolsey : — * he
was a scholar^ and a ripe and good one '*. The term is specially
applied to one who has attained a high degree of skill in the
mastery of language, as where Ruskin says in Sesame and Lilies : —
' the accent, or turn of expression of a single sentence, will at once
mark a scholar ". It is often still further limited to one who ' has
become familiar with all the very best Greek and Latin authors ',
'has not only stored his memory with their language and ideas,
but has had his judgment formed and his taste corrected by living
intimacy with those ancient wits ". The true scholar, though in
no small measure he necessarily lives in the past, will make it his
constant aim to perpetuate the past for the benefit of the present
and the future. He will obey the bidding of George Herbert : —
* If studious, copie fair what Time hath blurr'd '*. Even if he has
long been in the position of a teacher of others, he will never
cease to be a learner himself; his motto will be discendo docebiSy
docendo disces; like the 'Clerk' in Chaucer's Prologue^ 'gladly
wolde he leme, and gladly teche ' ; as he advances in years, he
will still endeavour to say with Solon: — yrjpa<rKto S' olci vokXa
StScurico/xcvos ; and, when he dies, he may well be content if his
brother-scholars or his pupils pay him any part, however small, of
> //enfy VIII, iv it 51. * p. «4 (1888).
' Donaldson's Clcusical Scholarship and Classical Learnings 1856, p. 150.
* The Church Porch, xv.
S. I
INTRODUCTORY. [CHAP.
the honour paid to a votary of learning by a Robert Browning,
and deem him not unworthy of A GramtnariafCs Funeral,
'Scholarship' may be defined as 'the sum of the mental
attainments of a scholar '. It is sometimes identified
. s^houJihV'' with ' learning ' or ' erudition ' ; but it is often con-
trasted with it. Nearly half a century ago this
contrast was clearly drawn by two eminent contemporaries at
Oxford and Cambridge. 'I maintain,' says Donaldson, 'that
not all learned men are accomplished scholars, though any accom-
plished scholar may, if he chooses to devote the time to the
necessary studies, become a learned man'^ 'It is not a know-
ledge ', writes Mark Pattison, ' but a discipline, that is required ;
not science, but the scientific habit; not erudition, but scholar-
ship". 'Classical Scholarship' may be described as being,
and in the present work is understood to be, ' the accurate study
of the language, literature, and art of Greece and Rome, and of
all that they teach us as to the nature and the history of man '.
As compared with the term 'philology', often borrowed in
SchoUrahi English from the languages of France and Germany,
and » Phiio- the term ' scholarship ' has the advantage of being a
loflry '
more distinctively English word, and of having the
terms ' scholar ' and ' scholarly ' in exact correspondence with it,
whereas ' philology ' is in England a borrowed word of ambiguous
meaning, while 'philologer' and 'philologist' are apt to be used in
a linguistic sense alone. Thus, Scott in the Antiquary makes one
of his characters say of the question whether a particular word is
Celtic or Gothic : — ' I conceive that is a dispute which may be
easily settled by philologists^ if there are any remains of the
language ". We may also recall the memorable words of Sir
William Jones : — ' No philologer could examine the Sanskrit,
Greek, and Latin without believing them to have sprung from
some common source '*. ' Philologer' is hardly ever used in any
wider sense ; even in the linguistic sense, the word we generally
prefer is 'scholar'. 'When I speak contemptuously oiphilology\
says Ruskin, ' it might be answered me, that I am a bad scholar '*.
^ Ciassical Scholarship and Classical Learnings p. 149 (1856).
■ Essays^ i 4^5 (written in 1855). • c. vi p. 61 of Centenary ed.
< Works^ iii 34, cd. 1807. • Modem Painters^ iv xvi § 18 n.
I.] SCHOLARSHIP AND 'PHILOLOGY*. 3
The present confusion in the English use of the word ' philology '
may be illustrated by the fact that in a standard work bearing the
title of a * Manual of Comparative Philology ', the term ' Philology '
is frequently used in the same sense as ' Comparative Philology ',
and as a synonym for ' the Science of Language '. The author, I
need hardly add, is fully conscious of the confusion between the
English and German senses of the word. " In Germany " (as he
justly observes) "the word Philologie means only the body of
knowledge dealing with the literary side of a language as an
expression of the spirit and character of a nation and consequently
the department dealing with language as language forms but a
subordinate part of this wide science. But in England the study
of language as such has developed so largely in comparison with
the wider science of Philology under which it used to rank, that it
has usurped for itself the name of ' Comparative Philology ' and in
recent years of * Philology ' without any limitation "*. Similarly, in
the article on * Philology ' in the latest edition of the Encyclopaedia
Britannica : — " Philology is the generally accepted comprehensive
name for the study of the word; it designates that branch of
knowledge which deals with human speech, and with all that
speech discloses as to the nature and history of man. Philology
has two principal divisions, corresponding to the two uses of
'word' or 'speech', as signifying either what is said, or the
language in which it is said, as either the thought expressed —
which, when recorded, takes the form of literature — or the instru-
mentality of its expression : these divisions are the literary and
the linguistic.... Continental usage (especially German) tends
more strongly than English to restrict the name * philology ' to "
the literary sense. Mpanwhile, in England, it is unfortunately the
fact that ' philology ' and ' comparative philology ' are constantly
confounded with one another. Yet, some forty years ago, Max
Miiller insisted that comparative philology has really nothing what-
ever in common with philology in the wider meaning of the word.
^ Philology... IS an historical science. Language is here treated
simply as a means. The classical scholar uses Greek or Latin...
as a key to the understanding of the literary monuments which
bygone ages have bequeathed to us, as a spell to raise from the
^ P. Giles, Manual of Comparativt Philology^ p. 3 f.
I — 2
INTRODUCTORY. [CHAP.
tomb of time the thoughts of great men in different ages and
different countries, and as a means ultimately to trace the social,
moral, intellectual, and religious progress of the human race....
In comparative philology the case is totally different In the
science of language, languages are not treated as a means ;
language itself becomes the sole object of scientific inquiry '^
The above reasons are sufficient to justify the choice of the
title ' History of Classical Scholarship * for a work appealing
primarily to students and scholars who, in England or elsewhere,
claim English as their mother-tongue. But, whether, in this
connexion, we prefer to use the English word 'Scholarship',
or the foreign word * Philology ', in either case the history of the
latter term is part of the history of our subject, and a few pre-
liminary paragraphs may well be devoted to a brief examination
of the ancient Greek originals from which that term and also the
terms 'philologer', ' grammarian ' and ' critic ' are directly derived.
The variations in the meanings of the ancient terms themselves,
as compared with those of their modern derivatives, are not
uninteresting or unimportant.
The word ^iXoXoytia has a somewhat varied history*. It is
first found in Plato, where it means the ' love of dialectic ' or ' of
scientific argument ''. The corresponding adjective ^tXoXoyos is
applied to * a lover of discourse '*, as contrasted with
^*^*^^ a * hater of discourse'*. It b applied to Athens
as a city 'fond of conversation', in contrast with Sparta and Crete
with their preference for brevity of speech*. Socrates applies it to
himself in a studiously ambiguous sense, either ' fond of talking ',
or ' fond of speeches ' (like those of the orator Lysias)l Else-
where, when added to ^Aoo-o^os, it means a ' lover of reason '^
Thus its uses in Plato are as varied as the meanings of the word
Xayo«, 'speech', 'discourse', 'conversation', 'argument', 'reason'.
^ Lectures on the Science of Languor ^ \ 14, ed. 1866.
' Lehrs, De vocabulis 0cX6Xoyof, 7pa/i/Miriic6t, icpiru6t (Konigsberg, 1838);
reprinted in Appendix to Herodiani scripta tria, p. 379 — 401, 1848; cp.
Boeckh, Encyklopddic.der philologischen Wisitmchafien^ p. 11 — 14.
' Tkeaet, 146 A. ^ ib. 161 A. * Laches i88c.
* Laws 641 b; cp. Isocr. Antid, 196, where ^tXoXoT^a and ci>rparcX/a are
characteristic of Athens.
^ Phaedrus 436 B. « Rep, 581 E.
I.] «IAOAOrOS.
Aristotle describes the Spartans as having made Chilon, one of
the * Wise Men ' of Greece, a member of their Council, although
they were rJKiara ^lAoXoyoi, 'the least literary of all people";
and in the 'Aristotelian' writings we find included under the
general phrase, oo-a ircpc ^lAoXoyuiv, questions of reading, rhetoric,
style and history*. Thus far, the word has not yet acquired any
narrower signification. When Stobaeus (in the fifth century of
our era) in telling an anecdote of Pericles, uses ^iXdXoyoc in one
of its later senses, that of ' educated ', in contrast to ' uneducated '
(airotScvrcK), he is not really quoting the language of Pericles
himself, but is only reflecting the usage of a later age'.
The first to assume the title of ^cXoXoyoc at Alexandria was
the learned and versatile scholar, astronomer, geographer, chrono-
loger, and literary historian, Eratosthenes {c. 276-195 b.c.). The
same title was assumed at Rome by a friend of Sallust and Pollio,
a Roman freedman of Athenian birth, Lucius Ateius Praetextatus
{Ji. 86-29 B.C.)*. The term is applied by Plutarch to those who,
in reading poetry, are attracted by its beauty of expression*. In
late Greek it is mainly found in two senses (i) 'studious', 'fond
of learning ', (2) * learned ', ' accomplished '*. The first is approved
by the Atticist Phrynichus ; the second is condemned^
The word is frequent in the familiar Latin of Cicero's Letters ;
philologia is there applied to the study of literature ", and phiUh
logiis means 'learned' or 'literary'*. Vitruvius calls Homer
poitarum parens philologiaique omnis dux^ ' the father of poetry and
the foremost name in all literature ', and describes the Pergamene
princes as prompted to found their famous Library by the delights
> RheL ii 13, 11. ■ ProbL xviii, p. 916*. •
' Stobaeus, 70, 17.
^ Suetonius, De Grammaticis^ 10.
* De Audiendis Poitis^ c. 1 1 .
* Lehrs L€. p. 380, (1) iruditionis amicus ^ studicsus; (1) eruditus^ litti-
raius*
' p. 483 Rutherford, ^1X6X0701* h 0<Xu»r X^ovt nok ffwov^dfttw W€pl wai-
dc/ar* cl 6i rOr iwl ifiwtipiaw nOiaoiw odx dpBtat,
* Ad AIL ii 17, I ; (Cicero Alius) ad Fam, xvi lit 4; ^v/i^XoXoyccr = tma
ttudere^ ib, S 8.
* Ad Att xiii II, 3 ; 59> 1; xv 15, 1 ; used as a Subst. in xv 19, i and ad
Quint, fr, ii 10, 3.
INTRODUCTORY. [CHAP.
oi phihlogia^ or 'literature '\ In Seneca's IjMqts philologus is
contrasted with grammaticus in the lower sense of the latter : the
philologus (he observes) will notice points of antiquarian interest ;
the grammaticuSy matters of expression '. Lastly, in the fanciful
allegory de nuptiis PhUologiae et Mercuriiy written by Martianus
Capella in the fifth century, the bride Philologia appears as
the goddess of speech, attended by seven bridesmaids personifying
the seven liberal Arts. In modem Latin the meaning oi philologus
had been made much more comprehensive. It is now used in the
sense of a ' scholar ', thus including all that ancient writers under-
stood by grammaticus in the higher sense of the term, and much
more besides, — not only a knowledge of the languages of Greece
and Rome but also a knowledge of all that contributes to the
accurate understanding of their literature and their art. Those
who in modem Latin are called philologi were in ancient times
known either as grammatici (in its higher sense), or as critid.
Having briefly traced the history of the word ^cXoXoyos, we
may now deal no less briefly with the two terms which in modern
Latin, and in French and German, it has ultimately superseded,
the terms ypafifiaruco^ and icpirncos.
In the golden age of Greek literature the common meaning of
ypdfifiara is Metters of the alphabet', and ypafi-
fiariic<$9 is applied to one who is familiar with those
letters, knows * their number and their nature"; one in short who
has learnt to read^ In the same age rcxvi; ypafifiarucij is simply
the art of ypdfifiara*, the art of reading*. Not in the same age
only, but in all later ages, ypafifiarumj^ is a teacher of ypafifiaroj
a teacher of reading and writing^ The Latin term corresponding
to ypafifiartanj^ is litterator^,
* vii Praef, § 8 and § 4.
* Ep, 108 § 19.
* Plato, Philcbus 17 B; cp. Theaet, 907 B; Xen. Mem, iv 1, 10.
< Plato, Rip, 401 B.
* Philibus 18 D, Craiylus 431 E; Soph. 153 a; cp. ^ rdw ypafifidrvw fidBri-
fftt (Theaet, 106 A, to^ D; Protag, 345 a).
* Aristotle, PoL 1337 ^ «5 f; Categ. c. 9; Top, vi 5, 141 b 31 f.
^ Plato, Euthydemus 179 B, wtfi ypafi/idrtop ypa^rit re xal dt^aypiiwwitt cl
ypofiftariffTal, cp. Pi-otag, 396 D, Laws 811 A.
* Suetonius, De Grammaiicis 4.
I.] rPAMMATIKOS.
In the earlier time ypofifiara seldom means ' literature ' ' ; but
it is to this sense of the word that we owe the new meaning given
'to its derivative ypafifjuariKot in the Alexandrian age. That new
meaning is a ' student of literature ', especially of poetical litera-
ture ; and similarly ypo/ifiarun; now comes to mean the ' study of
literature \ especially of poetry. ypa/jL/uirucfj in this new sense of
the term is sometimes said to have begun with Theagenes of
Rhegium (yf. 525 b.c.), who was the earliest of the allegorical
interpreters of Homer". When Plato is described as the first who
speculated on the nature of ypafifiaruaj^ we may assume that the
reference is to the CratyluSy a dialogue in which he discusses the
nature of words. Aristotle is similarly described as the founder
of the art of ypafifiaTucj in that higher sense which implies the
learned study of poetic literature^ But this is only the language
of /a/er writers^ and we may be sure that neither Theagenes nor
Plato nor Aristotle would have described himself as ypafifxaTiK^f^
except in the sense applicable to all who could read and write.
The first who was called ypa/i/Aariicoc in the new sense of the
term was a pupil of Theophrastus, the Peripatetic Praxiphanes of
RHodes (yf. 300 b.c.), the author of certain works on history and
poetry. According to another tradition, the first who received
this designation was Antidorus of Cumae, who wrote a treatise on
Homer and Hesiod, and also a work on Style, and may be placed
very early in the Alexandrian age. After the time of Antidorus,
we find Eratosthenes giving the title ypafifiaruca to two of his
works, but their contents are unknown*. Dionysius Thrax (bom
' It seems to bear this meaning in Plato j4^. 26 D, dwtlpovt ypafifUrwif,
though this is denied by Kaibel in Hermes xxv (1890) 101 f.
' Schol. on Dionysius Thrax, p. 719, 9a, {ypOLikikorKiAi^ dp^a/tdvii iiiw iw6
Qtayiwovt, reXctr^eura 9i vapd tQp TLeptwan^ruc&p Upa^i^povt koI *A/Mrro-
rAovt.
' Diogenes Laertius, iii 15, wp&rot i$€tifnfff€ r^ ypa/ifULTiicijt t^p 66pafw^.
* Dion Chrysostom, Or. 53, i, d^* o5 ^vi tV KptruHiP rt Ktd ypa/ifiariK^p
d^xV Xa/3eir. Cp. Susemihl, GeschiekU tier Gr. Lift, in der AUxandnmrtiit^
ii 663-5-
• Clemens Alexandrinus, Stromateis i p. 309, 'Arridwpot (*AroXXAd«pof Ms)
6 Kv/iaiot wpCrrvt rod KptriicoO (iffirt^^ro {wafffgri^aro Usener) tcC^o/m koI
ypofi/MTtK^ wfioofiyopt&Bfi, tptoi di 'Bparmr^^if t6p Kv^mi6r ^o^cf, 4vu9^
4^hwK€P o&rot /9i/9X(a Ji^, ypafAfiariKii iwiyp^yf^ai, CupoiiikffBri M 7pa/guiTM6t, «^f
9^ (c. 100 A.D.) 6pot»/&i'ofitPt wfHOTot npa(c0dviff (e, 300 B.C.).
8 INTRODUCTORY. [CHAP.
about 1 66 B.C.), in the earliest treatise on Grammar now extant,
defined ypofi/uiriKii as being ' in general the practical knowledge
of the usage of writers of poetry and prose '*. He divided it into
six parts: — (i) accurate reading, (2) explanation of poetic figures
of speech, (3) exposition of rare words and of subject-matter,
(4) etymology, (5) statement of regular grammatical forms. These
five parts form the 'minor' or 'imperfect' art of Grammar, the
' perfect ' art including : (6) ' the criticism of poetry, which is the
noblest part of all". A better subdivision gives us only four
parts, (i) correction of the text, (2) accurate reading, (3) exposi-
tion, (4) criticism*. Dionysius of Halicamassus twice describes
rriv ypafifiarucriv as including the art of reading and writing and
the art of grammar, without extending its meaning to literary
criticism *.
In the Roman age the Alexandrian meaning of ypafifiariKo^ is
noticed by Suetonius who makes the borrowed word grammaticus
synonymous with the Latin litieraius^. He adds that Cornelius
Nepos agrees with this view, and regards litterati and grammatid
as equivalent to po'etarum interpretes. Similarly Cicero treats
grammatica (neuter plural) as synonymous with studium littcrarum^^
and includes in its province poetarum pertractatio^ histotiarum
cognitio, verborum interpretation pronuntiandi quidam sonus''. Else-
where he describes grammatici as interpretes poetarum^. Just as
Cicero identifies the science with studium litterarum^ so Quin-
tilian describes it as sometimes translated by litter at ur a} ^ and as
including disquisitions on style and subject-matter, the explanation
of difficulties and the interpretation of poetry *^ He divides it
into two parts, (i) *the science of correct language', (2) *the
* ifiwtipla u)t M t6 wo\d rC^ wapdk wottirait rt koX ffvyypa^Offi Xtyoiiivwv
(Iwan MUlIer*s Handbuch i 130*, 151')*
' Cp. Philo p. 348 B c and 461 g; and Sext. Emp. pp. 114, 116, quoted
by Classen, De Gram. Gr, printordiis^ p. 11 f.
* Schol. on Dion. Thrax in Bekker's Anted, 736, (m^^) dtop^cirrcir^, ova-
* De Dem, p. 1115 R, />^ Comp, Verb, p. 414 Schaefer (c. 14).
* De Grammaticis 4. ^ De Or, i § 10. ' 1^. § 187.
B De Div. i § 34 ; cp. ib, 1 16 and Orator § 71. Cp. ad Att, vii 3, 10, quo-
niam grammaticus es, si hoc mihi ^i^n^/ia persolveris, magna me molestia libe-
raris.
* II i 4. "I ii 14.
I.] PHILOLOGUS AND GRAMMATICUS. 9
interpretation of poetry''; the former, he adds, must include
'correct writing', and the latter must be preceded by 'reading
aloud with correctness'. It thus embraces correct reading and
correct writing, and, beside these, criticism, which detects spurious
lines or spurious works, and draws up select lists of approved
authors'. Seneca, as an adherent of the Stoic philosophy, which
had paid special attention to Grammar, uses grammaticus in a
somewhat narrower sense'. He also compares the different lights
in which Cicero's treatise de Republica is viewed by a philosophus^
a philologus and a grammaticus. While the philosophus wonders
that so much can be argued on the side contrary to that of
Justice, the philologus notices that, of two kings of Rome, the
father of the one (Ancus) and the mother of the other (Numa)
were unknown ; also that Romulus is said to have perished during
an eclipse of the sun, that the dictator was formerly called the
magister populi^ and that there was a provocatio ad populum even
in the time of the kings, 'as Fenestella also holds'. But the
grammaticus (he continues) notices (i) verbal expressions, such as
reapse for re ipsa^ (2) changes in the meaning of words, as the use
of calx for creta^ of opis pretium (in Ennius) for operae pretium^
(3) the phrase caeli porta^ borrowed by Ennius from Homer, and
itself borrowed in turn by Virgil*. Lastly, when Aulus Gellius
(yf. 150 A. D.) wished to ascertain the meaning of the phrase ex
iure manum consertum^ he applied to a grammaticuSy who professed
to expound Virgil, Plautus and Ennius, but (as it happened) was
quite unaware that this legal phrase was actually found in Ennius*.
Thus it appears that, in and after the Alexandrian age, ypafifia-
rucoc mainly implied aptitude in the study and interpretation of
poetry, and ypofi/iariin; included not only Grammar but also (in
its higher sense) the criticism of the poets.
•
' I iv 1.
* I iv 3, (judicium) quo quidem ita severe sunt usi veteres grammatici, ut
non versus modo censoria quadam virgula notare et libros, qui falso viderentur
inscripti, tanquara subditos summovere familia permiserint sibi, sed auctores
alios in ordinera redegerint, alios omnino exemerint numero.
' £p, 88 § 3, grammaticus circa curam sermonis versatur, et, si latius eva-
gari vult, circa historias« iam ut longissime fines suos proferat, circa carmina.
< £p, 108 §§ 30—34-
* Gellius, XX 10.
lO INTRODUCTORY. [CHAP.
The Alexandrian use of ypofifiarucos in the above sense was
apparently somewhat later than the use of Kpircxoc
in the same general sense. The word icpircxos is
found in a pseudo-platonic dialogue of uncertain date, in a passage
in which the Greek boy, on reaching the age of seven, is humor-
ously described as 'suffering much at the hands of tutors and
trainers, and teachers of reading and writing ' {ypafifiarurraC), and
as 'passing, as he grows up, under the control of teachers of
mathematics, tactics and criticism ' {icptriKoi) \ There is reason to
believe that, just as this use of icpiriicol probably preceded that of
ypafifiarucoi in its Alexandrian sense, similarly the term Kpirunj
was earlier than the corresponding term ypafifiaruci^
Criticism was regarded as founded by Aristotle, and among
its foremost representatives in the Alexandrian and Pergamene
age were Aristarchus at Alexandria and Crates at Pergamon'.
Crates and his pupils of the Pergamene School subordinated
ypafifxaTiKTJ to KpiTiKi;, and preferred to be called KpiriKoC*, Criti-
cism was among the higher functions of the ypafifiariKo^* Thus
Athenaeus {Ji, c, 200 a.d.) describes the authorship of certain
poems as a matter for the critical judgement (KpiVctv) of the best
ypafjLfiariKoi^ ; and Galen (130-200 a.d.) wrote a treatise on the
question whether any one could be Kpinico^ and also ypa/i/iaTCKOf,
implying a certain distinction between these terms.
Meanwhile, more than two centuries before Galen, Cicero in
one of his letters, after alluding to Aristarchus, describes himself
^ Axiochus 366 B. Cp. P. Girard, V Education Athiniennt^ p. 914 — 7.
' Schol. on Dionysius Thrax, p. 673, 19, ^»c7^parTai 7Ap rh ra/>^ ^iJ^y-
ypofkfUL icard fUw rcraf wtpl ypafifiaTiKijtf xarii 8i iHpovt wepl KpiriKrji Wx*^'*
KpiriK^ 8i A^eroi ^ Wx*^ ^*^ '''o^ KaWlarov /lipovu Bekker, Atucdotay p. 1 140,
rb wpdrtpop xpirucii i\iy€To {ii ypafifiaTiKij)^ xal ol raimnp fiert^rret KpiriKol. Cp.
Usener in Suscmihl i^, ii 665.
* Dion Chrysostoro, Or, 53, 1 1* kplrrapxot koX Kpdnjt xal h-epoi wXelovt twp
ficr€po» ypafifiariKUP xXriOipTutp, KpSrtpop 6i KpiTiKiOP, kcU dii xal aOrbt 6
'A/H<rro7Ai7f, d^* ov ^oo*! riip KptriKiffp re koI ypafifiariKiiP d/>xV Xa/3e7r.
* Sextus Emp., Math, i 79, (Kpdnjt) iXtyt 8tti^4p€ip rbp KpiTiKdp rod ypafi-
fiariKW' Kol TOP flip KpiTinhp w6aiitt ^i/ifft, 8tt XoyiKijt iwiaHffitit ifiweipop eirai*
t6p M ypofAfULTiicbp i,w\Qt y\uw<r£^p i^tfyrfriKbp xal wpoffi^lat dwoSoriKbp rrX.,
and 148, TavfUffKOt 6 Kpdiifrot dKowrHjt, iaawtp ol dXXoi KpiriKol, hrordinrup
r^ KptTixi riip ypafi/MTiKiiP ktX,
* p. 116.
I.] KPITIKOZ AND CRITICUS. II
as about to decide, tamquam criticus antiquus^ whether a certain
document is genuine or spurious \ The term is also used by
Horace, in a passage in which he calls Ennius an alter HomeruSy
ut critid dicunt^ where Varro is probably meant". It also occurs
repeatedly in the Commentary on Virgil by Servius, in the frequent
phrase notant criiici*. Lastly, fcpiriKof is found as a designation of
Dionysius of Halicamassus ; also of Munatius of Tralles (the
tutor of Herodes Atticus) in the second century, and of Cassius
Longinus in the third ^ Thus it appears that, owing to a certain
ambiguity in the term ypafifiariKos with its lower sense of ' gram-
marian' and its higher sense of 'scholar', and a corresponding
ambiguity in the term ypafifiarucrj with its lower sense of 'grammar'
and its higher sense of 'scholarly criticism', the term Kpirucdc
was generally applied to those of the ypafifiarucoi who excelled in
the higher branch of ypafifiariicj, that of literary criticism. We
may conclude on the whole that one who in modern times is in
English called a ' scholar ', in French a philologucy and in German
a philology would in ancient times have been called either a gram-
maticus or a cntiaiSy according to his degree of distinction, the
latter being the higher term of the two ; while the term philologus
in general designated a lover of learning, or a learned student of
varied accomplishments and especially of antiquarian tastes'.
In modern times the first who called himself studiosus philo-
logtae was F. A. Wolf, the founder of the modern
German school of scholarship, who thus described . phiiorogy •
himself in the matriculation-book of the University
of Gottingen on 8 April 1777, a date which has accordingly been
designated as the ' birthday of Philology '•. In after years Wolf
himself was dissatisfied with the term Philologie because its
Alexandrian associations confined it to the study of Literature
alone, to the exclusion of Art, and also because in modem times
it was apt to be regarded as synonymous with the Science of
* €ui Fam, ix 10, i. • Ep. II i 51.
* Servius on Atn. 171, viii 731, xi 188 etc. (ap. Lehrs /.^., p. 397 note).
^ Usener on Dionysius Hal. de Imitatione p. 1 33 note ; and Lehrs /. c.
P- 395-
* Lehrs l.c, p. 379.
* F. Haase in Ersch und Gruber, s,v, * Philologie,* p. 383 n. 19.
12 INTRODUCTORY. [CHAP.
Language. He therefore preferred the term Aiterthums-wissen-
schaftf *the Science of Antiquity**. Other terms have been sug-
gested at various times', but in France and Germany the term
PhiiologU still holds its own.
* Philology' was for a long time limited to linguistic studies, and
was regarded as only including grammar, lexicography, exegesis,
and textual and literary criticism ; but, since the time of Wolf, it
has been generally understood in a wider sense, as including the
study of ancient life in all its phases, as handed down to us in the
literature, the inscriptions, and the monuments, of Greece and
Rome'. It has thus been interpreted by scholars such as Ast
and Bernhardy, Boeckh and Otfried Miiller, Ritschl and Haase\
In contrast to the comprehensive definition given by these, we
have the narrower view best represented by Gottfried Hermann,
who saw in ' Philology ' a science of language alone \
The varied studies included within the province of Thilology'
have been grouped and classified in different ways by Wolf and
Bernhardy, Boeckh and Miiller, Ritschl, Reichardt and Haase'.
The tendency in the later classifications of the subject has been to
make Grammar not a merely instrumental means towards the
study of 'Philology', but one of the main subjects of study in
itself. It has also become increasingly necessary to include
^ KUine Schriften^ ii 814 f.
' e.g. 'classical learning', studia humanitatist and the unclassical term
hufna9tiora (criticised by Boeckh, Etuyklopadie der philologischen WUsen-
schaften^ p. 34 f).
» Kleine SchrifUn, ii 826.
^ Ast, Grundriss der PhiiologU (1808) p. i ; Bernhardy, Grundlinien %ur
EncyklopddU der Philologie (1833) p. 48 — 53; Boeckh, Rheinisches Museum
(1827) i 41; MuUer (1836) Gottingen gel, Anteiger^ p. 169; Ritschl, Convers.-
Lexikon, s.v. Philologie p. 501 ; and Haase in Ersch u. Gruber iii 33 p. 390
(all quoted in Freund*s Triennium Philologicum^ i p. 5).
* Hermann's view was attacked by Boeckh and Miiller Lc. In the preface
to the Acta Sodetatis Graecae he had spoken with contempt of the Comparative
Philologists 'qui ad Brachmanas et Ulphilam confugiunt atque ex paucis non
satis cognitarum linguarum vestigiis quae Graecorum et Latinorum verlK>rum
vis sit explanare conantur' (cp. Freund, pp. 11, 15).
• Wolf, Kleine Schriften^ ii 894 ; Bernhardy, Grundlinien^ p. xi ; Boeckh,
Encyklop&dUi pp. 54-^4 ; MUller, lx.\ Ritschl, l.c. ; Reichardt, die Gliederung
der Philologie (1846); and Haase, Lc, (transcribed in Freund, Lc, p. 8 — 14).
I.] RANGE OF MODERN * philology'. 1 3
among the introductory studies, the general and also the compara-
tive Science of Language. . Inscriptions, which were classed by
Wolf under the heading of Art, are now rightly regarded as part
of the written records of antiquity, and as supplying, side by
side with Literature, part of the documentary evidence for the
history and the antiquities of the Greek and Roman world*.
The history of Classical Scholarship corresponds to the last
of the four and twenty subdivisions of * Philology '
suggested by Wolf; and is the first of the studies cumIci?
introductory to * Philology ' in the scheme proposed SchoUr.hip
by Haase, and also in that elaborately carried out in the encyclo-
paedic work known as I wan MuUer's Handbtuh der klassischen
AUertumswissemchaft (1886 f). A knowledge of the general course
of the history of Classical Scholarship in the past is essential to
a complete understanding of its position in the present and its
prospects for the future. Such a knowledge is indispensable to the
student, and even .to the scholar, who desires to make an intelli-
gent use of the leading modem commentaries on classical authors
which necessarily refer to the labours of eminent scholars in
bygone days. And the study of that history is not without its
incidental points of interest, in so far as it touches on themes of
such variety, and such importance, as the earliest speculations on
the origin of language, the growth of literary and dramatic criticism
at Athens, the learned labours of the critics and grammarians of
Alexandria and Rome, and of the lexicographers of Constantinople.
It also has its points of contact with the Scholastic Philosophy of
the Middle Ages, with the Revival of Learning and the. Reforma-
tion of Religion, and with the foundations of the educational
systems of the foremost nations of the modem world.
The volume now offered to the public is the first instalment of
a History of Classical Scholarship from the sixth o u^i 1 1
century b.c. to the present day. That history may of the proposed
be most conveniently distributed over the following ^^'
twelve divisions of the subject, but the dates of the limits assigned
to each division must be regarded as only approximate.
' Boeckh, Introd. to Corp, Imcr. Cr, vol. vii.
14 INTRODUCTORY. [CHAP.
I. The Athenian Age, from 600 to 300 b.c.
II. The Alexandrian Age, from 300 b.c to the beginning
of the Christian era.
III. The Roman Age oi Latin Scholarship, from 168 b.c. to
530 A.D.
IV. The Roman Age of Greek Scholarship, from the be«
ginning of the Christian era to 530 a.d.
V. The Byzantine Age, or the Middle Ages in the £ast»
from 530 to 1350 A.D.
VI. The Middle Ages in the West, from 530 to 1350 a.d.
VII. The Revival of Learning in Italy from 1350 a.d. to the
death of Leo X in 1521, with the subsequent history
of scholarship in Italy.
The modern history of scholarship in (VIII) France, (IX)
Holland, (X) England, (XI) Germany, and (XII) the other
nations of Europe and the United States of America.
The time to be traversed will ultimately extend to as much
as two thousand five hundred years, and in the sequence of the
centuries the narrative will pass from one home of learning to
another, from Athens to Alexandria and Pergamon, from Pergamon
and Alexandria to Rome, and from Rome to Constantinople. It
will also range over the vast expanse of the Middle Ages in the
West, as well as in the East of Europe, pausing for a time in Italy
at the date of the death of Dante (132 1). On some future day it
may invite us to visit the studious haunts of Petrarch at Vaucluse
and Arqua; to linger for a while in Florence and in other
famous cities of Italy ; and then to turn to the chief centres of
scholarship in the northern lands which were successively reached
by the Revival of Learning. For three centuries of this survey our
interest will be mainly fixed on Athens, for three on Alexandria,
for more than five on Rome ; then, for eight centuries, it will be
first concentrated on Constantinople, and afterwards diffused over
the West of Europe. Rather less than six centuries will thus
await our study at some not far distant time. In any future review
of the period of exactly two centuries that divides the death of
Dante from the death of Leo X, our attention will be almost
exclusively confined to Italy, and, in the final period of little more
than 380 years, we shall look forward to tracing the progress of
I.] PLAN OF THE PROPOSED WORK. 1$
scholarship in Italy and in other lands from the close of the
Italian Renaissance down to the present day.
In that final period, even more than in the far earlier ' Ages '
of the present volume, a history of scholarship must necessarily
to a large extent consist of notices of the lives and works of
individual scholars. In the case of the more important names,
some estimate of the value of their services will naturally be
expected. In the case of names of minor importance^ the briefest
mention must suffice ; and, in a work so limited in compass as
compared with the wide extent of the subject, many will unavoid-
ably be omitted altogether. Every endeavour will however be made
to give accurate details as to the dates connected with those who
are mentioned in these pages. Names of special importance in
the annals of literature or scholarship will also find a place in the
chronological tables, in which an attempt will be made to give a
brief conspectus of the more than nineteen centuries over which
the present volume extends. The reader may remember that Cicero,
in his Orator^ tells us that his friend Atticus, in composing a
comprehensive work extending over seven centuries, had succeeded
' by a strict observance and specification of dates, without omitting
any notable event, in including within the compass of a single
volume the annals of seven hundred years*. Elsewhere he makes
the author modestly ask, ' what his work could possibly contain,
that was either new or particularly useful to Cicero*, and himself
vouchsafes a reassuring reply as to its * utility*, and as to its
containing ' much that was new to him '. I trust that the reader,
whether in using the present work he finds much or little that is
new to him, will at any rate find in its chronological tables,
unpretentious as they are, the same kind of utility that Cicero
found in the liber annaiis of Atticus : — ut explicatis ordinibus
temporum uno in conspectu omnia viderem^.
^ Cicero, Orator no, Brutus 14 f. For a conspectus of the periods covered
by these tables, and the pages on which they wiU be found, see p. xi supra.
BOOK I
THE ATHENIAN AGE
Thucydides, ii 41 § i.
TcHTovToi' 8' airoXcXoiirci' ij irdXis ly/ioJi' ir€/)i to t^poi^ciF Kai X^cif
To\)% dXXovs n.v6pwtQi\j^y ioo'ff ol ravrq^ fJLaOrjraX roiv oXXoif SiSacricaXoi
y€y6vaa'ij Koi to tcoi' 'EXXi^i^oiv ovofia irciroa;KC fUfKcn rov y€vov% diXXa
r^s Stai'oias SoKcti' cti^i, ical fAoXXov ^EXXi^as KoX^urOai rov9 r^s
iraiSevaccDS t^9 iJ/ACTcpas ^ rovs n7S koivi^s ^ixrccDS /ACTc;(OKraf.
IsocRATES, Panegyric^ § 50.
S.
Conspectus of Greek Literature &c., c. 840 — 300 B.C.
Epie Poet!
floruit
c. 840 ? Homer
c. 790 f Hesiod
Before 700
earlier Cyclic
Poeu, Stasi-
nus, Cy/ria,
Arctlnus, At-
tkiopU, Iliu-
fersitt and
Agiat, Ncstoi
700
Intermediate
Cyclic Poets;
c. 660 Lesches,
LittU Iliad
C.645 Peisander
lorrioPoeti
600
Later
Cyclic Poeu ;
c. 566 Eugam-
mon, TtU-
gmtia
600^
489 Pany&sii
Antimachui
fl. c. 464— 4«o
690 Calllnus'
676 Terpander
675 Tvrtaeuft'
657 Alcman
650 Archilo*
chu»'»
625 Semonides
of Amorgoft'
690 Mimner-
mus'
630 Stesichorus
612 Alcaeus
613 Sappho
600 Anon
594 Solon''
c. 6j9— 559
544 Ibycus
54a Hipponax*
540 Theognis'
537 Phocylides'
530 Anacreon
Dramatista
Simonidet of
Ceo» 556 — 468
Bacchylides
fl 476—45*
Inndar
c. 5aa— r. 443
404 Choerilus
400
OriUcs
(535 Theagenes)
ZoTlu*
7^-365—336
340 Hcradeides
Ponticus
Chamaeleon
Praxiphanet
300
Muiioians
(676 ? Terpander)
(508 Lasiis)
Alelanippides
d. 41a
Philoxenus
435-380
Timotheus
d. 357
310 Ariitoxeniu
PhilOBophen
580 Susarion'
536 The^pis
Epicharmus'
540—450
Phrynichus
13 — 476
Ae»
iyl
—456
^escnyius
Sophocles
495—405
449 Cratlnus'
Euripides
480—406
439 Eupolis'
43$| Phrvnichus'
Aristophanes <
<". 450— 385 *
585 Thales
c. 634—548
575 Anaximander
c. 611—^47
550 Anaximenes
c. 588—534
530 Pythagoras
c. 580 — c. 500
530 Xenophanes
c. 576—480
HistoriaiiB
500 Heradeitus
c.
495
Parmenides
MiddU Comedy
^90 — 320
Antiphanes^
Annxandrides'
Alexis<^
New CoiHedy
320—350
Philemon <^
c. 363—263
Menander'
Dl
hfJiilus'
455 Empedocles
450 Anaxagoras
c. 500 — 438
Socrates
46^399 .
430 Democntus
460—357
5«> Cadmus of
Miletus
500 Hecataeus
Oraton fto.
400 Antisthenes
Plato 430—348
Arixtotle
„ 384— 322
1 heophrastus
372-287
Zeno
c. 350 — 360
Epicunis
341-370
Herodotus
c. 484—^- ,425
4^ Hellanicus
1 hucydides
471 or 455—400
Ctesias
fl' 415-398
Xenophon
C- 434 7^- 359
360 Cleidcnius
Ephorus
c. 405—330
353 1 neo-
pompus
346 Androtion
Dicaearchus
347—387
Timaeus
153—356
Philochonis
c, 306—361
466 Corax
liKias
437 Gorgias
c. 485—380
Pericles
493—429
447 Prougoras
c. ^80—411
435 P':ot»»«"
435 Hippias
Antiphon
480—411
liirasymachus
c. 457—400
Andocides
C. 440—390
Lyiuas
c- 445—378
I Socrates
. 436—338
Isaeus ^20 — 348
Deniusthenes
384 — 333
AcKchincs
389—314
Lycurgus
k. 338-326
Hypereides
A 344 -32a
Deinarchua
fl 342.— •9*
Demetnus of
Phaleron
fl zii—yn
' otegiaCi *' iambic^ ' coinic poets.
CHAPTER II.
THE STUDY OF EPIC POETRY.
The earliest poems of Greece supplied the Greeks with their
earliest themes for study, for exegesis, and for Homer and
literary criticism. From about 600 b.c we have ***« rh«p»ode»
definite proof of the recitation of the Homeric poems by rhap-
sodes in many parts of the Greek world, — at Chios, at Delos, at
Cyprus, at Syracuse, at Sicyon, and in Attica. The recitations in
Attica were probably connected with the festivals of Dionysus at
Athens and with a similar festival at Brauron * ; and, by an ordi-
nance of Solon, the date of whose archonship is
594 B.C., the rhapsodes were required to recite con-
secutive portions of the Homeric poems, instead of selecting
isolated passages'. The effect of this ordinance would be not
' Clearchus in Athen. vii i, ^ rwr ^^^5«Dy {iopHi)t ifp ^Tor «roTd r^r rwr
Ato^vffltaif. Hesychius, Upavpwrlott t^p *IXid5a yiop JM^if^cX iv UpavpQpi rijt
'Arrucrjs. Cp. Welcker, Der epische Cyclust i p. 391 f; A. Mommsen, Heor-
tologitt pp. Ill, 138.
' Diogenes Laertius, Life of Solon^ i 1, 57, rd r« 'Ofti^pov i^ {fropoXijt
y4yf>a^€ patf^(fd€ic$ai, oTor 5wov 6 wpioTos fKr^tP, iKtWtp dpx^^^^ r^r ^6/Mvor.
I here understand i^ vwopoKrit not as the exact equivalent, but as the corrtla"
tive of i^ vroXi^^eon in [Plato], Hipparchusy 118 B (quoted on p. 11), e(
vxo/3oX^f , * by the giving of a cue *, referring to the first of two successive
reciters, who ends at a given cue and leaves the second to take it up (^0-
^XXec), and i^ ^roXi^^ewt, ' by the taking up of a cue*, to the next reciter,
who tekkes up the cue (inroKafi^dpti), i^ vwopoKijt has been much discussed.
The various interpretations may be stated thus: (1) *se invicem excipiem/o*
*in continuous (or alternate) succession' (Wolf, Boeckh, Wilamowitz) ;
(S) ex praeceptOt 'according to a prescribed rule*, the rhapsodes omitting what
they were told to omit, but reciting the rest unaltered (Nitzsch); similarly (8)
ex exempiari praescripto, *adfidan exemplaris probcUi\ *from an authorised
2—2
20 THE ATHENIAN AGE. [CHAP.
merely to cause the competition to be more severe, but also to
promote on the part of the audience, no less than on that of the
reciters, a more consecutive and more complete knowledge of the
contents of the poems themselves. Moreover, the competitions
between rhapsode and rhapsode, like the contests between poet
and poet in an earlier time, would excite in the audience a faculty
for discriminating not only between the competing reciters but
also between their competing recitations, and would thus give an
early impulse to a widely diffused and popular form of literary
criticism.
The above tradition regarding the Athenian legislator Solon
has its counterpart in a legend relating to the Spartan legislator
Lycurgus. The date of Lycurgus is uncertain, one account
placing him in 776 bc, at the beginning of the Olympic era, and
another a century earlier. According to Plutarch ', Lycurgus met
with the Homeric poems in Crete, and brought a copy back with
him to Greece. Plutarch's authority for this may possibly have
been Ephorus, a historian of the fourth century B.C. Even on
Attic soil, Solon has a rival in Peisistratus, whose
rule at Athens began m 560 and ended m 527 b.c.
According to the well-known story, he is said to have been the
first to collect the scattered poems of Homer and to arrange them
in order. The story is not found in any earlier author than
Cicero, or in any extant Greek writer earlier than Pau;>anias
(y7. 174 A.D.)*; but the question whether it was Solon or Peisis-
tcxt' to be exactly followed by the reciter (Grafenhan, Gesch, d, kL Phil, i
■268; Bern hardy, Gr. Litt. \ 330*); (4) praesetUe aliquo qui verba subiceret^
*with prompting' (Hermann, Mr Monro, and others), omitting olav Swov —
Tbp ix^fitrw. Part of the extensive literature of the controversy may be seen
in Wolf, ProUg, c. xxxii; Boeckh, Corpus Inscr, Gr. ii 676 ff; Nitzsch,
Quaestio Honurica iv (1818), De Hist. Homeri ii 131 (1837), SagmpoesU^
p. 413 (1853); Hermann, Opusc, v 300—311, vii 65—87 (1834—9); Wila-
mowitz, Homerische Untersuchungen^ p. 363 — 6 (1884). Cp. Kitschl,
Opusc. i 56; Sengebusch, Diss, ii 111; A. Mommsen, Hcortologie^ p. 138;
Bergk, Gr. Lit. \ 499, Christ, Gr. Litt.^ § 37*; Professor Jebb's Homer ^ p. 77 ;
and Mr Andrew Lang's Homer and the Epic^ p. 36.
* Lycurgus, c. 4, discussed by Wilamowitz, Horn, Unt. p. 167 — 285.
^ Cicero, De Or. iii 137, qui primus Homeri libros, confusos antea, sic
disposuisse dicitur, ut nunc habemus; Pausanias, vii 36, XUiciarparoi ivri rd
*Oiidipov di€ffwafffi4ifa re koI dXKa dXXaxoO /Junifi,o¥tv6fi,€Pa iidfioi^tTO, Cp. Wolf's
II.] HOMER AND THE RHAPSODES. 21
tratus who did a signal service to the Homeric poems was appa-
rently familiar to a Megarian historian of the fourth century b.c. *
The story about Peisistratus, it need hardly be added, has been
much discussed. Accepted unreservedly by some eminent scholars
and rejected entirely by others, it has sometimes been accepted in
a limited sense by those who hold that the story need only imply
the restoration of a unity which in process of time had been
gradually ignored'. The festival of the Panathenaea, at which
the Homeric poems were in after times usually recited", was cele-
brated with special splendour by Peisistratus, who is even some-
times called the founder of the festival* ; and, according to a
dialogue attributed to Plato, it was one of the sons of Peisistratus,
namely Hipparchus (527-514 b.c.), who *was the
first to bring into this land the proems of Homer,
and who compelled the rhapsodes to recite them successively, in
regular order, at the Panathenaea, as they still do at the present
day**. The story is inconsistent with the statement that the poems
of Homer were recited at Athens in the time of Solon, but it is
possibly true that the recitations at the Panathenaea in particular
Prdegonitna c. xxxiii; Egger, Histoire de la Critique (cd. 1887), pp. 9 — 18;
Wilamowitz, /. r., pp. 135 — ifi^',, and Flach*s Peisistraios und seine litterarische
HiiUigkeit (1885); also Jebb's Horner^ p. 114, A. Lang, Homer and the
EpiCf p. 37, and T. W. Allen in Classical Review^ xv (1901) p. 7 f .
^ Diogenes Laertius, i 3, 57, /laXXof o0v 'LbXtap'Ofuipov i^iirriffiw 17 Utifflv'
Tparotf <Dr Leaf, /liad, 1900, p. xviii, here inserts ixttPos 7&p ^ 6 rd tmi tit
rh» xardXoTov iiiroffyiat Koi 06 n€i<r<0'rparof , > un ^i7<r( Accvx^^t if^ riiiwr^
Mryapcviiyr. On the date of Dieuchidas, cp. Wilamowitz, /. r., p. 340 f.
' Jebb's Homer pp. 114 f. It is accepted in this sense by RitschI, but
rejected altogetlier by Ludwich, Wilamowitz and Flach. It had been accepted
by Wolf and Lachmann, both of whom regard the written Homer as dating
from Peisistratus. This view has recently been gaining ground. Dr Leaf
(/. c. p. xix) now believes that ' an official copy of Homer was made in Athens
in the time of Solon and Peisistratus*.
' Lycurgus c. Leocr, 101, ofhw 7&p uviXafiov hfiQp ol rar^pcf ffwovialop
clrcu vocirn^y (tftfre y^/ior (Otpro Ka$* ixdumiv wtPTtrriplda fU^w rwr dXX«#r
rocifTuir ^}f^f^Tff$ai r& fn;.
^ Scholiast on Aristeides Pamith. p. 333 Dindorf. The athletic contests
of the Great Panathenaea had however been instituted in 566 B.C. (Busolt, (7r.
Cesch, 'ii? 344), six years before Peisistratus became tyrant.
•[Plato], Hipparchus «a8D, ^rd7ira<re roift ^a^do^ IlaFatfiyitUMf i^
^oXi^^eon i^i^ airii inivoi. Cp. note 7 on p. 19.
22 THE ATHENIAN AGE. [CHAP.
were introduced by Hipparchus. It was on the invitation of
Hipparchus* that Simonides of Ceos lived at Athens from about
522 to 514 ac, and it is interesting to notice that it is in
Simonides that we find the earliest extant quotation from Homer
in a line which he ascribes to * the man of Chios ', — olqirtp ^vXXoiv
There are some dubious stories of early interpolations in the
Early inter- Homeric poems. Thus Peisistratus is said to have
poutions introduced into the Odyssey a line in honour of the
Attic hero, Theseus' ; and both Solon and Peisistratus are credited
with the insertion of a line referring to Ajax, for the supposed
purpose of proving that Salamis was an ancient possession of
Athens*; but, as the recovery of Salamis took place in Solon's
time, while Peisistratus was still a boy, Solon alone should have
been mentioned in this connexion'. Onomacritus, who is said to
have been one of the four who put together the Homeric poems
under the authority of Peisistratus*, was, according to Herodotus,
caught in the act of interpolating the oracles of Musaeus, and was
banished by the tyrant's son, Hipparchus ^
Meanwhile, Homer had been frequently imitated by Hesiod
{fl, c. 720? B.C.), had been described by the early
Horn "r^on* *"' elegiac poet Callinus (^r. 690) as the author of an
early Greek epic Called the Tlubais^^ and had been copied in
various ways by the earliest of the iambographers,
Archilochus {Jl, 650), whom *Ix)nginus* (c. 13 § 3) descrilxis as
^ ib, 318 c, and Aristotle's Constiiution of Athens^ c. 18 § 1, where
Hipparchus is also called 0iX6Moi/<rof.
* //iWvi 148.
' Od, xi 631, 9i}<r^a \\.€ifli9ob» re, B^dv ipiKvdia riKPa. Plutarch, Theseus
ao; cp. Flach, p> 97.
* //. ii 558, OTTjat 8* AyuPf U* 'ASri^cUup tararro ^\ayy€s. Strain),
p. 394; cp. Flach, p. 19.
* Cp. Diog. Laert. i 1, 57, and see Busolt, Gr. Gesch. ii' 310.
* Tzetzes, Proleg. in Aristoph, reff^dpufy SrTuip <twi'> iwl Utiffurrpdrov
cwdhnav TOP 'Ofiripop. Cp. La Roche, //om, Textkr, p. 10, and Jebb's Homer
p. ii5».
' Her. vii 6.
' Pausanias ix 9, 5.
II.] HOMER AND PINDAR. 23
'most Homeric', and by melic poets such as Alcman (about 657),
and Stesichorus (640-555)'.
In the age succeeding the expulsion of the Peisistratidae,
Pindar, with a conscious reference to the origin of
the word jRhapsodos\ describes the Rhapsodes as
'the sons of Homer, singers of deftly woven lays'". He also
alludes to the laurel-branch that they bore as an emblem of poetic
tradition. Homer himself (he tells us) had 'rightly set forth all
the prowess of Ajax, leaving it as a theme for other bards to sing,
by the laurel-wand of his lays divine'*. Pindar's praise of Amphi-
araus is a clear reminiscence of a Homeric line in praise of
Agamemnon*. He describes the 'fire-breathing Chimaera' in a
phrase like that of Homer*, but differs from him in minor details
as to Bellerophon, Ganymede and Tantalus^. He shows a similar
freedom in giving a new meaning to a phrase borrowed from his
own countryman the Boeotian poet, Hesiod, by applying to the
athlete's toilsome training a proverbial admonition originally
referring to the work of the farm*. In the age of Pindar, and in
the Athenian age in general, the poet and his audience were alike
saturated with the study of the old poets. Homer and Hesiod, and
a touch alone was wanted to awaken the memory of some long-
familiar line.
' Mahaffy, Gr, Lit. i 31, cp. for Hesiod, Christ, §65'; for Archilochus
and Stesichorus, Bergk ii 191 and 393, and (in general) i 483.
> ^^^Mf, from ^wTtiP doi8^ (Hesiod, /ni^. 217), contexere carmen, patt"
tptre versus, Cp. Bergk, Gr. Lit. i 490.
* Nem. ii 1, 'O/iripliat, jmwtQp (lit. 'stitched*) iwitaw doiBol.
^ Isth. iii 55, "O/iiypof...«'a0'aF dpStiaait dprriiP xard /M/3dor l^pcurcv Start-
alutf iw4ia0 XotvMf d$6p€i¥. Cp. Bergk, Gr. Lit. i 491.
^ 01. vi 17, i^i^hrtpw fii^rip r dya$6» «rcU Bovpl fiappoaStu, and //iW iii
1 79, Aft^&rtpop, poffiKtJit T dyaBht Kpartpbt r a/xMirr^f. The reminiscence is
far less clearly marked when he says that Homer ^TyeXov i9\h9 ^0a rtfiiip
fueylarap wpdy/MTi warri ^4p€iP (f^'th. iv 178), a phrase which has no nearer
parallel in our own Homer than the line, — iff$\6if koI r^ t4tvkt€u St* dyytXot
aXffifui ttSi {Iliad xv 107).
* Pindar, Ol. xiii 90 and //. vi 183.
' 01. xiii 67 (Gildersleevc's n.): i 43. 57 (Fenncll's n.).
* Isth. V 67, fuXimv tpyoit dra^v, and Hesiod, IVorks and Days 411, iit-
\lni 94 roc tpyop S^iWtt.
24 THE ATHENIAN AGE. [CHAP.
The influence of the Homeric poems on the tragic poets of
Athens was very considerable. Notwithstanding
polu ^'**^**^ Aristotle's statement that *the Iliad and the Odyssey
each furnish the theme of one tragedy, or of two,
at the most'*, we find that they supplied Aeschylus with the theme
of at least six tragedies and one satyric drama, Sophocles with
that of three tragedies {Nausicaa^ and the Phaeacians^ and possibly
the Fhrygians)y and Euripides with that of one satyric drama, the
Cyclops, The unknown author of the Rhesus derived his theme
from the Iliad', and Achilles and Hector, with Laertes, Penelope
and her Suitors, were among the themes of the minor tragic poets
of the fifth and fourth centuries. Aristotle's statement is practi-
cally true of Sophocles and Euripides, but not of Aeschylus,
whom he almost ignores in his treatise on Poetry. It is however
the fact that, among the tragic poets in general, a far larger
number of their subjects were suggested by other poems of the
Epic Cycle, namely the Cypria^ the Aethiopis, the Little Iliad^
the IliupersiSf the Nostoi and the lelegonia'^.
Aeschylus himself probably regarded ' Homer ' as the author
of all the poems of the Epic Cycle, when he
described his dramas as 'slices from the great
banquets of Homer* '. In the Frogs of Aristophanes, he is made
to confess that it was from 'Homer the divine' that his mind
took the impress of noble characters like those of the ' lion-hearted '
heroes, Teucer and Patroclus*. The influence of Homer shows
itself in many of his picturesque epithets, and in the use of not a
few archaic nouns and verbs, as well as in Homeric phrases and
expressions, and Homeric similes and metaphors^
Sophocles is described by Greek critics as the only true
disciple of Homer, as the 'tragic Homer', and as
the admirer of the Epic poet*. His verbal indebt-
* Poet, «3 g 4.
' See Nauck, Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenta^ pp. 963 — 8, or Haigh,
TragU Drama of the Greeks ^ p. 473^-6.
' Athen. 347 B, rtnAxn rdif'Ofi^pov fitydXup dtivpuif,
* Frogs ^ 1040.
* For details, see Haigh, l,c, p. 85.
* Ion, in vita Sophoclis, At^oi'...'Of(^/H>M itaOrrHiP, Polemo, ap. Diog.
LAert. iv 10^ 'O/iiipw rpayiicdi', Eustathius on /tiad, pp. 440, 605, 851, 90a
II.] HOMER AND THE TRAGIC POETS. 2$
edness to Homer is less than that of Aeschylus, though, like
other dramatists, he borrows certain epic forms and epithets, as
well as certain phrases and similes. His dramas reproduce the
Homeric spirit He is also Homeric in the ideal, yet human,
conception of his characters', and in the calm self-control, which
characterises him even in scenes of violent excitement. Here, as
elsewhere, *he has caught the impress of Homer's charm**.
While very few of his dramas were directly suggested by the //iad
or Odyssey, he is described as 'delighting in the Epic Cycle".
The extant plays connected with that Cycle are the j4jax and
J^Ai'/ocMes.
Of the extant plays of Euripides, the Cyclops alone is directly
taken from Homer's Odyssey, while the Epic Cycle
is represented by the Iphi^eiuia in Auliiie, Hecuba,
Troades, Andromache, Helen, Electra, Jphigeneia in Tauris and
Orestes, The plot of no extant play that was certainly written by
Euripides is inspired by the Iliad, but the opening scene of the
Phoenissae, where Antigone and her aged attendant view from the
palace-roof the movements of the Argive host outside the walls of
Thebes, is clearly a reminiscence of the memorable scene in the
Iliad, where Helen and Priam watch the Greek heroes from the
walls of Troy*.
Turning from the tragic poets to the historians, we find
Herodotus speculating on the date of Homer. He
places Hesiod, as well as Homer, about four hun-
dred years before his own time, i.e. about 400 years (or exactly
12 generations) before 430 b.c.' He assumes that other poems
beside the Iliad and Odyssey were generally attributed to Homer,
namely the Cypria and the Epigoni, He doubts the Homeric
authorship of the Epigoni \ and denies that of the Cypria ' ; but
etc., ^X^M^pof. Cp. Lechner, De Sophocle poeia 'OfiiyfKxwrdr^ ('^59); Schnei-
dewin's Sophokles p. 17; Bergk, Gr, Litt, i 830, iii 369 f; ami Haigh» Lc,
p. 101 f.
1 Arist. Pod. 3 § a.
' Vila Soph, *0firipuc7fif ixfuirrdfAtPot x^P*"*
' Athen. 397 d, ixiup€...T^ inxifi xi/irX^. Cp. Christ, Gr. LUt. % 175 p. 150*.
* //. iii 139 — 944.
• Her. ii 53. • Her. iv 32.
' Her. ii 117.
26 THE ATHENIAN AGE. [CHAP.
his denial of the latter is founded on the fact that, in the form in
which he knew the poem, it implied that Paris, on leaving Sparta,
sailed for Troy, and not for Sidon as stated in the Iliad \ As
Professor J ebb has aptly observed, ' this suggests how little these
attributions probably regarded the evidence of style, language, or
spirit. Unless there was some contradiction on the surface, the
attribution could pass current, or could be left an open question 'I
Thucydides regards the Phaeacians as a historical people and
the Homeric catalogue as a historical document'.
Thucydides
But he makes the story of the siege of Troy a
theme for rationalising criticism. In this spirit he suggests that
the Greek chiefs were compelled to go to Troy, not by the obliga-
tions of their oath to Helen's father, but by the superior power of
Agamemnon ; and that the long duration of the siege was due to
the Greeks being forced to spend part of their time in keeping up
their supply of provisions^ In a far different spirit to that of the
earlier age which interpolated lines in Homer to the credit of
Athens, he makes Pericles proudly declare in his funeral oration
that Athens needs no Homer to praise her\
Among the earliest treatises on Homer was that ascribed to
Democritus (460-357 B.C.), though we know nothing
of its purport". But, if he really wrote such a work,
it may have contained some of the sayings on Homer attributed
to him by later writers, who quote Democritus as speaking of
Homer's divine genius, the varied beauty of his epic verse, and
the happy union of order and variety which marked the com-
position of his poems ^ It was possibly his study of Homer that
inspired him with the lofty and often poetical language for which
he is eulogised by Cicero'.
For the three centuries between 600 and 300 B.C. the Homeric
* //. vi «9o. ' Honur^ p. 86. * ib. p. 85.
* Thuc. i 9 and 11. ^ ii 4I1 4.
* Diog. Laert. IX vii 13 § 48, tttfH 'Ofxiipov 5(?) dpBotwelrit Kal y\uHrff€b»,
Cp. Egger, /.f.p p. 107*, and Saintsbury's History of Criticism ^ i 15.
^ Dion Chrysostom, Or, 53 fiti/., "Ofiiypof ^0'cwf Xaxti^i' ^ca^oi/o^iff iiritaw
nbaium triimipaTO royro/wv' ci^ oi)x ipbt^ dtnv Odat xal dnifioiflat ^C€tift o0tw
ffaXd Kal o'o^d irri ipy&ooffBoit and Clemens Alexandrinus, Stroniat, vi 18.
* Dt Or, i 49 ; Orator 67.
II.] HOMER AND THE SOPHISTS. 27
poems were the subject of a considerable amount of uncritical
study. Homer was * the educator of Hellas'*; and,
during the fifth century n.c., the Sophists, who th"s?phuu'*
were among the most active educators of their
age, had naturally much to say of one whose poems formed the
foundation of all education at Athens. Thus Pro-
tagoras {c, 480-411 B.C.), who classified the modes
of expression under the heads of question, answer, prayer and
command, ventured to criticise the opening words of the Iliads
for expressing what was meant as a prayer to the Muse in the
form of a command^ fxrjviy actSc ^ca ; but Aristotle, who quotes this
criticism, justly observes that it is not of any special value as
applied to poetry*. A specimen of his criticism of Simonides is
given in the Protagoras of Plato, and it is probably this specimen
alone that has prompted an enthusiastic student of Plato and
Aristotle in the fourth century a.d. to describe Protagoras as
* expounding the poems of Simonides and other poets'*.
Hippias of Elis, so far as we can infer from the two dialogues
in the Platonic collection, which bear his name, was HippUt
interested, not only in the accurate study of letters
and syllables, and rhythms and harmonies \ but also in discussing
the characters of the Homeric heroes, holding the * frank and
straightforward' Achilles superior to the *wily and false' Odysseus*.
He probably agreed with the father of one of the interlocutors in
the Lesser Hippias in considering the Iliad a finer poem than
the Odyssey^ Odysseus being the central figure of the one poem,
and Achilles of the other*. Like the historian Ephorus, in the
following century, he supposed that Homer was a native of
Cumae^ He collected parallel passages from Homer, Orpheus,
Musaeus and Hesiod*; and he observed with truth that the term
rvpavvo^ did not belong to the Homeric age, but came into use in
Plato, Rep. 606 B, rV *EXXcida rera/5euirer.
Poet, c. 19 § 5.
Themistius, Or, 13, rd Si^iwrf^v re koX 6XKww roci^/iara ^(iry<N$/ccvof.
Hippias Major ^ ^858; Minor ^ 368 D.
Hippias Minor t 3^5 *• * »<*• 363 B.
The Sixth Life of Homer in Westermann's B<6ypa0oc, p. 30 f.
Possibly in a work entitled tf'i/raYbr^, quoted in Athen. 609 A.
28 THE ATHENIAN AGE. [CHAP.
the time of Archilochus, whereas in Homer even the lawless king
Echetus is called a ftacrikvk ^
His namesake, Hippias of Thasos, gave a new sense to two
passages of Homer by proposing an emendation in each. He
altered the indicative Sc^o/ack into the infinitive StSdftcv in the
words Bi6ofi€v Sc oi cvxo9 ap€(r$ai, * we grant him to obtain his
prayer', which appear to have been introduced from I/iaif xxi 297
in place of the words Tp<Jc(ro-i SI ki/Sc' i<f>riTrrai occurring thrice in
J/i'ad ii 15, 32, 69. The objection to the indicative is that it
implies that Zeus himself was intentionally deceiving Agamemnon
in sending the Dream-god on his errand to the hero, but the
infinitive only removes the charge of deception one step further,
as the Dream-god, who is prompted to deceive the hero, is un-
doubtedly sent by Zeus. The difficulty, such as it is, seems only
to have been founded on a mistake, as it is only by misplacing the
phrase of J/iad xxi that any difficulty arises. In the other passage
(//i'a/i xxlii 328) an ambiguous ov is supposed to have been mis-
understood as ov, 'of it', in which case the lines in question would
have run as follows : —
con/KC (v\ov avov, oaov r opyvC^ inrkp alrj^j
rj Spuo9 ^ TrvjKTj^' TO fA^v cZ Karairu^crai ofi/Spw.
'There stands a withered trunk, some six feet high,
Of oak, or pine, Aa/f-rotted by the rain * *.
Hippias appears to have proposed to change ov into ov i^half-
rotted* into '////-rotted'), which is the reading in our present
text*.
Lastly, Gorgias (e, 485-380 b.c.) probably composed a
Eulogy of Achilles*. He is the author of two
extant speeches connected with the tale of Troy,
* Od, xviii 84; sec Argument to Soph. O, 7'., and cp. Friedcl, De Hippiae
Sophistae siudiis Homericis^ Halle, 1872, and De Sophistarum siudiis liomericis
in Dissert, Philol. HaUnses^ i (1873) pp. 130 — 188.
' Lord Derby's rendering, except so far as * half-rotted* is here substituted
for his translation of the ordinary text, * unrotted*.
> Aristotle, FaeL c. 15 § 11 and De Soph, EL iv 8, with Wolfs ProUg. ad
Honierum^ c. xxxvii p. 101 Wagner, and Vahlen's Beitrdge %h AristoUUs
Poelik, iii 368. On the other hand, Ritter on Poet, l.c, supposes that oi; was
the old text, read by Hippias as oh,
^ Aristot. Rhet, iii 17.
II.] HOMER AND THE ALLEGORISTS. 29
namely the * Encomium of Helen ' and the * Defence of Pala-
medes'. Among the pupils of Gorgias, Licymnius may perhaps be
identified with an expositor of Homer mentioned in the Homeric
scholia *; while Alcidamas appears to have written a declamation
on the Odyssey^ which he describes as *a fair mirror of human
life'*
The Homeric representations of the gods roused a protest on
the part of the founder of the Eleatics, Xenophanes
of Colophon (fl, 540-500 B.C.), who says that agai^tt'the
* Homer and Hesiod have imputed to the gods all "^^SokT
that is blame and shame for men". It was on
other grounds that his contemporary, Heracleitus, declared that
* Homer and Archilochus deserved a sound thrashing'*, nor did
he s()are Hesiod. He ap^iarently held that the first two poets
were wrong in regarding happiness as dependent on the will of
Heaven, and the third in distinguishing between lucky and un-
lucky days*. Another great contemporary, Pythagoras, is said to
have descended to the world below, and to have seen the soul of
Hesiod bound to a brazen column, squeaking and gibbering;
and that of Homer hanging from a tree and encircled by serpents,
in punishment for all that he had said concerning the gods ^
In reply to protests such as these, some of the defenders of
Homer maintained that the superficial meaning
of his myths was not the true one, and that there defended by
was a deeper sense lying below the surface. This fUegoricai
..... 11 1 1 interpretation
deeper sense was, m the Athenian age, called the
vxdvota\ and the vn-oVoiac of this age assumed the name of
'allegories' in the times of Plutarch •. Theagenes of Rhegium
(y?. 525 B.C.), who suggested a two-fold form of allegory, moral
1 On //. ii 106.
> Aristot. Rhet, iii 3 § 4 ; cp. §§ 1, 5.
* Sextus Emp., Math, ix 193, rdi^a ^eoff dp4$iiKe» 'Ofirifi^ $* *Uffio96t rt |
6c9a wap* dpSpiinroifftp ^ef5ea xed yffhyoi iffrlw (Zeller*s Prt-socratic Philosophy^
i 561, and Jebb's Horner^ p. 88 n.). Cp. in general Grilfenhan, Gesth, d, kl,
Phil, i loi f, iif f, and Egger, /.r., p. 96* f.
* Diog. Laert. ix i. • Zeller, /.r., i 10, 31, 102 f.
' Diog. Laert. viii § 11.
' Xen. Symp. 3 8 6; cp. Plato Pep, 378 D.
" De audiendis poetis^ c 4 p. 19 E.
30 THE ATHENIAN AGE. [CHAP.
and physical, regarded the names of the gods as expressing either
the mental faculties of man or the various elements of nature.
Thus Apollo was, in his view, opposed to Poseidon, as fire to
water ; Pallas to Ares, as wisdom to folly ; Hera to Artemis, as
the air to the moon ; Hermes to Leto, as reason, or intelligence,
to forgetfulness^ Anaxagoras of Clazomenae {c. 500-428 b.c.)
saw the rays of the sun in the arrows of Apollo. Not content
with this obvious anticipation of Solar Mythology, he is said
(whether truly or not) to have found in the web of Penelope an
emblem of the rules of dialectic, the warp being the premises, the
woof the conclusion, and the flame of the torches, by which she
executed her task, being none other than the light of reason*.
Though he is stated to have been the first to interpret the
Homeric myths in a moral sense', this is probably true of his
pupils only, especially of Metrodorus of Lampsacus (d. 464 B.C.),
who maintained that Hera, Athene and Zeus were the elements
of nature ^ and that Agamemnon* represented the air. Such
interpreters as these may well have been in Aristotle's mind, when
he mentions the 'old Homerists, who see small resemblances,
but overlook large ones'*.
In the Memorabilia of Xenophon the rhapsodes are described
as * very precise about the exact words of Homer, but very foolish
themselves '\ Among the rhapsodes who were also celebrated as
interpreters o( Homer, were Stesimbrotus of Thasos, a contem-
porary of Pericles, and Ion of Ephesus, a con-
PUto^^/JiT temporary of Socrates. Ion, who gives his name
to one of the most interesting of the shorter
dialogues of Plato, was not only a reciter, but also an inter-
preter of Homer. He comes to recite Homer to more than 20,000
Athenians at the Panathenaea. He wears a golden crown and is
arrayed in a magnificent robe. He is ' possessed ' with an enthu-
siasm for Homer, and he transmits his enthusiasm to his audience.
' Schol. Venet. on //. xx 67.
* Schol. on Od. ii 104. ' Diog. Laert. ii 1 1 .
* Tatian c. Gratcos loi D (Zeller, /.r., ii 372).
* Hesychius, s,v.
' ol apx"'^^ 'OfififKKol, Met, xiii 6, 7.
' Mem* iv 2, 10.
II.] PLATO ON HOMER. 3 I
It is through him that the magnetic influence, which has passed
from the Muse to the poet, passes from the poet to the listener,
who is the last link in the magnetic chain ^ Ion was also the
author of a commentary on Homer. He declares that he ' can
speak about Homer better than anyone else', — better than Metro-
dorus or Stesimbrotus ; and it may fairly be assumed that the
fluent rhetorical exposition, with which he * embellished ' Homer,
was in the main a fanciful allegorical interpretation of the poet's
meaning.
But no apologetic interpretation of the Homeric mythology
was of any avail to save Homer from being expelled Homer in
with all the other poets from Plato's ideal Republic. PUto^t r^.
Plato insists that the stories of gods and heroes told
by Homer and Hesiod give a false representation of their nature ^
The poet is a mere 'imitator', and 'we must inform him that
there is no room for such as he in our State". *The awe and love
of Homer', of which Plato had been conscious from his child-
hood, * makes the words falter on his lip>s ; but the truth must be
spoken ^' *AU the poets, from Homer downwards, are only imi-
tators; they copy images of virtue, but the truth they never
reach". *We are ready to admit that Homer is the greatest of
poets . . , but we must remain firm in our conviction that hymns
to the gods and eulogies of famous men are the only poetry which
ought to be admitted into our State '^ Homer's expulsion from
Plato's Republic called forth a considerable controversial litera-
ture ^ Athens, notwithstanding this expulsion, continued to
learn Homer by heart', and this ancient custom was continued
far beyond the Athenian age. Even at the close of the first
century of our era there were Greeks in the Troad who taught
their children Homer from their earliest years*. In fact, from
the Athenian age to the present day, the study of Homer has
never ceased.
* -^-^« 533 D— E.
' Hep. 377 D— 378 B. Hesiod is also clearly meant, though not mentioned,
in Laws 886 B — c.
' AV/. 398 A. * 595 B. • 600 R. • 607 A.
' Scngclmsch, Diss, i 119 (Mahaffy, Gr, Lit, i 33).
» Xen. SytHp. 3 § 5.
• Dion Chrysoslom, Or. 1 1 p. 308 R.
32 THE ATHENIAN AGE. [CHAP.
In connexion with the use of Homer as an educational text-
book, we may recall two anecdotes of some little interest in
Plutarch's Life of Aldbiades\ We are there told that when
Alcibiades ' was just emerging from boyhood, he went to a school-
master and asked him for a book of Homer ; and, on the master's
replying that he had nothing whatsoever of Homer's, Alcibiades
struck him with his fist, and went on his way'. Another school-
master told him that he ' had a copy of Homer, emended by him-
self. *What?' said Alcibiades, *are you really content to teach
reading and writing, when you are capable of emending Homer ?
Why are you not instructing young men?' The first of these
anecdotes shows that a young Athenian held he had a right to
expect even an elementary teacher to possess part at least of the
poems of Homer ; the second presents us with an early example
of amateur textual criticism ; and both imply that Homer was
really better suited as a text-book for young men than for mere
children.
In the earliest play of Aristophanes there was a scene in which
a father, who believed in the old-fashioned style of
Arittophanet .... , ....
poetic education, is represented as examining his
son as to the meaning of certain *hard words in Homer'": the
son, who has a preference for the prose of practical life, retorts by
asking his father the meaning of obsolete terms in the laws of
Solon. In the Frogs^ * the divine Homer ' is counted among the
nobler poets, because he is preeminently the poet of the art of
war*. He is also quoted or parodied in several passages*.
Turning from the comic poet to one of the gravest of the
ancient rhetoricians, we find Isocrates, in his letter
of exhortation to Nicocles, expressing his own
admiration for Homer and for the early tragic poets*, and
rebuking his contemporaries for preferring the most paltry comedy
> Plut. Alcib, 7.
' Aristoph. AatraXeit, quoted by Galen inpraef, Uxici Hippocralici^ p. 404
Franz, r/)6t ravra cit \4^0¥ 'Ofiriptlovs yXiirrrat, rl KoKoOffi K6pv/ifia...,rl koXoOo'
dficri|rd Kdpiipa.
* I^rogs 1036.
* Birds 575, 685, 910, 914, PMce 1089 fT, Chuds 1056.
* Isocr. 1 § 48.
II.] QUOTATIONS FROM HOMER. 33
to the poems of Hesiod and Theognis and Phocylides*. In his
Panegyric he describes the fame of Homer as enhanced by the
fact that ' he pronounced a splendid eulogy on those who fought
against the foreign foe', adding that this was the reason why he
had been honoured by Athens in the instruction of her youth*.
In his pamphlet Against the Sophists he points out why it is that
Homer, who ' is deemed the wisest of men', describes the gods as
deliberating. It is because he desires to teach mortal men that
even the gods cannot discern the future'. Lastly, in his Pana-
thenaicj written in the 95th year of his age, he speaks of the
frequenters of the Lyceum as reciting the poems of Homer and
Hesiod, and as * talking twaddle ' about them ; but he defers his
own remarks on those poets to a more convenient season, which
never came*. — It was probably in the time of the pupils of
Isocrates that Homer became the theme of the paltry criticisms
of Zoi'lus (see p. 108 f).
The quotations from the 'Homeric poems' in the Athenian
age sometimes differ from our present texts. Thu-
cydides* quotes two passages from the 'Homeric' fr^*5^*orner
hymn to Apollo' in a form slightly different from
that handed down to us in the mss of the hymns, while he identi-
fies with Homer the ' blind man ' there described as ' dwelling in
rocky Chios*. Similar divergences may be noticed in Plato's
quotations. Some of these are clearly intentional, while others
are almost certainly due to mistakes of memory ^ Aeschines
quotes a passage of fifteen lines from the Iiiad\ the longest quoted
by any classical writer, with at least four variations ; and Lycurgus
a shorter passage with very slight changes*. Further, about
twenty-one of Aristotle's quotations from Homer differ from our
ordinary text*", and there are also five passages in which he refers
» Isocr. a §§ 43, 44. * Pan^, 159.
• 13 § «• * i» 8§ 33. 34' • Thuc. Hi 104.
• Homeric Hymn, i 145 — 150 and 165 — 17 a.
' Jiep. 379 D, 388 A, 389 E, 405 E, 414 B.
' //. xxiii 77— 91 1 quoted by Aeschin. i 149.
• //. XV 494— 9 > Lye. § 103.
*• Iliad ii 31, 196, 391 f, iv 115, vi aoo, vii 63, viii 18 f, 84, ix 385 f, 538 f,
59a f, XI, u, 457, xi 54«, xiv 117, xv 145 ; Odyssey iv 567, xi 598, xv 399,
six I a I. Cp. R. Wachsmuth, De Aristotelis Studiis Homerkis Capita SeUcta^
S. 3
34 THE ATHENIAN AGE. [CHAP.
very loosely to the language of the Homeric poems ^ All these
variations may be due to errors of memory, and they appear to
throw little (if any) light on the state of the Homeric text in the
fifth and fourth centuries b.c. On the whole, the evidence of
quotations shows that the text of those centuries was practically
the same as ours '.
The epic poet Antimachus, of Colophon in Ionia ijl, 464-410),
who was among the older contemporaries of Plato, prepared a
text of Homer, which is mentioned seven times in the Venetian
Scholia on Homer', and was supposed by Mr F. A. Paley to
g^^i be perhaps the first publication of the lUad and
* edition! 'of Odyssey in their present form*. An * edition* of
Homer is also attributed to Aristotle by Plutarch and
Strabo. The former in his life of Alexander quotes Onesicritus as
stating that Alexander constantly kept under his pillow, with his
dagger, a copy of the liiad^ which Aristotle had corrected for
him, called * the casket copy'*. Strabo calls Alexander an
admirer of Homer ((^tAdfii/pos), adding that there was a recen-
sion of Homer called ' that of the casket ' ; that Alexander
had perused and annotated certain parts of it with the help of
men like Callisthenes and Anaxarchus; and that he kept it in
a casket of costly workmanship which he had found in the
Persian treasure*. On the eve of his victorious career in Asia,
he visited the plains of Troy, and placed a garland on the
tomb of Achilles, declaring him happy in having had, in his
life, a faithful friend, and in his death a mighty herald of his
fame^
pp. I — 19, and on the variations in Plato and Aeschines, as well as in
Aristotle, Laroche, Homtrische Textkritik (1866). p. 13 — 36, with Wilamowitz
Horn, Unt,y p. 199. Cp. Komer, Sitzungsb, d. Miitukener Acad, xvii (1884)
«64— 3«4. <539 flf-
> Elk, \\ 9, iii II ; Pol, viii 3, p. i338<i; Rhet. iii 4; Pott, 8.
' A. Ludwich, Die Honur-vulgata (Us voraUxandrinische erwiesen^ 1898.
' ^ * kmyAx^M (sc, l« 500*11), ^ KOjk 'Arrlfiaxoi^t 4 *Amndxtiot» Schol. on
//. i 198, 424, 598; V 461; xiii 60; xxiii 870; and Od, i 85.
* Homeri quae nunc exstant an reiiquis CycU carminibus antiquiora iure
hab'Ua sint (1878), p. 39, quis ille fuerit qui Homerum nostrum litteris primum
mandavit, si non fuit Antimachus, ego ignoro.
• Plut. Alex, 8, ^ U ro\t popSiiKot,
< Strabo p. 594. ^ Plut. Alex, 15.
II.] ARISTOTLE ON HOMER. 35
Aristotle, in his Poetic^ describes Homer as 'representing men as
better than they are ' (2 § 3), and as * pre-eminent in
the serious style of poetry' (4 § 9), as * the earliest and Homer**** **"
the most adequate model' of all the excellences of
epic poetry, and as ' unequalled in diction and thought ' (34 ^ i, 2).
The poet keeps himself in the background, leaving his characters,
which are clearly marked, to speak for themselves (§ 7). He has
taught all other poets the true art of illusion (§ 9). In ' unity of
plot', as in all else, he is of surpassing merit; he has made the
Iliad^ and also the Odyssey^ centre round a single action (8 § 3).
These two poems ' have many parts, each with a certain magnitude
of its own ; yet they are as perfect as possible in structure '
(26 §6)*. In the Rhetoric Aristotle, in explaining what he means
by * bringing things before the eye', or vividness of expression, cites
a series of metaphors from Homer : — the stone of Sisyphus * re-
morseless ' in its bounding down into the valley, the flying arrow
* yearning * for its mark, the javelins * thirsting ' for the foeman's
blood, and the 'passionate' spear-point, speeding through the
hero's breast. The same vivid effect, he adds, is produced by the
similes, in which Homer gives life and movement and animation
to things inanimate, as in the line where he says of the ' waves of
the bellowing ocean', — * Arch'd and crested with foam, they sweep
on, billow on billow".
Aristotle's interest in Homer led him to draw up a collection
of Homeric Problems^ a subject which he approaches in the
chapter on ' critical difficulties and their solutions ' towards the
close of his treatise on Poetry*. These Problems are only pre-
served in a fragmentary form*. For most of our knowledge of
their purport we are indebted to the scholia on the mss of Homer,
especially in the Venice MS b (cent. xi). They are there quoted
in twenty-one places, not to mention isolated passages of Strabo,
Plutarch and Athenaeus; they were also familiar to the Neo-
» Cp. Jcbb's Homer, p. 4 f. « Rhet. iii 1 1 §§ 3, 4.
' Pott, 35, rf/»{ wpo^Xrffidrunf Kal Xi^ectfr, esp. §§ 10, if.
* dwop^fiaraf wpoftX-^fiara or {iiri^fiara (originally in either 69 7 or 10
books), Aristot. frag. 14a — 179 Rose. In one of these fragments we find the
verb "/jwdfifictp (t59)» in five the corresponding verb Xikuf (149, 160, 161, 164,
174) and in one (179) the title 'A^.'Ofn^puroTt awop-^fULffiK
3—2
36 THE ATHENIAN AGE. [CHAP.
platonist Porphyry, the author of a similar work in the third
century of our era. The points raised concern the ethical and
dramatic sense of the poems, rather than verbal or literary
criticism*. For example, * Why does Agamemnon tempt the
army to return to Greece?'* *VVhen the Greeks are fleeing to
their ships, why is it that Odysseus flings off his cloak, when he
runs at the bidding of Athene to stay their flight?'* * Why does
Homer assign to Crete one hundred cities in the Iliad^ and only
ninety in the OdysseyV* * Why are we told in the Iliad that the
sun-god sees and hears everything, and yet in the Odyssey he
needs a messenger to tell him of the slaughter of his oxen ? '' 'If
the gods drink nothing but nectar, why is Calypso described as
mixing a draught for Hermes, mixing implying the addition of
water? '• " What is meant by * more of the night than two of the
three parts is gone, and (yet) the third part still remains'?' " *Why
are two talents of gold (an apparently large amount) given as a
fourth prize in a chariot-race?'' Part of Aristotle's reply to this
last question is to the effect that the Homeric talent was smaller
than the Attic talent ; and, so far, modern 'scholars are in entire
accord with Aristotle. Once we seem to reach the region of
textual criticism when the question is asked, **why is the epithet
avSr/corcro, 'voiceful*, 'speaking with human voice', applied to the
'goddesses' Circe and Calypso^ as well as to the once mortal
Ino?" '• Here it is strangely proposed in the first two cases to read
aOAifccrcra, which can only mean 'apt at playing on the flute', and
yet is described as a synonym for ikovia^rj^^ 'apt in singing a solo';
and, in the case of Ino, to read ovSiyco-o-a, ' earthly'. These frag-
mentary Homeric problem s^ as a whole, are very disappointing; and
it may well be doubted whether Aristotle himself is really re-
sponsible for them, any more than for much that has come down
under his name in the varied contents of the general Prodlems^\
• Cp. Eggeft /.r. pp. i88 — 194*, and Saintsbury, /.r., pp. 49 f.
« //. ii 73-
• //. ii 305. * //. ii 649; Od, xix 173.
• //. iii 177 ; Od, xii 374. • Od, v 93. ' //. x 153.
• //. xxiii 169; Arist. Frag. 164 Rose.
• Each of these is called a $t6t aWftffffa in Od, x 136 etc., and xii 449.
^^ Oi/. V ^%^, fiporbt aA9ijwffa. ^^ Zeller, AHsMU, i 96, 104.
II.] THE STUDY OF HESIOD. 37
It is refreshing to turn from these to the passage in his Poetic^
where he quotes the Homeric phrase, describing the comrades of
Diomede as sleeping with their spears standing upright on their
butt-ends, * their spears stood upright on the spike", instead of
being laid level with the ground, in which case (as observed by the
scholiast) there would have been no risk of a spear falling, and
raising an alarm. Aristotle solves the difficulty caused by the ex-
ceptional position of the spear, by simply suggesting that * this was
the custom then, as it is now among the lllyrians". It was prob-
ably in one of his lost chapters on Poetry that Aristotle observed
that ' the most striking thing in Homer' was the passage describing
the effect produced on the Trojans when they first see Patroclus,
gleaming in the armour of Achilles, and fancy for the moment that
Achilles has laid aside his ' wrath ', and has been reconciled to the
Greeks: — *each several m2ix\ peered round* to seek escape from sheer
destruction \ This, adds Aristotle, is characteristic of barbarians".
We have seen thus far that, from the days of Solon to those
of Aristotle, Homer was constantly studied and quoted, and
was a favourite theme for allegorizing interpretation and for
rationalistic or rhetorical treatment. He was also the subject of
a very limited amount of verbal criticism. Of any literary criti-
cism of his poems, we have scanty evidence, with the important
exception of Aristotle's treatise on Poetry. The criticism of
his text was in the main reserved for the Alexandrian age.
Apart from Homer, the epic poets studied in the Athenian
age included those of the * Epic Cycle ' {c, 776-566 b.c.) which (as
we have already seen) supplied the tragic poets with many of their
themes. The TAeogony o( Hesiod {Jioruit c, 720? „ ..^
B.C.) was also studied as a text-book of mythology,
and the questions which it raised may well have been em-
barrassing to instructors who had to deal with exceptionally
precocious pupils. We are told that Epicurus, before the age
^ 77. X 152 r, (yx^o^ 9^ (fi^ I ^p^* ^'2 aavfuarripot.
« Poet. 15 § 7.
• Townlcy Schol. on //. xvi 183 (Aristot. Fraj^. 130 Rose) wdwrrfptw:
6ttp6TaTOP rCw iwCHv 'Ofi^pov twt6 ^<rir * AptcroriXrit 4p j> ircSrTct ^vKTi&^t,
38 THE ATHENIAN AGE. [CHAP.
of fourteen (c, 328 b.c.), asked certain schoolmasters and sophists
some puzzling questions about Hesiod's account of Chaos ; and
that, dissatisfied with their replies, he resolved on devoting
himself to the study of philosophy ^ Still more popular was
his poem on Works and Days^ which with its moral maxims
and its precepts of farming is the prototype not only of Tusser*s
Points of Good Husbandrie but also of Tupper's Proverbial
Philosophy. Aristophanes makes Aeschylus name Hesiod among
the * noble poets \ because he tells of * tilling the soil and times
for ploughing and seasons of harvest '\ One passage from this
poem, that on Fame or Rumour, is quoted by Aristotle, as well
as twice by Aeschines', who also quotes on two occasions a
passage of political import ^ and in the second of these last
occasions introduces the lines by observing that * the reason why
we learn the precepts of the poets by heart in our boyhood is
in order that we may obey them when we arrive at man's estate '.
Hesiod was also the reputed author of a versified form of
the precepts of reverence and obedience, which Achilles learnt
from the centaur Cheiron ; and the fame of Cheiron's precepts
is attested not only by Pindar* and Plato*, but also by that
unknown artist who on a vase in the Berlin Museum represents
two boys standing and listening with rapt attention to a boy
seated between them who is reading from a scroll, with a box
before him on which rests a second scroll bearing in archaic
characters the title •»-IRONEIA^ The Hesiodic authorship of this
work was first denied in the Alexandrian age, by Aristophanes
of Byzantium".
Only two more epic poets need here be mentioned. The
first of these, Antimachus of Colophon (fl, c. 464-
410), the author of a prohx poem called the
* Diog. J^ert. x 1. ' Frogs^ 1034-
* IVorks and Days 761; Aescliin. i § IJ9, 1 § 144 (cp. Dein. 19 § 143);
Aristot. £ih. vii 13, 5.
"* ib. 240 f; Aeschin. 1 § 158, 3 § 135.
* Pyih, iv loa.
* AV/. 391 u — c.
' See cut in Klein, Euphronios^ 183* ; Daremberg and Saglio, s.v, Educa-
tion^ p. 469; or P. Girard, Ed, A/A., p. 149.
^ Quint, i I, 15 (cp. Kinkel, £p, Gr, Frag, \ pp. 148 f).
II.] ANTIMACHUS AND CHOERILUS. 39
ThebaiSy is said to have begun the story of the return of Diomede
with the death of Meleager, and to have reached the end of
Book XXIV before getting the Seven heroes before the gates
of Thebes*. Nevertheless he appears to have been approved
by Plato, who is said to have been present on the occasion
when the poet recited his voluminous work. One by one the
company slipped away, till Plato alone remained. 'I shall go
on reading', said the poet unperturbed, 'Plato alone in my
opinion is worth a thousand'*. The philosopher is also said to
have sent to Colophon for a complete collection of his poems,
and to have preferred him to Choerilus', an opinion which
was afterwards opposed in the Pergamene School by Crates of
Mallos\ In the Alexandrian age the diffuseness of his epic
poem was condemned by Callimachus^ whose condemnation is
echoed by Catullus*. Nevertheless he was awarded a high
place in the Canon of the epic poets', and was even preferred to
Homer by the emperor Hadrian", possibly because he was easier
to imitate. Mention has already been made of his ' edition ' of
Homer, some of the readings of which are recorded in the
Homeric scholia}.
The second of these epic poets, Choerilus of Samos (/f. 404
B.C.), who was regarded by the Spartan general,
Lysander, and by the Macedonian king, Arche-
laus, as one of the foremost poets of his time*", was the author
of an important Epic on the Persian wars. Choerilus broke
new ground by abandoning the old mythological themes in
favour of a national and historical subject He attained the
unique honour of a decree providing apparently for the public
recitation of his poems together with those of Homer". Aris-
* Porphyrion on Horace, A. P, 146.
• Cic. Brutus^ 191.
' Proclus on Plato. Tim, i p. 18 c (Kinkel Ix. p. 374).
* Anth, Pal, xi ai8.
• Frag. 441. • C. 95, 10. ' Quint, x i 53.
* Dio Cass. Ixix 4 (cp. Hist. Aug. Hadr, 15).
• Supra^ p. 34, note 3. Cp. A. Ludwich, Aristarchs Homerische Text'
kritik, i 18; ii 43'. 383.
" Plutarch, Lysand. 18; Athen. 345 D.
" Suidas, 0'dr roct 'Ofi-^pov ipayaf(JbaKtff$cu iyjni^Bn (Kinkel l,c, p. 165).
40 THE ATHENIAN AGE. [CHAP. II.
totle in the Topics^ considers the Homeric similes clearer than
those of Choerilus. In the Rhetoric* he quotes what is ob-
viously part of the exordium of his Epic, immediately after
the first phrase of the Iliad and the Odyssey.
From another passage early in this poem Aristotle quotes
a single phrase as an example of an apologetic exordium : —
vvv S* 6t€ irdvra ScSao-rai, 'now that all has been apportioned'.
His readers were doubtless familiar with the context, which has
fortunately been preserved in an ancient scholium^ and in the
form of the following paraphrase may fitly close the present
chapter :
Oh! the bards of olden ages, blessed bards in song-craft skillM,
Happy henchmen of the Muses, when the field was yet untitled.
All the land is now apportioned ; bounds to all the Arts belong ;
Left the last of all the poets, looking keenly, looking long,
I can find no bright new chariot for the race^course of my sung'.
> VIII I.
' m 14.
' a /idx^Pt iffTit lip Keun)¥ XP^^" f^P<< doc^t,
"i/Lowrduif Oepdwup, 6t dir^parot ^r tri \€im!i¥*
rvr d' irt wdtfta 648eurTai, ix^*^^ ^^ wtlpara r^rot,
0jraroc unrrt dpdfiov KaTa\€lirofi€0\ o664 wq ion
wamni rarralpo¥Ta P€o^uyh apfia T€\dffffai.
Since the a6ove chapter was in type^ Mr D. B. Monro has published^ in the
Appendix to his editioft of Odyssey xiii-xxiv (1901), important papers on
* Homer and the Cyclic foets* (pp, 340 — 354), and on the * History of the
Homeric poems* (pp, 355— 454)«
CHAPTER III.
THE STUDY OF LYRIC POETRY.
An interesting picture of the normal course of education at
Athens is drawn by Protagoras in the dialogue of
Plato which bears that name. In the picture in poetry * ** ^ **
question special stress is laid on the study of the p^f^^^r^
poets.
When the boys have learned their letters, and are beginning to understand
the sense of what is written.... their teachers set beside them the works of
excellent )x>ets, and compel the boys, while seated on the benches, to read
them aloud and learn them by heart. In these are contained many admo-
nitions, many detailed narratives and eulogies and laudations of brave men of
old. These are learnt by heart, in order that the boy may emulate and imitate
those brave men, and be eager to become like them.... Then, again, the
teachers of the cithara^ as soon as their pupils have learned to play on that
instrument, instruct them in the works of other excellent poets, the composers
ofsongsS which they set to music, forcing the very souls of the boys to become
familiar with their rhythms and their melodies, in order that they may be more
gentle, and be better fitted for speech and action by becoming more beautifully
' rhythmical * and * melodious * ; for the whole of man's life has need of beauty
of rhythm and of melody. Besides all this, their parents send them to the
master of gymnastic, in order that they may have their bodies in better
condition and able to minister to the virtue of their minds, and not be
compelled by the weakness of their bodies to play the coward either in war or
in any other action'.
The study of the poets is also emphasised in the references to
the ordinary course of education contained in Plato's Laws :
We have very many poets (says *the Athenian* in that dialogue), writing
in hexameter verse, and in (iambic) trimeters, and in all other kinds of
* AAcXorocwr. • Plato, Protag. 315 C — 316 B.
42 THE ATHENIAN AGE. [CHAP.
'metres', some with a serious purpose, others aiming merely at raising a
]augh. With these the many myriads of Athens say that young men, who are
being rightly educated, should be nurtured and saturated, by being made to
have much to hear at recitations, and much to learn, and by getting whole
poets by heart ; while others select choice passages out of all the poets and
make a collection of certain complete set-speeches, and say that these are what
should be committed to memory by anyone who is to be made good and wise
by a variety of experience and a variety of learning^.
The artistic counterpart of these pictures is to be found in the
scenes from an Athenian school which adorn the
ing by Durit outsidc of an Attic vase executed by Duris in the
early part of the fifth century h.c. In the centre of
one of the two scenes the master, seated on a chair, holds a scroll
half op>en, and listens to a boy standing before him, who may
either be saying by heart the lesson that he has learnt, or com-
mitting it to memory under the master's prompting. The op>en
part of the scroll bears a rather inaccurate copy of a line from
some ancient Hymn : — Moio-a /loi a^<^i ^KdfxavBpov Itppoov dp)^ofiaL
aciSciv. To the left is a bearded master playing a seven-stringed
lyre, face to face with a pupil who is playing on a smaller instru-
ment of the same kind ; both of these are seated on stools. To
the right, seated on another stool, is a bearded man with a staff
in his hand, probably the boy's tutor or supervisor, the iratSaywyos.
In the centre of the second scene a youthful teacher sits holding
a tablet in his left hand and a stylus in his right. He is ap-
parently correcting an exercise written by the boy who stands
before him. To the left another youthful teacher is playing the
double flute as a lesson to a second boy standing before him.
To the right, as in the first scene, sits a bearded man with a staff,
watching the giving of the lesson. A variety of articles are
suspended on the walls, including a scroll tied up, a pair of
writing-tablets fastened together by a string, a wicker-basket, two
flat drinking-cups, a cross-like object consisting of two intersecting
pieces (possibly for drawing angles and straight lines), and lastly a
flute-case, and three lyres*.
> Plato, Laws 810 B.
' Published (with red figures on black ground) in Afon. d. hut, ix pi. 54 ;
also, with article by Michaelis, in Arch, Zeitung^ xxxi p. x. See Frontispiece.
III.] THE STUDY OF LYRIC POETRY. 43
The stringed instrument of the Homeric poems is the
phorminx or cithara or citharis. The citharis and
the 'lyre' are synonymous in the Hymn to Hermes, and the lyre
where the * lyre ' is first mentioned. But a distinc-
tion is sometimes drawn between the Myre' and the cithara.
While the 'lyre' (with projecting 'horns' and with a simple
equivalent for the original tortoise-shell body) is the instrument
depicted in the vase-painting, and also mentioned in the context
of the passage from the Laws\ it is the 'cithara' (in which the
' shell ' is replaced by a wooden case and the * horns ' superseded
by a prolongation of the case on either side of the strings) that is
mentioned in the passage from the Protagoras, Elsewhere, both
the instruments are mentioned together*. But, although the lyre
and the ' cithara ', and especially the former, were the instruments
ordinarily used in education, the poets, whose songs were set to
the music of these instruments, were never known
in the Athenian age as the * lyric ' poets, but as . „g,j^ . p^^,
/AcXoiroioi^ 'makers of fteXi;' or 'songs'*. For the
earliest use of the term * lyric ' we have to wait until the Alex-
andrian age, in which a pupil of Aristarchus, the grammarian
Dionysius Thrax*, refers to 'lyric poetry'; while, for the first
mention of a 'melic ' poet, we have to wait still longer, even until
the time of Plutarch* {fl, 80 a.d.).
In contrasting the old and the new style of education
Aristophanes, in a play whose date is in or after
423 B.C., describes the master of the good old days and*Phryni»*
as making his pupils learn the song of 'Pallas,
dread sacker of cities', composed by Lamprocles (c, 476 b.c.), the
fellow-pupil of Pindar and the instructor of Damon', or the
^ 809 E, Xdpat ci^ffCLffBat. ' Plato, /^ep. 399 D.
' Also as KiBaptpdol (Ber|rk, Gr, Litt. \\ 117).
* Ars Gramm. p. 6 /. 10 Uhlig, XvpciH) rofij^-ct (cp. Smyth's Greek Melic
Potts^ p. xvii n.). Cp. Varro*s Relliquiae^ p. 187 Wilmanns, and Cicero's
Orator t 183.
' ii no c, ro\t AteXcKoC ncrSd/Mu, cp. Plin. N,H, vii 89, 193 ; pdmaiU melici
is found as early as Ciceru, De Opt, Gett. Or, 1.
* riaXXada wtpa4wo\tP, StipiLP Btop iyptic68oifiow,
Toida Acdf fiiydXov iafkitaiwTwt (cp. Smyth, /. c, p. 340).
44 THE ATHENIAN AGE. [CHAP.
* loudly sounding strain' of Cydides (or Cydias of Hermione), —
songs marked by the grave and severe melody of the olden
time, as contrasted with the difficult and complicated turns and
flourishes of the modern style of the Lesbian Phrynis*. Else-
where he frequently denounces the dithyrambic poet, Cinesias,
who with the foreigners Phrynis, Melanippides and Timotheus
is also attacked by Pherecrates in a celebrated passage preserved
by Plutarch*.
The study of the * melic ' poets in the Athenian age may be
partly inferred from citations. A line of Alcaeus
Sappho"**" 0^- 612-580 B.c) addressed to Sappho (/7. 612),
• and four lines of her reply are preserved by
Aristotle'; and the famous palinode of Stesichorus is quoted
in the Phatdrus of Plato*. Anacreon of Teos
Simonidet" (.fl- 53° ^-c) and Simonides of Ceos (556-468 b.c.)
were both invited to Athens by Hipparchus. As
the singer of love and wine, Anacreon does not lend himself
either for purposes of education, or for quotation by grave
philosophers or orators. He is the poet of the symposium. The
sweetness of his melodies is mentioned by Aristophanes ^ who
couples his name with that of Ibycus of Samos (y?. 544 b.c.). A
much more serious poet is Simonides. A popular definition of
justice as 'paying one's debts', ascribed to Simonides, is criticised
in the Republic^, In the Protagoras^ one of his poems is selected
by Protagoras as a thesis for discussion ^ In that poem the
Sophist professes to find a contradiction. The poet first says,
' hard it is for a man to become good ' ; and then inconsistently
reproaches Pittacus for saying, 'hard it is to be good'. The
solution offered by Socrates, who draws a distinction between
being and becomings is probably 'a caricature of the methods of
interpretation' practised by the Sophists, and the discussion on
the passage as a whole may be ' regarded as Plato's satire on the
* Ar. Clotuis^ 966 — 971.
* De Afusica, p. 1 141 § 30 (on Phrynis, cp. Smylh, p. Ixvi, on Melanippides
and Timotheus, t^. 454, 462).
* Hhet, \ 9 (cp. Smyth, p. 139).
* 143 A ; cp. Rep, 586 c.
* Thesm, 161. • i p. 331 D — B.
' p. 339 (Smyth, pp. 54, 309).
III.] SIMONIDES AND PINDAR. 45
tedious and hypercritical arts of interpretation which prevailed in
his own day'*. His elegiac epigram on those who fell at Marathon
is quoted by Lycurgus*, who also quotes one of his two epigrams
on the heroes of Thermopylae, both of which are quoted by
Herodotus ^ In none of these cases is the name of the author
mentioned, though the epigram on the seer Megistias is expressly
ascribed to Simonides. The opening line of his ode in honour of
the victory in the mule-race won by Anaxilas of Rhegium, or
possibly by his son, is quoted by Aristotle as an example of the
use of epithets to lend elevation to a subject : — ** When the victor
in the mule-race offered him a small fee, he declined to compose
the ode in honour of the victory on the ground that he was
shocked at the thought of writing on the subject of semi-asses;
but when the victor actually gave him sufficient pay, he wrote : —
* Hail to the brood of the storm-footed coursers'*."
The Theban Pindar {c. 522-443 B.C.) must have been popular
at Athens, not because he celebrated the Pythian
victory of Megacles the Alcmaeonid*, but because
he recognised Salamis as the glory of the Athenians*, and Athens
herself as *the gleaming city of the violet crown' and 'the
bulwark of Hellas '^ It is said that in consequence of these
praises of Athens, Pindar was fined by his countrymen, but that
the Athenians paid the poet twice the amount of the fine and set
up a statue of bronze in his honour^ Pindar is repeatedly
quoted by Plato, for example in the MenOy where he is counted as
one of the ' divine poets ', and a splendid passage is cited from his
dirges*. The lines on the reign of I^w seem to have been
Plato's favourite quotation, for he refers to them in the Protagoras^
the Gorgias and the Symposium^ and also in the Laws^^, The
* Jowcll's /Va/<>, i 113*, 114'.
* Leocr. 109. ' vii 118.
^ /ihet. iii 1, 14, x^^P^"*"* dtWowSdiap $Oyarp€t txirtiiP,
» Pyth. vii. • Pytk, i 75.
^ Frag. 46, at rt \iTapal xal locri^awoi Koi iioliiiioit 'EXXddot tptwfia^
kXeu^al 'A^aroi, dai/i6nor wroXltBpWf cp. Nem, iv 18, /jM. ii lo, and Aristoph.
Ac A. 636 — 640.
" [Aeschin.] £p. iv (Donaldson's PinJar p. 346); cp. Isocr. Antid, 166.
* Meno^ p. 81 B.
** Frag. 151, phfiot h wdrnaw /Sotf^tXcdt kt\.
46 THE ATHENIAN AGE. [CHAP.
same passage is cited by Herodotus*, and by the rhetorician
Alcidamas'. Pindar was held in honour all over the Greek
world. He was early known in Thessaly, as well as in his native
Thebes and in Orchomenus ; one at least of his odes was familiar
to Tenedos; he was still more famous in Aegina; he was not
unknown at Argos and Sicyon and Corinth ; his name must have
lived on the lips of men at the scenes of the celebration of the
great Greek games, at the Isthmus and at Nemea, at Delphi and
Olympia. He was bound by the ties of hospitality with the
Achaeans dwelling above the Ionian sea on the Thesprotian
border of Epirus", where *the mountain-pastures sweep downwards
from Dodona to the Ionian main'\ His fame extended to the
western as well as the eastern Locrians; in the south-east to
distant Gyrene, and in the west, as far as Himera and Camarina
and Acragas and Syracuse. The lines of the Sixth Olympian ode
bidding men * remember Syracuse and Ortygia, where Hieron
ruleth with unsullied sceptre and with p>erfect counsel, while he
tendeth not only the worship of Demeter with her ruddy feet, and
the festival of her daughter, Persephone, with her white horses,
but also the might of Zeus, the lord of Aitna', have been found
stam[)ed on an ancient brick at Syracuse, possibly by Hieron's
own order*; and the Seventh Olympian in honour of the most
famous of Greek boxers, Diagoras of Rhodes, was inscribed in
golden letters in the temple of Athene in the Rhodian town of
Lindos*. Pindar composed an encomium in honour of the
Macedonian king, Alexander *the Philhellene*'; and, one hundred
and fifty years aftenvards, at the sack of Thebes (335 b.c.), it was
in memory perhaps of that encomium that another Alexander,
1 Her. iii 38. * Arist. Khet. iii 3 § 3.
* Nem. vii 64 f.
* Nem, iv 51 f.
* 01. vi 93 — 96; Zeiischr, f. AHerth. 1846, p. 616; Bergk cut loc,\ and
Freeman's Sicily ^ ii 539.
* Gorgon ap. Schol. Cp. A. Croiset, Le poisie dt Pindare^ p. 18. C. Graux,
Rev. de Phil, v 117 (=^ Notices BibL 303), supposes that the ode was written in
gold ink on the inner surface of a little roll of parchment or fine leather
(Gildersleeve's Pindar^ p. 184).
' Frag. 121 [86].
III.] PINDAR AND BACCHYLIDES. 47
'The great Emathian conqueror, bid spare
The house of Pindarus, when temple and tower
Went to the ground * *.
Of the rest of the nine principal * melic * poets of Greece
neither the earliest, Alcman of Sparta (yf. 657 b.c.),
nor the latest, Bacchylides of Ceos {fl. 476-452), is *" ^
quoted by any of the authors of the Athenian age. Bacchylides,
however, and his uncle, Simonides, are supposed to have been in
Pindar's mind in a well-known passage of the Second Olympian,
in honour of Theron : — * many swift arrows have I beneath my
bended arm within my quiver, arrows vocal to the intelligent
(^vaci^ra auFCTouriv), though for their full meaning they need
interpreters. Wise is he that knoweth much by nature; but,
when men have merely learnt their lore, they are turbulent and
intemperate of tongue, even as a pair of crows idly chattering
(yapuerov) against the divine bird of Zeus' (OL ii 91-97). But
time has brought some compensation to Bacchylides. We now
know that, in the ode in honour of an Olympian victory of
Hieron won in the same year as that of Theron (476 B.C.), Pindar's
rival compared his own range of flight to that of an eagle (v 16 —
27); and that, in celebrating another victory of Hieron eight
years afterwards (468 B.C.), he too could say: *I utter words
intelligible to the prudent * (iii 85, <f>pov€ovri ctuvctci yapwa).
In Aristotle's treatise on poetry (i § 2), mention is made of
*dithyrambic poetry*, and *the music of the flute and the dthara'\
but in that treatise, in its present form, lyric poetry is never
discussed. The author, however, was not necessarily unsym-
pathetic towards this kind of composition. We still possess
a grave and dignified ode to Virtue written by Aristotle him-
self.
The lyric poetry of Greece may be conveniently regarded as
including not only the * melic' but also the 'elegiac' and 'iambic'
poets. All alike were associated with song, and were generally
accompanied by music, the instrument, in the case of 'melic'
poets, being the lyre or the cithara^ and in the case of ' elegiac '
* Milton, Sotmet 8 ; cp. Pliny vii 109; Aelian, Var, Hist, xiii 7.
' ap. Athen. 695 a (Smyth, pp. 143, 468).
48 THE ATHENIAN AGE. [CHAP.
and * iambic' poets the flute'. Of the elegiac poets, one of the
earliest (in the ordinary view) is Tyrtaeus ijl, 685-
Tyrtaru/^**" 66^ B.C.). His poeiii on Good Gouemtnent (Eu-
nomia) is specially mentioned by Aristotle, while
not less than thirty-two lines from his spirited and stirring
Exhortations are quoted in court by the orator Lycurgus. Two
other portions of the same poem are embodied in passages in the
Laws of Plato, where their author is called a ' most divine poet ',
though Plato regrets that personal bravery in battle is the only
kind of virtue that wins his praise*. Mimnermus
of Smyrna (fl, 620 B.C.) is partly a political and
still more a sentimental poet. He sighs as he prays: — *Ah !
that from sickness safe and bitter cares, Death may overtake me,
e'en at sixty years * (frag. 6). The sentiment meets with a protest
from the sturdy good sense of Solon who, addressing Mimnermus,
says : — ** But, if, even now, you will take my advice, erase this ;
nor bear me any ill-will for having thought on this theme better
than you ; emend the words, Ligyastades, and sing : * May death
o'ertake me, e'en at eighty years * " (frag. 20). In
Solon's case, the prayer was apparently answered,
for he seems to have died at the age of eighty (c, 639-559). In
his poems elegiac and iambic verse are alike represented. Among
his elegiacs are some forty lines of a vigorous and patriotic poem
on Athens, which Demosthenes calls upon the clerk of the court
to read aloud in the course of the speech for the prosecution of
Aeschines, and also two or three passages, probably from the
same poem, which Aristotle quotes in his Constitution of Athens^
together with thirty-five iambic lines on his political reforms, and
nine trochaic lines on the same topic. In his Rhetoric he quotes
a single line of admonition to Critias. Plato cites a couplet in
the LysiSy without the author's name, and elsewhere mentions
Solon and his contemporaries'.
In the Timaeus in particular Critias (who died in 404 b.c.)
^ Cp. Jebb's Growth and I ttflueme of Classical Greek Poetry ^ pp. 108, 117,
laa.
* Arist. PoL V 6, a ; Lycurg. I^eocr, 107 ; Plato, Laws 629 a, e, 660 K.
" Dem. 19 § 155; Arisl. Const, Ath, c. 5 and i%\ Rhet, i 15; Plalo, Lys,
419 E, Charmid, 157 F, Tim, 10 E and esp. 11 B — c.
III.] ELEGIAC POETRY. 49
recalls an incident which happened when he was a boy of about
ten years of age. It was on the day of the Apaturia set apart for
the registration of boys ; and, in accordance with the custom of
that festival, parents gave prizes for recitation (fia^tfSia), many
poems were recited, and among them ' many of us boys sang the
poems of Solon, which were new at the time' (i.e. recently
introduced into public recitations). Someone said to the boy's
grandfather, a contemporary and relation of Solon's, that, in his
judgment, Solon was ' not only the wisest of men, but also the
noblest of poets '. The old man smiled and said that, ' if Solon
had only made poetry the business of his life,... he would have
been as famous as Homer or Hesiod, or any poet '.
'i'he elegiac epigrammatists Demodocus of Leros and Phocylides
of Miletus {Ji, 537 B,c.) are cited by Aristotle in Phocyiides.
the Ethics (vii 9) and Politics (iv 11, 9) respectively, TheognU
the former passage describing the character of the Milesians, and
the latter the advantage of belonging to the middle classes.
Theognis of Megara (fl, 540 B.C.) is commended in Plato's Laws
for eulogising political loyalty, and is paraphrased in the Meno^
while his proverbial sayings are quoted by Xenophon and Aris-
totle'. Most of his verses are of a political, and indeed intensely
aristocratical, type, and they could hardly be expected to be
popular in democratic Athens. The only evidence adduced to
show that he was one of the standard school-authors is the
proverbial line : — * 7 hat indeed I knew before Theognis was
born ''. All that this proves is that his moral maxims were often
quoted and had long been very trite. They seem to have
inspired much of the worldly wisdom of Isocrates, who names
Theognis (with Hesiod and Phocylides) as a wise counsellor who
was neglected in comparison with the comic poets of the day
(2 § 43). His lighter verses were expressly meant to be sung at
the symposium to the strains of flutes, and a phrase from one of
them has actually been found inscribed on a wine-cup of Tanagra*.
^ Plato, Laws 630, Meno 95 E ; Xen. Mem. i a, 30, Symp, \\ 5 ; Arift.
Eth. i 8, X 9.
' -ro\rrX yjkw yfitKV Tpip Qioypip ytyowipou (Dousa ad Liicil. frag, inccrt. io9,
quoted by Griifenhan, 171); Plul. Afor. ii 777. Cp. Schomaiin, Op. iv 15 f.
' '365, w TcUStav KaXXwTt, cp. 141 f; Christ, Gr. Litt, § 90*, § loo*.
S. 4
50 THE ATHENIAN AGE. [CHAP.
The foremost of the early iambic poets, Archilochus of Paros
i^fl. 650}, though ranked with Homer by the
Archiiochut**' ancients, is described by Pindar, at a distance of
two centuries, as *the bitter-tongued Archilochus,
who fell full often into distress by battening on virulent abuse of
his enemies* (Pyth, ii 55). Pindar also mentions 'the chant of
Archilochus, vocal at Olympia, even the song of victory, swelling
with its thrice-repeated refrain*, which, in the absence of any
special ode, was sung as the ancient counterpart of our modem
strain of victory: — *See the conquering hero comes*. Archi-
lochus is twice imitated by Aristophanes', twice quoted by
Aristotle^ and twice in the Platonic dialogues ^ His poems were
recited by rhapsodes, and sung to music like those of Homer and
Hesiod, Mimnermus and Phocylides*. The other 'iambic* poets,
Semonides of Amorgos and Hipponax of Ephesus, are not quoted
in the Athenian age. The * iambics ' of Solon have been already
noticed (p. 48).
It must not be inferred from the limited range of the quo-
tations from the elegiac, iambic and melic poets in the Athenian
age, that those poets were comparatively unknown. Almost all
of their poetry was 'occasional'; much of it was ephemeral;
and few besides Pindar could say: — Monger than deeds liveth
the word* (Nem. iv 6). Many however of their poems played
a part in the private life of Athens, either in the school, or at
the symposium^ or both. Elegiac poetry lasted for sixteen cen-
turies, beginning with Callinus {c, 690 b.c.) and ending with
the Greek Anthology of Constantinus Cephalas (c, 920 a.d.).
In the Greek drama this metre is only used once, in the lament
of Andromache (Eur. Andr, 103- 116); but iambic poetry found
a fresh lease of life in the dialogue, and melic in the chorus of
the drama ; while the epic poetry of narration survived in the mes-
senger*s speeches of Greek tragedy. The canon of Greek lyric
poetry closes in 452 b.c., the date of the last known odes of
Pindar and Bacchylides. Meanwhile the personal and reflective
^ Rancu 704, Pax 603.
• PoL vii 6, 3, Khet, \\\ 17.
' Rep, 365 C, Eryx, 397 E.
^ Athen. 630.
III.] IAMBIC POETRY. 5 1
interest, which lyric poetry had excited in the individual, had
begun to abate in the presence of the public enthusiasm aroused
in vast audiences by the drama. Aeschylus had won his first -
tragic prize in 484 b.c; Sophocles in 468, about the time of
the death of Simonides; and Euripides in 441, about the time
of the death of Pindar; while the year 450 is the approximate
date of the successes gained in the Old Attic Comedy by Crates
and Cratinus, and also of the birth of Aristophanes.
Masks op Combdy and Tragbuy.
(Fiom ihe BtiiUh Museum.)
CHAPTER IV.
THE STUDY AND CRITICISM OF DRAMATIC POETRY.
Literary criticism was promoted at Athens not only by
the epic recitations of the rhapsodes (p. 20), but also by the
contests for the prizes offered for lyric, and much more by those
for dramatic poetry. But such criticism was purely of a popular
and unprofessional kind. The contests of the
poetry And drama were at first decided by acclamation, and
criticUm ^^^ voice of the people awarded the prize. Sub-
sequently the decision was made by five judges
in comic, and probably the same number in tragic, contests.
This small number of judges was appointed by lot, out of a
large preliminary list elected by vote. It speaks well for the
general competence of the judges that Aeschylus and Sophocles
were usually successful ; but, strange to say, at the presentation
of the Oedipus Tyrannus^ Sophocles was defeated by a minor
poet, Philocles, a nephew of Aeschylus. Euripides won the prize
on five occasions only, while Aeschylus is credited with thirteen
victories, and Sophocles with at least eighteen. The decisions
pronounced by the judges on such occasions were not without
their effect in leading to the improvement of plays which were
unsuccessful at their first presentation. The revision and re[)ro-
duction of unsuccessful plays was not an uncommon practice*.
Dramatic criticism occasionally found its way into the plays
themselves. Euripides, in his Electra (I. 522-544), openly criti-
cises the means adopted by Aeschylus in the Choitpttoroc for
* Egger, Hist, de la Criliquty p. «6 f.
CHAP. IV.] CRITICISM IN ATTIC COMEDY. 53
bringing about the recognition of Orestes by his sister. Such
criticism, singularly out of place in tragedy, was
more frequent and more appropriate in comedy. AttilTcomedy
More than sixty years after the memorable occasion,
when the contest between Aeschylus and Sophocles had been
decided for the first time in favour of the latter by the verdict of
Cimon and his colleagues (468 B.C.), the comic
poet, Phrynichus, represented the nine Muses ©f^phrytiichu*
themselves as assembled in court to decide on the
respective merits of the tragic poets, and passed an encomium on
the dramatic career of Sophocles*.
On the above occasion the Muses of Phrynichus competed
with the play familiar to ourselves under the name
of the Frogs of Aristophanes (405 b.c.). In that Ariitoph^ne*'^
play, it will be remembered that Sophocles takes
no part in the contest for the throne of Tragedy. Aeschylus and
Euripides enter the lists and criticise passages in one another's
plays. These criticisms extend over nearly three hundred lines
(11 19-14 1 3), but a very brief analysis will here suffice.
Euripides begins by taking Aeschylus to task for his bombastic style,
while Aeschylus criticises his rivaVs prologues. Euripides next claims credit
for making Tragedy more familiar, more domestic; Aeschylus, for inspiring
his countrymen with a patriotic spirit by means of martial plays, such as
the Seven aj^ainst Thebes and the Persae. He also taunts his opponent with
bringing on to the stage not only women with strange passions, but also
fallen kings in rags and tatters. Thereupon Euripides attacks the opening
lines of the ChoHphoroe^ finding fault (among other things) with one or two
tautological phrases, * listen* and *hcar ', and * I have come* and * I revisit*'.
In the latter case Aeschylus triumphantly retorts that the second verb is rightly
added, being particularly appropriate to return from exile. Aeschylus rejoins
with an attack on Euripides for the monotony of his prologues, and ridicules the
too frequent recurrence of the pause after the fifth syllable of the iambic line,
adding to all the verses in which this pause occurs, and in which the gram-
matical construction allows, a burlesque and trivial conclusion, — 'lost his
little flask of oil' (Xi/Kv^ior avcuXe^^er), by which the poet's tragic phrase
* Egger, /. r. p. 38 f; cp. Fragmenta Comicorum Graecorum ii 59a Meineke,
9€{(6t, I roXXdt voii/jcat ital xaXat rpaytpBlav \ KoXut 8* ireXcHfi^*, oAdiw
Owoftilpat KaKOP.
' 1 118, fircit yiip c/t yrjw Tijrde xal xaHpxofuu,
54 THE ATHENIAN AGE. [CHAP.
is made to end in bathos. Euripides in reply attacks the choruses of
Aeschylus, stringing together a number of pompous phrases, and criticising
their obscurity, their |X>nderous metres, and their monotonous refrains. Aes-
chylus returns the compliment with a series of affectedly pretty verses from
the choruses of Euripides, exemplifying (among other things) his innovations
in choral music and metre. He next parodies his rival's monodies, in choral
lines combining the false sublime with the vulgar pathetic, and both with
impertinent appeals to the help of Heaven. Lastly, the two poets put their
verses to the test of the balance. A large pair of scales is produced ;
Aeschylus stands beside one of the scales and Euripides by the other ; each
in turn repeats a single line from one of his own plays, and the scale is
supposed to rise or fall, according as the sense of the line is light or heavy.
In the end Aeschylus, weary of competing line against line, challenges
Euripides to a final and comprehensive contest. With the challenge he
combines a sly allusion to the help that Euripides was supposed to derive from
his slave Cephisophon in the composition of his plays, and to the book-
learning already noticed in a line describing him, as * from learned scrolls
distilling the essence of his wit' (943): —
Come I no more line for line ! Let him bring a//, —
His wife, his children, his Cephisophon,
And mount the scale himself, with all his books.
I shall outweigh them with two lines alone.
Dionysus, the arbiter of this conflict of wits, finally decides in favour of
Aeschylus, who is accordingly brought back to the upper world. In the
ensuing chorus (i 483-1 499) Aristophanes dwells on the triumphant recall
of Aeschylus as a tribute to the good taste and sound sense characteristic
of the true poet, while the fate of Euripides is a warning that it is not well
to sit and chatter with Socrates, denouncing the art of poetry and neglecting
the noblest aims of the tragic art.
The passing attack on Socrates does not fairly apply to the
Socrates whom we know in Plato ; but, in the controversy as
a whole, we feel that, although the author is clearly prejudiced
against Euripides, the points selected for criticism on both sides
are both interesting and instructive. The criticism of Aris-
tophanes (as has been well observed) "rests upon a reasoned
view of art and taste as well as of politics and religion. He
disapproves the sceptical purpose, the insidious sophistic, the
morbid passion of his victim; but he disapproves quite as
strongly the tedious preliminary explanations and interpolated
narratives, the 'precious' sentiment and style, the tricks and
the trivialities". Yet he 'is far too good a critic and far too
IV.] CRITICISM IN ATTIC COMEDY. $5
shrewd a man not to allow a pretty full view of the Aeschylean
defects, as well as to put in the mouth of Euripides himself a
very fairly strong defence of his own merits'. Notwithstanding
this signally effective dramatic example of the 'direct criticism
of actual texts', it is remarkable that 'formal criticism in prose'
was long in making its appearance, and when it appeared
showed 'much less mastery of method'*.
The traces of literary criticism preserved in the fragments
of Attic Comedy are neither very numerous nor very trustworthy.
Hesiod was quoted and parodied in the Cheiron of Pherecrates,
a play in which Music complains of the maltreatment she has
received from some of the lyrical composers of the day*. In
the Hesiodi of Telecleides we have some references to contempo-
rary poets, and a passage on Euripides, referring to his being
aided in his tragedies by Mnesilochus and Socrates, possibly
comes from this play*. Other plays of the Old Comedy, like
the Tragedians of Phrynichus and the Poets of Plato, were
possibly concerned with literary criticism. The lovers of Euripides
were satirised in the Phileuripides of Axionicus*, and of Phi-
lippus or Philippides*. Sappho was the title of six plays; of
four of these we know next to nothing ; but in that of Antiphanes'
she was represented as propounding and solving riddles ; and
in that of Diphilus^ as having among her admirers Archilochus,
who flourished forty years before her time, and Hipponax, seventy
years after it In the case of Sappho in particular, any inference
that we may draw from the mere titles of such plays, must
necessarily be uncertain.
There is a passage in the comic poet Timocles, humorously
describing the consolations enjoyed by the spectator of a tragedy
who finds his own troubles lightened by the contemplation of
• Saintsbury*8 History of Criticism^ i p. n f . See also Jcbb*s Clasmai
Greek Poetry ^ pp. 130—3. The terseness of Euripides was appreciated by
Aristophanes (frag. 397 D).
' Athen. 364 A* R; Plut. De Musica^ § 30; cp. Meineke, Fr, Com, Gr, ii
334 fl Kggcr»'-^-. 39-
' Meincke, 1 88, il 371. * Athen. 175 B (Meineke, I 417).
• Meineke, I 341, 474.
• ib. 277 f.
' 1^. 447.
S6 THE ATHENIAN AGE. [CHAP.
the troubles of others in the play. There is also a passage from
the Poiisis of Antiphanes, insisting that Tragedy is far easier
to write than Comedy because in Tragedy the story is already
familiar to the audience'. But neither of these passages really
contains any literary criticism. It is far otherwise with the very
striking fragment ascribed to Simulus (a comic poet about 399
B.C.), which is welcomed with enthusiasm by an excellent judge
of literary criticism, as advancing * not only a theory of poetry
and poetical criticism, but one of such astonishing completeness
that it goes far beyond anything that we find in Aristotle, and
is worthy of Longinus himself at his very happiest moment'*.
I offer the following rendering:
Nature of Art bereft will not suffice
For any work whate'er in all the world;
Nor Art again, devoid of Nature's aid.
And, e*en if Art and Nature join in one,
The poet still must find the ways and means,
Passion, and practice; happy chance and time;
A critic skilled to seize the poet's sense.
For, if in aught of these he haply fail,
He cannot gain the goal of all his hofies.
Nature, good will, and pains, and orderetl grace
Make poets wise and good, while length of years
Will make them older men, but nothing more'.
The philosopher Xenocrates, when attacked by Bion, declined
to defend himself; 'Tragedy' (he said), *when satirised by Comedy,
^ Athen. vi 333 a, 133 b.
* Saintsbury's History of Criticism^ i 15.
• Stobaeus, 60, 4, oCb-e ^^^it Uw^ ylyptrai, r^i'iyf 4rep | Tp6% od8i¥ ^TtnJ-
8tv/ia irapdiray oddtvl, \ oOrt rdXi rix'^V M 4>^9tM Kticnjfiivrf, \ toOtui» dfiolut rCiP
dvoiy avvfiy/iivuMf \ elt radrdif, in Jet TpooXa^tiv xopTf^aWt \ fpurra, fitXinjtff
KOipbtf ei/^v^, XP^'^*'t I KptTiji> rd fniBbf dwdfiivw irwapirdirai. \ ip <f yAp Ar
ToOrtatf Tit dwo\fi^€li rOxVt I o&f^ ^PX^* ^^^ ^^ ripfUL toO wpOK€tfUpov. | 0i^(t,
$i\rictSt iwtfU\€i\ €i>ra{/a, | ao^Hidt TiBifffi xdyoBout' irCiw 64 rot | dpiBfi^ ou6ip
&KKo w\ri¥ yrjpat woiti. In 1. 6 — 7 Mcinckc on Stob. (omitting xp^^oy as
su|)erfluous) aptly suggests Kaipbv^ tinpvrj Kpir^M, aw<uf t6 ^Oh irrX. ; but ci/^i;^
Koipoif occurs in l*olybius i 19, 12. In /hi^'; Com. Cr. 1 xiii he considers rdXi
and rix^yi in 1. 3, and rh before ^Oiw in 1. 7, foreign to Attic Comedy, and
identifies the author of this and two partly similar passages with a didactic
poet named Simulus little earlier than the Augustan age. The passage is
partly parallel to Horace, A. Z'., 408 — 413.
IV.] THE TEXT OF THE TRAGIC POETS. $7
does not deign to reply". There is in fact very little evidence
that the attacks of the Comic poets led to any changes in the
text of the Tragic writers. It is possible that a line in the Medea
may owe its present form to a jest in the Clouds of Aris-
tophanes'. The prologues of the MeUager and Oeneus of Eu-
ripides, which were ridiculed in the Frogs^ were apparently altered
by Euripides the younger before those plays were again put on
the stage*. That of the Iphigeneia in Aulide is not attacked by
Aristophanes ; in fact the play was not produced until after the
Frogs^ \ but it has two alternative openings: — (i) a dialogue in
anapaests, (2) an ordinary Euripidean prologue. Possibly the
latter was superseded by the former owing to the gibes of Aris-
tophanes against the poet's prologues in general. A line from
a scene in the TcUphus of Euripides representing Achilles playing
at dice, * Achilles has thrown twice — Twice a deuce ace *, quoted
in the Frogs (1400), is said to have been afterwards omitted by
the poet, with the whole of the context ; but the omission cannot
have been due to the Frogs, as Euripides died shortly before
that play was produced. Hence it was either omitted by Eu-
ripides the younger, or, if by the poet himself, the omission
may have been suggested by a possibly earlier attack by Eupolis.
The plays of Aeschylus were frequently reproduced after his
death, but in the fourth century Sophocles was more popular,
and finally Euripides was left without a rival. In process of
time, alterations made by actors and copyists led to uncertainties
as to the true text. A decree was accordingly carried by the
eminent Athenian statesman and orator, Lycurgus (396-323 B.C.),
providing, not only for the erection of bronze statues of the
three great tragic poets, but also for the preservation of a copy
of their tragedies in the public archives. The town-clerk was
to collate the actors' copies with this text, and no departure
therefrom was to be allowed in acting'. Possibly the manuscript
^ Diog. Laert. iv § 10.
' Eur. Med. 1317, W rdo^dc Kiwkti irdra/AoxXei/eif iri^Xat (with Porson*s and
Vcrrall's nolcs), Ar. Clouds 1397, vhw ipyov ta frcurwv iwQp ircvifrd iral fioxXevrd.
' Frilzsche on Ar. Ranat^ no6.
^ Introd. to my ed. of Eur. Batchae^ p. xliii.
• [Plutarch], Lives of the Ten Orators^ p. 841 F, rdf rpay^^hiM adrC^ h
$8 THE ATHENIAN AGE. [CHAP.
included only those of the plays which continued to be acted
after their authors' death. It is said to have been this manu-
script that was borrowed for the Alexandrian Library by Ptolemy
Euergetes (247 or 146 b.c.), who deposited the sum of fifteen talents
as a pledge for its safe return, but instead of returning it, forfeited
his pledge, kept the original, and sent the Athenians a sumptuous
copy in its place*. If it ever reached Alexandria at all, it does
not appear to have been regarded as a final authority. Other-
wise we should not find mere conjectures on the part of the
Alexandrian critic, Aristophanes, mentioned in the Scholia on
the Tragic poets. It is probable that the object of Lycurgus
was not so much to restore the original text of the plays, as
to record the current acting-version, so as to prevent unauthorised
departures from the form which long experience had approved.
The official copy thus supplied a test for rejecting alterations
due to actors of later date than the time of Lycurgus*.
The leading tragic poets are quoted as authorities by orators
and (not without occasional criticism) by philoso-
from tragic phers. Lycurgus cites no less than 55 lines from
^^^^ the Erechthem of Euripides, with two shorter pas-
sages from unnamed tragic poets'; Aeschines (i § 154) two short
passages from Euripides, and Demosthenes (19 § 247) 16 lines
from the Antigotie of Sophocles (175-190), as illustrating maxims
of political conduct which Aeschines had violated. Plato quotes
from Aeschylus three passages of the Septem Contra Thebas^, but
protests against the language respecting Apollo, which, in another
play, the poet puts in the lips of Thetis*. He never quotes a line
from Sophocles, while he ascribes to Euripides a line which also
Koivf ypa\ffafUpovf ^vKdrrtip, Kal r6y rijt r6\ttin ypafifULria Tapai^ayiyininrKeiP
rots ifwoKpi¥OfU»oitt oOk i^iiwai yiip <wap* added by Grysar> ai/rdf {a/, aXXwt)
^0Kpl¥€<r$ai.
* Galen, im Hippocralis Epidem, ill a. See i)clow, p. 111.
* p. 15 of Kom, De publko Aachyli Sophoclis EuripiUis /ahuianwt exem-
plari Lycurgo auciore con/ecto, lionn (1863) pp. 34; cp. Wilamowitz in
Hermes xiv 151 and in Eur. Ilerakles \ 130.
* Leocr, §§ 100, 91, 13a.
* S, C. T, I {Euthytt 191 D), 451 (Rep. 551 c), 59a f (Rep. 361 B, 361 A).
» Rep, 383 B. Cp. 380 A. 563 c, Phaedo 180 A, Symp. 383 B.
IV.] THE STUDY OF THE DRAMATISTS. 59
occurred in the Aias Locrus of the former*. In this connexion he
says that 'people regard tragedy on the whole as wise, and
Euripides as a master therein '. He also quotes Euripides twice
in the Gorgias*, Of Aristotle it is enough to say that his citations
from Aeschylus are very few, those from Sophocles more numerous,
while those from Euripides are taken from as many as ten of his
extant plays, not to mention fourteen others*. Aristophanes is
one of the persons who take part in Plato's Symposium^ but the
language of the comic poets is very rarely quoted by the philoso-
phers, and never by the orators.
To the Athenian the theatre was mainly a place of amuse-
ment, but it was also to some extent a means of
education. Aristophanes makes Aeschylus say to ^h^ dramatUM
Euripides: *What the master is to childhood, the
poets are to youth; therefore we poets are bound to be strictly
moral in our teaching* {Frogs^ ^^SS)' ^^^ teaching of Euripides
may not have been entirely sound, but it was widely popular.
His popularity throughout the Greek world is partly attested by
Plutarch. In the Life of Nicias (29), we are told that, at the
disastrous close of the Sicilian expedition (413 b.c.), some of the
Athenian prisoners at Syracuse owed their liberty to the fact that
they were able to recite passages from Euripides; and that, at
Caunus, on the Carian coast, opposite to Rhodes, a vessel pursued
by pirates was not allowed to enter the port, until it was found
that some of those on board knew by heart the songs of Euripides,
— stories which have supplied Browning with the theme of
Balaustiofi s Adventure, Similarly, in the Life of Lysander (15),
we learn that, nine years later, when Athens had been conquered
by Sparta, and a Theban proposed that the city should be
destroyed and its site left desolate, the Spartan captains were
deeply moved by a Phocian who sang before them the opening
chorus of the Electra of Euripides. But, whatever compunction
may have been caused by this pathetic incident, the walls were
undoubtedly demolished, though, to the fancy of Milton,
1 9o^oi Tfjpawpoi rdv ffo^utv ffvrovclqi (AV/. 568 A with schol., and Theag,
1^5 B).
* 484 E, 492 E. Afelanippe in Symp. \11 K.
' See the Index of Bonitz or of Heitz.
6o THE ATHENIAN AGE. [CHAP.
*the repeated air
Of sad Electra*s poet had the power
To save the Athenian walls from ruin bare'^.
In and after the times of Euripides, selections from the tragic
poets were probably learnt by heart in the schools of Athens.
Such may have been the set speeches (piycrci?), mentioned in
Plato's Laws (8ii a). The study of 'tragedy', as an alternative
subject at school, is implied by the comic poet Alexis, who repre-
sents the legendary musician Linus as setting before the youthful
Hercules a number of volumes and telling him to look carefully
at their titles and choose the one that strikes his fancy most.
The choice includes a tragedy (author not named), as well as
Orpheus, Hesiod, Choerilus, Homer, Epicharmus and 'all kinds
of books ' ; but the choice of Hercules characteristically falls on a
manual of cookery (Athen. 164 b).
In the midst of the dramatic contest between Aeschylus and
Euripides, Aristophanes pays his audience the compliment of
assuming that ' each has got his little book, to prompt him to be
clever' {Frogs^ 11 14); and he is generous enough towards Euri-
pides to make Dionysus confess that reading a copy of the poet's
Androftuiia on board ship has smitten him with a sudden desire
to see Euripides once more {ib, 54). But Aristophanes himself,
and the poets of the Old Attic Comedy, with their unbridled
license of personal attack on public characters, were unsuited for
the purposes of education, though the plays of their Sicilian
precursor Epicharmus (d. 450), appear to have been rich in moral
maxims'. The later Attic Comedy was more appropriate for this
purpose ; and * Comedy ' as well as * Tragedy ' was among the
subjects for which prizes were given to junior boys at a school in
Teos in the second century B.C.* In the Roman age an alpha-
betical list of some 850 sententious sayings was collected from the
plays of Menander. As in Comedy, so also in Tragedy. Early
in the Christian era the Tempter might appropriately represent
Athens as the place for hearing and learning all that
' Milton, Sonnet 8.
* Diog. I^ert. viii 78, 7i'w/AoXo7ei.
* Boeckh, C. /. G. 3088 ( = no. 913 in Michel's Kecueil),
IV.] DRAMATIC CRITICISM IN PLATO. 6l
* the lofty grave tragedians taught
In Chorus or lambick, teachers best
Of moral prudence, with delight received,
In brief sententious precepts, while they treat
Of fate« and chance, and change in human life,
High actions and high passions best describing''.
Dramatic criticism in Plato is represented mainly by certain
important passages of the Republic^ and also by Dramatic
some incidental references in other dialogues. In criticism in
the Phacdrus (268 c) a person coming to Sophocles
or Euripides, and saying that he 'knows how to compose very
long speeches about a small matter and very short speeches
about a great matter, and also pathetic or terrible and menacing
speeches', is described as 'knowing only the preliminaries of
Tragedy' (269 a), while Tragedy itself is the 'arranging of all
these elements in a manner suitable to one another and to the
whole' (2680). Tragedy, in brief, must be an organic whole.
In the Philebus (48 a) the passions excited by Tragedy and
Comedy are described as producing a feeling of pleasure mixed
with pain. In the Gorgias (502 b) the aim of * that grave and
august personage. Tragedy,' is narrowly scrutinised. Her aim is
merely to please the spectators, and her creations are denounced
as only another form of flattery. At the close of the Symposium^
in the early morning, when the rest of the company have either
withdrawn or have fallen asleep, we find Socrates still discoursing
with the comic poet, Aristophanes, and the tragic poet, Agathon,
and pressing both of them to admit ' that the genius of comedy
was the same as that of tragedy, and that the truly artistic writer
of tragedy ought also to be a writer of comedy', but the two
poets (we are assured) were 'getting very sleepy, and did not
quite understand his meaning' (223 d). That meaning may
possibly have been that the object of tragedy as well as comedy
is to influence men's hearts; tragic, as well as comic effect, if
it is to be attained by means of true art, must 'presuppose
a scientific knowledge of mankind, and this knowledge will fit
its possessor equally for either capacity". Tragedy and Comedy,
> Milton, P. R, iv 761—6.
• Zeller, Plato and the Older Academy^ p. 509 n. 66.
62 THE ATHENIAN AGE. [CHAP.
not as they might be, but as they were^ find very scanty appre-
ciation in the Republic- and the Laws, Plato urges that the
'imitation', oc (as we should say) representation, of what is bad
and unworthy, which plays so prominent a part in music and
in poetry, and especially in the drama, imperceptibly familiarises
both artists and the public with thoughts and acts which are
reprehensible'. Further, the effect, which Tragedy produces on
the audience, depends on the excitement of pity and grief; that
of Comedy, on the excitement of laughter and (ultimately) exult-
ation over the misfortunes of others. The poets (he continues)
claim our sympathy for the passions of love, anger, fear, jealousy,
and the rest, — all of them unworthy passions, which we do not
approve in ourselves, and the representation of which ought
not to afford us any pleasure*. The excitement of pity and
fear by means of Tragedy is, according to this view, relaxing
and enfeebling, these emotions being apt to degenerate into
sentimentality and to make men unmanly. For these and
similar reasons Plato banishes dramatic poetry from his ideal
Republic.
While Plato thus objects to Tragedy as tending to make men
cowardly and effeminate by the excitement of their
A^stoUe sympathies, Aristotle tacitly opposes this view in his
famous definition of Tragedy. The closing words
of that definition imply that Tragedy presents us with noble
objects for the exercise of the feelings of pity and fear, and
affords relief by removing them from our system: — 'through
pity and fear accomplishing' (not the purification but) 'the pur-
gatioH of those emotions' {Pott, 6 § 2). That the latter is the
true meaning of katharsis was seen by Milton in his preface
to Samson Agonistes (167 1). Milton's interpretation had been
anticipated in Italy by Scaino (1578) and Galuzzi (1621)*:
and the exact sense of the term has since been discussed
by Twining (1789), by Weil (1847) and Bernays (1857), and
by many others*.
1 Rep. 395 c r, 401 B ; Laws 816 D (Zeller, /. ^., p. 510).
• Bep. 603 c — 607 A, 387 c f, Laws 800 c f (Zeller, /. r., p. 511).
• '^y^^X.'tt^ Journal of Philology^ xxvii 1^ — 275 (1900).
• ^g' Egger, /. f.f pp. 167—300; Susemihl and Hicks, Politics of Aristotle^
IV.] DRAMATIC CRITICISM IN ARISTOTLE. 63
The Poetic includes a slight sketch of the historical develop-
ment of Tragedy. In the fuller form of the treatise, or in some
other work, Aristotle must have mentioned Thespis as introducing
the 'prologue and the set speech**. The treatise, in its present
form, tells us that Aeschylus was the first to introduce a second
actor, that he made the chorus more subordinate and gave
greater prominence to the dialogue; also that Sophocles intro-
duced a third actor, and added scene-painting (4 § 13). In
the only other reference to Aeschylus, apart from a passing
mention of his Niobe (18 § 5), it is noticed that Euripides had
improved on a line in Aeschylus by altering an ordinary word
into one that was rarer, thus producing a beautiful instead of
a trivial effect*. Sophocles and Euripides are twice contrasted^
firstly, when Aristotle insists that the chorus ' should be regarded
as one of the actors and be an integral part of the whole and
join in the action, in the manner of Sophocles but not of Eu-
ripides' (18 § 7) ; and secondly, when he tells us that 'Sophocles
said that he drew men as they ought to be (or * to be drawn '), but
Euripides as they are^^. There are at least four references to the
Oedipus*^ a play which Aristotle obviously admires. Euripides
is defended against the criticism of those, who * censure him for
making many of his plays end unhappily ' ; this (says Aristotle)
is *the right ending'; such plays *have the most tragic effect',
and in this respect Euripides, * faulty as he is in the management
of the rest, is recognised as the most tragic of the poets' (13 § 6).
His Medea^ his Fphigeruia in Tauris and his Orestes are noticed.
Poets who have * dramatised the whole story of the Fall of Troy,
instead of selecting portions, like Euripides, have been unsuc-
cessful' (18 § 5). In the Rhetoric (iii 2, 5) Euripides is described
as having set an example to others by the skilful selection of his
vocabulary from the language of ordinary life. The only actual
pp. 641—656; and Butcher's AristotUs Theory of Poetry ^ pp. 136—168. The
relations between Aristotle's Poeiic and Plato are discussed by Chr. Belger, De
AristoteU etiam in Arte Poetica componenda Platonis discipulo (Berlin), 1890^
and by G. Finsler, Platon unddie aristotelische Poetik (Leipzig), 1900.
> Themistius, Or, 16, 316 D.
' 11 § 7t ^oivfirou for iffBUi.
• «5 § 6, cp. Butcher /. c. p. 361*.
^ c. 14, 15, 16, 16; afterwards known as the Oedipus Tyrannus,
64 THE ATHENIAN AGE. [CHAP.
mention of Aristophanes in the Poetic is where Sophocles is
described as * from one point of view, an imitator like Homer,
both imitating higher types of character'; from another, like
Aristophanes, both being dramatic poets (3 § 2). The chapters
on Comedy have not come down to us ; but, even from the
treatise as it stands, it is clear that Aristotle preferred the poets
of the Middle Comedy, with its growing preference for generalised
types of character, to the personal satire and rude invective of the
Old Attic Comedy. A * lampooner ' is the label which Aristotle,
by implication, attaches to its foremost extant representative,
Aristophanes ^
Aristotle's interest in the Drama led to his laying the founda-
tion of its history in the form of a collection of
did^TiiM * abstracts of the archives recording the dates of the
several plays. From the term (StSacrKcti'), applied
to the teaching and training of the chorus and actors and the
general rehearsal of a play, the play itself, or the connected group
of plays produced by a poet at a single festival, was called a didas-
calia. The same designation would naturally be given to the
public record of the result, and hence the title of Aristotle's
work. Such a work was doubtless largely founded on the various
records of success in the dramatic contests. These records were
of five kinds: (i) the documents preserved by the State in the
public archives; (2) the inscriptions on the monuments erected
at private exi)ense by the citizen, who as chorions had borne the
cost of the production of the play ; (3) public lists of victors in
all the contests at one particular festival ; (4) similar lists of the
victors at one particular kind of contest at such a festival;
(5) lists of tragic and comic actors and tragic and comic poets,
with numerals denoting the total number of their victories.
Plutarch has preserved an early example of (2), commemorating
a victory won in 476 B.C., when the chorigus was Themistocles*.
As an example of (3) we have the list of the victors* names,
including that of Aeschylus, for 458 B.C., the year in which he
produced the trilogy of the Orestcia. Aristotle's work, founded
* 5 § 3 » 9 § 5 ; Butcher, /. r., p. 370 f.
' Plutarch, Them. 5 § 3t Q€tu9T0K\rj% ^p€dppiot ^x^My^^ ^p^ix^t 48l8aaK(v,
IV.] ARISTOTLE'S *DIDASCALIAE'. ' 65
on records like these, is the ultimate source of our knowledge
of the results of the dramatic contests in which poets such as
Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes were competi-
tors. It was the foundation of a similar work by Callimachus
(c, 260 B.C.), which in its turn supplied the facts embodied by
Aristophanes of Byzantium {c, 200 b.c.) in a work which sur-
vives in the fragments quoted from it by the Scholiasts in
the Arguments to Greek plays still extant. There are thirteen
fragments of Aristotle's didascaiiae^ five of them with Aristotle's
name and the rest without it\ The accuracy of the tradi-
tion beginning with the public records of Athens and passing
through the works of Aristotle Callimachus and Aristophanes of
Byzantium down to the Scholiasts who transcribed the Arguments
which ultimately reach us in the mss of the Greek dramatists^
has in one important particular received a striking confirmation.
Though some fourteen or fifteen centuries had elapsed between
the date of the Medicean MS of Aeschylus (tenth or eleventh
century), and the date of the first performance of the Agamemnon
(458 B.C.), the copyist's written record of the name of the chorigus
and the archon of the year and the fact that the first prize was
won by Aeschylus, was confirmed by an inscription found on the
Acropolis in 1886, giving a complete list of the victors at the
City Dionysia of the year in question*.
Aristotle is also said to have written a work on Dionysiac
Victories^ but it is never quoted and is probably only another
name for his Didascaliae. Lastly, he drew up lists of victors in
the Olympian and Pythian games'. One of these Olympian
victors he mentions in the Ethics*^ in illustration of a particular
kind of ambiguity of designation. Notwithstanding the state-
ment made by an ancient commentator on Aristotle, Alexander
of Aphrodisias, that 'Av^panros was here a proper name, the name
^ Aristot. Frag. 618 — 630 Rose. Cp. Trendelenburg, Grammaiuorum
Graecorum de arte tragica mdicia^ pp. 3 f ; A. MUUer's Buhnenalterthiimer
p. 375 f; llaigh's Attic Ifteatre, pp. 59—64, 319 — 318; and Jebb in Smith's
Diit, Ant, ii 865 A.
' Haigh /. r., pp. 18, 64, 319. The only point in which the copyist has
gone wrong is in writing Olympiad 38 (in\) by mistake for 80 (i-).
' Diog. Laert. v 3i,*OXvMiriovcjra( and Ilv^toriicou (Frag. 615 — 7 Rose).
^ vii 4, 'Ai^pwros 6 rd *0\6fiTia puc&p,
s. 5
66
THE ATHENIAN AGE.
[CHAP. IV.
in fact of a successful boxer at Olympia, the editors have gene-
rally rejected this explanation and printed the word with a small
initial letter, anOpunnn. But a papyrus found at Oxyrhynchus,
and first published in 1899, shows that the old Greek Commen-
tator was right, for we there find the name 'Avtfpunros as that of
the winner of the Olympian boxing-match for 456 B.C.'
' Grenfell and Hunt, Oxyrkynckui pafyri, li p. 93, and ClaaUal Reviem,
' Aristotle.'
(In ihe Spada PbUc«, Rome.)
CHAPTER V.
THE CRITICISM OF POETRY IN PLATO AND ARISTOTLE.
The earliest Greek theory of poetry is that which we find in
the Homeric poems. In the Odyssey the source of
poetry is found in * inspiration '. The blind bard The Theory
Demodocus is 'beloved by the Muse', who gave Homer
him the gift of * sweet song'; he is 'prompted to
sing the glorious deeds of heroes' by the Muse, who Moves the
race of bards ' and has ' taught them all the ways of song ' ; he is
'taught by the Muse, the child of Zeus, or by Apollo'; and, when
he begins to sing, he is ' impelled by a god '*. Similarly, the bard
Phemius, the unwilling servant of the suitors of Penelope, says in
pleading for his life before Odysseus : — ' self-taught am I ; but it
was a god that inspired my mind with all the varied ways of song '
(()d, xxii 347).
A belief in the divine inspiration of the poet is one of the
doctrines of Democritus, whose recognition of the
. Democritus
mspiration of Homer has been already noticed
(p. 26). Of poets in general he says: — *all that a poet writes
under the influence of enthusiasm and of holy inspiration is
exceedingly beautiful". He 'denies that any one can be a great
poet, unless he is mad''. 'Poets who are sober', he excludes
from the haunts of Helicon*.
' Od, viii 63 — 5, 73 db^^acfy, 481 of/tat, 488, 499 6p/irf6(lt $€oO,
' Clemens, Strom, 698 B, "wav^rift 6i aaffa fUp dr ypdipff lur hBovctoffftoO
Kol UpoO irrft/fiarot iraXd icdpra iarl.
• Cicero, Divin, i 80.
* Horace, A. P. 195.
5—2
68 THE ATHENIAN AGE. [CHAP.
The theory of 'inspiration' is also prominent in Plato. In
Plato's view, the source of all artistic and poetic
creation, as also of philosophy, is a higher inspira-
tion. In the Phaedrus he describes the * state of being possessed
by the Muses' as a kind of 'madness, which, on entering a
delicate and virgin soul, arouses and excites it to frenzy in odes
and other kinds of poetry, with these adorning the myriad exploits
of ancient heroes for the instruction of posterity. But he that is
without the Muses' madness when he knocks at the doors of
Poesy, fancying that art alone will make him a competent poet, —
he and his poetry, the poetry of sober sense, will never attain
perfection, but will be eclipsed by the poetry of inspired madmen '
(245 a). In the Apology Socrates consults the poets — * tragic,
dithyrambic, and the rest *, asks them the meaning of their finest
passages, and finds that there was hardly any one of the
bystanders who could not have talked better about their poetry
than they did themselves. He soon concludes that it was not
by wisdom that poets wrote poetry, but (like diviners and sooth-
sayers) by a kind of genius and inspiration (22 b). In the Laws
it is 'an old story', which has been an immemorial tradition at
Athens and is accepted everywhere else, that * whenever a poet is
enthroned on the tripod of the Muse, he is not in his right mind '
(719 c). In the Meno the epithet 'divine' is applied to poets
and statesmen, as well as to 'diviners and prophets, who say
much that is true without knowing what they say' (99 d). But
the fullest expression of this thought is to be found in the lon^ a
dialogue whose genuineness has been doubted or denied by some
critics (including Ast, Schleiermacher, Susemihl and Zeller), while
others (such as K. F. Hermann, Stallbaum, Steinhart and Grote)
accept it as one of Plato's earliest works : —
It is not by art, but by being inspired and possessed, that all good epic
poets produce their beautiful poems; and similarly with all good melic poets,
— ^just as the Corybantic revellers are not in their right mind when they are
dancing, even so the melic poets are not in their right mind when they are
composing their beautiful strains. On the contrary, when they have fallen
under the spell of melody and metre, they are like inspired revellers, and on
their becoming possessed,— even as the Maenads are possessed and not in their
right senses, when they draw honey and milk from the rivers, — the soul of
the melic poets acts in like manner, as they themselves admit. For the poets
v.] CRITICISM OF POETRY IN PLATO. 69
tell us (as you remember) that they cull their sweet strains from 'fountains
flowing with honey', 'out of the gardens and dells of the Muses*, and bring
them to US like bees ; for, like bees, they are ever on the wing. And what
they say is true; for the poet is a light and winged and holy being; he
cannot compose until he becomes inspired and out of his senses, with his
mind no longer in him ; but, so long as he is in possession of his senses, not
one of them is capable of composing, or of uttering his oracular sayings.
Many as are the noble things that they say about their themes of song, like
your own sayings. Ion, about Homer, yet, inasmuch as it is not by Art that
they compose but by the gift of God, all that the poet can really succeed in
composing is the theme to which he is impelled by the Muse. Thus, one of
them composes dithyrambs, and another hymns of praise, and another epic or
iambic verses; and each of them succeeds in one kind of composition only,
for it is not by Art that they produce these poems but by a power divine
...And the reason why God takes away their senses, when he uses them as
his ministers, even as he uses the ministrations of soothsayers and prophets
divine, is in order that we who hear them may know that, since they are out
of their senses, it is not these poets who utter the words which we prize so
highly, but it is God himself who is the speaker, and it is through them that
he is speaking to us (533 E-534 d).
Elsewhere, Plato uses far more sober language, when he
calmly analyses the process by which the art of poetry comes into
being. Poetry is then described not as an ' inspiration *, but as a
kind of 'imitation*'. * Imitation' is the characteristic of all art,
and of the poetic art in particular. In the third book of the
Republic the question is started whether *all imitation is to be
prohibited', 'whether tragedy and comedy are to be admitted
into the State ', and it is contended that the same person cannot
play a serious part in life and also imitate many other parts;
and that, even in forms of imitation that are closely connected, as
in 'IVagedy and Comedy, the same |x;r.sons cannot succeed in
both. All imitative poetry is accordingly rejected {Rep, 394-5).
In the tenth book the attack on poetry as an imitative art is
renewed. All poetic imitations are there denounced as dangerous
to those who have not discerned their true nature (595 b). Just
as the painter makes only a superficial likeness of a thing, and
not the actual thing itself, much less the ideal thing, so the whole
tribe of imitators, including the poet and the tragic poet in
particular, are *in the third degree removed' (or, as we should
say, * twice removed ') * from the truth ' (597 e).
* Zeller's Plato^ p. 509 — 513.
JO THE ATHENIAN AGE. [CHAP.
Plato's description of art as a kind of 'imitation' has not
unnaturally met with a considerable amount of criticism. Thus
it has been justly observed, that ' in modern times we should say
that art is not merely imitation, but rather the expression of the
ideal in forms of sense*'. Poets and painters are more than
mere imitators, as Plato himself admits elsewhere in the case of
the painter. *How', he asks, * would a painter be in any less
degree a good painter who having painted a perfect pattern of the
highest human beauty, and left nothing lacking in the picture, is
unable to prove that such a man might possibly exist ? ' and the
answer is, *He would not* {R^p. 47 2 d). *No theory', it has
been remarked, * can be more erroneous than that which degrades
art into mere imitation, which seeks for beauty in the parts and
not in the whole... .The requirement of composition in a work of
art is alone an evidence that mere imitation is not art ". Of the
passage from the Gorgias^ above cited, it has been frankly said
that *the censure... is too sweeping even from Plato's point of
view, for Euripides at any rate aimed at a moral purpose of one
sort or other, and sacrificed to his zeal as an instructor much of
the popularity and much also of the poetic beauty of his plays.
As a criticism on Sophocles and Aeschylus it is, to modern
apprehension, still more deplorable'. One of the passages
already quoted from the Phaedrus (268 c) * proves that Plato had
a thorough perception of poetic excellence whenever it suited
him to forget his political theories".
Even when we pass from Plato to Aristotle, we are still
pursued by the description of Poetry as one of the
'imitative' arts, and of Poetry and Music in par-
ticular as 'modes of imitation' (Foet. i § 2). But there is a
change in the point of view corresponding to the difference
between the philosophy of Plato and the philosophy of Aristotle.
Plato, 'starting from the notion of pure Being', and regarding the
world of 'ideas' as the world of true existence, and sensible
phenomena as merely copies of a suprasensuous archetype, in the
* Joweit's PltitOt \\ 130 ed. 187 1.
' Jowett and Campbell on Rtp. 596 D.
* W. H. Thompson on Gorg. 503 B. — See also SainUbury*s History of
Criticism^ i 17 — 90. Cp. p. 61 supra.
v.] CRITICISM OF POETRY IN ARISTOTLE. /I
domain of art has apparently but a small opinion of the earthly
counterparts of the celestial originals. In Plato's view the poet
and the painter (as we have seen) make an imperfect copy of the
actual, while the actual in its turn is only a distant adumbration
of the ideal. Plato accordingly regards a work of art, whether a
poem or a picture, as in the degraded position of a copy of a
copy, and therefore twice removed from the truth. Poets and
painters alike are superficial in their knowledge of the things
which they 'imitate* or represent, and the result of such imper-
fect knowledge cannot be worthy of admiration*. The contrast
between Plato and Aristotle is thus summed up by Zeller': —
' While Plato and Aristotle agree in regarding art as a species of
imitation, they draw very different conclusions from this account
of it. Plato thinks of it only as the imitation of sensible phe-
nomena and accordingly expresses the utmost contempt for the
falsity and worthlessness of art; Aristotle, on the other hand,
looks upon artistic presentation as the sensible vehicle to us of
universal truths and thus places it above the empirical knowledge
of individual things'. Here and elsewhere, Aristotle, in whose
philosophy the fundamental doctrine was not Being but Becoming,
has a higher regard for the processes of growth and development
and for the phenomena of the visible world. Hence his greater
regard not only for the study of physical science but also for the
appreciation of the products of imitative art, whether in painting
or in poetry. In short, while 'imitation' is a term common in
this connexion to Aristotle and to Plato, the suggestion of con-
tempt implied in Plato's use of the term has disappeared*.
The impression given to a modern reader by the somewhat
narrow term 'imitation* with its suggestion of a slavishly me-
chanical copy, is sufficiently corrected by the hints supplied by
Aristotle himself. While art is traced by Aristotle to the natural
love of 'imitation', and to the pleasure felt in recognising
likenesses {Poet. 2 § i; 15 § 8), art is not confined to mere
' Cp. T imams ^ 19 D.
• Aristotle^ ii 307.
• This is fully set forth by Professor Butcher, /. r., pp. 11 1 — 161*, csp.
pp. 158 — 160; see also esp. Zeller's Aristotle^ ii 300—394, and Belger and
Finsler, quoted on p. 63 n.
72 THE ATHENIAN AGE. [CHAP.
copying. Art not only imitates Nature, but also completes its
deficiencies ^ Art endeavours to seize the universal type in the
individual phenomena. Poetry (as compared with History)
represents things in their universal aspect {Poet, 9 ^ 1-3)*
Immediately after speaking of 'imitation', Aristotle recognises
that the poet, in particular the tragic poet, may represent men as
better than they are, just as Polygnotus depicted men as nobler
than they were (i § 4). He also allows room for the play of
genius and even for the transport of phrensy, when he says that
' poetry demands either a natural quickness of parts, or a touch of
madness ', adding that poets of the former type can mould them-
selves to the characters which they represent, while those of the
latter are transported out of themselves (17 § 2)'. But, while
Aristotle recognises the workings of poetic phrensy, he has no
term to express ' imagination ', in the sense of a ' creative faculty '.
In the Rhetoric (i 11, 6) he describes phantasia as 'a kind of
feeble sensation'; elsewhere he defines it as * a movement re-
sulting from the actual operation of the faculty of sense", i.e. as
'the process by which an impression of sense is pictured and
retained before the mind'\ Even among the most imaginative
of peoples, the workings of the ' imagination ' had not yet been
analysed. For phantasia in the sense of * creative imagination '
we have to wait for more than five centuries till we find it in
Philostratus*.
Aristotle's Theory of Poetry is partially unfolded in his Poetic^
* Phyt. ii 8, ^ r^x»"? ^^ Z*^" ^tr«\<t a ^ ^ax ddi/varci drcp7daaa^at, rA
^k fu/AiTrcu,
* Cp. /fA€t, iii 7, II, fi^0€O¥ ^ Tolrfffitt Prod/, xxx i, Mdpajrot.. d/xc^vwr ijv
iroiiyr^ff, 6t* iKoralii, and Plato's /on, quoted on p. 68; also Finsler, /.r., 17a —
191.
* De Anima iii 3, 4390 i, xlvrioit bwb t^i alvBi^tm r^ kot Mffy€iap
yiyyofUvii (ed. E. Wallace, p. 153).
* E. Wallace, Outlines of the Philosophy of Aristotle, p. 90' ; cp. Cope on
Rhet, i p. 105 ; Freudenthal, i^raaia bei Arist, ; BoniU, Index, x. v.
* Vita Apollonii, vi 19 (cp. Saintsbury, L c, i lao); of the images of the
gods carved by a Pheidias or a Praxiteles, ^vraalo. tuOt' elpydaaro, ao^-
ripa tufiifatuft diitiiovpy6t. /dfirfff it fjJkw 7A/) dtifuovfiY/iirii d eMev, ^M^raala W
Kol 6 fiii ttiti^' OwoOi/fafTai yiip a^6 wp6t TH^r dva^opdv toO 6rrot, koI
/dfifiau^ tUv roXXdircf ^Kxpwkt (KwXri^t, ^at^raffloM 8* o^64p' X<^/x? T^P dW«-
v.] ARISTOTLE'S TREATISE ON POETRY. 73
a most suggestive work which has come down to us in an un-
satisfactory condition, imperfect in some of its parts and inter-
polated in others. Its general outline (omitting interpolations)
is as follows: —
The arts of Poetry, Music, Dancing, Painting and Sculpture rest on a
common principle of * imitation ' ; but they differ in the means, objects and
manner of imitation. In Poetry, the nitans are rhythm, language, and melody
(c. i). The objects of imitation are persons in action, either persons of a higher
type as in Tragedy, or of a lower type as in Comedy (c. 1), The manner of
imitation may be either a combination of direct and dramatic narrative, as
in Homer, or direct narrative alone ^ or pure drama, as in Tragedy and
Comedy (c. 3).
Poetry originated in the instinct of imitation, and of melody and rh3rthm.
It soon parted in two directions, as is proved by the Iliad and Otfyss^t as
compared with the Margttes^ a satirical poem (here ascribed to Homer), and
by Tragedy, as compared wiih Comedy. Then follows a sketch of the
history of Tragedy (c. 4) and Comedy. Epic poetry agrees with Tragedy in
being an imitation, in verse, of characters of the higher type, but epic action
has no limits of time, and Tragedy has some constituent parts peculiar to
itself (c. 5). Tragedy is then defined as * an imitation of an action that is
serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude ; in language embellished with
each kind of artistic ornament, the several kinds being found in separate
parts of the play ; in the form of action, not of narrative ; through pity and
fear effecting the proper purgation of these (lit, *such') emotions'*. It
has six elements ; three external, scenic presentment, lyrical song (iitKoToda),
and diction; and three internal, plot, character, and thought (c. 6). The
plot must be a whole, complete in itself, and of adequate magnitude (c 7).
It must have a unity of action (c. 8). Dramatic unity can be attained only
by the observance of poetic truth (c. 9). The plot may be either simple,
when the turning-point is reached without reversal of fortune (repcWrfca),
or without recognition (iLvay¥tStpiOit)\ complicated, when it is reached by either
or both (c. 10). Reversal of fortune and dramatic incident (vdBoi) are next
defined (c. 11). A perfect tragedy should imitate actions which excite pity
and fear. Pity is excited by unmerited misfortune ; fear, by the misfortunes
of men like ourselves (c. 13). These emotions should spring from the plot
itself (c. 14). The character represented must be good, appropriate, true
' i.e. either 'as in some of the later epic poets*, cp. 34 § 7 (Bywater,
youmal of Philology^ xiv 41), or ' as in certain types of lyric poetry *, cp.
with i^xorfiiKKwra, Plato Rep. 394 c, dc' d«'a77f\(af ro^ woiiiroO (of dithy-
rambs). But Ritter and Vahlen rightly hold that only two kinds of poetry
are here noticed, epic and dramatic, not tAree as in Plato /.r. Cp. Belger,
PP- 34—44-
' Butcher's transL Cp. p. 61.
74 THE ATHENIAN AGE. [CHAP.
to life, consistent ; it should also be idealised (c. 15). Recognition may be
brought about in various ways (c. 16). The tragic poet should follow certain
rules : (i) with a view to a perfect and consistent realisation of the dramatis
personae^ he must place the scene before his eyes, and in imagination act
the parts himself; (ii) he must Brst draw the outline of the play, and then
fill in the episodes (c. 17). He must be careful about the complication
(dMt) and especially about the disentangling or dimnument (Xi^o-tf) of the
plot. He should combine varied forms of poetic excellence. He must not
overload a Tragedy with details suitable to an Epic poem. He must make
the choral odes an organic part of the whole (c. 18). Thought (dtivMa),
or the intellectual element in Tragedy, may be expressed by dramatic speeches
or by dramatic incidents. Diction mainly belongs to the province of decla-
mation, rather than that of poetry (c. 19). Various kinds of words are next
distinguished, and metaphor, in particular, defined and exemplified (c. ai).
Elevation of language may be combined with perspicuity by a certain infusion
of rare, or metaphorical, or ornamental words, with those that are common ;
or by the use of words which have been extended, contracted, or otherwise
altered (c. ai).
Epic poetry agrees with Tragedy in unity of action (c. 13), also in being
either simple or complicated, * ethical ' or ' pathetic *, in having the same
parts (with the exception of song and scenery), and in requiring artistic
thought and diction. It differs in scale, and in metre, and in the art of
giving an air of reality to fictions which are really incredible (c. 14). The
principles on which critical objections brought against Poetry should be met,
are then set forth (vepi wpopXvfMTtap xal Xi^cwv). Poetic truth, as distin-
guished from ordinary reality, is next elucidated (c. 15). Epic poetry is
sometimes supposed to be superior to Tragedy, because it appeals to a
cultivated audience, which has no need of gesture. Tragedy, however, is
really the higher art : it has all the elements of Epic poetry, with the addition
of music and scenic accessories ; it also attains its end within narrower limits
of time, and it has more unity of action (c. 16) ^
Of the * Three Unities * of Action, Time and Place, popularly
ascribed to Aristotle, it will be observed that Unity of Action
is the only one which he actually enjoins*. As a treatise on
poetry the work is obviously incomplete, Lyric poetry being
practically ignored, and Comedy noticed only in a slight sketch
of its origin. The author (c. 6) undertakes to treat of Comedy,
but his treatment of the subject has not reached us. He defines
' For a more detailed analysis see Butcher, /.r., pp. i — 3 ; cp. Saintsbury,
/.r., pp. 3a — 39 ; and Prickard's Lecture on Aristoiie on (he Art of Poetry^
pp. 9 — 18.
• Egger, /.r., 165'; Butcher, /.r., 183 — 195*.
v.] ARISTOTLE'S TREATISE ON POETRY. 75
* the ludicrous ' (c. 5 § i), but the * different kinds of the ludicrous*,
which, as we know from the Rhetoric (iii 18), were once dis-
criminated in the Poetic^ doubtless in connexion with Comedy, are
not to be found in the present text'. In the Politics (1341 b 39),
while briefly treating of katharsis^ he promises to express him-
self more clearly on this point in his treatise on Poetry (^v roi%
v€pi voirjTucrj^)^ but this part of the definition of Tragedy (6 § 2)
is unfortunately not explained in the Poetic*, In the complete
work he also treated of synonyms, as stated in the Rhetoric
(iii 2, 7)'; and he could hardly have failed to mention Thespis
(p. 63). His treatise On Poets^ probably in three books, may
have contained materials for his treatise on Poetry, which in
its original form probably consisted of two. Even in its present
condition it is an invaluable work. Severely scientific and mas-
terly in method, unadorned in style, and almost entirely destitute
of literary grace and charm, it nevertheless stands out con-
spicuously in Greek literature as the earliest example of a syste-
matic criticism of Poetry; and, in our present survey of the
critical literature of the past, we shall find nothing in Greek
literature to rival it as a model of literary criticism until, in the
Roman age, we ultimately reach the celebrated treatise On the
Sublime,
' Cp. Vahlcn's 3rd ed. (1885), pp. 77—80.
• Sec Frag. 5 (Vahlcn and By water).
' Frag. 4 Vahlen, = i B)rwater.
CHAPTER VI.
THE RISE OF RHETORIC AND THE STUDY OF PROSE.
The greater part of the materials for the early history of Greek
rhetoric has been collected by Spengel in his Ariiutn Scriptores
(1828), by Westermann in his Geschichte der Bercdtsatnkeit (1833-
5), and by Cope in his articles on the Sophistical Rhetoric in the
Cambridge Journal of Classical and Sacred Philology (1855-7),
The history itself has been fully set forth by Professor Blass in
the first volume of his Attische Beredsamkeit (1868), and has been
brilliantly sketched by Sir Richard Jebb in his Attic Orators
(1876, vol. I, pp. cviii-cxxxvii), while it has also been briefly
traced in the Introduction to the De Oratore of Cicero, as edited
by Professor Wilkins (1879) and in that to the Orator^ as edited
by the present writer (1885, pp. ii-xi). All that is here attempted
is a very short survey of the subject, so far as it concerns our
immediate purpose.
In the heroic age some of the foremost heroes are described
in the Homeric poems as orators as well as
oraton^ ^ warriors. Achilles is trained to be * a speaker of
words, as well as a doer of deeds' (//. ix 443);
Nestor is the clear-voiced orator, from whose lips 'sweeter than
honey flowed the stream of speech * (i 249) ; Menelaus touches
only on salient points *in words though few, yet clear' (iii 214);
while Odysseus, though awkward in action, is beyond compare
with his ' deep voice ' and with his ' words that fall like flakes of
wintry snow' (iii 222).
In historic times Athens was the only city of Greece where
eloquence found a home. The eloquence of
Pericles is said to have been singularly persuasive.
CHAP. VI.] GORGIAS. TJ
We are told by Eupolis that *a power persuasive rested on his
lips ; such was his charm ; alone among the speakers, he ever left
his sting in them that heard him' (Pliny Ep, i 20, 17); while
Aristophanes describes him as, like the Olympian Zeus, 'lightening
and thundering and confounding Greece' {Ach. 531). But his
eloquence was of a purely practical kind, uninfluenced by the
theoretical treatment of the art, which had sprung into being in
Sicily, but apparently made little, if any, impression on Athens
until after the beginning of the Peloponnesian war.
Greek rhetoric had arisen in Sicily with the establishment of
democracy at Acragas in 472 b.c., and at Syracuse in 466. Its
earliest professors had been Corax and Tisias, and
Pericles had passed away two years before Gorgias,
the famous pupil of Tisias, made his first appearance in Athens
in 427. He came as an envoy to invite Athens to aid his native
town of Leontini against the encroachments of Syracuse. The
embassy is described by Thucydides (iii 68) ; but, although the
speech delivered by Gorgias made a singular sensation, the name
of Gorgias is not mentioned. It is a Sicilian historian, Diodorus
(xii 53), who tells us that *the Athenians, clever as they were and
fond of oratory (<^tAoAoyoi), were struck by the singular distinction
of the style of Gorgias, with its pointed antitheses, its symmetrical
clauses, its parallelisms of structure and its rhyming endings,
which were then welcomed owing to their novelty*. These figures
of speech are most simply classified as follows : —
dvT{0coas = contrast of sense.
irapCo-«o%f = parallelism of structure.
wopofiotMOTt = parallelism of sound.
The last is subdivided into ^ifcoioicdLTopicrov, ^i&oiorAtvror and
irapovo|iao^ according as the 'parallelism of sound' affects the
beginning, or the end, or the whole, of the two contrasted words.
Gorgias was the founder of an artificial or semi-artistic type of
Greek prose. His style had a strongly poetical colouring (Arist
Rhet, iii i, 9); even at the close of his life he observed in a
poetic vein : * At last Sleep lays me with his brother Death * ; and
another of his last sayings finds its parallel in Waller's line
describing the body in old age as 'the soul's dark cottage.
78 THET ATHENIAN AGE. [CHAP.
battered and decayed'. His sentences were broken up into
short symmetrical clauses, which had a general effect very similar
to that of actual metre ; and his example was closely followed by
certain writers of artificial prose in later ages, especially among
the adherents of ' Asianism ' in the third and following centuries
B.C., who had their counterpart in the 'Euphuism' of our own
1 6th century*.
The figures of speech characteristic of Gorgias were retained
by his pupil, the eminent rhetorician, Isocrates
(436-338 B.C.). Isocrates, however, unlike the
later * Asiatic ' adherents of Gorgias, with their cramped and jerky
sentences, succeeded in expanding the unduly concise and
monotonous clauses of his master by moulding them into an
ampler and more varied periodic form» in which metrical and
symmetrical effects were diversified by meandering melodies of
rhythm and subtle harmonies of cadence. A very short specimen
of his prose may here be quoted from the latter part of his
Panegyric (§ 186): — 4*rit^riv hi koX fivTJfxrjy kol B6(av \ voarfv nva
;(p^ vo/Ai(civ, I rj l^vjvTa^ <^<t>'i | ^ TcAcvnyaavTas KaroXct^ciK, | tovs
iv Tois TOiovrois tpyoi^ dpicrrcvcravTaf ; The Style of Isocrates
was in the main the foundation of the style of Cicero ; and the
style of Cicero has in its turn supplied the languages of Europe
with a model for some of the most highly finished forms of the
ampler types of mcxlcrn prose.
While rhetoricians of the Sicilian school of Gorgias, in culti-
vating a semi-poetic type of prose, aimed mainly at * beauty of
language' (cvcircia), the Greek school of certain
Protagorms. other Sophists, such as Protagoras, Prodicus and
Hippias Hippias, aimed at 'correctness of language (6p-
docVcta)'. Protagoras classified the modes of
speech; Prodicus, whose style is parodied in Plato's Protagoras
(337 A-c), dwelt on distinctions between synonyms ; while
Hippias aimed at a correct and elevated style of
Thrasyma- expression. Two more names may be briefly
Theodorut noticcd. Thrasymachus of Calchedon (r. 457-
400 B.C.) marked an epoch in Greek prose by
* Norden, Die Antike /Cunstprosa, pp. 15 f, 134 f, 786 f.
' Plato, Phoidrus^ 367 c ; Spengel, Artium Scriptores^ p. 40 f.
VI.] PLATO'S PHAEDRUS. 79
forming a style intermediate between the 'elaborately artificial'
style of Thucydides and the ' simple and plain ' style of Lysias,
and became in this respect a precursor of Plato and Isocrates';
while Theodorus of Byzantium (yf. 412 e.g.), who is regarded as
a prominent rhetorician both by Plato and Aristotle, introduced
some novel terms for the subdivisions of a speech, and is described
in the Phaedrus (266 e) as a 'cunning speech-wright ' (XoyoSat-
SaXo^), a phrase implying mastery in rhetorical artifice.
The two dialogues of Plato specially concerned with rhetoric
are the Gorgias and the Phaedrus, In the former
it is described, not as an art, but as a happy knack PUto's
acquired by practice and destitute of scientific Phm^dr^
principle (463 b, 501 a). In both dialogues Plato
casts ridicule on the writers of the popular rhetorical treatises ;
but, in the Phaedrus^ instead of denouncing rhetoric unreservedly,
he draws up an outh'ne of a new rhetoric founded on a more
philosophic basis, resting partly on dialectic, which aids the orator
in the invention of arguments, and partly on psychology, which
enables him to distinguish between the several varieties of human
character in his audience and to apply the means best adapted
to produce that persuasion which is the aim of his art*.
The hints which Plato throws out in the Phaedrus are
elaborately expanded in the Rhetoric of Aristotle,
especially in the first two books, which deal with jei^Jt*^*** *
the modes of producing (persuasion. In the first
book these are classified ; while the second includes (i) 'a careful '
analysis of the affections of which human nature is susceptible,
and also of the causes by which such affections are called forth ;
(2) a descriptive catalogue of the various modifications of the
human character, and the sort of arguments adapted to each".
The first two books, which thus deal with the invention of
arguments (cupeais), are followed by a third occupied with the
two other parts of rhetoric, style (A.cfi«) and arrangement (rafis).
The third book includes criticisms on the poetic style of Gorgias (c. i),
* Dion. Hal. £& cuim, vi dicendi Dem, c. i* — 3.
* Thompson's PhatdruSt p. xiv.
* f^. p. XX.
8o THE ATHENIAN AGE. [CHAP.
defines the main merits of style as perspicuity and propriety (c. i), touches on
* metaphors' and * epithets*, gives examples of bad taste in the use of compound
or foreign words, or of redundant epithets, in prose (c. 3), and distinguishes
between * similes* and ' metaphors', with examples of the latter (c. 4). Purity
of Greek depends on the proper use of connecting words or clauses {aOi^defffxoi),
on the avoidance of periphrasis and ambiguity, and the proper use of gender
and number. As a general rule, every written composition should be easy to
read, and easy to deliver. Therefore it must avoid all excess of connecting
words or clauses, and everything that is difficult to punctuate (a fiii ^diw
diaarl^ai). It must also avoid zeugma and parenthesis (c. 5). Amplitude of
style may be produced by the use of periphrasis ; conciseness by its avoidance.
We must make our meaning clear by the use of metaphors and epithets, but
we must avoid the poetical. Amplitude may also lie produced by the use of
the plural for the singular, by the repetition of the article before the epithet as
well as before the noun, and by the enumeration of negative characteristics
(c. 6). Propriety of style may be attained by making it expressive of the emo-
tions, true to character, and appropriate to the subject (c. 7). Prose must have
rhythm, without metre. The first paean (~^«'^) supplies an appropriate
rhythm for the beginning; the fourth (^^^ — ) for the end of a sentence. It
is best to end with a long syllable ; and tlie conclusion must be made clear,
not by the transcriber or by any marginal mark of punctuation {rapaypa^)^
but by the rhythm (c. 8). Prose style may either be the continuous style (X^((f
€lpotihrf)t which runs on with a continuity supplied by connecting particles
alone, a style like that of Herodotus, or the compact and periodic style (X^^tt
KarwrpaiitUpri), The period must be neither too short nor too long; if it
consists of several clauses, it must be easily pronounced in a single breath.
The clauses may either be simply parallel to one another, or antithetically
contrasted ; ten examples of these are added from the Panegyric of Isocrates.
Besides d¥Tl$€ffit or * contrast of sense', there is also waplataaitt where the
two parallel clauses are equal in length, and wapofuUiaait, where there is a
resemblance either in the l)eginning or in the end of the contrasted words
(c. 9). Among graces of style may be mentioned * metaphor ' (c. 10) and vivid
personification (c. 11). The written style is different from the style of debate,
whether deliberative (i.e. parliamentary) or forensic. The written style is
precise ; that of debate lends itself to effiective delivery. Delivery must not be
monotonous, but appropriately varied. Delil>erative speaking is like scene-
painting : before a large audience minute details are useless. The forensic
style is more precise. The * epideictic ' style (that of encomium) lends itself
best to writing ; its aim is to be read ; next to this is the forensic. — The rest of
the book is concerned with the arrangement of the several parts of the
speech : — exordium {wpoolfuovt c 14), narrative (dii^acf, c. 16), proofs
(rttf-rect, c. 17), and peroration {iwlXoyot, c. 19}.
Aristotle was bom at Stageirus in 384, lived at Athens from
367 to 347, was tutor to Alexander from 343 to 340, returned
VI.] ARISTOTLE'S RHETORIC. 8 1
to Athens from 335 to 323, and died at Chalcis in 322. The
Rhetoric was not completed before 338 B.a (ii 23, 6), probably
not before 336 (ii 23, 18). If 336 was the date of
its completion, the author was then 48 years of age, reuttont'to*
and a new interest is added to his own statement i«ocrmte« and
that the mmd is m its pnme ^ about the age of
49* (ii J 4, 4). Possibly, while writing these very words, the
author was himself conscious for a moment that he had approxi-
mately reached the prime of his own intellectual life. The year
338 B.C. is the date not only of the battle of Chaeroneia, but also
of the death of 'that old man eloquent', Isocrates, who eight
years previously had urged Philip to levy war on Persia (Or, 5 ;
346 B.C.) ; and, after the battle, wrote to the victor rejoicing that
many of his own hopes were already fulfilled. Notwithstanding
the traditional feud between Isocrates and Aristotle, which has
been assigned to the latter part of Aristotle's first residence in
Athens, both were inspired with Macedonian sympathies. More-
over, the artificial style of Isocrates lent itself readily to citations
illustrating rhetorical forms of expression. Hence we are not
surprised to find that there is no author from whom Aristotle
quotes more frequently in the Rhetoric \ there are as many as ten
citations from him in a single chapter (iii 9). While Isocrates
was 52 years older than Aristotle, Demosthenes was his exact
contemporary. But, although Aristotle was at Athens during the
delivery of the First Philippic (351) and the Three Olynthiacs
(349), he never illustrates a single rule of rhetoric from any of the
speeches of the great orator. To Demosthenes he ascribes an
isolated simile, which is not to be found in his extant speeches
(iii 4, 3), while he cites the saying of a minor orator, that the
policy of Demosthenes was the cause of the disasters of Athens,
as an example of fallacious reasoning (ii 24, 8). He mentions
the 'orators at Athens, and Isocrates' (iii 17, 10), and (in a
passage open to suspicion) describes hyperbole as a favourite
figure with the * Attic orators' (iii 11, 16). He quotes striking
metaphors from speakers such as Iphicrates, Leptines, Cephiso-
dotus, Peitholaiis, Moerocles and Polyeuctus, but his quotations
are apparently not derived from any published works, being
rather of the nature of * parliamentary ' anecdotes from the every-v
S. 6
82 THE ATHENIAN AGE. [CHAP.
day talk of the Lyceum \ He illustrates the metaphorical use of
Pafjaai from an obscure contemporary of Demosthenes (iii lo, 7),
though he might have illustrated it better from Demosthenes
himself (19 §§ 92, 129). It is not entirely fanciful to suppose
that Aristotle, who lived as a foreigner at Athens, and had close
relations with Philip and Alexander, may have felt a sense of
delicacy in exemplifying the precepts of rhetoric from the speeches
of the great opponent of Macedonia. He never quotes the other
anti-Macedonian orators, Lycurgus and Hypereides, but he also
makes no mention of the Macedonian orator, Aeschines. In
relation to the foreign policy of Athens, he apparently deemed it
best, as a foreigner, to remain neutral. Of the Ten whom a later
age recognised as the 'Attic orators', Isocrates is the only one
whom he quotes by name; while a passage, which has come
down to us in the funeral oration wrongly ascribed to Lysias
(2 § 60), is quoted by Aristotle without the name of any author
whatsoever {Rhet, iii 10, 7), being probably written by an un-
known imitator of Isocrates.
The study of the style of prose in the Athenian age was
mainly connected with the study of rhetoric. The
rhetoric to*** prose of public Speech was the first to attain an
prose In artistic form, but other kinds of prose had a closer
general ... .
connexion with it than they have in modern times.
In the domain of history, the style of Thucydides shows the
influence of the Sicilian rhetoric ; and the historian readily resorts
to speeches as a means of expressing the political opinions of the
day, while he employs the medium of a dialogue to give a
dramatic representation of the controversy between Athens and
Melos. In the next century, two prominent historians, Ephorus
and Theopompus, were both of them pupils of that trainer of
rhetoricians, Isocrates. The criticisms in the Rhetoric are not
confined to the criticism of speeches. A particular kind of prose-
style is there (iii 9, 2) exemplified from Herodotus, while many of
the precepts apply to prose in general, and not a few to poetry as
well. From the time of Aristotle downwards literary criticism
forms part of the province of rhetoric.
^ Cp. Wilamowitz, ArisMiiis und Athen, i 350.
VI.] THE STUDY OF PROSE AUTHORS. 83
The earliest complete work in Greek prose now extant is that
of Herodotus (484-^. 425 B.C.), who, according to
the Chronicle of Eusebius, read his * books ' aloud pZmta!nthon
to the Council at Athens about 446-4 B.C. Ac-
cording to Lucian (Aiiion^ i), he recited his history to an
enraptured audience at Olympia, and his books, which were nine
in number, were thenceforth known by the names of the nine
Muses. The biographers of Thucydides have added that the
future historian of the Peloponnesian war was himself present and
was moved to tears by the recital; but the story is generally
regarded as unworthy of credit \ Some of the statements of
Thucydides on early Greek navies may have been derived from
Herodotus, whom he appears to be tacitly correcting in his
account of the affair of Cylon (Thuc. i 126) and the prerogatives
of the Spartan kings (i 20). He claims that his own conclusions
on the early state of Hellas are more trustworthy than those
derived from his predecessors, whether * poets* or 'writers of
prose' (i 21), but the only historian whom he mentions by
name is Hellanicus (i 97)'. Similarly the only historian named
by Herodotus is Hecataeus (ii 143 etc.), who had already
been criticised by Heracleitus in the celebrated saying: 'much
learning does not teach sense; else it would have taught He-
siod and Pythagoras, and also Xenophanes and Hecataeus'
(frag. 16). Thucydides in turn was studied by Demosthenes,
as is clear from the style' as well as from the matter^ of his
speeches, however little we may credit Lucian's statement that
the orator transcribed the work of the historian eight times
over (adv, Indoctum^ 4). The style of Demosthenes, again,
is studied and criticised by Aeschines (iii 166), who quotes a
series of harsh metaphors, which he ascribes to his opp>onent.
Lastly, the dialogues of Plato were studied and quoted by his
great pupil, Aristotle. The citations fall under four heads:
either (a) the name of Plato, or Socrates, is added to the title of
^ Dahlmann*s Life of Herodotus (G. V. Cox, 1845) ; and Stein*s ed., p. xxi.
* On 'Prose Writings in Thucydides* tiipe,' see Thuc. i, ed. Forbes,
p. xli — Ixxx.
' Dion. Hal. Thm, 53, 54 (Dem. 14 § 13) ; cp. Blass Att, Ber, in i' 19, 37.
* Phil, iii 47—51, OL iii ai, Lept. 73.
6 — 2
84 THE ATHENIAN AGE. [CHAP.
the dialogue ; or (d) the title alone is given ; or {c) the name of
Plato is mentioned without specification of any particular work ;
or {d) the reference is in general terms and in the plural number,
introduced by phrases such as * certain persons say' or 'think/
where some particular work of Plato's is either certainly or
probably meant ^ The evidence of these citations is of some
importance in determining the genuineness of the dialogues
ascribed to Plato".
While the place of poetry in Athenian education was due
partly to a belief in the poet as a teacher and as an
Place of , ,
Prose in inspired being, partly to the fact that poetry attained
educat on ^^ artistic form at an earlier date than prose (besides
being easier to commit to memory), the place of prose was
distinctly subordinate. In elementary education prose appears to
have been partly represented by the traditional fables of Aesop
(Ar. Birds 471). In Plato's Phaedrus (274 c) Socrates is
described as disparaging reading and writing in comparison with
talking and memory; but in Xenophon's Memorabilia (i 6, 14) we
find him unrolling and perusing, with his friends, ' the treasures
of the wise men of old, which they wrote down in books and left
behind them.' As a young man, he had * heard someone reading
aloud ' a book of Anaxagoras, and hastened to obtain it {Fhaedo
97 b). ' Strains written in prose,' and * compositions in prose,
without rhythm or harmony,' are discussed, as well as poetry, in
the scheme of education in Plato's Latvs (809 b, 810 b), but the
' works handed down by many writers of this class ' (whether in
prose or verse) are deemed Mangerous,' while a discourse like
that in the Laws is described as * inspired of heaven ' and ' exactly
like a poem,' and as in fact an appropriate pattern for other
discourses to be used in the education of youth (811 c-e).
After the death of Plato the original manuscripts of his
dialogues were possibly preserved in the school
mu^ion o?the ^^ ^^^ Academy. For eight years the school was
works of Plato under the care of his nephew and successor, Speu-
and AnstoUe ^ » r
sippus, and afterwards for twenty-five under that
of Xenocrates, who was succeeded by Polemon and others.
^ See the Index of Bonitz, and of Heitz.
• Zeller's Plaio, 54—77.
VI.] MSS OF PLATO AND ARISTOTLE. 8$
Copies of the original mss were doubtless made at an early date,
and some of these may have been transmitted from Athens to
Alexandria, possibly through the agency of Demetrius of
Phaleron'. The earliest extant MS of any part of Plato has
been found in Egypt. It is the Petrie papyrus from Gurob in the
FaiyClm, containing about 12 columns of the Phaedo^ being
portions of a neatly written trade-copy assigned to the middle
of the third century b.c."
On the death of Aristotle, the school of the Lyceum, with the
library of its founder, remained for more than 34 years under
the control of his successor Theophrastus. During this time
Aristotle's pupil, Eudemus of Rhodes, wrote to Theophrastus
for a transcript of a passage in the Physics which was missing in
his own copy of that work', and doubtless other copies Of the
master's manuscripts were in circulation during his successor's
life-time*. Theophrastus, on his death in or about 287 b.c., left his
own library and that of Aristotle to his pupil Neleus, who removed
it to his home at Scepsis in the Troad. A few years later the
town passed into the possession of the Kings of the Attalid
dynasty, who from about 230 b.c. began to found a great
Library at Pergamon to vie with that of the Ptolemies at
Alexandria. The heirs of Neleus prudently concealed the mss
in a cellar, awaiting an opportunity for sending them safely out of
the country. The mss had thus remained in their possession
for more than 150 yearsj when, about 100 b.c, they were bought
by Apellicon of Teos, and restored to Athens. After the capture
of Athens by Sulla in 86 B.C., they were transported from Athens
to Rome, where they were consulted by scholars such as Tyran-
nion, Andronicus*, and others; but, owing to long neglect, many
* Grotc*s Plato^ i laj, 135, 169; criticised in Zeller*s Plaio^ 51 — 3, and
esp. in Gomperz, Platonische Aufsdtu, ii 1899.
* MahafTy's Petrie Papyri (1891) pi. viii — x; E. M. Thompson's Palaeo*
graphy^ p. i ao ; and Kenyon's Palaeography of Gk papyri^ p. 59 — ^y Exhibited
in the British Museum ; Case A, i. See p. 87.
' Zeller*s Aristotle^ i 136; Grote's Plato^ \ 140,
^ Stahr, Aristotelian ii i — 166, 194 f; Susemihl, Gr, Liit, Alex,, ii 999 f,
note 314.
* Added in Plutarch's Sulla, 16.
86 THE ATHENIAN AGE. [CHAP.
of them had become illegible, and the copies made after they had
passed into the hands of Apellicon were disfigured with unskilful
conjectures and restorations. The above story of their fortunes
is told us by Tyrannion's pupil, Strabo, who adds that Aristotle
was the first to 'collect books/ thus setting 'an example after-
wards followed by the Kings of Egypt*.' The story is partly
confirmed in one passage of Athenaeus (214 de), but contradicted
in another (3 b), carelessly asserting that all the books of Aristotle
in the possession of Neleus were purchased for the Alexandrian
library by Ptolemy II, who is elsewhere described as possessing
more than 1000 books or rolls of the Aristotelian writings'. The
earliest extant manuscript of any of the Aristotelian writings is the
papyrus containing Aristotle's Constitution of Athens^ found in
Egypt in 1890 and ascribed to about 100 a.d.'
Apart from Aristotle's library we hear of no important collec-
tion of books in the Athenian age, though books are said to have
been collected by Polycrates of Samos, by Peisistratus and
Euripides (Athen. p. 3), and by a pupil of Plato and Isocrates,
the 'tyrant* Clearchus who founded a library at the Pontic
Heraclea in Bithynia before 364 b.c. (Photius BibL 222 b\ while
in 400 U.C. * many books ' are mentioned by Xenophon {Amilf, vii
5, 14) as found in the cargo of some vessels wrecked on the coast
of the Euxine. In or after the first century b.c. an incomplete
title of a speech of Demosthenes and of certain portions of
Hellanicus appears by the side of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Crates,
Diphilus, and the Meleager and Alcmaeon of Euripides, in an
inscription conjecturally supposed to contain a list of books
presented by Athenian youths to the library of K\im gymnasium^.
We know for certain that 100 volumes were annually presented by
the youth of Athens to the library of the gymnasium called the
Ftolemaion^ which was founded at Athens early in the Alexandrian
age (probably by Ptolemy Philadelphus) and was visited in the
* Strabo. pp. 608—9; Grotc's Flato, i 138 f.
' Schol. Arist. it a la. Cp. Zeller's Aristotle^ c. Hi, and Shute's History
of the Aristotelian Writings^ pp. 19 — 45.
' Complete facsimile edited by Kenyon (1891) ; specimen given by E. M.
Thompson /. c. p. 140.
* C. /. A, ii 99a.
VI.] LIBRARIES. 8/
Roman age by Cicero' and Pausanias*. But in the Athenian age
itself, it was not so much the books that the Athenian read as
the words that he heard, in the theatre, in the law-courts, in the
groves of Academe and in the walks of the Lyceum, that served
to complete his education. In the language of John Henry
Newman, ' it was what the student gazed on, what he heard, what
he caught by the magic of sympathy, not what he read, which
was the education furnished by Athens'."
* Dt Finibus v i, i.
' i 17, 1 (with Frazer's note). Cp. C. /. A, \\ 465, 468, 478, 480, 489,
&09Q9 «al pipXla c/t T^p ip IlroXcfia/^f /3t/9X<otf'^iyr, and Dittenberger, De
Ephebis, P* 5> ; Curtius, Stadtgeschichte von Athen^ Ixxxii 158, 181 ; and
P. Girnrd, V Education Athinienne^ p. 159 f.
' Historical Sketches, p. 40.
JAri/c\ )c u-p f J H •€ »M N\>-C ArUArV H
A^f rrc«AIrA|Aa|o\xr«Alr-rAfAlcl
X^y^c Ai^jfTfyniJ^?MH^rrJ|AMiM
From the earliest extant ms of the Phaedo of Plato,
p. 83 A (c, 950 B.C.).
(E. M. Thompson's Pcdaeography, p. no.)
<.awB^'>9tfap wtiBovoa de c« T<nrrw/i
<MC>r apax'ifpfi'^ oaofi /iti away mi
X|>1^r<^>ai avTTiP 8* cct tavnfP vvX-
\€y€<r$at kcu adpoiftoBai wapaxt-
\€V€<r<.$>-€U vurrcvctr Bt /iriitPi aXXwc
CHAPTER VII.
THE BEGINNINGS OF GRAMMAR AND ETYMOLOGY.
We are told by Herodotus (v 58) that the Phoenicians who
. ^ came with Cadmus brought with them the letters of
Herodotus °
the Phoenician alphabet, and that in course of time
they adapted the method of writing them to the requirements of
the Greek language. In the temple of the Ismenian Apollo at
Thebes, Herodotus had himself seen three tripods inscribed with
'Cadmeian* letters, 'for the most part resembling those of the
lonians '. He assigns the three inscriptions to the age of Laius
in the third, and to those of Oedipus and Laodamas in the fourth
and sixth generations from Cadmus (v 59-61). We are also told
by Herodotus that the lonians who lived nearest to the Phoe-
nicians (e.g. in Cyprus and Rhodes) borrowed the Phoenician
alphabet, with a few changes, and that they habitually called
them the * Phoenician ' letters (v 58), — a statement confirmed by
an inscription found near the Ionian town of Teos\
Spelling was taught by means of a series of syllables combining
the consonants with all the vowels in succession. Fragments of
a tile have been found in Attica bearing the syllables ap fiap yap
Sap, cp fitp yep 8cp etc ' The comic poet Callias wrote a * letter-
play * {ypafipariKri TpaywSCa) in which the dramatis personae were
the letters of the alphabet, all of which were enumerated in the
prologue, with a separate enumeration of the vowels at a later
point. The play included a spelling-chorus, firjfTVL aX^a ^a etc.,
and some of its choral arrangements are said to have been
^ C. /. G. 5044 = /. G, A, 497 B 57 (r. 475 B.C.), l\ Ay...0Mitjn}td ^<c<c6^cc
(Roberts, Greek Epigraphy^ p. 170).
■ PMlistort iv 317.
CHAP. VII.] THE GREEK ALPHABET. 89
imitated in the Medea of Euripides (431 b.c), — a statement of no
value except as an indication of the probable date of the play^
In the Theseus of Euripides a slave who could not read was
represented as describing the shape of each of the characters in the
name of 8H2EYZ, and the same device was adopted in the case
of the same name by Agathon and Theodectes, while Sophocles
is said to have represented the shapes of various letters of the
alphabet, in one of his satyric dramas, by means of the attitudes
assumed by a dancer (Athen. p. 453-4). In the archonship of
Eucleides (403 b.c.) it was ordered at Athens on the proposal of
Archinus that all public documents should be written in the Ionic
characters'; and the 'treaty with the barbarian' (commonly
called the 'peace of Cimon' or 'Callias', after 466 or 449 b.c)
is denounced by Theopompus as a fabrication, on the ground
that the characters used in the inscription recording it were those
of the Ionic instead of the Attic alphabet*. The fact that
Euripides, who died three years before the archonship of Eu-
cleides, recognises H as the second letter of * Theseus ' (as above
noticed) is part of the proof that the Ionic alphabet was in
literary and private use at Athens before 403 b.c.
The current division of letters (aroixcia), as may be inferred
from three passages of Plato, was as follows :
(i) 'voiced' or 'vocal* letters (^frcoi^'cvra, vocales\
our 'vowels'; (2) 'voiceless' letters {^^Miva)^ our 'consonants'.
The latter were divided into (a) letters not only 'voiceless' but
also ' without sound ' (a^oiva kqX a^^oyya), our ' mutes ' ; and
ijj) letters that are ' not vocal ', but * not without sound ' (^njcvra
/ACK ov, ov fiivroi yc a^^oyya), i.e. A, /a, v, p, f, afterwards known as
•semivowels' (17/xi^cova)*. A passage in the Timaeus (75 d)
mentions the 'teeth', 'tongue' and 'lips' as producing 'the
river of speech *, which is ' the fairest and noblest of all streams '.
In the Cratyius (394 d) Plato notices that the only letters which
have no special names are E, Y, O, fl, thus showing that the
* Cp. Verrall's Medta^ p. xxiii.
' Suidas, j.v. Xofdup Bilftot.
* Harpocration, s.v, *AttikoU ypd/tfuifftw,
* Cratyius 434 c ; Philebus 18 B, c (where t4 lUaa are the * semivowels ') ;
Theaei, 103 B.
90 THE ATHENIAN AGE. [CHAP.
names epsilon^ upsilon^ otnicron and omega are of later origin, the
Greeks in this age calling these letters ci, v, ou and oi. The name
cpsilon^ or * simple' c, was afterwards introduced to distinguish
that letter from the diphthong ai, and similarly upsilon^ or 'simple'
V, to distinguish that letter from the diphthong oi^ and both these
names belong to the late Byzantine age, when c and ai, and v and
oi respectively, were pronounced alike. The name omega is also
late : oA^a and O (not omega) are recognised in the best mss of
the Greek Testament, ^y<i> cifu ro aX^ xac to <5 {Rev, i 8), and in
Prudentius : — * aX^ et <S cognominatus ' *.
The earliest trace of any classification of words is to be found
in Plato. ' Grammar * was at first regarded mainly as the art of
reading and writing (p. 6) ; but it also included the theory of the
nature of sounds and of accent, with questions of quantity and
rhythm, and in these respects it was closely connected with
Music. With the classification of words grammar entered on a
new stage. It is traditionally held that Plato was the first to
distinguish between the Noun and the Verb, calling the former
oKOfia and the latter p^fia. But the correspondence between
these terms is incomplete', and the distinction drawn by Plato
between oKOfia and l»rjfia does not answer to the grammatical
distinction between Noun and Verb, but to the logical distinction
between Subject and Predicate*. This is true even of the passage
in the Sophistes (261 e), which is the main support of those who
ascribe to Plato the first distinction between Noun and Verb as
parts of speech. He there says : — * There are two kinds of inti-
mations of being which are given by the voice*, *one of them
called ^Fo/iara and the other ^/xara ' ; ' that which denotes action
we call firjim \ ' the articulate sign set on those who do the actions
we call oKOfia ' ; * a succession of oKc^fiara or ^ijfiara alone is not
discourse'; 'it is only when they are mingled together that
language is formed**, ^iffia in Plato includes every kind of
> Mayor's First Greek ReaJer^ p. Hi; Blass, Pronunciation of Ancient
Greeks p. 30.
* Classen, De Gram. Gr, primordiis (1829), p. 45 f.
< Deuschle, Die Plat, Sprachphilosophie (1852), p. 8 f.
^ Cp. Theaet, 206 D, Symp, 198 B, 199 B, Pep. 540 E, 462 c, 464 A, 474 A,
561 c, Tim, 49 e; also Crat, 425 a, 431 B (Deuschle, p. 9).
VIL] THE BEGINNINGS OF GRAMMAR. 9I
predicate. Thus, in the Cratylus (399 b), A a ^1X09 (being
predicated of a person) is called a /ii7/Aa, while its derivative
Ai^iXoc is an ovo/ao. In later times Plato's Hvofuk and /i^fia were
regarded as grammatical parts of speech, and the question whether
this division was meant by Plato to be exhaustive, or whether the
other parts of speech were only omitted because they were com-i.
paratively unimportant, was discussed by Plutarch in his Platonic
Questions (Moralia ii 1008), and decided in the latter sense. In
Plato we find suggestions of the distinction afterwards drawn in
grammar between the Substantive and the Adjective (cp. hruh
wfiia in Parm, 131 A, Soph, 225 D, Phaedr. 238 a); he also
recognises Number {Soph. 237 e), Tenses of Verbs {Parm, 151 e,
156 a; Soph, 262 d), and 'Active and Passive* (Soph, 219 b;
PhiUbus 26 e)'.
Moods are not yet mentioned, but Protagoras had already
distinguished in rhetoric some of the various modes of expression
which correspond to the Moods of grammar (p. 27). He had
also divided nouns into three classes, male, female, and inanimate
(o-iccvi;), a classification apparently founded on a real or natural,
and not on a grammatical basis, *male' and 'female' nouns
denoting male and female persons, or distinctions in sex, whether
in mankind or among animals in general, and things inanimate
including the names of all other objects, natural and artificial,
real and abstract. This last class contains many words which are
grammatically masculine or feminine, but the classification of
Protagoras can hardly be identified with a classification of nouns
as masculine, feminine and neuter. Protagoras uses in the sense
of * classes ' the same term (y^), which was afterwards adopted
in grammar to denote * genders ' '.
In the earlier Greek philosophers we find a few traces of
speculation on the origin of language. Thus Pythagoras (fl, 540-
510 B.C.) held that, next to 'number', the highest wisdom
belonged to 'him who gave things their names". Heracleitus
1 Deuschle, pp. 10, 17, 18 ; cp. Schomann, Die Lehre von den ReeUtheilen
(1861). p. 1 ; and Steinthal, Sprachwissenschaft^ i' 137 f.
• Cope in Journ. of CI, and S, Phil, iii 48 f., and on Arist. Rhtt. iii 5, 5
and Introd. p. 193. Ar. Clouds 659 fT. may be a satire on Protagoras.
' 6 rd hvbik^rti ro<t wpdyfioffi $4/itwott Proclus on Plato*s Crafy/us, p. 6 ;
Cicero, Tusc, Disp. i 15; Steinthal, p. 157 f.
92 THE ATHENIAN AGE. [CHAP.
(y?. 503 B.C.), though celebrated for the obscurity of his language,
appears to have laid stress on linguistic expression, but we know
of no scientific enunciation of his on this subject. He is, how-
ever, known to have held that words existed naturally (^vo-ci).
Words, he said, were not like the artificial, but like the natural
Jmages of visible things ; they resembled shadows, and reflexions
in water, or images seen in mirrors*. Democritus (460-357 b.c.)
described the names of the gods as their 'vocal images". His
contemporary Hippocrates {c. 460-359 b.c) called names * ordi-
nances of nature' (^uo-ios vo/xo^cn^fiara) ; and Antisthenes (y?.
400 B.C.) wrote on names and on language in connexion with his
dialectical theories'. But our knowledge of these speculations is
very imperfect. In the case of Plato we have more material for
forming an opinion, but even here there is much that is confused
and perplexing. It was said of Plato that he was the first to
speculate on the nature of 'grammar'^; and some of the passages
on language in his dialogues have been collected by Stobaeus^
but all these are of less importance than the dialogue known as
the Cratylus,
In the Cratylus there are three interlocutors holding different views as to
th'e nature and origin of language. (1) Hermogrnes holds that language is
conventional^ and that all names have their origin in convention and mutual
agreement (J^wBiixyi koL 6fio\oyla, 384 D) ; like the names of slaves, they may be
given and altered at pleasure. (2) Cratylus, a follower of Ileracleitus, holds
that language is tiatnra/, and that every name is either a true name or not a
name at all ; he cannot conceive of degrees of imitation ; a word is either the
perfect expression of a thing or a mere inarticulate sound. (S) Socrates
takes up an intermediate position, holding that language is founded on naiure,
but modified by conventions^ In his view * language is conventional and also
natural, and the true conventional-natural is also the rational ; it is a work not
of chance but of art ; the dialectician is the artificer of words, and the legislator
' Ammonius on Aristotle, de Interp, p. 34 11 Aid., quoted by Lersch,
Sprachphilosophie, i 11 f; cp. Plato, Theaet, 306 D; Steinthal, pp. 171, 173.
' dTdX/iara ^iMi^ma, Olympiodorus on Plato, Philebus^ p. 143 ; Steinthal,
p. 183.
• Zft\\tx'% Plato, p. 311 f.
^ Favorinus ap. Diog. Laert. Ill i 19* 35, wp&rot iBtii^pifat rijt ypafi/iaTiKijt
T^v ddfafup,
* 81 SS 14—16 (Philehus, p. 186 ; Theaet, 302 B ; Sophist, 361 d).
' Lewis Campbell, EncycL Brit, ed. 9, i,v, Plato,
VII.] PLATO'S CRATYLUS. 93
gives authority to them*^. Words are the expressions or imitations of things
by means of sound. In the extravagance of some of his etymologies, Socrates
is regarded by Jowett as 'ridiculing the fancies of a new school of sophists and
grammarians^; but, 'when the fervour of his etymological enthusiasm has
abated*, he ends, as he began, with 'a rational explanation of language'.
'Having explained compound words, by resolving them into their original
elements, he proceeds to analyse simple words into the letters of which they
are composed*. He 'supposes words to be formed by the imitation of ideas in
sounds ; he also recognises the effect of time, the influence of foreign languages,
the desire of euphony...; and he admits a certain element of chance'*. He
says, apparently in irony, 'my notion is, that we may put in and pull out
letters at pleasure and alter the accents, and we may make words into
sentences and sentences into words' (399 a). The name (hfdpwrw (he adds) is
a case in point, for a letter has been omitted and the accent changed; the
original meaning being 6 dfaSpQ^ d 6www€¥ — 'he who looks up at what he
sees*. He observes in a more serious mood that, in speaking of the gods, we
are only speaking of our names for them: — 'the truest names of the gods are
those which they give themselves, but these are unknown to us' (400 b).
Inquiring about the human names of the gods, he makes many fanciful
suggestions, the only one which can be accepted being his derivation of the
name of Pallas dw6 roO irdXXety rd 5irXa (407 a). He suspects that certain
words, which cannot be explained with the help of Greek alone, must be of
foreign origin, ' for the Greeks, especially those who were under the dominion
of the barbarians, often borrowed words from them. Consider whether this
word wvp is not foreign ; for it is not easily brought into relation with Greek,
and the Phrygians may be observed to have this same word slightly inflected,
just as they have Mtap and jri^ct, and many other words' (409 D, 410 a).
ica«6y (416 a) and 60AXccr (417c) he considers 'foreign' words; but 'the idea,
that the Greek language and that of the barbarians could have had a common
source never entered his mind**. After proposing some far-fetched etymo-
logies, he excuses himself by adding ' you must remember that all language is
in a process of disguise or transition; and letters are taken out and put in at
pleasure, and twisted and twirled about in the lapse of ages — sometimes for
the sake of euphony' (414 c). Again, 'mere antiquity may often prevent our
recognising words, after all their complications ; and we must remember that,
however far we carry back our analysis of words, there must be some ultimate
elements which can be no further analysed' (431 D, e). 'Secondary names
derive their significance from the primary ; how, then, do the primary indicate
anything?' (411 a). 'The only way in which the body can express anything
is by imilation\ and the tongue or mouth can imitate as well as the rest of the
• Jowett *s Plato^ i 6a«*=a57*.
• ib. p. 614', «59'.
• ib. p. 6i5», «59*.
« Max Muller*s Lectures, i 131 (1866).
94 THE ATHENIAN AGE. [CHAP.
body. What, then, is a name ? A name is not a musical or pictorial imita-
tion, but an imitation of that kind which expresses the nature of the thing;
and is the invention not of a musician, or of a painter, but of a namer* (413
a-e). **The way to analyse names will be by going back to the UtUrs^ or
primary elements of which they are composed. First, we classify the letters
of the alphabet, and, when we have learnt the letters singly, we shall learn to
know them in their various combinations. We may apply letters to the
expression of objects, and form them into syllables; and these again into
words (434 c-e). I mean that this was the way in which the ancients formed
language. Whether the primary and secondary elements are rightly given, is
a question which we can answer by conjecture alone. But still we hold that
the method which we are pursuing is the true and only method of discovery.
Otherwise we must have recourse to a Deus ex mcuhina^ and say that *the
gods gave the first names, and therefore they are right'; and this will perhaps
be our best device, unless indeed we say that the barbarians are older than we,
and that we learnt of them, or that the lapse of ages has cast a veil over the
truth" (415 a-e). Primary words which do not admit of derivation from
foreign languages *must be resolved into the letters of which they are com-
posed, and therefore the letters must have a meaning. The framers of language
were aware of this: they observed that a was adapted to express size; 19
length; o roundness; ¥ inwardness; ^ rush or roar; X liquidity; 7X the deten-
tion of the liquid or 8lip])ery element; h and r binding; ^, ^, 9, {, wind and
cold, and so on' (416 c-417 D).
'Plato's analysis of the letters of the alphabet', says Jowett\ * shows a
wonderful insight into the nature of language'. *In passing from the gesture
of the body to the movement of the tongue', he ** makes a great step in the
physiology of language. He was probably the first who said that 'language is
imitative sound', which is the greatest and deepest truth in philology". But
convention has its influence no less than imitation. * Imitatioti\ says Plato,
* is a poor thing, and has to be supplemented by cotwetition^ which is another
poor thing; although I quite agree, that if we could always have a perfect
correspondence of sound and meaning, that would be the most perfect form of
language' (435 c-d).
Plato, it will be observed, is a supporter of what has since been called the
onomatopoetic theory of language. *He was probably also the first who made
a distinction between simple and compound words...; but he appears to have
been wholly unaware of the difference between a root and a termination''.
The dialogue may have been in part *a satire on the philological fancies of the
day''; the author may have been ridiculing 'the arbitrary methods... which
were in vogue among the philologers of his time'^ but this is uncertain.
The etymological speculations of Plato in the Cratylm were regarded with
» Jowett's Plato, i p. 646*, 183— 4'.
« ib, p. 646*, i84». « ib. p. 6i5», i6o>.
* ib. p. 6^7*, «6i*.
VII.] PLATO'S CRATYLUS. 95
respect by Dionysius of Halicarnassus and by Plutarch, but they are now
generally treated as too absurd to be taken seriously. Schleiermacher describes
as 'a valuable discovery of modem times* the view that Plato meant all or
most of his etymologies as mere parody and caricature. This view is accepted
by Stallbaum, Brandis, Zeller' and others; but is opposed by Grote', who
here (as elsewhere) appears to take an unduly literal and prosaic view of the
flights of fancy and the play of humour which are among the most constant
characteristics of Plato's manner. But, if we do not accept Plato*s etymo-
logies as intended to be taken seriously, it does not necessarily follow that he
meant them as mere caricatures of the etymological speculations of his day.
'The ix>sition which he takes up in the Cratylus is* (as suggested to me by
Dr Henry Jackson) 'a definite one, and seriously maintained. He holds that,
whereas the significance of names is determined by custom and convention,
the names themselves have their origin in attempts to represent vocally the
things signified by them. For, secondary names are derived from primary
nnmes, and primary names are constructed out of nidimentary sounds, which,
in virtue of the action of the organs useil in producing them, are naturally
suitable for the representation of certain rudimentary processes and states:
e-g. the letter p, in virtue of the movement of the tongue in producing it,
appropriately represents movement. But, to all appearance, he wishes to
suggest (i) that, partly because from the beginning there was in names an
arbitrary element, partly because in the course of time names have been
corrupted and disguised, their origins are lost in obscurity; and (1) that,
inasmuch as names could at best represent the views of their makers, they
cannot be, as the Heracleiteans seem to have thought them, guides to truth.
It would appear then that Plato attaches no value whatever to the particular
etymologies offered ; and, as in his wilder flights he ironically appeals to the
authority of Euthyphro (396 D), it may well be that in this part of the exposi-
tion there is a satirical element. Moreover, Plato's interest in the general
question about the origin of language is subordinate to his interest in the
theory of ideal unities, which at the end of the dialogue he opposes to the
dogma of Cratylus, that things are to be studied in their names '.
The dialogue has been discussed by Steinthal, who maintains that Plato
begins by assuming that words exist as a product of naturt^ but ends by
holding that they exist as the result of convention^ This view is confessedly
opposed to the scholiastic tradition, as represented by Proclus, who makes
Plato a supporter of the natural origin of language^ ; but the views may be
reconciled by regarding Plato as holding an intermediate position between the
adherents of nature and convention. It has also been discussed by many others*,
* PlcUo^ p. 113 n. • PlcttOt ii 519 — 529.
* Sprachwissenschaft^ i' 107, 150.
* ib, 168.
* e.g. Dittrich (Berlin) 1841 ; Schaarschmidt, Rheinisches Museum^ xx
311 — 356, Albert!, ib, xxi 180 — 409, xxii 477 — 499, Lehrs, ib, xxii 436 — 440;
g6 THE ATHENIAN AGE. [CHAP.
best perhaps by Deuschle^ and (from the comparative philologist's point
of view) by Benfey*. It is a dialogue of enduring interest as the earliest
attempt at a philosophy of language, but language is here (as elsewhere) in
Plato's view subordinate in importance to dialectic. Its general teaching
seems, in Zeller's opinion, to be summed up in the conclusion that * we must
give up seeking in words a knowledge of things' (435 D-436 D, 438 c); *we
must turn our attention not to names, but to the things themselves* (439 A,
440 c), and * acknowledge the dialectician to be superior to the maker of
language* (389A-390R)'. Similarly, it has been shown by Mr D. D. Heath
in the Journal of Philology (xvii 193-118) that Plato's sketch of the theory of
nomenclature, and his discussion and criticism of the Heracleitean school, is
entirely 'subordinate to the clearly expressed conclusion': — 'A scientific
nomenclature as perfect as possible might suffice for teaching the truths of
nature. But, inasmuch as names are but images, and therefore necessarily
imperfect representations of things, the surest way is the study of the things
themselves; and therefore... n knowledge of the truth of things^ indepeftdently
acquired^ is a necessary preliminary to the formation of such an approximately
perfect nomenclature* (p. 193). On the question how far Plato is serious in his
etymologies taken in detail Mr Heath holds that * Plato had no thought of
propounding an elaborate history and analysis of the Greek language', and
that this part of the dialogue may ht compared to the myths in other dialogues,
described by Grote as 'fanciful illustrations invented to expand and enliven
general views' (p. 101).
The controversy as to the origin of language long continued. Aristotle
r;;jected the opinion that words existed naturally, and held that their meaning
was purely conventional (De Interp. c. 3 and 4) ; Epicurus, that words existed
at first naturally, and afterwards conventionally {Bieeiy, The Megarian
philosopher, Diodorus, took the side of convention, and, by way of asserting
his right to invent a language of his own, himself called one of his slaves dXXd
/Ai^y, and gave the others arbitrary names from other Greek particles*. The
Stoics on the other hand traced the origin of language to nature'; and the
same view was held by the Roman grammarian Nigidius Figulus (d. 45 B.C.),
as we learn from Aulus Gellius (x 4), who describes the question as one which
was much debated.
Luckow (Treptow) 1868; Hayduck (Breslau) and Dreykorn (Zweibriicken)
1869; also by Steinhart in his Prolegomena^ Susemihl in his Genetische
Entwickelungt i 144 — 174, and Ch. Lenormant in his Commentaire (Athens),
1861.
^ Die Platonische Sprcuhphilosophie (Marburg), 1851, pp. 83.
' Gottingen Abhandlungen, xii (1866), 189 — 330.
* Zellcr's /Vfl/o, p. 114.
^ Diog. Laert. x 75 ; Lucr. v 1017 f.
* Ammonius on Arist. de ItUerp. p. 103, ap. Lersch, i 43.
* Origen, contra Celsum^ i 34 (Lersch, i 46).
VII.] GRAMMAR IN ARISTOTLE. 97
Aristotle's treatise on Poetry includes an analysis pf the parts
of speech and other grammatical details (c. 20), and
a passage on the gender of nouns (c. 21). Probably
both of these passages are interpolations. In the former a 'letter'
is defined, and letters divided into vowels, semivowels and mutes
(^ton/cvra, i/ftii^cova and a^cova); a noun, a verb, and a 'connecting
word' (<rw8€<rfu)s) are also defined; and 'inflexion* {m-wns) is
described as belonging to the noun and the verb, and expressing
'of, * to *, or the like, or the relation of number, or that of * mode
of address'*. In the J?f Jnterpretatione the verb in the present
tense is the pi7fia, and the other tenses are its irroxrccf, and else-
where the trTOKTcis of a noun include even adjectives and adverbs.
In contrast with irrctfcrif, the nominative is called icX^ais '. Various
cases are distinguished by Aristotle, but their number and their
names are still undetermined'. In addition to 'Active and
Passive ' Verbs, those subsequently known as * Neuter ' and
* Deponent ' are now recognised for the first time*. The symbol
of the rough breathing distinguishing 0P02 'boundary* from 0P02
* mountain ' is called by Aristotle (Soph. EL 177 ^ 3) a irapdinifiov,
the former word being probably written as>0P02. The writings of
Heracleitus are described (^^/. iii 5) as hard to punctuate (810-
oTiifai), but the only mark of punctuation actually mentioned by
Aristotle is the wapaypaffnj (id. 8), a short horizontal dash drawn
below the first word of the line in which the sentence is about to
end. It is from this ancient symbol, which marks the close of
the sentence, that we give lo the sentence itself, or to a connected
group of sentences, the name of a * paragraph '.
I'he only parts of speech that Aristotle recognises in the first
chapter of the Categories are ovo^uix. and ^17/10, the Noun and the
Verb. In the Rhetoric (iii 5 and 12) and the Problems (xix 20) he
makes incidental mention of o-wSco-fioi, a term including conjunc-
tions, connecting particles and even connecting clauses. In the
Poetic (c. 20) he is also made to mention ap^pa (Pronouns and
Articles), but we are assured by Dionysius of Halicamassus (De
Comp, c. 2) that only three parts of speech were recognised by
* Classen, /. r. 51—58 ; Steiiuhal, /. r. i* 153—9.
« Sieinlhal, i» 166 f. » Classen, 64 f.
* Schwalbe's Beitrag (1838), p. 92.
S. 7
98 THE ATHENIAN AGE. [CHAP.
Aristotle, and, for this and other reasons, the chapter in question
is best regarded as an interpolation.
In the controversy as to the origin of language Aristotle, as
already observed (p. 96), is an adherent of * convention ' and not
of 'nature*. The terms constituting a Proposition arc declared
by Aristotle to be a Noun in the nominative case as Subject, and
a Verb as Predicate*; and the Verb is distinguished from the
Noun as connoting time (16 b 2). While Plato {Soph. 261 f)
regards the Proposition as composed of the oKOfia and the {trjika
(having no other terms than these for Subject and Predicate), and
expresses affirmation by ^00*19 and negation by diro^(rc9, Aristotle
has a technical term not only for affirmation (Kara^oo-is) and
negation (dird^o-is) and for negative Noun and Verb, but also
for Subject (to vitokci/jici'ov) and for Predicate (to Kan/yopov/Acvoi')'.
' Subject ' is in fact the modem form of subjectum^ the late Latin
rendering in Martianus Capella (iv 361) of the term first found in
Aristotle.
The further development of the terminology of Grammar was
reserved for the Stoics of the third and following
teUc sfhoo^*' centuries B.C.* Meanwhile, the Peripatetic School
carried on the Aristotelian tradition by the special
study of the history and the criticism of Literature. Our survey
of the Athenian age may here conclude with a brief mention of a
few of the members of that School.
Heracleides Ponticus of Sinope {fl, 340 b.c) had been a pupil
of Plato before he became a pupil of Aristotle.
Ponticut^ ** While his philosophical works were soon forgotten^
his grammatical and literary writings long survived.
He wrote on Rhetoric and Music, and also on Poetry and Poets,
on Homeric problems, on the age of Homer and Hesiod, on
Homer and Archilochus, and on Sophocles and Euripides. One
of his works, entitled ypa/i/AariKo, may have touched on (Questions
of literary criticism. The excerpts U ri^v 'HpajcXciSov xcpl
xoXirciwF are portions of an abridgement of the xoXcrciac of
Aristotle, now ascribed to Heracleides Lembos^ an Alexandrian
^ Crete's AristotUt i 156.
■ ib, 194 f J cp. Steinthal, i* 183 f, 135 f. » p. 144 f.
VII.] THE PERIPATETIC SCHOOL. 99
'grammarian' who lived under Ptolemy Philometor (182-146 b.c.)*.
A fellow-countryman and a rival of Heracleides Ponticus, named
Chamaeleon, wrote on Homer, Hesiod, Stesichorus,
Sappho, Anacreon, Lasus, Pmdar, Simonides,
Thespis and Aeschylus; also on the early history of Tragedy
and on Ancient Comedy (Athen. 406 e)1 The Peripatetic
School included Aristoxenus of Tarentum, the
leadmg authority m the ancient world on Rhythm
and Music {fl. 318 b.c.), who wrote on the History of Music, and
on Tragic dancing and Tragic poets, besides biographies of
Pythagoras, Archytas, Socrates and Plato*.
The critical study of prose style was continued by Aristotle's
successor, Theophrastus of Eresos in Lesbos (372-
287). Among the ten works on rhetoric ascribed to
him by Diogenes Laertius (v 46-50) was a treatise On Style (irtpl
Xcfcois), still extant in the time of Cicero. He is expressly named
in Cicero's Orator in connexion with the style of Herodotus and
Thucydides (§ 39), the four points of excellence in style (79), the
rhythm of prose (172, 228), and the use of the paean (194, 218);
while several passages may probably be traced to him, e.g. that on
delivery and its effect on the emotions (55), on beauty of diction
(80) and on moderation in the use of metaphor (81). To Theo-
phrastus we also owe the division of style into the 'grand', the
'plain', and the 'mixed' or 'intermediate', adopted by Cicero in
§§ 20, 21. In the Augustan age his treatise on style is either
expressly quoted or otherwise noticed in several passages of
Dionysius of Halicarnassus*, and is possibly the source of other
passages where his name is not mentioned*. Theophrastus also
^ Grafenhan, /. c, i 63 f, 360 ; Classen, /. c. p. 8 ; MUller, F, //. G, ii
197 — 107; Christ, Gr. Lilt. § 420*; also Unger, Rhein, Mus. xxxviii 481 ff;
Cohn, Brewlau, 1884; Schrader, Philol. xliv 136 ff; HoUinger, PfuloL liv, Ivi;
Voss, Rostock, 1897; Susemihl, Lit. Al^x. \ 501-5.
' Christ, § 410* ; Kopke, Berlin, 1856.
* Miiller, ii 162 — 292 ; Christ, § 422'; Hilbner, Bibliographic, p. 12.
* Df Comp. 16, De Lysia 14, De Dem. 3, De Isocr, 5; cp. Theophr.
Fragm. iii 93 — 96 Wimmer, and the present writer's ed. of Cic. Orator^ p. Ixx
and note on § 79 ; also Ral)e, De Theophr. wtpl \4^ttat (Bonn), 1890.
* Usener (D. //. de Imitatione, 1889, p. 14 1) says of Dionysius: *normas
elocutionis aestimandae Theophrasto plerumr|ue debet '•
7—2
lOO THE ATHENIAN AGE. [CHAP.
wrote a work on Comedy (A then. 261 d). He and his school
appear to have discussed the question whether by parts of speech
ovofxa and ^rj/m alone were meant, or whether they also included
apOpa and o-wScfTficH'.
Among the younger pupils of Aristotle was Dicaearchus of
Messana (347-287 b.c.), the author of an important
work entitled )9ios rij^ *EXAa8o9. It was the first
attempt at a history of civilisation, tracing the ' Life of Greece '
from the dawn of history to the age of Alexander. It included an
account of the geography and history, as well as the moral and
religious condition of the country, besides embracing music and
poetry in its extensive range. Treatises on Constitutions, such as
those of Pellene, Corinth and Athens, mentioned by Cicero (a/f
Att ii 2), may have either formed part of this work or served as
materials for it ; while that on ' musical competitions ' may have
t)elonged to a larger treatise on * Dionysiac contests '. His name
is assigned to certain Arguments to the plays of Sophocles and
Euripides ; and those on the Aicestis and Medea are still extant.
He also wrote biographies of the Seven Wise Men, and of
Pythagoras and Plato, besides treating of the leading poets in the
course of his great work on Greece. He did much for the study
of Greek geography, and his maps were known to Cicero {cui Att,
vi 2) ; but he was much more than a mere student. He measured
the altitudes of the mountains of the Peloponnesus, and he
appeared as a public speaker at the Panathenaic festival at
Athens, and. at the Panhellenic festival at Olympia'.
A pupil of Theophraslus, Praxiphanes of Rhodes or Mytilene
Praxi hanes ^' ^°° ^'^'^* ^^ ^^^ ^^ ^^^ ^^^ *® P^^ Special
attention to 'grammatical' studies in the literary
sense of the term (p. 7). His interests included history, poetry,
rhetoric, and the criticism and interpretation of literature. He
was the first to suggest the spuriousness of the beginning of the
ordinary text of Hesiod's Works and Days on the ground of its
omission in the earlier mss; and he also criticised the opening
words of Plato's Timaeus, His work on poetry was in the form
of a dialogue between Plato and Isocrates ; and, probably be-
> Simplicius on Arist. Cattg, fol. 8, ed. Ven.
■ Miillcr, F, H. G, ii 115—153 ; Christ. | 4ii»; Hubiier, p. 13.
VII.] DEMETRIUS OF PHALERON. lOI
tween 291 and 287 b.c., he counted among his pupils Aratus and
Callimachus^
All the members of the Peripatetic School, whose names have
hitherto been mentioned, belonged by birth to other lands than
Attica. They had come from Italy and Sicily, from the shores of
the Euxine and from the islands across the Aegean, to find a
philosophic training of the most varied kind in the city which was
the school not of Greece alone but also of the Greek world in its
widest sense. We now turn in conclusion to the name of one
who, although he was the son of a freedman only, was neverthe-
less of Attic birth, and rose to the highest political position in
Athens, and even in his fall was a most appropriate intermediary
for the transmission of the learning of Athens to the new city,
which Alexander, the victorious advancer of Greek civilisation in
the distant East, had founded early in 330 b.c. on the western
verge of the Delta of the Nile.
Demetrius of Phaleron, who was bom about 354-348 b.c. and
died after 283, was a pupil of Theophrastus, and
began his public career about 324. For a period of phllwoir"* **^
ten years (317-307) he ruled with distinction at
Athens as Regent for Cassander. As an incident of literary
interest, it may be mentioned tha( he was the first to introduce
recitations by rhapsodists into the t/uatre of Athens (Athen.
620 b). After his fall in 307 he fled to Thebes, and, ten years
later, in 297, left for Egypt, where he attained great influence at
the court of Ptolemy I, and gave the first impulse towards the
founding of the Alexandrian Library. Having urged Ptolemy I
not to appoint Ptolemy Philadelphus as his successor, Demetrius
was naturally banished from Alexandria when Philadelphus be-
came sole ruler in 283. Besides his numerous political and
oratorical works, he wrote on the Jiiad and the Odyssey^ collected
the Fables of Aesop, and drew up a chronological list of the
Archons of Athens. In his treatise on Rhetoric he told the story
he had heard from Demosthenes himself, on the way in which
the orator had in his youth corrected the defects of an indistinct
' Susemihl, i 144 f; cp. Preller, D^ Praxiphane (1841) m Aitsgewahite
Aufsdtu (1864); also articles in Hermes xii 336 f (Wilamowitz), xiii 46 f
(Hirzel) and 446 f (Scholl).
I02 THE ATHENIAN AGE. [CHAP. VII.
delivery (Flut Dem. c. 1 1 ) ; the work also included details as to
the birth of Isaeus and the death of Isocrates, and as to the
masterly manner in which the architect Philon described the
construction of his naval armoury in the presence of the people
(Cic flS; Or. i 6a). The treatise vtpl ipfirjvtiat which bears his
name belongs to a later age. His public speeches are only
represented by inadequate fragments ; we have therefore to rely
mainly on Cicero for our knowledge of his oratorical charac-
teristics. He is described as the leading representative of the
'intermediate' style, which combines the minimum of force with
the maximum of charm ; his diction was marked by a placid
smoothness, and ' lit up by the stars of metaphor and metonymy '
{Orator ^ 91 f.). More florid than Lysias and Hypereides
{Brutus aSs), he marks the b^inning of the decline in Attic
eloquence which followed the death of Demosthenes'. In the
history of Schohirship he marks the close of the Athenian and the
beginning of the Alexandrian age, serving as a link between the
first capital of Greek culture and the second, in so far as, after
holding a prominent position in the oratorical and political world
of Athens, he prompted the founding of the famous Library of
Alexandria.
' Intred. lo Cic. Orator, p. xxxiii. Cp. CliriH, | ^n*; Suseinihl, i 135—
Alexandbb the Great.
Silver tctradrachni of Lysimachus, king of Thrace.
(From the British MuMom.)
BOOK II
THE ALEXANDRIAN AGE
TToAAoi \l\v PocTKovrai Iv AiywTTtf voXvif>vktf
piPXiaKoi ^CLpaKirai air€ipiTa Siypcocovrcs
Mov<rc(ov iv raXapw.
TiMON OF Phlius, ap. Athen. 22 d.
/n the thronging land of Egypt^
There are many that are feedings
Afany scribblers on papyrus
Ever ceaselessly contending^
In the bird-coop of the Muses,
On the Alexandrian Museum, c, 230 b.c.
Conspectus of Greek Literature &€., c. 300 — i B.C.
Rolen of
Bgypt
330 foundation
of Alexandria
393 d. of Alex*
ander
Ptolemy I
3»a satrap
305 king
aSj Ptolemy II
(FhUadttAhus)
370 d. of Arsi
Doe II
947 Ptolemy 1 1 1
{Eneixeics 1)
938 decree of
Canopus
239 Ptolemy IV
{Phito/ator)
aos Ptolemy V
(E^iphatus)
200
196 Rosetta
ttone
189 Ptolemy VI
(Eu/aiar)
183 Ptolemy VI I
iPkiiottuttr)
i46VIII(/'4i7i^
patar Neos)
146 IX (Etttr-
getes II, or
Physatn)
117 Cletiuatra
1 1 1 aim her
sons X {Pkito-
tn^tor Sottr
II. or Lathy-
rut) and XI
(AUxatuter)
boo
81 Ptolemy XII
{AiexanderU)
81 Ptolemy XI 1 1
{AuUtts)
liCUfiPntraW
anUPiol.XIV,
(47) Ptol. XV,
and (45) Cae-
tarioH
30 Egypt be-
comes a Ro-
man province
Ralenof
Porgunon, fto.
983 Philetaerus
978 Antlgonus
Gonatas king
of Macedonia,
d. 9^9
363 Eumenes I
941 Attalus I
393 Antiochus
the Great, king
of Syria, d. 187
197 Eumenes 11
159 Attalus II
138 Atulus III
i33d.ofAtiaIus,
who umkcs
Rome his heir
PooU
ftoruit
300 Philetas
c. 340— c. 385-3
390 Hermesia-
nax
3B5 Alexander
Aetolus
b c. 31s
385 Lycophron
b. c. 330-335
376 A rat us
376 Timon of
Phlius
c, 315— <^. 396
373 Theocritus
1). c. 334
Leonitfaft of Ta-
rentum
363 Callimachus
c. 310— f. 835
3«o ApoUonius
Rhodius
b. c. 383
350 Rhianus
c. 350 Herondas
330 Euphorion
b. c. 376
150? Moschus
150 Nicander
Antipater
Sidun
of
too? Bion
80? Bionit epi'
tnphiut
60 Meleager
13 Antipater of
Thessalonica
Seliolan and
Critics, fto.
385 Zenodotus
c. i^i—c. 834
334 Eratosthenes
c. 376 — 196-4
300 Hermippus
195 Aristophanes
of Byzaniiuni
c. 357— <". 180
180 AristarchuH
c. 317-5— « 45-3
168 Crates of
Mallos
c. i45Ammonius
r. I )o 1 )iunysiiu
Tlirax
Ptolemy of As*
calun
Philoxenus
45 ApollodoruK
(rhetor) of Pcr-
gamon, 105-23
30 Didymus
r.6^b.c. — 10A.U.
Anstonicus
Tryphon
30—^ Dionysius
of Halicamas-
sus
Caecilius
35 Juba
d. 30 A.D.
ApoUonius
Ohronoloffdn,
Hittorianifto.
395 Softibius
c. 380 Craterus
380 Bcrosus
377 Manetho
373 Hieronymus
of Cardia
364 M armor
Parium
940 Aniigonus
of Carystus
395-0— f. 330
Pliilo«opli«n
197 Neanthes
191 Heracleides
c. i8s Polemon
of Ilium
170 Demetrius
of Scepsis
b. c. 314
170 Polybius
c. 305— c. 123
144 Api>nudoru.s
70 Castor of
Rhodes
60 Diodorus
(c. 9o--f. 30)
visits Egypt
34 Strabo (c. 63
B.C. — f. 24 A.D.)
visits Egypt
333 Theophras-
tus>
330 Pyrrhon
c. 360 — 270
317-07 Deroe*
trius of Phale*
ron>
314 Polemon «
308 Zeno'
c. 3*0^360
306 Epicurus
341—270
304 Grantor «
300 Praxi-
iihnncs/
387 Siraion>
376-0 Crates «
370 Arccsilaa*
c, 315—341
964 Cleaiithet'
331—333
341 Lacydes**
332Chrysippus<'
c. 380 — c, 308-4
i76Arisiobulus/
155 Cameades«
c. 219—12^
140 Panactius'
f. 181 -*r. 109
121 CIcitoma-
chus •*
c. 175— c. 105
105 Philo of
Larissa*
c. 147 — 80
80 Antiochus^
d. 68
80 Poseidonitu'
C' i35-<. 45
60 Andronicus>
55 Philodemus
Q. Sextius
D. C. TO
Philo judaeus
b. ao D.C. d.
after 40 a.d.
« Academics, P Peripatetics, ' Stoics.
CHAPTER VIII.
THE SCHOOL OF ALEXANDRIA.
Greek Scholarship was fostered in Alexandria under the rule
of the earlier Ptolemies. It was during the reign of Ptolemy
Soter, who had been satrap of Egypt from 322 to 305 rc, and
was king from 305 to 285, that Demetrius Of Phaleron gave the
first impulse towards the founding of public libraries in the
Egyptian capital (c, 295 B.C.)*. Ptolemy Soter, who had in vain
invited Theophrastus and Menander to settle in Alexandria,
entrusted the education of his son and successor Ptolemy
Philadelphus (285-247) to the poet and scholar, Philetas of Cos,
and to the philosopher, Straton, the successor of Theophrastus.
Early in the Alexandrian age literary institutions of the highest
importance were founded in Alexandria. The foundation of the
Great Library in particular was probably due in the first instance
to Ptolemy Soter, acting under the advice of Demetrius', but the
credit is often assigned to Philadelphus, who may have continued
and completed his father's designs', though he was himself mainly
interested in zoology \ Philadelphus' is also credited with the
foundation of the splendid shrine of learning known
The Museum
as the Mowctoi/, *the temple, or home, of the
Muses ', which is described by Strabo, who visited Alexandria in
24 B.C., as forming part of the royal quarter of the city, and as
* Susemihl, Geschichte der Griechischen Littemtur in der AUxandrinerteit
(1891). i 6, 138.
' Wilamowitz, Anti^oncs von Karystos^ p. 191, and Kuiper (Utrecht) 1894
(Mahaffy's Empire of the Ptolemies^ 1895, p. 91).
' Suscmihl, i 6—7.
^ Dioclorus, iii 36, 3 f (MahafTy, /. ^., p. 118 f).
■ Athcn. 103 c, K.
I06 THE ALEXANDRIAN AGE. [CHAP.
including a covered walk, an arcade furnished with recesses and
seats, and a large building containing a common hall, in which
the Scholars who were members of the Museum met for their
meals. This learned body had endowments; and its president,
nominated by the government, was called *the priest of the
Museum '*. The provision for the maintenance of these Scholars
was apparently on so liberal a scale that a satirical poet of that
age, I'imon of Phlius (writing about 230 B.C.), humorously called
it a * bird-coop of the Muses '^ It is among the attractions of
Alexandria mentioned by Herondas (i 31), immediately after the
$€0}^ d8cX<^faii^ Tc/iCF09, the precinct of the temple of Philadelphus
and his sister and wife, Arsinoe II, who (as we now know)* died
in 270 B.C.* It had some points of contact with the Academy and
the Lyceum. The name recalls the Platonic brotherhood, or thiasos^
with its common cult of the Muses in the * groves of Academe ',
as well as the * Museum ' mentioned in the will of Theophrastus';
while its covered walk, or peripatos^ is no less suggestive of still
earlier memories of the Peripatetic School. But we may realise
its character still better by regarding it as a kind of prototy[)e of a
College at Oxford or Cambridge, with its common hall for dining
and its cloisters and grounds, and with some provision for the
endowment of research. The members of the Museum probably
received annual stipends; but whether the Library, as in an
English College, was part of the buildings of the Museum, is
unknown, though it was probably very near them. We are also
unaware whether there were any arrangements for instruction.
Even 500 years after its foundation it is eulogised by Philostratus
as a society of celebrities'; in the following century the quarter of
^ p. 793 f, rwy d^ Pcun\€tuf¥ fiipot iirrl xal r6 Mov<retoi', #x<^ irepiiraroy
Kal i^ibpap Koi oUo¥ lUyav^ iv ^ r6 (rv^fflnoy tu¥ /iercx^KTwy tov Mowrelov
^i\o\6yw¥ d^dpiMf kt\.
• Quoted on p. 103.
' Mahaffy's PtoteNtaic Dyfutsty^ p. 79.
^ For portraits of Ptolemy Soter (and Berenike J) and also of Ptolemy
Philadelphus and Arsinoe II, see coin inscribed OEflN AAEA4>nN
on p. 143.
' Diog. Laert. v 51.
' Vit, Soph, i 11, 5, rpdire^ Alyuwrla ^vyKoXoOaa rout if wday rj y^
iXKoylfiovs.
VIII.] THE MUSEUM AND LIBRARIES OF ALEXANDRIA. IO7
the city where it lay is described by Ammianus Marcellinus as
'having long been the home of eminent men'*, while the last who
is actually named as a member of the Museum is the celebrated
mathematician and neo-platonist Theon (yf. 380 a.d.), the father
of the noble-hearted and ill-fated Hypatia (d. 415 a.d.)* It is in
connexion with the pathetic story of her life that the old associa-
tions of this memorable haunt of Alexandrian scholars and poets
have been happily characterised by Kingsley: — * School after
school, they had all walked and taught and sung there, beneath
the spreading planes and chestnuts, figs and palm trees. The
place seemed fragrant with all the riches of Greek thought and
song ' •.
The other literary institutions of the earlier Ptolemies were the
two Libraries. The larger of these is stated to have ^^ , .^
° The Library
been m the Brucheion^ the N.E. quarter of Alex-
andria, and was probably very close to the Museum'. It has
however been conjecturally placed in the western half of the city,
S.E. of the Heptastadion, about 400 yards from the Great
Harbour, and to the north of the main street, which was lined
with shady colonnades* and extended for nearly four miles from
the N.E. to the S.W. of Alexandria*. * There it towered up, the
wonder of the world, its white roof bright against the rainless
blue ; and beyond it, among the ridges and pediments of noble
buildings, a broad glimpse of the bright sea*.'
The smaller Library, sometimes called the * daughter-library \
was in the RhakdtiSy the S.W. quarter, near the temple of Serapis
^ xxii 16, diuturnum praestantium hominum domicilium. The Museum
and the Lil)rarie$ of Alexandria have been the theme of several monographs,
by Parihey and by Klippel, 1838, and by Gcill 1868, Weniger 1875, *^"<1 Couat
1879; ^^^y l^^vc also been discussed by Clinton, Fastis iii 380 f; Ritschl,
Opttscit/a, i (first published in 1838); Bernhardy, Gr, Litt, i 517 — 541*;
Susemihl, /. c.\ Holm, Gr, Hist, iv, c 14; Mahaffy's Empire of the Ptolemies^
91 — 99 ; and Dziatzko in Pauly-Wissowa, s.v, Bibliotheken^ 409 — 414.
• Hypatia^ c. r, * Susemihl, i 336.
^ Arislides, ii 450 Dind., i9 rtf /xrydXy ip6fjui^ T(f card rdt crodt,
^ Cp. Dziatzko, in Pauly-Wissowa, s,v, Bibliotheken^ p. 411. Similarly
Botti's map of 1898, reproduced in Mahaffy*s Egypt under the Ptolemaic
Dynasty^ puts the Museum in the middle of the Neapolis, and south of the
Emporium, with the Public Gardens between the Museum and the main
street ; but this seems too far west from the Brucheion and the Royal Palace.
I08 THE ALEXANDRIAN AGE. [CMAP.
and *Pompey's Pillar', and not far from the Mareotic lake,
which extends behind the spit of land on which
The Library Alexandria was built. It is this Library which is
Serapeum doubtless intended by the rhetorician Aphthonius
(end of cent, iv), when he mentions it in the course
of his glowing description of the * acropolis ' of Alexandria. The
description has a twofold interest, firstly, because it appears to
imply that, by the time when it was written, an * acropolis' had
been formed on the rising ground surrounding the Serapeum * ;
and secondly, because the library is stated to have been closely
connected with a temple and with certain colonnades, and both
of these are among the characteristics of ancient libraries ".
The completion of the Library of the Serapeum^ like that of
the Great Library of the Brucheion^ may be ascribed to Ptolemy
Philadelphus. It was also Philadelphus who, according to the
'Letter of Aristeas', quoted by Josephus {Afit./ud, xii 2), caused
the law of Moses to be translated into Greek by a commission of
learned Jewish elders, thus beginning the version known as the
Septuagint^ probably projected in the reign of Ptolemy Soter*.
To the reign of Philadelphus, and to about the year 255 b.c.,
belongs the settlement of a Greek colony in the newly reclaimed
and greatly enlarged oasis of lake Moeris, now known as the
Faiydm. The Hellenic culture . of that district is attested by the
TiMmexows papyri there discovered by Mr Flinders Petrie in 1889-
90, including portions of the Phaedo and Laches of Plato, and of
the Antiope of Euripides, ascribed to the 3rd century b.c.*
It may here be observed that Zoilus of Amphipolis, whose
name is proverbial for the bitterness of his criticisms on Homer,
is wrongly assigned to the age of Philadelphus, who is described
in Vitruvius {Prae/, vii) as having listened to his criticisms with
* Cp. Clem. Alex. Protrcp. p. 14 Sylburg.
' Aphthonius, Progymnasmata^ c. 11 (i 107 Walz), irap^od^/ui^yrac Hk
cafCi^tUvoi 4n\oco^X¥^ koX ir^Xu' awoffav tit i^ovclop r^t <ro^as iiratpo¥Tft, ol 5i
roi)t irdXcu ri/Aoy Idpvfiiyoi $«o6t.
* Susemihl, i 6 (note) and Swete's Introduction to the Greek Old Testament ^
pp. 9 — 18, 510.
* Mahafry*s Empire of the Ptolemies^ pp. 1 56, 1 80 ; Kenyon, Palaeography
of Creek papyri^ p. 6 f. Cp. Facsimile on p. 87 supra.
VIII.] THE DATE OF ZOILUS. IO9
silent contempt, and also as having caused him to be crucified for
his pains. Zoilus the critic is now regarded as identical with
Zoilus the rhetorician, and his true date is determined by the fact
that the rhetorician was a pupil of Polycrates, an earlier contem-
porary of Isocrates, that his rhetorical writings are said to have
been studied by Demosthenes in his youth (c, 365 b.c.), and that
he composed a historical work ending with the death of Philip
(336 B.C.). He accordingly flourished between the above dates.
The description of his person in Aelian (yar. HisL xi 10), his
short cloak, his long beard and his closely shaven crown, are
suggestive of a Cynic. His pupil Anaximenes was also a pupil
of Diogenes the Cynic; it was probably in sympathy with the
Cynics that he attacked Plato; like Antisthenes, the founder of
the Cynics, he also attacked Isocrates ; and above all he signalised
himself by attacking Homer. His criticisms on Homer filled
nine books, and the designation Homeromastix^ said by Sui'das
to have been a nickname of the author, may possibly have been
the title of the work. It included an encomium on the ill-used
Cyclops, Polyphemus, in the course of which the critic remarked
that, as soon as Odysseus had been cursed by the Cyclops, he
was abandoned even by his guardian-goddess Athene*. The
companions of Odysseus, described by the poet as 'weeping'
when turned into swine by Circe, he ridiculed as 'whining
porkers'*; he satirised the perfect symmetry with which Odysseus,
in his contest with the Cicones, lost exactly six men from each of
his ships {^Od, ix 60); he criticised the poet for describing
Achilles as bidding Patroclus 'mingle stronger drink' for the
Achaean envoys (//. ix 203); Apollo, as making the innocent
mules and dogs of the Achaean camp the first victims of his
pestilential arrows (//. i 50) ; and Zeus himself, as weighing the
Fates in a pair of scales (//. xxii 209). Like Plato (Rep, 388 a),
he found fault with the inordinate grief of Achilles over the
death of Patroclus (//. xviii 22). He also carped at the descrip-
tion of Athene causing 'the fire 10 blaze from the head and
shoulders ' of Diomedes (//. v 7), to the peril of that hero's life,
and of Idaeus ^leaving his stately chariot* (//. v 20), when he
* Schol. on * Plato's* Hipparchus^t p. i«9 D.
' X^P^^^^ ffXaiorra (vf^ ^wn 9 § 14).
IIO THE ALEXANDRIAN AGE. [CHAP.
might have escaped more easily (if that indeed had been his
object) by remaining in it. He attacked the statement that ' the
spirit fled away beneath the ground, like smoke' (//. xxiii loo),
whereas smoke rises upwards. Like Chrysippus, he charged Homer
with combining a plural verb with a singular noun in //. i 129,
ZCV9 SuKTi, and was refuted by Aristarchus, who pointed out that
the right reading was hi^\. (the contracted form of the 3rd Person
Singular of the Subjunctive Aorist 8*u]yo-i), as in Od, \ 168, ttot^p
d7ro8<p<riv '. But, in comparison with the attacks on the poet's
invention, the attacks on his grammar are rather rare. A con-
fused legend preserved by Suidas makes the assembled Greeks at
Olympia indignantly drive him from the festival and fling him
down from the crest of the Scironiari cliffs, — which are not far
from the scene of the Isthmian games. One or two of his
criticisms on Homer (those on //. i 50 and ix 203) happen to be
identical with those to which Aristotle replies in his treatise on
Poetry (c. 25). In the Alexandrian age the first to answer his
attack on Homer was Athenodorus, the brother of the poet
Aratus^ while in Roman times he is described by Ovid as owing
his name and fame solely to his envious detraction of the merits
of Homer :
* ingenium magni livor detrectat Homeri :
quisquis es, ex illo, ZoKle, nomen babes'*.
To return to our immediate subject, the number of mss
comprised in the two Alexandrian Libraries is variously stated.
We are informed that, in reply to a royal inquiry, it was stated by
Demetrius of Phaleron (about 285 B.C.), that it was already
200,000, and that he would soon bring it up to 500,000 ^ In
the time of Callimachus (c. 310-^. 235 B.C.), the larger Library
contained 400,000 volumes, including several works in each
volume, and also 90,000 separate works*. In the middle of the
* Col>et, Afiic, Crit. 339.
' Susemihl, i 193, note 39.
* Kerned. Amor is ^ 365 (cp. Pope's Essay on Criticism, 465 f, and Ibe
sequel to I. 114 in tbe first draft of tbe poem). On ZoUlus see esp. Lehrs, De
Aristarchi stiuiiis^ 100 — 7*, and Blass, Att, Ber. \\^ 373 — 8 ; and cp. Clinton's
Fasti, iii 380 f, 485.
^ * Aristeas' ap. Euseb. Fraep, Ev. viii' p. 350^.
' Tzetzes, ap. Susemibl, i 341.
VIII.] ALEXANDRIA AND PERGAMON. Ill
first century b.c. the number is said to have been 700,000*. The
smaller Library comprised 42,800 volumes', which were probably
comparatively modern mss with each roll complete in itself.
The Ptolemies are said to have resorted to many ingenious
devices' with a view to adding to the treasures of their Libraries.
We are told by Galen (xvii a p. 606) that the numerous vessels
which entered the harbour were compelled to surrender any mss
which they had on board, and that the owners of these mss had
to rest content with copies of the same ; these mss were known
as TO c#c irXoioiv, and among them (according to one version of the
story) was a MS of a book of Hippocrates brought to Alexandria
by the physician Mnemon of Side in Pamphylia*. Galen is also
the authority for the story already quoted (p. 58) as to the way in
which the official text of the three great tragic poets of Athens
was secured for Alexandria by Ptolemy Euergetes, i.e. either the
first of that name (247-222 b.c), or the second', also known as
Ptolemy Physcon (i 46-1 17 B.C.). The keenest rivalry arose
between the royal patrons of learning at Alexandria and Pergamon.
It is even stated that one of the Ptolemies, probably Phila-
delphus, prohibited the export of paper made from the Egyptian
papyrus^ and thus led to the use of skins of animals as materials
for writing in the reign of the Pergamene prince, Eumenes (I,
263-241 B.C.)'. But such materials had been long in use, so that
we can only infer that improvements in their preparation were
introduced at Pergamon. In process of time skins were made
smooth for writing on both sides, instead of only one, and the
material thus manufactured was called charta pcrgamena^ or
* parchment ' ; but the word is not found earlier than the Edict of
Diocletian (301 a.d.)'. Eumenes II (197-159 b.c.) is said to
have invited the Alexandrian Librarian, Aristophanes of Byzan-
tium, to leave Alexandria for Pergamon, and the mere suspicion
that the Librarian was ready to accept such an invitation prompted
Ptolemy Epiphanes (205-182 b.c) to put him in prison*. The
' Gellius vi 17; Amm. Marc, xxii 16, 13.
' Tzetzes, u.s, ' Dziatzko, /. r., p. 411.
^ Suscmihl, i 815, ii 681. ' Usener in Susemihl, ii 667.
• Pliny, M H, xiii 70. ' Birt, Atiiike Buchwesen^ P* 51-
• Pliny. M H, xiii 70. ' Bi
^ Suidas, ap. Susemihl, i 431 ; cp. ii 667.
112 THE ALEXANDRIAN AGE. [CHAP.
royal passion for collecting mss at Alexandria and Pergamon
naturally led to the fabrication of many spurious works'; and to
vanous devices for giving recent copies a false appearance of
antiquity'; it also led to careless transcription for the mere sake
of rapidity of production'.
It will be remembered that the Library has been conjecturally
placed at a distance of about 400 yards from the harbour of
Alexandria (p. 107). In 47 b.c., shortly after the death of Pompey,
the conflicts between the Roman soldiers and the Egyptians in
the streets of the city compelled Caesar to set the royal fleet on
fire to prevent its falling into the hands of the Egyptians. The
naval arsenal was also burnt ^ According to the historian Orosius
(c. 415 A.D.), the flames spread to the shore, where 40,000
volumes happened to be stored up in the adjacent buildings*.
The phrase used by Orosius has led to the conjecture that these
volumes, having been removed by Caesar from the Library, were
temporarily stacked in certain buildings near the harbour, with a
view to their being shipped to Rome as part of the spoils of
conquest : and that the burning of these books led to the legend
of the burning of the Library*. It is not at all probable that the
Library itself was at this time consumed by fire. The author of
the Bellutn Alexandrinum (i 2) expressly states that, as even the
private houses of the citizens, including the very floors and roofs,
were built entirely of stone, Alexandria was in general safe from
the risk of a conflagration. Writing about 80 a.d., Plutarch in
his Life of Caesar (c 49) implies that the flames spread from the
fleet to the docks and from the docks to the Library ; and, early
in the 3rd century, Dio Cassius (xlii 38) describes the arsenal and
' Galen, xv p. 105, wfibr yiLp to^ iv *A\€^dp€l^ ical Tltpydfu^ ytwi^Bai
PoffiKtU iirl Krfyrti fii^MuMf ^\oTifiri$4¥Tat, odd4iru(\) ^tvdQt ir€y4ypawT0
o^YtP^N'^' Xa^drccy A' dp^a/Upufp fu<r$6tf rOv KOfu(Ofiipu» ai^oit tr&Yypafifta
waKeuou ru^ot dp6p6t, o0rwt i^iri iroXXd ^«vd&s iviyftd^mt fKOfu^w^ and id,
p. 109.
' David (or EHas) in Schol. un Aristot. 18 a 13 f (Susemihl, ii 413, note
367)-
' Strabo, 609 (Susemihl, ii 667 f). * Caesar, B, C iii in.
' Orosius, vi 15, 31, quadraginta milia librorum proximis pfrtg aedibus
condita exussit.
* Parthey, Museum Alex, p. 33.
VIII.] FATE OF THE ALEXANDRIAN LIBRARY. II 3
the stores of corn and of books as having perished in the flames ;
but these accounts seem less probable than the suggestion that it
was not the Library itself, but only those of the books which had
been transferred to buildings near the harbour, that suffered
destruction. The Court Journals at Alexandria were consulted
not only by Diodorus Siculus (iii 38), before Caesar's visit, but
also by Appian {Praef, 10) long after (r. 160 a.d.). The story of
the burning of the Library is not mentioned either by Cicero, who
shortly afterwards induced Cleopatra, during her stay in Rome, to
promise to get him some books from Alexandria \ or by Strabo,
who visited Alexandria only 22 years later. The earliest mention
of the disaster which befell the mss is in Seneca •. 'The Per-
gamene Libraries', containing 200,000 separate volumes, were
presented to Cleopatra by Antonius in 41 b.c. (Plut Ant, 58), and
Domitian is said to have supplemented the deficiences of the
libraries in Italy by means of transcripts from the Alexandrian
MSS (Suet. Dom, 20). In the time of Aurelian (272 a.d.) the
larger part of the region of Alexandria in which the Library was
situated was laid waste (Amm. Marc, xxii 16, 5), and it may be
conjectured that this was the date when the Library suffered most
damage ; for, late in the following century, we find a rhetorician
of Antioch, Aphthonius, assigning a special importance to another
Library, identified as that of the Serapeum*. Under Theodosius I
(391 A.D.) the temple of Serapis, which had been partly burnt in
183 A.D., was demolished, and transformed into a church and
monastery, by Theophilus, the patriarch of Alexandria, and the
lesser Library of the Serapeum can hardly have survived this
destruction. Orosius, at the time of his visit, saw only empty
book-cases in * the temples * of the city*, but his evidence is very
vague*. In 642 a.d., when Amrou, the general of Omar, Caliph
of the Saracens, captured Alexandria, it is stated that Johannes
' Ad Att, xiv 8, XV 15 (Mahaffy, /.^., 461).
' De Tranq. An, 9, quadraginta milia librorom Alexandriae anenint.
' Aphthonius, quoted on p. 108.
^ Orosius, vi 15, 31, quamlibet bodieque in templis exstent, quae et not
vidimus, armaria librorum, quibus direptis exinanita- et a rusticis bominibus
nostris temporibus memorant, etc.
' Bury*s Gibbon, iii 495.
S. 8
114 '^^^ ALEXANDRIAN AGE. [CHAP.
Philoponus, the commentator on Aristotle, asked the conqueror
for the gift of the Alexandrian Library, that the conqueror felt
constrained to consult the Caliph, and that the Caliph made the
well-known reply : — * if these writings of the Greeks agree with
the book of God, they are useless and need not be preserved ; if
they disagree, they are pernicious and ought to be destroyed'.
It is added that the contents of the Library were consigned to the
flames, and that they served for six months as fuel for the 4000
baths of Alexandria. The authority for this story is Abul-
pharagius'; but it has been urged by Gibbon (c. 51) that his
account, written in a distant province six centuries after the
event, is refuted by the silence of two annalists of an earlier date
and of a direct connexion with Alexandria, the more ancient of
whom, the patriarch Eutychius, has minutely described the
destruction of the city. The destruction of books, the historian
adds, is contrary to the principles of Mohammedanism. In any
case it may well be doubted whether any laige number of ancient
MSB were still to be found in Alexandria at the date of its capture
by the general of the Saracens*.
The first four Librarians of Alexandria were Zenodotus
(c. 285-^. 234 B.C.); Eratosthenes {c, 234-195);
Librarians Aristophanes of Byzantium (195-180); and Aris-
tarchus (180 or 172-146). It has sometimes been
supposed that Callimachus was Librarian between the time of
2^nodotus and that of Eratosthenes ; and Apollonius Rhodius,
between that of Eratosthenes and Aristophanes; but chrono-
logical considerations make this view improbable'. Nearly a
century after the appointment of Aristarchus, an inscription from
Paphos shows that the office was given, after 89 B.C., to a kinsman
and priest of Ptolemy Soter II (Lathyrus), named Onesander,
who is otherwise unknown\
* DyruLst, p. 114, vers. Pocock (cp. Bury*s Gibbon, v 453, 515).
* Cp. Susemihl, i 344. The modem writers agreeing or disagreeing with
Gibbon on this point are quoted by Parthey, Mus. AUx, p. 106. Cp. notes in
Bury*s Gibbon, v 454, and 45a (where it is observed that Philoponus lived
more than a century before the conquest of Alexandria).
* Busch, De biblhthtcariis Alex, qui feruntur primis^ 1B84; Dziatzko in
Pauly-Wissowa, s.v, BibUotheken^ p. 41a.
* Joum. Hell, Si, ix 340.
VIII.] ALEXANDRIAN LITERATURE. 11$
Of the names above mentioned Callimachus and ApoUonius
Rhodius are celebrated in the history of Literature as well as in
that of Scholarship; we may therefore cast a passing glance on
the literature of the Alexandrian age before giving a more
detailed account of the representatives of Scholarship in the same
period.
The literature of this age was slavishly imitative rather than
spontaneously creative ; it was inspired not by the
immediate impulse of true genius, but by the uttiitlw'**"
reflected reminiscences of a golden age that was •
gone for ever ; it appealed not to the general body of free citizens,
but to the cultivated few, who formed a separate class of men of
learned and critical tastes, either actually enjoying or attempting
to attract the favour of the court, amid the multitudinous popula-
tion of a vast commercial city. In this age Parody and Satire are
represented by Timon of Phlius (r. 315-r. 226), who lived at
Calchedon and Athens, cultivating his garden to the age of nearly
ninety, and using the vehicle of hexameter verse for those criti-
cisms on the dogmatic schools of philosophy, which incidentally
supply us with an early satirical allusion to the Alexandrian
Museum (p. 103). Pastoral Poetry is represented by Theocritus
of Syracuse (Jl, 272 b.c). Of his idylls, the 17th (273-1 b.c) is
an encomium on Ptolemy Philadelphus, celebrating his extensive
empire, his extraordinary wealth, and his generosity towards
priests and poets; the 14th (after 269 b.c.) is on the soldiers in
his service; the 15th, the Adoniazusac (before 270 b.c.), paints a
graphic picture of the thronging crowds of Alexandria at a festival
attended by two ladies from Syracuse; while his bucolic poems in
general must have charmed the dwellers amid the dust and din
and glare of Alexandria with glimpses of the idyllic life of
shepherds and herdsmen resting beside the fountains beneath the
plane-trees, or amid the pine-woods and the upland pastures that
look down on the Sicilian sea. With Theocritus we associate the
two other bucolic poets, Moschus of Syracuse, the author of the
Runaway Eros (c, 150), and Bion of Smyrna, the author of the
Lament for Adonis {c, 100 b.c). The recently recovered Mimes
of Herondas may be as early as the latter part of the reign of
Philadelphus. Theocritus and Herondas alike found a model in
8—2
Il6 ^THE ALEXANDRIAN AGE. [CHAP.
the Mimes of Sophron, which must have remained in existence
till late in the first or early in the second century a.d., as the
label of a ms of that date has been found in Egypt \ Didactic
Poetry is represented by Aratus of Soli, who lived at the court of
Pella (276 a c), and imitated Hesiod in his extant astronomical
poem entitled the Phaetiotnena^ paraphrased from Eudoxus,
concluding with Prognostics of the Weather^ paraphrased from
Theophrastus. It was a work that won the praises of Calli-
machus (Anth, ix 507), and, in the Roman age, the compliment
of repeated translation by Varro Atacinus, Cicero, Germanicus
and Avienus. Didactic poetry is also represented by the extant
epics on venomous bites (Thiriaca) and on antidotes {Alexi-
pharmaca) composed by Nicander (150 b.c.), one of whose lost
poems was imitated in the Metamorphoses of Ovid. Other
learned types of verse are represented by the elegiac Hymns and
Epigrams of Callimachus (c. 310-^. 235), by the epic poem of
Apollonius Rhodius (yf. c, 250-200) on the Argonauts, and by the
iambic drama of Lycophron (c, 295). In the same age mathema-
tical and other kindred sciences were represented by Euclid (y7.
300 B.C.)*, and Archimedes of Syracuse (c, 287-212 b.c.); by those
masters of Mechanics, Heron of Alexandria and Philon of Byzan-
tium ; by the earliest writer on Conic Sections, Apollonius of Perga,
and by the astronomer, Hipparchus of Nicaea; Geography, by
Eratosthenes; the Chronology of Chaldaea by Berdsus (280), that
of Egypt by Manetho (277), and that of Greece by the unknown
author of the Parian Marble, now in Oxford, with its summary of
Greek history beginning from the earliest times and originally
ending with 264 ac* The important trilingual inscriptions, in
hieroglyphic and demotic Egyptian and in Greek, which are
known as the * decree of Canopus', discovered by Lepsius in
* Oxyrhynchus Papyri^ ii p. 303.
* It was Ptolemy I who was informed by Euclid that there was no royal
road to geometry (Proclus in Eucl. p. 68).
' ed. Flach, 1884. The fall of Troy is here assigned to 1108 B.C. It had
previously been assigned to 1 1 7 1 B.C. by Sosibius, a member of the Alexan-
drian Museum under Ptolemy II, and the author of a chronological work, in
which Homer is described as having flourished c, 865 B.C. The fall of Troy
was afterwards placed by Eratosthenes in 11 84, and this has become the
traditional date.
VIII.] ALEXANDRIAN LITERATURE. II7
1865, and the * decree of Memphis ' or the * Rosetta Stone ', found
by the French near the Rosetta mouth of the Nile in 1798, belong
to the years 238 and 196 respectively*. The 'Rosetta Stone'
was placed in the British Museum in 1802, and the Greek text
restored by Porson early in the following year; it afterwards
supplied Young and Champollion with the key to the deciphering
of Egyptian hieroglyphics. The great age of Alexandrian criti-
cism is drawing to its end with the death of Aristarchus about
145 B.C., when we reach an important representative of History
in the person of Polybius {c, 205-^. 123), who in 146 b.c
witnessed the destruction of Carthage and the burning of Corinth,
closing with that year his record of Roman conquest, which
throws light on the history of Egypt, especially between the
accession of Ptolemy Philopator (222 b.c) and that of Ptolemy
Physcon (146). Though he is the first great historian since
Herodotus and Thucydides, he is little interested in the earlier
Greek literature, quoting Herodotus only twice, and Thucydides
and Xenophon only once. His historic vision rests far less on
Alexandria than on Rome; and, in the history of Scholarship,
his work is mainly interesting as the earliest and best example,
now extant, of the 'common dialect', founded on Attic Prose,
which prevailed in the Greek world from about 300 b.c. In the
century after Polybius we find in Diodorus Siculus (c, 40 b.c.) a
historian who took Ephorus, the pupil of Isocrates, for his model,
and who, in compiling a history which ended with Caesar's Gallic
Wars, Consulted the Libraries and the public archives of Rome,
visited Alexandria and parts of Upper Egypt about 60 b.c., and,
in relating the early history of Egypt, paused over the name of
the ancient king, Osymandyas, who placed above the portal of a
library of sacred books in Thebes an inscription describing it as
a * sanatorium for the soul ' '. Of Alexandria at the date of his
own visit he tells us, as an eye-witness, that a Roman who had
accidentally killed a cat was mercilessly put to death by the
populace (i 14). The incident is of some importance for
our present purpose. It proves that the mob of Alexandria
* Texts in Mahaffy, /,c., pp. 116 — ^39, and 316 — 317.
' Diod. Sic. i 49, 3, fvx^ Urpnon^, The king has been identified with
Ramses (II) Miamun (cent. 14 B.C.).
Il8 THE ALEXANDRIAN AGE. [CHAP.
was *no longer Greek, as it professed to be*, but was 'deeply
saturated with Egyptian blood '\ thus showing that, towards the
close of the Alexandrian age, as at the beginning, Greek civilisa-
tion in Alexandria was confined to a very limited circle.
The Alexandrian age is in the main an age of erudition and
criticism. Even its poets are often scholars. The
earliest of the scholars and poets of this age is
Philetas of Cos* {c. 340 — c. 285-3), the preceptor not only of
Ptolemy Philadelphus (about 395-2 b.c), but also of Zenodotus
and of the elegiac poet Hermesianax. He was remarkable for
the extreme delicacy of his frame ; it is even stated that he was
compelled to wear leaden soles to prevent his being blown away
by the wind'. He was the author of a glossary of unusual poetic
words, quoted as araxra or aratcTOi ykwaaai or simply ykiS<r<rai\
The readings which he preferred in the Homeric text are noticed
in several of the schoiia*^ and he was criticised by a greater
Homeric scholar, Aristarchus, in a work entitled irpo9 *iXiyraF.
About 292 he returned to Cos, where he apparently presided over
a brotherhood of poets including Theocritus and Aratus*. Cos
had been 'liberated' from Antigonus by Ptolemy Soter in 310;
in that island his son Philadelphus had been born in 308 ; and
from this time onwards it was closely connected with Alexandria.
It was a place of safety for royal exiles; and, with its lofty
mountains and its verdant slopes, it was also a favourite retreat
for men of letters weary of the heat and turmoil of the great
commercial city^ It is doubtful whether it was a 'place of
education for royal princes'; it seems more probable that
Philetas was summoned to Alexandria than that Philadelphus
' Mahaffy, /. c, 440. * Strabo, 657 ult., woii(r^ ofia kqX KpiTucht.
* Athen. 551 B ; Aelian, V. H* ix 14. * Cp. Athen. 383 B.
* //. ii 169, xxi ia6, 179, 351 (Susemihl, i 179, n. 16).
* Susemihl, i 175, and in PhUohgus^ 57 (1898). The identification of
Aratus the friend of Theocritus (Id, vi) with the astronomical poet is doubtful
(cp. Wilamowitx in Gottingtn Nachrichten^ 1894, quoted in Cholmeley's
Theocritus^ p. 17).
' Mahafiy, /. c. 54. Cos is the scene of the second poem of Herondas.
It was oflf Cos that Philadelphus was defeated by Antigonus c. 358, thus
losing for a time the mastery of the sea which he recovered off Andros in 147
(ib, 150).
VIII.] PHILETAS. ZENODOTUS. II9
was sent to Cos. As a poet, Philetas was a writer of amatory
elegiacs of simple form, but without any special power. At
Alexandria his fame was soon superseded by that of Callimachus,
though Roman writers regard them as nearly equal in repute.
They are linked together in a well-known couplet of Propertius
(iv I, i):—
'Callimachi manes et Coi sacra Philetae,
in vestrum, quaeso, me sinite ire nemus^'
His pupil Zenodotus of Ephesus {c, 325-^. 234 b.c.) was
made the first Librarian of the great Alexandrian
Library early in the reign of Ptolemy Philadelphus.
As Librarian, 2^nodotus classified the epic and lyric poets, while
Alexander Aetolus dealt with the tragic and Lycophron with the
comic drama*. He compiled a Homeric glossary, in which he
was apparently content with merely guessing at the meaning of
difficult words'. Shortly before 274 he produced the first
scientific edition of the Iliad and Odyssey, It was about that date
that Timon of Phlius, when consulted by the poet Aratus about a
proposed edition of Homer, replied that it must be founded on
ancient mss and not on those that had already been revised (rois
17617 5((l>p^(l>/AcVol9)^ Zenodotus is described as the earliest editor
(hiopBtorris) of Homer*; his edition was founded on numerous
MSS ; each of the two poems was now for the first time divided
into 24 books, and spurious lines marked with a marginal obelus.
His reasons for condemning such lines were mainly because he
deemed them inconsistent with the context, or unsuited to the
persons, whether deities or heroes, whose action is there described.
Thus he rejected Jiiad iii 423-6 on the ground that it was
unbecoming for Aphrodite to 'carry a seat' for Helen; and
similarly he altered a passage in iv 88, because it is out of
' Cp. iii «6, 31 ; iv 3, 51; v 6, 3 ; Quint. X 1, 58.
' Scholium 1 1 of Tzetzes on Greek Comedy: § 19 in Studemund*s article
in Phihlogus 46 (1888) p. 10, Ivriov Bn *A\4^9.99pot 6 Atru>\6i kcU K\m6^ptmf 6
XaXffidei}f hwh WroKtiialov roii ^iKtMK^v vporpaWrret rdt tf'nyrurdt 9id»p$W9M
filpXovt' Avk6^p»9 1^9 rkt r^ iruifi^dfat, 'AX^^ai^pot hk rdt r^f rpaTy^at, ib.
% 21 rat hi yt o'lriyriirdf 'AX^^rdptft rc.iral KvK6^pw dua^iiffawro* rdt 64 y9
woirrruciit Zi^r^Sorot wpG^op cat tartpw ^Aptffrapxoi divpSibeawro,
' Knaack, s,v, AUxandrinucke Utt. in Pauly-Wissowa, p. 1404.
« Diog. Laert. ix 113. • Suldas, i.r.
I20 THE ALEXANDRIAN AGE. [CHAP.
character for a goddess to endeavour to find the object of her
search. In both cases a later critic in the Venetian scholia
(probably Aristarchus) triumphantly replies that the goddess is
for the time disguised in human form, and the supposed im-
propriety vanishes ^ Himself an epic poet, he occasionally
inserted verses of his own to complete the sense, or blended
portions of several verses into one. He deserves credit, however,
for making the comparison of mss the foundation of his text.
Our knowledge of his criticisms rests almost entirely on statements
recorded in the scholia on the Venice MS (A) of Homer. He
sometimes confuses o-^oli (2d person) and o-^cuc (3d person), fiui
(Nom. and Ace.) and v^w (Gen. and Dat)*, makes the dual
interchangeable with the plural, regards -arai as a singular as well
as a plural termination, and -i(i> instead of -oof as a termination of
the Comparative ; but he rightly recognises the fact that ^o^ is not
confined to the third person, and the readings preferred by him
are not unfrequently important*. He is sometimes right, when
his great successors, Aristophanes and Aristarchus, are wrong ^
His recension of Homer was the first recension of any text which
aimed at restoring the genuine original. It was succeeded by a
recension executed with taste and judgement by the epic poet
Rhianus*. 2^nodotus also produced a recension of Hesiod's
Theogony^ and possibly one of Pindar and Anacreon^ His
merits as a Homeric critic are well summed up by Sir Richard
J ebb. 'In the dawn of the new scholarship, he appears as a
gifted man with a critical aim, but without an adequate critical
method. He insisted on the study of Homer's style; but he
failed to place that study on a sound basis. The cause of this
was that he often omitted to distinguish between the ordinary
usages of words and those peculiar to Homer. In regard to
* Lehrs, De Aristarchi Studus HomeridSt p. 333'; cp. Cobct, Misc, Cn't.
««5-.^9 («P- ««7» «34) and ^5«-
' Cobet, /. c, 350.
' See Index to Dr I..ears //tW, s,v. Zntodotus,
^ Rbmer in Abkandl, Afiinch. Akad. I CI. xvii 639 — 713.
' MayhofT, De Rhiani CreUnsis Sha/iis Homericis^ 1870, ap. Susemihl, i
399 f-
• DUntzer, De Z, Studiis Homericis, 1848; R6mer, Lc; Christ, f 438^
Susemihl, i 330—4, and HUbner*s Bibliographies % 7.
VIII.] ALEXANDER AETOLUS. LYCOPHRON. • 121
dialect, again, he did not sufficiently discriminate the older from
the later Ionic. And, relying too much on his own feeling for
Homer's spirit, he indulged in some arbitrary emendations.
Still, he broke new ground ; his work had a great repute ; and to
some extent, its influence was lasting ' ^
Alexander Aetolus (bom c, 315, fl. 285-276 ac.) was
responsible for the classification of the tragic and
satyric dramas in the Alexandrian Library. It is Attoiul"*'*'^
probably owing to this fact that he is called a
ypafjLfxariKos by Suidas. His work at Alexandria lasted from
^. 285 to 276 B.C., at which date he withdrew to the Macedonian
capital of Antigonus Gonatas. In his youth he was probably a
companion of Theocritus and Aratus in Cos, and he was also
associated with the latter in Macedonia. As a tragic poet, he
was included among the seven known as the Alexandrian Pleias.
He also wrote in epic verse, and in anapaestic tetrameters.
Among the latter were some notable lines on Euripides: —
kqX futroyiXvi, Kal rwtfdj'eir ou9i wap* otMonf /itfJM$fiitiiHt
dXX' 6 Ti ypd\l^eUf roihr* &r fUXirof xal fftip^wf ir9T€t&x€t*.
Lycophron of Chalcis in Euboea (bom c. 330-325 b.c.) was
summoned to Alexandria c, 285 ac, and entmsted
... g, , . , Lycophron
With the arrangement of the comic poets m the
Alexandrian Library. About ten years previously {c, 295) he
had written his Alexandra, a very lengthy tragic monologue
consisting of a strange combination of mythological, historical and
linguistic learning, grievously wanting in taste and deliberately
obscure in expression. He was one of the tragic Pleias of
Alexandria. He also wrote the earliest treatise on Comedy in at
least eleven books, the extant fragments of which give an un-
favourable impression of his attainments as a scholar*.
Callimachus of Cyrene {c, 310-^. 235), and his somewhat earlier
contemporary Aratus, studied at Athens under the Peripatetic
* J ebb's Homer t p. 91 f.
* ap. Gellius xv 10, 8. Cp. Meineke, AnaUcta Alexandrina, 115 — 151;
Couat, Poisie Alex, 105 — no; Susemihl, i 187 — 190.
' Strecker, De Lycophrone etc, ap. Susemihl, i 374 ; Lycophron's AUx*
atuirOt ed. Holzinger, 1895 ; and HUbner, Bibliographies § 7.
122 THE ALEXANDRIAN AGE. [CHAP.
Praxiphanes (p. loo). In his youth he was invited to Alexandria,
where he spent the rest of his life. His Coma
Berenices^ wntten in 246 b.c., and only preserved in
the translation by Catullus, incidentally refers to the famous sister
and second wife of Ptolemy Philadelphus, Arsinoe II, who died
in 270 B.C (p. 106), and was worshipped as Aphrodite Zephyritis,
while the poem as a whole is intended as a compliment to
Berenice, the newly-wedded queen of Ptolemy Euergetes I. His
literary feud with Apollonius Rhodius (c, 263 b.c.) has left its
mark on the poems of both^ Even in his old age he was still
conscious of this feud, when he described himself as having ' sung
strains which envy could not touch', o V rj€ia€v Kpiaaova fia-
a-Kavitf^*, In contrast to the vast and diffuse epic of Apollonius,
he preferred composing hymns and epigrams, and treating heroic
themes on a small scale, expressing his aim in a phrase that has
become proverbial : — /icya fiipxiov fiiya icat(6v\ He is sometimes
supposed to have succeeded Zenodotus as head of the Alex-
andrian Library. Whether he actually held that official position or
not, he was certainly a most industrious bibliographer. He is
said to have drawn up lists of literary celebrities in no less than
120 volumes described as iriVaKCC tiiDf iv vday iraiSfti^ SiaXafi^l/avTotv
Koi wv {Tvvcfpwlfav. This vast work was far more than a mere
catalogue. It included brief lives of the principal authors, and,
in the case of the Attic drama, the dates of the production of the
plays. It was divided into eight classes : — (i) Dramatists, (2) Epic
poets etc., (3) Legislators, (4) Philosophers, (5) Historians,
(6) Orators, (7) Rhetoricians, (8) Miscellaneous Writers. In the
Drama, the order was that of date ; in Pindar and Demosthenes,
that of subject; in Theophrastus and in the Miscellaneous
Writers, the order was alphabetical. If the authorship was
disputed, the various views were stated. In these lists, as well
as on the label (aiAAv/3os) attached to each roll in the Library,
^ Apollonius in Anih, Pal, xi 375, KoXXi^iaxof* rh xdOapfia, r6 valyino¥,
6 (uXir6t rovt. | afriof 6 ypd^at * afna KoKKitidxov * (Croiset, Zt//. Gr, v
31 1)1 Argonauticat iii 933 f; and Callimachus in Hymn to Apollo^ 105 — 114.
• Epigr. 31, 4.
' Athen. 73 A, KaXXlMaxot 6 ypafifiaTucbt t6 fUya /3t/9Xioi^ taw iKtytf tUai
VIII.] CALLIMACHUS. ERATOSTHENES. 1 23
the opening words and the number of lines contained in each
work were given, in addition to the author and the title ^ Legends
of the origin and foundation of various cities were included
not only in the four books of his poem known as the Airta, but
also in one of his prose-works. Among the latter was a list of
the writings and of the provincialisms of Democritus. His works
in prose and verse extended to over 800 volumes'. To his school
belonged some of the most celebrated scholars and poets, such as
Eratosthenes, Aristophanes of Byzantium, his own rival Apollonius
Rhodius, with Hermippus, Istrus, and Philostephanus of Cyrene.
His monograph on the different names given to the same thing in
different nations, and a work on dialects by Dionysius lambos,
had a considerable effect on linguistic research in the next
generation. This may be traced not only in the remains of
Aristophanes and Istrus, but also in those of Neoptolemus of
Parion and Philemon of Athens. Neoptolemus wrote on
' glosses \ and also composed a treatise on poetry, which was one
of the authorities followed by Horace in his Ars Pottica * ; while
Philemon wrote on 'Attic nouns and glosses*, and was the
precursor of the purists who in later times maintained the integrity
of Attic Greek against foreign corruption ^
While the evidence in favour of describing Callimachus as
head of the Alexandrian Library is very far from conclusive, and
indeed depends mainly on a priori probabilities, it is certain that
that high office was actually filled by his pupil and fellow-country-
man, Eratosthenes of Cyrene, who is now generally regarded as
the second of the Alexandrian Librarians.
Eratosthenes {c. 276 — €, 196-4 b.c.) spent some years in
Athens, whence he was recalled to Alexandria by _
^ 1 ^ / V , . , . Eratosthenes
Ptolemy Euergetes (r. 235 b.c.), and placed at the
head of the Library. He remained in that important position
during the reigns of Ptolemy Euergetes (d. 222 b.c.), and Philo-
pator (222-205). The tastes of the former were scientific, those
' O. Schneider's Callimachea^ \\ 197 — 311 ; Susemihl, i 337 — 34a
' On Callimachus, see Couat, PoisU Alex, iii — 384; Christ, § 349*;
Susemihl, i 347 — 373 ; and HUbner*s Bibliographies § 8.
' Porphyrion, ap. Susemihl, i 405.
* Susemihl, i 37a — 3.
124 THE ALEXANDRIAN AGE. [CHAR
of the latter literary and aesthetic. Philopator was not only the
author of a tragedy, but also honoured the memory of Homer by
building a temple which was adorned with a seated statue of the
poet, surrounded by statues of the cities which claimed his birth ^
The building of this temple has been regarded as an indication of
a change of attitude towards Homer. While 2^nodotus had
allowed his personal caprice to introduce fanciful alterations into
the poet's text, the influence of Callimachus and Eratosthenes
inspired a feeling of greater reverence for Homer as the Father of
Greek poetry, and also led to a more sober treatment of his text
by Aristophanes and Aristarchus, as well as to a careful imitation
of his manner in the epic poems of Rhianus*.
Eratosthenes bore among the members of the Museum the
singular designation of firfra, which is supposed to be due either
to some physical peculiarity (such as the bowed back of old age)
or (far more probably) to his attaining the second place in many
lines of study*. The more complimentary designation of ircW-
aOkoi implied his high attainments in more than one kind of
mental gymnastics, while (like the second sense of p-^a) it
suggested that he was inferior to those who confined themselves
to a single line of study*. We can easily imagine each of the
specialists of the Museum proudly conscious of his supremacy
in his own department, and enviously depreciating his widely
accomplished and versatile colleague, who was really 'good all
round ', as a ' second-rate ' man. But it is only in his minor epics
and elegiacs and in his philosophical dialogues that he seems
actually to have deserved a place lower than the very highest.
In other respects he attained the foremost rank among the most
versatile scholars of all time. It was this wide and varied learning
that prompted him to be the first to claim the honourable title of
^cXoXoyos (p. 5). He was the first to treat Geography in a
^ Aelian, far. ATiV/. xiii 11.
' Usener ap. Sus^mihl, ii 671.
' /3, 7, 5t «, f; $t X were all used as nicknames; cp. Photius, BiM, p. 151,
7 — 18, and Panhey, Afus. A/ex* p. 53 n. In Rostand's VAiglon^ i iii, we
find the phrase, je fais done le bita,
^ In [Plato] Anterastatt 135 E, ol whTa9\oi are described as dtih'€poi as
compared with the best runners and wrestlers. Cp. fhraxpot, 136 A, and repi
0^M;t, c. 34 § I, (of Hypereides) ffx*^'' OroKpot hf wmip Cn 6 wirraOXot,
VIII.] ARISTOPHANES OF BVZANTIUM. 12$
systematic and scientific manner'. He also wrote on Mathe-
matics, Astronomy and Chronology, and, in connexion with the
latter, we may mention his work on the Olympian victors. But
the masterpiece of his many-sided scholarship was a work in at
least twelve books, the first of its kind, on the Old Attic Comedy
(ircpl n79 dpxaia9 KCD/uupSta?). He there corrected his predecessors,
Lycophron and Callimachus, dealing with his theme, not in the
order of chronology, but in a series of monographs on the author-
ship and date of the plays, and on points of textual criticism,
language and subject-matter. He was less strong in his know-
ledge of Athenian antiquities* than in that of the Attic dialect in
its historical development. His encyclopaedic learning was not
incompatible with poetic taste. In opposition to the prosaic
opinion that the battles of the warriors in the //iW, and the
wanderings of the hero of the Odyssey, were a precise description
of actual events, he maintained that the aim of every true poet is
to charm the imagination and not to instruct the intellect'. ' The
scenes of the wanderings of Odysseus will be found ' (said Erato-
sthenes), 'when you find the cobbler who sewed up the bag of the
winds, and not before * *.
His successor as Librarian (c. 195 r.c) was Aristophanes of
Byzantium (r. 257-^. 180), the pupil of Zenodotus,
Callimachus and Eratosthenes. He was the first ofB*y««Suum*
of the Librarians who was not a poet as well as
a scholar; but in Scholarship he holds, with Aristarchus, one
of the foremost places in the ancient world. He reduced
accentuation and punctuation to a definite system. Some sort
of punctuation had already been recognised by Aristotle (p. 97).
To Aristophanes are attributed the use of the mark of elision, the
short stroke (vTroScao-ToXi;) denoting a division in a word (such as
the end of a syllable), the hyphen (w below the word), the comma
(vTTooTiy/LiiT), the colon {intarj a-Tiyfjuj) and the full-stop (rcXcia
(TTiyfiTJ) ; also the indications of quantity, yy for * short ' and - for
> Tozcr's History of Ancient Gtography^ p. 18a. ' p. 160 uU»
' Strabo, p. 7, iroofrhjii vat ^rox^^rrcu fi/x^ydry^at, od 6c<«iaffaX(at (an
opinion criticised by Strabo).
* ib. p. 14. On Eratosthenes, cp. Christ, § 419*, Susemihl, i 409—418 ;
and HUbner's Bibliographit^ § 9.
126 THE ALEXANDRIAN AGE. [CHAP.
* long ', and lastly the accents, acute ', grave \ and circumflex * or
'"*. These accents were invented with a view to preserving the
true pronunciation, which was being corrupted by the mixed
populations of the Greek world. Aristophanes was certainly the
originator of several new symbols for use in textual criticism.
To the short horizontal dash called the ojScAos or ' spit ' — , which
had already been used by Zenodotus to denote a spurious line, he
added the asterisk 4( to draw attention to passages where the
sense is incomplete, and, in lyric poets, to mark the end of a
metrical k^Kov; also the K€pavyiov T, to serve as a collective
obelus where several consecutive lines are deemed to be spurious ;
and, lastly, the dvriaiyfia, or inverted sigma, D , to draw attention
to tautology*. These symbols were used in his edition of the
//i'ad and Odyssey, which marked an advance on that of Zeno-
dotus and the next editor, Rhianus. He agreed with 2^nodotus
in obelising many lines, but he also reinstated, and obelised,
many which had been entirely omitted by his predecessor. Thus
he appears to have had some regard for manuscript evidence, or
at least for the duty of faithfully recording it, even if he dis-
approved it. In rejecting certain lines, he acted on independent
grounds ; in this he showed considerable boldness, but was often
right. A good example of his acuteness is his rejection of the
conclusion of the Odyssey, from xxiii 296 to the end*. Like
Zenodotus, however, he is apt to judge the picture of manners
presented in the Homeric poems by the Alexandrian standard,
and to impute either impropriety, or lack of dignity, to phrases
that are quite in keeping with the primitive simplicity of the
heroic age*.
^ Pseudo-Arcadius, pp. 186—190, ap. Nauck, Aristophanis By%, frag,
(1848) p. II f; this epitome of Herodian has been ascribed to Theodosius
(end of cent. 4, Christ, p. 838'). Cp. Steinthal, /. r., ii 79 n. See also Blass
on Gr, Palatogr, in I wan MUller's Handbuch, vol. i, C f 6. It is contended
by K. £. A. Schmidt, Beitrdge %ur Gesch, d, Gr, p. 571 f, that accents and
marks of punctuation existed before Aristophanes. The account in Pseudo-
Arcadius may possibly have been fabricated by Jacob Diassorinus (cent. 16;
see Cohn in Pauly-Wissowa, s,v, Arkadies), Cp. Lentz, Herodiani relL I xxxvii.
• Nauck, /.f., pp. 16 — 18 ; Lehrs, Di Aristarchi Studiis Uomwicis^ p. 331*,
note 340; Reifferscheid, Suetoni Reliquiae, p. 137 — 144.
* Nauck, /. r., p. 33.
^ Od, XV 19, 8a, 88 ; xviii 181 etc., quoted by Cobet, Misc, Crit, 335 — 7.
VIII.] . ARISTOPHANES OF BYZANTIUM. 12/
Besides his Homeric labours, he edited the Theogpny of
Hesiod, and the lyric poets, Alcaeus, Anacreon and Pindar. In
the case of Pindar lie produced what was probably the first
collected edition. He divided the odes into sixteen books, eight
on divine, and eight on human themes (els ^cous and c^s dv-
tfpaiirovs). Each of these groups had further subdivisions, viz. i
(on divine themes), hymns^ paeans^ dithyrambs^ prosodia^ parthenia
(the last three in 2 books each); 11 (on human themes), hypor-
chemata (in 2 books), encomia^ threnai^ epinikia (in 4 books). A
book of ceremonial odes was added to i as an appendix to the
parthenia (ra Kcxoipio-ficVa rdv irop^cFioii'), and similarly, at the end
of the book of Nemean odes, which was probably the last of the
four books of epinikia^ an appendix of poems unconnected with
Nemean victories (probably under the name of rk K€x<fopiafi€ya
The general outline of this arrangement assumes that the
titles of the various books in the poet's Zt/e in the Breslau ms are
ultimately due to Aristophanes. FuVther, there is reason to
believe that it was Aristophanes who divided the texts of the
lyrical poets into metrical K<SXa*. The test of metre was thus
easily applied, and interpolations detected*. The scholia on
Pindar, unlike those on Homer, assume a fixed text, and it seems
probable that this text was practically settled by Aristophanes^
In the lyric poets, his erudition enables him to defend readings
which Zenodotus had condemned. Thus *• Anacreon describes a
fawn as forsaken tctpota-trrf^ . . .vn6 fiarpo^, Zenodotus wrote ipo-
tfrarjq (* lovely ') on the ground that only the males have horns.
Aristophanes vindicated the text by showing that the poets ascribe
horns to hinds as well as to stags '*.
' Wilamowitz, Eur. //rr, i 139; cp. Thomas Magister, Fila Findari,
' Dion. Hal. De Comp. Verb. 31, ffAXa...edff oft 'Apitrro^dnit, ij tQ^ AXXwir
r(f lurpiKthv^ dif KSfffirivt rif (fidi (of Pindar) ; cp. i6. 16 (of Simonides). The
MS of Bacchylides is written in xQIXa.
' Thus, in Pindar, Oi. ii 36, ^Xct 94 fuw IlaXXAt aid is followed in many
MSS by 0cX^ov<ri 5i Mcifftu, but the Scholiast remarks : — d^crci ' Apc^ro^dnyt,
V€piTT€6€tw 7dp oArd ^^i wp6f <7df> drrwTpo^i*
^ Wilamowitz, /. r., p. 141 f.
• Lehrs, De Aristarchi Stud, Hem. p. 35a*, quoted in Jebb*s Ifomtr^ p. 93.
The authority for the views of Zenodotus and Aristophanes on this point is the
128 THE ALEXANDRIAN AGE. [CHAP.
It may fairly be inferred from the scholia on Euripides and
Aristophanes that he prepared a recension of both of those
poets. It is probable that he also edited Aeschylus and
Sophocles. He wrote introductions to the plays of all the three
tragic poets, as well as to Aristophanes, and these have survived
in an abridged form in the Arguments (viro^^acic) prefixed to
their plays', which are ultimately founded on the researches of
Aristotle and others of the Peripatetic School*. Aristophanes
also divided the works of Plato into trilogies, viz. (i) Republic,
lUmaeui, Critias\ (2) Sophistes, Politicus, Cratylus\ (3) Laivs,
Minos, Epinomis ; (4) Theaetetus, Euthyphron, Apologia \ (5) Crito,
Phaedo, Letters**, but an arrangement which separates the Crito
and Phaedo from the Apologia cannot be regarded as satisfactory.
He further compiled an important lexicographical work entitled
Xc{cts\ in the course of which he treated of words supposed to be
unknown to ancient writers, or denoting different times of life,
forms of salutation, terms of relationship or civic life or of Attic
or Laconian usage*. The work showed a wide knowledge of
dialects, and marked a new epoch by tracing every word to its
original meaning, thus raising ' glossography ' to the level of
lexicography*. He probably wrote a work on Analogy or gram-
matical regularity, as contrasted with Anomaly or grammatical
irregularity ^ In this work he apparently endeavoured to de-
schoUum of Didymus on Pindar, OL iii 19 = 52, xpvtf'ojr^pwr Aa^r 9i(Kti9.¥
(identified as a reindeer by Professor Ridgeway, Early Age of Greece^ i 360 — 3).
* Schneidewin in Abhdl, d, Coit, Ges, vi 3 — 37.
' Wilamowitz, p. 144 f (see supra^ p. 64 0-
' Diog. Laert. iii 61, ap. Nauck, /. r., p. 350; cp. Christ, p. 439', and
Platotu Stud. p. 5 f.
* A fragment of this work, preserved in a MS of Mount Athos, is published
in Miller's AUlangts^ 417 — 434 ; cp. Cohn, in Jahrb. /. PhiL^ Suppl, xii 185,
and Fresenius, De \ii%ia¥„.excerptis By%antinis^ Wiesbaden, 1875.
'His articles on rpd^cKOi, /dtd^cyM, 5op6^tPoi and {^roc are clearly the
source of the 3rd scholium on Lucian's Phalaris^ ii i.
* Nauck, pp. 69 — 134 ; Susemihl, i 439 f.
' Varro, Z. L* x 68, tertium (analogiae) genus est illud duplex quod dixi,
in quo et res et voces similiter proportione dicuntur, ut bonus tnalust botti nuUi ;
de quorum analogia et Aristophanes et alii scripserunt ; and ix 13, Aristophanes
...qui potius in quibusdam veritatem (=analogiam) quam consuetudinem
•ecutus. Cp. Nauck, pp. 264 — 171 ; Steinthal, ii 78 — 8) ; Susemihl, i 441.
VIII.] THE ALEXANDRIAN CANON. 1 29
termine the normal rules of Greek declension, by drawing
attention to general rules of regular inflexion rather than irregular
and exceptional forms. Among his other works was a great
collection of proverbs, an article on a phrase in Archilochus
{&xyyfiiyrj o-icvraXi;), a treatise on comic masks, and a list of
passages borrowed by Menander^ He also wrote a work on the
irtVaKcs of Callimachus*. Lastly, there is reason to believe that
he drew up lists of the ancient poets who were foremost in the
various forms of poetry. This is inferred from a passage of
Quintilian (x i 54) stating that Apollonius Rhodius is not included
in the ordo a grammatids datus^ 'because Aristarchus and Aris-
tophanes did not include any of their own contemporaries'. In
the same chapter (§ 59) he states that Archilochus was one of the
three iambic poets approved by Aristarchus; elsewhere (i 4i 3)
he describes the ancient gramtnoHci not only as obelising lines
and rejecting certain works as spurious, but also as including
certain authors in their list and entirely excluding others; and
from the first chapter of his tenth book (§§ 46-54) we infer that
the four leading epic poets were Homer, Hesiod, Antimachus and
Panyasis. These passages are almost all the foundation for the
discussions on the Alexandrian canon from the time of Ruhnken'
downwards. Ruhnken regarded it as a classified list of writers of
prose^ as well as verse. Bemhardy* and others limited it to poets
alone, while the canon of the orators has since been regarded
either as the work of the Pergamene school (r. 125 b.c)*, or as
due to Didymus, or still more probably to Caecilius of Calacte*,
^ His indication of Menander*s debt to others was combined with a
marked admiration for the poet expressed in the words, w VLhvivhpt xal /3(<, |
T&rtpct Ap* (ffiQp whrtpw dvifu/A'^aTo ; Syrianus tn Hermogerum^ ii 13 Rabe.
' Athen. 408 F, rh vpbt rodt KoXXiAidxov wtwaxaf, and 336 E, df^aypn^
' //isL CriL Orat, Gr,^ pp. 94 — loo^Opusc. \ 385 — 391; cp. Wolfs
Kleine Schriften^ ii 814.
* Gr. Lin, i* 185—8.
' Brzoska, De canone decern oratorum Atticorum^ 1883.
' Suldas mentions among his works xapaKi^ptt rcSr i ^tirhpfnp, Cp. Meier,
Opusc. i iiof, esp. 138; P. Hartmann, De eancne decern cra/orum, 1891 ;
Susemihl, i 444, 511, ii 484 and esp. 694 f ; and Kroehnert, Canomsne
poitarum scriptorum artificum per antiquitatem fuerunt f 1897; also Heyden-
reich's Erlangen Dissertation^ 1900.
S. Q
I30 THE ALEXANDRIAN AGE. [CHAP.
the friend of Dionysius of Halicornassus. Between the age of
Aristarchus and that of Strabo, Philetas and Callimachus were
added to the canon of the elegiac, and ApoUonius, Aratus,
Theocritus and others, to that of the epic poets. The most
important document bearing on the Alexandrian canon is a list
published by Montfaucon from a ms of the tenth century from
Mount Athos, and (with some variations) by Cramer from a late
MS in the Bodleian. The following are the names included in
this list, as revised by Usener^ who omits late additions. The
last in the list is Polybius, who died more than 50 years after
Aristophanes of Byzantium.
(£pic) PaeiJ (5): Homer, Hesiod, Peisander, Panyasis, Antimachus.
Jatnbic Poets (3) : Semonides, Archilochus, Hipponax.
Tragic Poets (5) : Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Ion, Achaeus.
Comic Poets^ Old (7): Epicharmus, Cratinus, Eupolis, Aristophanes,
Pherecrates, Crates, Plato. Muidle (a): Antiphanes, Alexis. New (5):
Menander, Philippides, Diphilus, Philemon, Apollodonis.
Elegiac Poets (4) : Callinus, Mimnermus, Philetas, Callimachus.
Lyric Poets (9) : Alcman, Alcaeus, Sappho, Stesichonis, Pindar, Bacchy-
lides, Ibycus, Anacreon, Simonides.
Orators (10): Demosthenes, Lysias, Hypereides, Isocrates, Aeschines,
Lycurgus, Isaeus, Antiphon, Andoddes, Deinarchus*.
Historiatu (10): Thucydides, Herodotus, Xenophon, Philistus, Theo-
pompus, Ephorus, Anaximenes, Callisthenes, Hellanicus, Polybius'.
Aristophanes of Byzantium was probably nearly 60 when he
,_,_ ^ counted among his pupils his successor Aristarchus
Artstarcnus f e> \
of Samothrace (r. 217-5—145-3 b.c.), who lived in
Alexandria under Ptolemy Philometor (181-146), and, on the
murder of his pupil Philopator Neos and the accession of
Euergetes II (146), fled to Cyprus, where he died soon after.
His continuous commentaries (uirofuof/uiara) filled no less than
800 volumes, partly as notes for lectures, partly in finished form.
These were valued less highly than his critical treatises (tnrfyf^-
^ Dion, Hal, de Imitatione^ p. 130.
' Deinarchus, omitted by Usener, is restored by Kroehnert.
' On the Canon, see Steffen, De camone qui dicitur Aristophcmis et
AristarcAi, 1876 ; Kroehnert, /. c, (who rejects all * canons' except that of the
Orators); and Susemihl, i 444 — 7 ; and on Aristophanes in general, id. i 4^8 —
448; Qirist, f 435' ; Cohn i.v. in Pauly-Wissowa; and HUbner*s i^i^/%ra-
pAie, § u.
VIII.] ARISTARCH US. 1 3 1
fmra) on such subjects as the I/iad and Odyssey^ on the naval
camp of the Achaeans, and on Philetas and on Xenon (one of the
earliest of the choritontes^ who ascribed the Iliad and the Odyssey
to different poets). As a commentator he avoided the display of
inelevant erudition, while he insisted that each author was his
own best interpreter. He also placed the study of grammar on a
sound basis ; he was among the earliest of the grammarians who
definitely recognised eight parts of speech. Noun, Verb, Participle,
Pronoun, Article, Adverb, Preposition and Conjunction*. As a
grammarian he maintained the principle of Analogy^ as opposed
to that of Anomaly, He produced recensions of Alcaeus,
Anacreon and Pindar; commentaries on the Lycurgus of Aes-
chylus, and on Sophocles and Aristophanes ; and recensions, as
well as commentaries, in the case of Archilochus and Hesiod.
He had a profound knowledge of Homeric vocabulary, and was
the author of two recensions of the Iliad and the Odyssey^ with
critical and explanatory symbols in the margin of each. These
symbols were six in number: (i) the obelus — to denote a spurious
line, already used by Zenodotus and Aristophanes (p. 126);
(2) the dipU (StTrAiJ) >, denoting anything notable either in
language or matter ; (3) the dotted dipU (ScirX^ vtpitariyfiiyrj) >,
drawing attention to a verse in which the text of Aristarchus
differed from that of Zenodotus ; (4) the asterisk (dorcpurfcoc) 41 ,
marking a verse wrongly repeated elsewhere; (5) the stigm^ or
dot (o'Tiy/iii;), used by itself as a mark of suspected spuriousness,
and also in conjunction with (6) the antisigma D, in a sense
differing from that of Aristophanes, to denote lines in which the
order had been disturbed, the dots indicating the lines which
ought immediately to follow the line marked with the antisigma
<cp. p. 140)'.
^ Srofia, ^/M, furox^t dtrrvPVfUa, ApBpow, iwlppftiftat wpM€ffit, v^iwiaat
{6ifOfia included the Adjective). Quint, i 4, to, alii ex idoneis...auctoribus
octo partes secuti sunt, ut Aristarchus.
* Lehrs and Reifferscheid, quoted on p. 116; Ludwich, Aristarcks
Homerische Textkritik^ pp. 19 — 13 ; and Jebb's H9mer^ p. 94. Similar sym-
bols were used in an edition of Plato (Diog. Laert. iii fi^ sometimes identified
with that of Aristophanes of Byzantium, mentioned on p. 148 (Gomperz, Plai.
AufsatUy ii). On Aristarchus see also Wilamowitz, Eur. Her, p. 138^;
P. Cauer's Grundfragen^ 11 — 35; Susemihl, i 451 — 463; Cohn j.v. in Pauly-
Wissowa ; and Hiibner's BibliograpkU% f 1 «.
2
132 THE ALEXANDRIAN AGE. [CHAP.
In his criticisms on Homer three points have been noticed,
(i) His careful study of Homeric language. Thus he observes
that in Homer cSSc never means *here' or * hither*, but always
* thus ' ; that /SoAXciv is used of missiles, ovriXuv of wounding at
close quarters; ^^os of * flight', and irdvos of the 'stress' of
battle. (2) His strong reliance on manuscript authority^ and, in
cases of conflicting readings, on the poet's usage. In contrast
with Zenodotus, he abstained from merely conjectural readings^
and wa3 even censured by later critics for excess of caution.
(3) His comments on the subject-matter^ comparing the Homeric
versions of myths with those in other writers, and noticing charac-
teristic points of Homeric civilisation. His interest in topography
led him to make a plan of the Trojan and the Greek camp ; and
to notice that *Apyos IIcXaarytfcoF denotes Thessaly, and *Apyos
'AxoiicoF the Peloponnesus ^ As a critic he is more sober and
judicious than Zenodotus and Aristophanes, but he sometimes
lapses, like his predecessors, into an over-fondness for finding
' improprieties ' of expression in the plain and unaflected style of
Homer*.
The Homeric mss accessible to Aristarchus mainly fall into
two groups, those bearing the names of (i) persons^ or (2) places.
The former are known as ai «car' avSpa (^icSdo-cic) \ the latter as at
Kara iroXcts, or oX diro (or Ik^ or Sia) rwv itoXcwf, or ax rwv iroXcwv.
The former are often cited by the name of the editor: — Anti-
machus, Zenodotus, Rhianus, Sosigenes, Philemon, Aristophanes ;
the latter, by the names of the places from which they came : —
Massilia, Chios, Argos, Sinope, Cyprus, Crete and Aeolis; but
the Cretan edition was probably not used by Aristarchus, and the
Aeolian is cited only for some variants in the Odyssey. Besides
these groups there were other texts denoted as 'common' or
'popular' (fcoivat, Si/fuuScif), representing the 'vulgate' of the
day, described as ' the more careless ' (clKacorcpat) as contrasted
with the * more accurate ' or * scholarly ' (xopuo-Tcpai)'.
* Jcbb*s Horner^ p. 94 f. * Cobet, Misc, Crii. 129.
• La Koche, Hotn, Textkriiik^ p. 45 f ; Ludwich, /. f., i 3—16 ; Jcbb's
Nom^t p. 91 f ; and Mr T. W. Allen in Class, Rev. 1901, pp. 941—6, The
eccentric editions and Aristarchus, On the history of the Homeric poems in
the Alexandrian age cp. Mr D. B. Monro's ed. of Odyssey xiii — xiv, pp. 418 —
454-
VIII.] THE TEXT OF HOMER. 1 33
The extant evidence for the text of Homer is to be found
mainly in the two mss in Venice, A and B, belonging to the loth
and nth century respectively, together with statements in the
scholia in the earlier of these, mss, and quotations in ancient
authors. From these materials what may be called the ' vulgate '
text of Homer has been formed, and down to the year 1891 the
evidence of Homeric papyri^ going back as far as the Christian
era, was in agreement with this text. In contrast with this text
were the readings of the Alexandrian critics, and certain of the
quotations in ancient authors. In 1891 fragments of an earlier
papyrus of Iliad xi 502-537, found by Mr Flinders Petrie among
dated documents belonging to 263-224 b.c and published by
Professor Mahaffy, supplied indications of a text differing from
the vulgate and including four more lines in a passage consisting
of 39 lines. Similar phenomena were noticed in the fragment
published by M. Nicole at Geneva in 1894, and by Messrs
Grenfell and Hunt in 1897. Two suggestions arose from these
discoveries. The first was that these Ptolemaic papyri repre-
sented a prolix prae-Alexandrian text, before it was cut down
into the current text by the criticisms of Zenodotus, Aristophanes
and Aristarchus. But this suggestion is opposed to the evidence
of the scholia^ which record the readings preferred by the
Alexandrian critics and show that the Alexandrian school had
hardly any effect on the traditional text The second suggestion
was that the remarkable additions to the Homeric text found in
nearly all the few Ptolemaic papyri proved that the vulgar text of
the present day could not have been in existence in the Ptolemaic
times, but must have come into existence, later.. But (1) the
statements in the scholia relating to the Alexandrian critics,
Didymus and Aristonicus, who distinguish between the editions of
their Alexandrian predecessors, especially those of Aristarchus,
and certain other editions, known as 'common' or 'popular',
show that a vulgar text of some sort or other was in existence in
Alexandrian times. (2) The evidence of quotations in prae-
Alexandrian writers shows that their text of Homer was sub-
stantially the same as ours. 152 portions of the Homeric text
are quoted by 29 writers from Herodotus downwards, and the
480 lines (or thereabout) thus quoted do not include more than
134 THE ALEXANDRIAN AGE. [CHAP.
9 to 1 1 lines in addition to the ordinary text. It may thus be
inferred that the ordinary Homeric text preceded the Alexandrian
age and that it existed as early as the fifth century b.c The
Ptolemaic /o/^ri may therefore be regarded simply as a few stray
examples of eccentric texts of Homer, and texts no less eccentric
may have been not unknown to the author of the Second Alci-
biades^^ and to Aeschines and Plutarch, who occasionally quote
from a text including lines not found in the ordinary text of
Homer".
Notwithstanding the very slight impression which Aristarchus
produced on the current text of Homer, later writers had a
profound respect for his authority as a critic. In the Venice ms
(A) of Homer the scholiast on //. ii 316 knows that the accent of
nT^vyof is normally proparoxytone, but accepts the paroxytone
nTcpvyof solely on the authority of Aristarchus'; and on //. iv
23s he follows Aristarchus in preference to Hemiappias, 'even
although the latter appears to be in the right '^ His power of
critical divination is recognised by Panaetius, who calls him a
•diviner'*; and with Cicero (ad Att, i 14, 3) and Horace (A. P,
450) his name is a synonym for a great critic, and it has so
^ 149 D. 'The fact that this spurious quotation is found in a spurious
Platonic dialogue only emphasizes the fact that to the real Plato Homer is our
Homer, neither more nor less ' (Leaf* on //. viii 548 f)*
' See esp. Ludwich, Die Homtr^vulgata als voralexandrinische erwitsen,
1898, rev. by MrT. W. Allen in Class, Rev, 1899, pp. 39— 41. In the same
volume, p. 334 f, Mr Allen shows that the modern Homeric text is identical
with the ancient vulgate to the extent of about 60 per cent, of the passages
where its reading are noticed, and further .that in about 10 per cent, the
ancient vulgate was in conflict with another text, and in about 30 per cent, had
been dislodged by that text. On p. 439 f he shows that, of the known
readings of Arlitarolias (664 in number), between one-fifth and one-sixth have
left no trace whatever in our mss, and only one-tenth are found in all Mss
hitherto collated. In Clcus, Rev, 1900, p. 141 f, he shows that of the known
readings of Zanodotui (385 in number) 359 survive in none of our mss, and
the rest in all or some, only 4 being found in all ; also that of the readings
peculiar to ArlftophanM of Bjnanttiiin (81), 46 are found in none of our mss,
and the rest in some or all, only two being found in all.
' wti$6fii0a airtf wf wdt^v dpUm^ ypafiftATiKt}.
* c/ Kol 9oK€i 6.\fi0€^tuf, This grammarian is also quoted on xi 336, xiii
137, but is otherwise unknown.
* fidmt, Athen. 634 c.
VIII.] CALLISTRATUS. HERMIPPUS. APOLLODORUS. 1 35
remained ever since. He was the founder of scientific Scholar-
ship. He was also the head of a School, and Apollodorus,
Ammonius and Dionysius Thrax were among the most famous of
his forty pupils. Even the king (Euergetes II), whose accession
in 146 was the signal for a persecution of his Hellenic subjects
from which men of letters, like Aristarchus, were not exempt,
discussed points of Homeric criticism with his courtiers far into
the night, and himself proposed an ingenious emendation of a
line in the Odyssey (v 72)*.
Next to Aristarchus, the most important pupil of Aristophanes
was Callistratus, whose admiration for his master
led to a bitter feud with Aristarchus. He wrote
criticisms on the passages in Homer attacked by the latter, as
well as a commentary on the IHad^ and on Pindar, Sophocles,
Euripides and Aristophanes'.
Before turning to the pupils of Aristarchus, we must mention
a pupil of Callimachus, Hermippus of Smyrna, the
author of an extensive biographical and biblio-
graphical work, connected with his master's Finakes and including
lives of literary celebrities and lists of their writings, so far as they
were preserved in the Alexandrian Library. The work is cited
under its various subdivisions. On the Legislators, On the Seven
Wise Men, On Pythagoras, Gorgias, Isocrates, Aristotle and
Chrysippus (d. 204 B.C.). It was one of the chief authorities
followed by Diogenes Laertius, and by Plutarch in his Lives of
Lycurgus, Solon and Demosthenes'.
Apollodorus of Athens (fl, 144 b.c) was a pupil of Aris-
tarchus in Alexandria, which he left c. 146 B.C.
After 144 B.C. he dedicated to Attalus II of
Pergamon a great work on Chronology, beginning with the
fall of Troy and ending with the above date. The work was
^ Plut. aU aduL 17, 60 A, IlToXeiiai^i ^CKi»iiM.9ti9 dotcoOrrt wtfl ykAmn Kml
erixi^^ov Koi Iffroplat fiax^/uwoi ftdxp*^ fU^ww 9vktQ» dw4rt»w. Athen. 61 C,
IlroX. 6 d€&rtpot EOtpyinft wap* *0/iijfHfi d^coc ypd^tw^ * ^^ M Xtc^wrt
fiaXaKol elov -ffii ^eXirov.' 0'ia (a marsh plant) yitp furii etXbw ^&t90ai dXXd
^^ fa (Susemihl, i 9).
' R. Schmidt. De Caliisiraio Aristophaneo, reprinted with Nauck, Aristopk,
Byt, ; cp. Susemihl, i 449 f.
* Christ, § 432'; Susemihl, i 493 — 5.
136 THE ALEXANDRIAN AGE [CHAP.
afterwards brought down to 119 b.c. It was written in comic
trimeters, possibly as an aid to the memory; it unfortunately
superseded the probably far greater chronological work of Erato-
sthenes, and took its place as a great storehouse of chronological
facts. Apollodorus is named by Cicero {ad Att xii 23, 2) as likely
to throw light on the date of an Epicurean philosopher and of
certain politicians at Athens. Where the exact date of the birth
and death of any personage was unknown, he used some im-
portant date in that personage's active life to determine the time
at which he flourished ; this was called his ^fnf and was regarded
as corresponding approximately to the age of 40. Following in
the track of Eratosthenes and of Demetrius of Scepsis, he wrote
a commentary in 12 books on the Homeric catalogue of ships,
often quoted by Strabo ; also on Sophron and Epicharmus, and
on Etymology, and further a geographical compendium in iambic
verse, and an important work in 24 books on the Religion of
Greece (s-cpl 0c«i»v)^ Some of the numerous fragments of this
work are inconsistent with the corresponding passages in the
mythological Bibliotheca^ which bears the name of the same
author. Between 100 and 55 B.C. a handbook of mythology was
compiled, which became the source from which Diodorus, Hyginus
and Pausanias drew their information on this subject ; this was
also the source of the extant Bibliotheca (possibly of the time of
Hadrian) bearing the name of Apollodorus*.
Aristarchus was succeeded by his pupil Ammonius, who
devoted himself mainly to the exposition and the
defence of his master's recensions of Homer. He
wrote * on the absence of more than two editions of the Homeric
recension of Aristarchus ', ' on Plato's debt to Homer ', and also
' on Prosody ', probably in the course of his criticisms on Homer.
He was one of the main authorities followed by Didymus in his
work on the recension of Homer by Aristarchus. Lastly, he
wrote a commentary on Pindar, in which he appears to have
followed in his master's footsteps*.
^ Christ, I 608' ; Susemihl, ii 33 — 44 ; Schwarz in Pauly- Wissowa, s»v.
p. 4857 — 75; and HUbner's Bibliographies | 14, p. 31.
' Christ, I 576'; Susemihl, ii 50 f ; cp. Schwarz, /. r., p. 3875 — 86.
' Susemihl, ii 153; Pauly -Wissowa, s,v* p. 1865.
VIII.] AMMONIUS. DIONYSIUS THRAX. 1 37
Another eminent pupil of Aristarchus was Dionysius Thrax
(bom c, 166 B.c). In his admiration for his
master's apparently perfect familiarity with all the xhnuT^"*
tragedies in existence, he painted his master's
portrait with a figure representing Tragedy (possibly on a breast-
plate) near his heart'. He afterwards taught in Rhodes, where he
made a model of Nestor's cup (//. xi 632-5), the material for
which was provided by means of a subscription on the part of his
pupils. But his main title to fame is that he was the author of
the earliest Greek Grammar. This is still extant. It is a work
of less than z6 printed pages'. It begins by defining Grammar
(p. 8 supra\ and stating its parts (dmyvuKrtv, ^trn^^^j yXwra^v
Koi IvropiQv aird&xrif, ^rv/uioXoyta, avaXoytaf ^«r\oyicrfuSf, Kpi<n%
iroirnjuartav). It next deals with Accentuation (tovos). Punctuation
(crrtyfii;). Letters and Syllables (o-rotxcia kcu (rvAAa^ou), and, after
enumerating the Parts of Speech (ovo^ia, /^/ao, fjuiroxrj^ apBpov,
avTUivvfuoLj np60€fn%^ inipprjfia, crvvSco-fioc), ends with Declension
and Conjugation, without including either Syntax or precepts on
Style. In this Grammar ovofia includes not only the Noun, but
also the Adjective and the Demonstrative and Interrogative
Pronouns ; and apOpov, not only the Article but also the Relative
Pronoun ; while Avrtowfua {* Pronoun ') is limited to the Personal
and Possessive Pronouns'. It remained the standard work on
grammar for at least 13 centuries. It was known to the great
grammarians of the imperial age, Apollonius and Herodian.
Among its many commentators may be mentioned Choeroboscus
(end of cent. 6), Stephanus (early in cent. 7), and (not much
later) Heliodorus and Melampus\ It became the source of the
grammatical catechisms (iptori^fiara) of the Byzantine age, e.g.
that of Moschopulos, and also of the manuals introduced into
Italy during the Renaissance by Byzantine refugees such as
Chrysoloras, Gaza, Constantine Lascaris and Chalcondylas. The
' Aristarchus, however, was sometimes criticised severely by his pupil, as
appears from the scholia on //. ii 361,' xiii 103.
' YifiV\itT'% Anecdoia Gr. (1816), pp.619 — ^43 > £ngl* trans, by T. Davidson,
1874: the best text is that of Uhlig, 1883. It was apparently written at
Rhodes, under Stoic influence.
' Classen, De Gram, Gr.prim,, p. 85.
^ Susemihl, ii 173 note. Cp. A. Hilgard's ed. of the ScAviia, 1901.
138 THE ALEXANDRIAN AGE. [CHAP.
Greek terms of this treatise thus survived for many centuries;
e.g. (hro|u^ ycvof, dpiO/ioi, irXio'cts (* Declensions'), mrwo-cis ('Cases'),
irrakrif SvofiatrTiKtf koX tvOtia (Nom.), yCFimJ (Gen.), Sortm; (Dat),
alriaruai (Acc), KXiynio; (Voc.); ^|u^ avCvyiai (* Conjugations'),
8ia^«r€is ('Voices'), ^icXorcis (* Moods'), XP®*'®* ('Tenses'),
wpoautira ('Persons'). With a strict adherence to Attic usage
the Active and Passive Foices are here exemplified by rvnrw and
rvrro/AOi, the Numbers by tvittw, twittctoi' and Tunro/uifi', and the
Persons (in inferior mss) by tvhtw, tuittcis, iwrci. It was ap-
parently in the Canons of the late Alexandrian grammarian
Theodosius (probably a friend of Synesius of Cyrene,yf. 400 a.d.),
that this verb appeared for the first time with the complete
paradigm of all its imaginary moods and tenses. Before the end
of the fifth century this paradigm was included in the Armenian
and Syriac versions of the supplements to Dionysius Thrax ' ;
and, through the Manuals of the Renaissance, it has found its
way into modem Grammars, although, as is now well known, the
Present and Imperfect, Active and Passive, were the only tenses
actually used in Attic prose of the Athenian age*.
Among the Romans, Varro was indebted to the Grammar of
Dionysius Thrax for his definition of the * Persons ' of the Verb,
and for that of Grammar itself. It was also the authority followed
by Suetonius, by Remmius Palaemon (the teacher of Quintilian),
and (probably at second hand) by later Roman grammarians,
such as Donatus, Diomedes, Charisius and Dositheus. The
original text was known to Priscian.
Dionysius Thrax was also the writer of two or three rhetorical
works, together with a critique on Crates, and commentaries on
the Works and Days of Hesiod, and on the Odyssey and the
liiad. In this last he followed Aristarchus in actually regarding
Homer as a native of Athens'.
It is sometimes stated that Dionysius Thrax taught in Rome
as well as in Rhodes. This arises from a confusion
between Dionysius and his pupil, Tyrannion the
^ ed. Uhlig, pp. liii, 49, 51.
' Cp. Dero. Siiict Private Orations^ it, Excursus to Speech against Conon.
* Christ, § 439^; Susemihl, ii 168 — 175; and HUbner's BibliographU^ § 14^
p. 10.
VIII.] TYRANNION. DIDYMUS. 1 39
elder, who was taken to Rome by Lucullus and was a teacher
there in the time of Pompey the Great Tyrannion was among
the first to recognise the value of the Aristotelian mss transported
to Rome by Sulla in 86 b.c (p. 85). His pupil, Tyrannion the
younger, who reached Rome as a prisoner and owed his freedom
to Terentia, the wife of Cicero, wrote on Homeric prosody and
on the parts of speech, and on the connexion between the Greek
and Latin languages*.
The most versatile and industrious of all the successors of
Aristarchus was Didymus {c. 65 B.C.-10 a.d.), who
taught at Alexandria, and perhaps also in Rome*.
To his prodigious industry he owed the notable name of CAalc-
enterus*. He is said to have written between 3500 and 4000
books, and we are not surprised to learn that he sometimes forgot
in one book what he had himself written in another^. He is
described by Macrobius (v 18) as grammaticorum facile eru-
ditissimus omniumque quique sint quique fuerint instructissimus.
His lexicographical labours included treatises on ' metaphors ', on
' words of doubtful meaning ', on ' names corrupted by change of
spelling ', and two vast works on the language of Comedy, and on
the language of Tragedy (Xc^cis #coi/tuicat and rpaynrou). The last
two (and especially the second of these) may be regarded as the
ultimate source of most of the lexicographical learning which has
come down to us in Athenaeus and the scholia^ and in the
lexicons of Hesychius and Photius. The a 8th book of the
work on the language of Tragedy is cited by Harpocration' ; and
one of the longer fragments is preserved by Macrobius*. Turning
to his labours as an editor, textual critic and commentator, we
have first to mention his elaborate attempt to restore the Homeric
recension of Aristarchus in his work ircpl r^v 'Apurropxc^v Siop-
^(MTcws. Aristarchus had produced two recensions of the text;
but both were lost, and Didymus had to restore their readings
1 Christ, § 441*.
' Susemihl, ii 195, note 364; and esp. Wilamowitz, Eur. Her, 157 — 1$8.
' XaXir/i^repot, cp. Amm. Marc, xxii 16, 16, multiplids scientiae copia
memorabilis.
^ Quint, i 8, 19, cp. Athen. 139 c.
' x.v. ^paXoi^cV.
* V 18 S§ 9, II, un the use of *Ax<Xv^ for water in general.
140 THE ALEXANDRIAN AGE. [CHAP.
with the help of transcripts together with such evidence as could
be derived from the critical monographs and the continuous
commentaries of Aristarchus. At the end of each book of the
Iliad in the Venice ms of Homer known as A, Didymus is
mentioned, together with his younger contemporary, Aristonicus,
and Herodian, the author of a treatise on the prosody and
accentuation of the Iliad {c. i6o a.d.), and Nicanor, the writer
on Homeric punctuation (c, 130 a-d.), as one of the sources of
the scholia in that MS. The following is a simple example of a
scholium on //. x 306, in which the readings preferred by
Zenodotus, Aristophanes and Aristarchus are all recorded : —
of Kfv dtpto-TC^Mri Ooijit iirl vtivorlv *Axau*v,
^op4ovffi¥ d/iOfioifa IliyXc^iiira (cp. 1. 313)* 'Apcoro^oi^t icaXoi&t ot
^op4ovai¥*
In the following passage (//. viii 535-541) we have critical
symbols in the margin, with a scholium giving the statement by
Aristonicus of the views of Zenodotus and Aristarchus, and adding
that the statement of those views by Didymus was identical with
that of Aristonicus : —
a
3 aiJpiov i{v ctpcn^v 8104(0*1701, ft k' fyjdv t^X^
3 |if(vt|i lirfpx^P<*^ov* c^* ^ «p«(rouriV, itm,
3 KiCo'flTOi ovrv|6f(t, iroXtftt 8' d^' nMv frotpoi,
• iffXCov dlvi^VTOf h oi^piov. H yd^ fy4v i%
• cCtpr d^flCvarof koX clYifpfif ^d&ara vdnu,
• Tio{|ii|v 8' lit rUr' 'A0ipra(i| koX 'AvdXXwv,
lit vOv if|Upi| 48c Koicdv ^pci 'ApY*^^^*^^*
5rc rj ToArovt M roi>t rptit ffrlxovt iU»tVy oft rb ijnlffiyiM wapdKtirat, 19
rodf ^^t rpcit, off al ^riy/ial wapdicttprtw c/t yap rV a<I^V yr^pafifUwoi tM
didMOioi^, iyxpUti di ftSXKotf 6 *Ap(0Tapxot rods 8«VT4povt itik r6 iravx^^njcco-
ripwn c&m ro(>t Xoyovt* 6 6i Zip^5orof ro^ wptl^ovt Tp€U o^M iypa^p, rd
airh. 9i \iyti w€pl rC^ ffrlxvi^ toOtvp h Aidv/iot cE kqX 6*ApiffT6wiKot* 8i6 o^k
iypdyffaiup ri. AiiOfJLOv, (In the MS the third ffrvyfi^ should have been prefixed
to the last line, and not to the last but one, which was apparently absent from
the recension of Aristarchus ^)
^ Aristophanes, Aristarchus and his successor Ammonius, as well as
Didymus and Aristonicus, are mentioned in the interesting stkolia on //. x
398, partly quoted in Leaf's n.
VIII.] DIDYxMUS. 141
Didymus also wrote commentaries on Hesiod, Pindar and
Bacchylides, and on Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides.-
Many of the scholia on Pindar and Sophocles, as well as the
extant Lives of the three tragic poets, are probably in the main
due to Didymus. He further commented on the comic poets,
Eupolis, Cratinus, and Aristophanes, the extant scholia on the
last being traceable through Symmachus to Didymus, and ulti-
mately to Aristophanes of Byzantium'. Extending his industry
to prose, he produced an edition of Thucydides, whose life by
Marcellinus is, either entirely, or at least as far as regards $§ x-
45, taken from Didymus'; also of the Attic orators Antiphon,
Isaeus, Hypereides, Aeschines and Demosthenes, besides at
least ten books of rhetorical memoranda on the orators, and a
monograph ircpi tv^ huia.riLvtfau His grammatical works included
a treatise on inflexions (ircpl icaAQf¥\ and on orthography; his
literary and antiquarian works, a treatise on myths and legends
(fcio; Icrropta), on the birthplace of Homer, on the death of
Aeneas, on Anacreon and Sappho*, on the lyric poets, on the
amoves of Solon \ on proverbs, and even on the De Republica of
Cicero.
Notwithstanding his restoration of the Aristarchic recension of
Homer, he appears to have had an imperfect sense of the re-
quirements of systematic textual criticism. His younger contem-
porary, Aristonicus of Alexandria, wrote a treatise on the critical
signs used by Aristarchus ; and, wherever the views of Didymus
differ from those of Aristonicus, the latter are as a rule to be
preferred*. The work of Aristonicus was probably written before
that of Didymus on the same general subject*, and appears to
have given a more complete account of the passages criticised by
Aristarchus^ In the comments of Didymus on Pindar and
Aristophanes, and on Sophocles and Euripides, there is little
^ Symmachus^. 100 B.C. (Wilamowitz, Eur* Her, i 179); cp. O. Schneider,
De veterum in Ar, schoUorum fontibtts^ pp. 59 — 63.
' Susemihl, ii 103, note 314.
• Seneca, Ep, 88 § 37. * Plut. Solon, i.
• Cp. Christ, § 443', p. 611; Wilamowitz, /. r., 161.
• Lehrs, /. f., 18'; Ludwich, Aristarchs Homerische Textkritik neuh den
Fragtnenten ties Didymos^ i 51.
' Ludwich, i 60 f .
142 THE ALEXANDRIAN AGE. [CHAP.
trace of any exceptional acumen ; but he deserves our gratitude
for gathering together the results of earlier work in criticism and
exegesis, and transmitting these results to posterity. The age of
creative and original scholars was past, and the best service that
remained to be rendered was the careful preservation of the varied
stores of ancient learning; and this service was faithfully and
industriously rendered by Didymus\
Among the younger contemporaries of Didymus was a
specialist in grammar and pure scholarship, who flourished under
Augustus, named Tryphon, son of Ammonius,
probably not the pupil of Aristarchus bearing that
name (p. 136). Fragments of his works are preserved by writers
such as Apollonius Dyscolus, Herodian, Athenaeus, and a third
Ammonius {c. 389 a.d.) who abridged a work on Synonyms by
Herennius Philo (c. 100 a.d.). It appears from these fragments
that, besides dealing with points of orthography and prosody, and
with various parts of speech, he wrote on purity of Greek, on
ancient style, on terms of music, and on names of plants and
animals. Late abridgements of his works on letter-changes and
on tropes and metres are still extant, but many of them
now survive in their titles alone, e.g. those on the dialect of
Homer and the lyric poets, and on Doric and Aeolic Greek.
The titles of several show that he was a strict adherent of
•Analogy*".
Theon the ' grammarian ', of Alexandria, who flourished under
Tiberius, wrote a commentary on the Odyssey, and
possibly also on Pindar; and, like Didymus, he
compiled a lexicon of comic diction. Besides completing the
commentary of his father, Artemidorus, on the Alna of Calli-
machus, he was himself a commentator on Lycophron, Theo-
critus, Apollonius Rhodius, and Nicander. To the poets of the
Alexandrian age he stood in the same relation as that of Didymus
to the great writers of the classical age of Athens. He has
1 WiUmowitz, Eur. /fer, i 157 — 166; cp. Christ, | 443'; Susemihl, ii
1^^ — 310; M. Schmidt, Did, fragm. (1854); ^'^^ HUbner*s BibliographU^
I I4t P' ««•
' Christ, § 554'; Susemihl, ii 110— -3; Fragments collected by Velsen
(Berlin) 1853.
VriL] TRVPHON. THEON. I43
accordingly been aptly described as 'the Didymus of the
Alexandrian poets".
In this brief notice of Tryphon and Theon, we have already
passed the chronological limits of this Book. Later Alexan-
drians, beginning with Pamphilus and Apion, are reserved for
the Roman age.
' Christ, 9 555*1 SuKinih], ii 115—7. Cp. Maais in Phil. Unl. iii 33, and
cp. Wilimowilt, I.e., i 156, i6t, (86.
Gold OctadraciIm op Ptolemy II and Aksinob II
inscribed QEHN AAEA4>nN.
(Prom ihe Briiish Museum.)
For other portraits of Ptolemy I, Berenike I and their vm ftolemy II see
the sard from the Muithead collection Hfured in Mr C. W. King's AiiHqiu
Gtms ami Jtinjp, I p. ix and II pi. xlvii 6, and supposed by Mr King to have
been engraved for ihe Signet of Plolemy II,
CHAPTER IX.
THE STOICS AND THE SCHOOL OF PERGAMON.
Grammar was studied by the Stoics, not as an end in itself,
but as a necessary part of a complete system of
The dialectics. Much of their terminolof|[y has become
Qraminar of .
the Stoics a permanent part of the grammanan s vocabulary,
and some of their views on matters of language
may seem to the modem reader very far from novel. They
distinguished between the inarticulate cries of animals, and the
articulate voice of man (^t^ tyapOpoij, The latter might be
either reduced to writing (ly7pafi/xos) or not (aypa/ifibs). When
reduced to writing, it became a Xc^is, having for its elements the
24 letters. They further distinguished between the sound (oroc-
X<iov) of the letter, and its written character (xapaicnip rov
<rroiX€iov), and the name of the character (e.g. oA.^). They
regarded the letters as consisting of seven vowels and six con-
sonants (P y it ^ K r), the rest being perhaps loosely regarded as
semivowels. From these letters words (Xc^tis) were formed,
either conveying sense (o-i/ftavrticai) or not. The former became
a Xoyos ; Xcyciv was the expression of reason in words, while wpo-
it>€p€<rOai was merely the utterance of a sound. Speech might be
either in Prose or Verse ; it was also of a twofold nature, appealing
to the ear and to the mind'. While the earlier Stoics recognised
four parts of speech, ovofia, ^rjfia^ avvitcrfio^t apOpov, Chrysippus
distinguished between 6vofia as * a proper name ' (e.g. Swicpan/s ),
and wofia wpoariyopucov, nomen appellatwutn (e.g. aK^fxuiros). Under
* Diog. Laert. vii 55—58; cp. R. Schmidt, Stoicorum GreunnuUica, p. 18 f;
Griifenhan, Cesch, cUr Fhiioiogie, i 441 1 505; Steinthal, S^tukwissenschaft^ i*
191—3, and Egger, /. c, p. 349 f.
CHAP. IX.] THE GRAMMAR OF THE STOICS. I45
ofiOpov was included the pronoun as well as the article, and it
was noticed that, while the apOpov was inflected, the <rw8c<rftoc
was not The definition of the ^17/Aa is identical with that of the
Kan/ydpi/fuz, Or predicate. Predicates may be active {6pOa)f
passive (vimo), or neuter (ovScrcpa). A special variety of the
verbs passive in form, but not in sense, are the 'reflexive causative'
verbs (Avrwrciroi^oTa) now generally called * middle *. The term
irrcMTK or 'inflexion' is applied by the Stoics to the noun and
the apOpov (pronoun and adjective), not to the verb. While
Aristotle calls the nominative ovo/xo, and the oblique cases
TTToxrct?, the Stoics apply nroia'ts to the nominative as well, but
they do not (like Aristotle) call an adverb a m-oKris of the
corresponding adjective ^ In fact they conflne irrcoacs to the four
cases, the nominative {opOri nrwri^ or cv^cio, casus rectus) and the
three oblique cases (irToKrcw irXayioi), the genitive (yevMciy), the
dative (80x1107) and the accusative (alriarucf}. The original
meaning of these oblique cases was soon forgotten ; the accusative
did not originally mean the case that denotes the object of an
accusation, but the case that denotes the eflect of (ro ainaTov,
* that which is caused by ') an action ; so that its original meaning
is best expressed by the epithet effccHvus or causativus. Again,
ycviici; to the Stoics could only mean the case that denotes the
7CV0S or kind or class (as in the 'partitive' genitive), although
Priscian afterwards translated it by generalis*. A verb, when
used with a nominative subject, is called by the Stoics a avfiPapa
(e.g. ircpiirarci) ; when used with an oblique case a mpojovpfiofia
(e.g. ftcra/mcXci). A verb with a nominative subject needing an
oblique case to complete the sentence is called tkarrov if ovfiPtifAa
(e.g. nXara>v ^iXci AuDi^a) ; a verb with an oblique case needing
another oblique case to complete the sentence is called cXarrov ^
wapaavfifiafjia (e.g. Sfo'cparci ficrafiAct 'AXici^iaSovs)'. In Other
words, we have two kinds of verb, personal and impersonal, and
each of these kinds may be either transitive or intransitive.
Time past, present and future was distinguished as (xp^vo^)
irap^)(rjfjL€vo^, ivtartik and fii\\<av. The Stoics named the present
and past tenses as follows :
* Supra, p. 97. Steinthal, i 197 — 303.
* Zeller*s Stoics etc. p. 94. * Steinthal, i 306.
s. 10
146 THE ALEXANDRIAN AGE. [CHAP.
Present: ixP^^) ^tarCn waparaTiK^ (or drcXi^).
Imperfect: wafHpxVf^'^ot waparariKot (or drcXi^t).
Perfect: hearCn awreXucdt (or rAccot).
Pluperfect: wapi^fifUfot avtrr€\uc6t (or rAccot).
The above four tenses, whether rcAcioi or drcXcTf, are all
wpiafiivotf (tempora) finita\ the other tenses, whether future or
past, are ddpurroi; but, while the future is called h ft^XAoiv
(xpovos), the term dopicrros is only used of the past\
The Stoics also paid special attention to Etymology. They
regarded language as a product of nature, and * onomatopoeia ' as
the principle on which words were first formed. This is defi-
nitely stated by Origen', and the statement is confirmed in a
treatise bearing the name of St Augustine'; while, before the
time of either, the fanciful etymologies of the Stoics had been
singled out for attack by Galen ^ Apart from Diogenes Laertius
and certain ancient commentators on Aristotle, our chief authority
for the views of the Stoics on questions of language is the treatise
of St Augustine above mentioned^. Their grammatical theories
were known to Varro, who (as he tells us) combined the study of
Cleanthes with that of Aristophanes of Byzantium*.
The founder of the Stoics, Zeno of Citium (336-264), is said
to have written ircpl Xc^ccdv, and as, in Stoic termi-
nology, \ii\f% is defined as * voice in written form \
it has been conjectured that the work dealt mainly with definitions
of terms, while it included passages in which the author gave an
extended meaning to the term * solecism '^ He also wrote on
^ Steinthal, i 309, 314; T. Rumpel, Casusiehre, 1845, pp. i — 70.
' Contra Celsumy i p. 18, ...wt ^ofd^ovaof ol dv^ r^f Xroas ^6ffei (i^rl rd
^^^iara), fUfAovfUwuif rtotf v/H&rwr ^un^&w rd wpdyfuira Ka0* c5r rd 4r6fuira, Ka$6
teal <rrocx€<a ru^a irv/ioXoylat «lffdyovff»,
' Principia Dialecticat^ c. 6, haec quasi cunabula verborum esse credide-
runt, ut sensus rerum cum sonorum sensu concordarent.
^ De Platonis et ffippocr, Dogm, \\ 3, dXa^i^y ^rc fiofrrvs ij irvfioXoyla...,
(Chrysippus appeals to the evidence of poets and) r^ ptXrlffrriv irvfioKoylw If
re dXXo rocoOroy, d wipeUwti fikv o^d^v, dvoX/o'ircc ^k koI Kararpipti /xdnfif ijfiu^
t6p xP^^' — On the subject in general cp. R. Schmidt, Stoicorum Grammatical
1839; also Steinthal, i 171 — 374; Christ, § 426*, and Susemihl, i 48 — 87.
' Steinthal, i 393 f ; Teuffel, Rom, Ut,^ § 440, 7 Schwabe.
* Varro, Z.Z. v 9, non solum ad Aristophanis lucemam, sed etiam ad
Cleanthis lucubravi.
' A. C. Pearson, Fragments of Zeno and CUanthes^ pp. 37, 81, 81.
IX.] ZENO. CLEANTHES. CHRYSIPPUS. I47
* poetry ', together with five books on * Homeric problems ', full of
allegorical interpretations, which were justly attacked by Aris-
tarchus\ Like Aristotle, he accepted the Margites as a work of
Homeric authorship, and in Od, iv 84 he introduced by emen-
dation a reference to the ' Arabians ' \ He regarded Zeus, Hera
and Poseidon as representing aether, air and water respectively ;
and, in interpreting Hesiod*s Theogony^ he gave free play to his
etymological fancy'. The allegorical interpretation of myths in
general, and of the Homeric poems in particular, was in fact one
of the characteristics of the Stoic school*.
Zeno's successor, Cleanthes of Assos (331-232), wrote on
grammar, and was the first of the Stoics to write on
rhetoric*. In his work ttc^i tov iroiiyTov he treated
of Homer, applying playful etymologies and fanciful allegories to
the interpretation of the poet. In the allegorical sense which he
applies to the herb * moly * we find the earliest known example of
the word AXXi/yopiKws'. With Cleanthes *the Eleusinian mys-
teries are an allegory ; Homer, if properly understood, is a witness
to truth ; the very names given to Zeus, Persephone, Apollo, and
Aphrodite are indications of the hidden meaning which is veiled
but not perverted by the current belief, and the same is true of
the myths of Heracles and Atlas*'. He described poetry as the
best medium for expressing the dignity of divinity'; and his grave
and dignified Hymn to Zeus is still extant*.
As a representative of the grammatical as well as the general
teaching of the Stoics he was less famous than Chry-
sippus (c, 280 — c. 208-4), who is proverbially known
as the Pillar of the Stoic Porch '", cl ft^ yap r\v Xpwrtniro% ovk ^
^v Sroa". He showed his independence of character by de-
* Diog. Laert. vii 4; Dion Chrys. Or. 53, 4.
' Pearson, /.^., pp. 31, 118, 119.
' Pearson, /.c, pp. 13, 155. * Zeller's S/oics, 334 — 348.
• Cic. df Fin. iv 7; Quint, ii 15, 35; Striller, De Stoicorum studiis rhi'
toricis,
• Pearson, pp. 287, 193. ' ib. p. 43.
^ Philodemus, De Musica^ col. 18 ; cp. Seneca, Ep, 108, 10 (f^. p. 179 f ).
* Stobaeus, EcL i i, 13 (fi^. p. 374).
'^ Cic. Ac€ui, ii 75, qui fulcire putabatur porticum Stoiconim.
" Diog. Lraert. vii 183.
10 — 2
148 THE ALEXANDRIAN AGE. [CHAP.
clining an invitation to the court of Alexandria, and by never
dedicating to royalty any of his numerous works. They exceeded
the number of 700, and it was said of him that no one ever was
a clearer dialectician or a worse writer^ ; accordingly his writings
have not survived. Himself a native of Soli in Cilicia, he wrote
several works on 'Solecisms', a term which then had no con-
nexion with the dialect of the inhabitants of Soli, but implied
faults of logic, as well as offences against good taste and correct
pronunciation*. He also wrote a series of works on * ambiguity^
{<SLfjjf>ifio\ia)t with treatises 'on the five cases', 'on singular and
plural terms', 'on rhetoric', and 'on the parts of speech". To
the five parts of speech recognised by Chrysippus {ovofia, vpoa-
rfyoptoLy prjfia^ avyhtcfio^ and apOpov)^ his pupil, Antipater of
Tarsus, added a sixth (ftco-onys, the participle). Chrysippus
agreed with Zeno in holding that not only justice, but also law,
and language in its correct form {6pBo% \6yo%)^ exist by nature.
He wrote four books on ' anomaly '^ being (so far as is known)
the first to use the term in a grammatical sense, as the opposite
of 'analogy'*, the adherents of 'analogy' insisting on the ruUs
applicable to the forms of words, and the adherents of ' anomaly '
on the exceptions. The cause of 'analogy' was maintained by the
Alexandrian critic, Aristarchus, while among the most conspicuous
adherents of ' anomaly ' was the Stoic Crates of Mallos, who, like
Chrysippus and Antipater, was a native of Cilicia, and (about
168 B.C.) was the head of the Pergamene school.
. Pergamon, the literary rival of Alexandria, was a town of
ancient origin in a lofty situation looking down on
and*iu'roier» ^^^ valley of the Caicus, about 15 miles from the
Mysian coast. Early in the Alexandrian age a
dynasty was there founded by Philetaerus, treasurer of Lysimachus,
king of Thrace. Throwing off his allegiance to Lysimachus
{c. 283), he appropriated the vast treasure of 9000 talents entrusted
* Dion. Hal., De Comp. Verb. c. 4.
< Griirenhau, i 508 f.
* Classen, Dt Gram. Gr. Prim, 73 f.
^ Diog. Laert. vii 193, Ttpi ri^t xard rdf X^^ctf drw/taX/at wp6t Lliavc^ d';
VarrOt L, Z., ix i (Susemihl, ii 8).
* Lersch, Sprachphilosophu^ 151.
IX.] PERGAMON AND ITS RULERS. I49
to his care, and bequeathed his power to his nephews Eumenes I
(263-241) and Attalus I (241-197). Eumenes I was not only a
generous patron of Arcesilaus, a native of the neighbouring town
of Pitane, the first president of the Middle Academy at Athens,
and the writer of epigrams in honour of Attalus I; he also
invited to his court the Peripatetic philosopher, Lycon*. His
famous successor Attalus I claimed the title of king after his
early victories over the Gallic invaders, and celebrated those
victories by a splendid series of sculptures in bronze, the most
famous of which is familiar to us in the marble copy now known
as the 'Dying GauP of the Capitoline Museum. Among the
sculptors employed on these works was Antigonus, who also wrote
treatises on the toreutic art and on famous painters, and is once
called Antigonus of Carystos*. The sculptor and writer on art
has accordingly been identified with the author of that name and
place, who died later than 226 B.C., after writing lives of philoso-
phers founded on his personal knowledge and frequently quoted
by Diogenes Laertius, and also a work on the wonders of nature,
which is still extant In literature he is the leading representative
of the earlier Pergamene School'. Attalus I was himself an
author, and his description of a large pine-tree in the Troad is
preserved in Strabo (p. 603). He invited to his court Lacydes,
the successor of Arcesilaus, as the head of the Academy at
Athens, but Lacydes declined with the apt reply that pictures
should be seen from a certain distance. He nevertheless laid out
for Lacydes a special garden in the grounds of the Academy ^
He was more successful in inviting the future historian of his reign,
the younger Neanthes, and the eminent mathematician, Apol-
lonius of Perga, who dedicated to the king his celebrated work on
Conic Sections. It was probably under his rule that books
began to be collected for the Pergamene Library,
but the credit of actually building the fabric is
expressly assigned by Strabo (p. 624) to his successor Eumenes II
* Diog. I^ert. iv 30, 38.
' Zenobius, Paroefn,^ v 81.
' Cp. the brilliant and suggestive work of Wilamowitz, Aniigonos von
A'atystoSi in Phil. Unt, iv ; also Christ, § 430' ; and Susemihl, i 468 f.
^ Diog. Laert. iv 60.
I50 THE ALEXANDRIAN AGE. [CHAP.
(197-159 ac), the elder son of Attalus I by Apollonis, whose
beautiful head may still be seen figured on the coins of Cyzicus^
Eumenes II strove to bring the Library to the same level as that
of Alexandria, and apparently endeavoured to induce Aristophanes
of Byzantium to leave Alexandria for Pergamon*. He adorned
his capital with magnificent structures, including a great altar of
Zeus. The frieze represented the battle of the Gods and Giants
in a perfect pantheon of highly animated mythological figures,
whose varied attributes possibly owed part of their inspiration to
the learned mythologists of the Pergamene Library*. The altar
has been assigned to about 180-170 B.C., and our knowledge of
its sculptures, as well as of the architecture and topography of
Pergamon in general, has been vastly increased by the German
excavations of 1878 to I886^ Along a lower level than the
precinct of the altar, ran the vast terrace of the theatre, with the
theatre itself above it, to the left of the altar. Above the theatre
and the altar was the precinct of the temple of Athena Polias
Nicephorus, with the acropolis rising beyond it, 1000 feet above
the level of the sea. The precinct of Athena, a quadrangle of
about 240 feet by 162, was bounded on the east by a single
colonnade, about 19 feet in breadth, and by a double colonnade,
twice as broad, to the north. These colonnades were in two
stories, and to the north of the upper storey of the double
colonnade the remains of four large rooms have been discovered.
The largest of these is 42 feet in length and 49 in width ; the rest
vary in length, and are 39 feet wide. Along the eastern, northern
and western sides of the largest room are the foundations of a
narrow platform or bench, and in the centre of the northern side
a mass of stonework identified as the pedestal of a statue. In
front of this pedestal, and facing the south-east entrance, was
found a colossal statue of Athena, the tutelar divinity of libraries*;
and, in adjacent portions of the ruins, pedestals of statues bearing
^ Head's Coins oftfu Ancients^ Plate 48, 6. For portrait of Eumenes II,
see p. 164 infra*
* SuMas (i.v. 'ApiOTo^.) (tft /Soi/X^/iCKOf vpot Wtylpii ^vyttv, supra ^ p. iii.
' E. A. Gardner's Handbook of Gr, Sculpture^ ii 461.
^ Cp. the official reports; also Baumeister's De»ikmdler^ pp. iioi — 1187;
and Holm, iv c. 11, n. i etc.
• Juv. iii 319; Plin. N. H, vii no.
IX.] THE PERGAMENE LIBRARY. 151
the names of Homer, Alcaeus, Herodotus and Timotheus of
Miletus (d. 357 b.c), besides two Macedonian historians (Apol-
lonius and Balacrus) who are less known to fame\ A block of
stone inscribed with a couplet in honour of Sappho, identical
with that assigned in Anth. vii 15 to Antipater of Sidon
{c 150 B.C.), had been seen at Pergamon early in the fifteenth
century. Such portrait-statues are characteristic of libraries'. In
the largest room were observed two rows of holes in the north
wall, and the lower of these two rows was continued along the
east wall. These holes may have served to receive supports for
brackets or shelves. There is every probability that the ruins of
these four rooms are all that remains of the famous Pergamene
Library'. The small adjacent rooms may have been used by
copyists and attendants, while the upper floor of the colonnade
in front of the Library may have served as a place of either
transit or lounge. In any case it had a sunny outlook towards the
S.E., thus commanding an immediate view of the temple of the
'Victorious Athena* and the sculptured memorials of victory or
of gratitude in the court below, and, beyond the latter, a wide
prospect of the valley of the Caicus.
The inscriptions above the colonnades and on the literary
statues already mentioned are sometimes assigned to the reign of
Attalus II ( 159-1 38) \ who, like both of his predecessors, was a
patron of art and learning. It was to Attalus II that Apollodorus
of Athens dedicated his great work on Chronology after leaving
Alexandria for Pergamon (c. 146 B.c.)^ As a pupil of the Stoic
Seleucus, and, for a still longer time, of Aristarchus, Apollodorus
forms a link between the school of Alexandria and that of
Pergamon, which was closely connected with the Stoic philo-
sophy.
* Frankel, nos. 198 — 103. ' Plin. AT.ff. xxxv 10.
' Conze, Monatsbtr, d. Berlin. Akad. 1884, pp. 1159 — 1370; Baumeister's
Detikmdler^ p. im with general plan on p. 11 15 and restoration of the pre-
cinct of Athena on p. 1119; Pauly-Wissowa, j.v. Bibliothtken^ p. 414; Pen-
tremolt and Collignon*s Pergame^ pp. 135 — 15a; and J. W. Clark, The Care of
Books (1901), pp. 7 — II, where there is a plan of the Library reduced from
Plate iii in vol. 11 of the AUertiimtr von Pergamon^ 1885.
* Urlichs, Ptrg. Imchr. (1883) p.. ao f.
' See p. 135.
152 THE ALEXANDRIAN AGE. [CHAP.
Attalus II was succeeded by Attalus III (138-133)1 a san-
guinary tyrant, who failed to follow the great example set by his
predecessors either as patrons of learning or as promoters of the
arts of sculpture and architecture. He was apparently, however,
the theme of an encomium by Nicander {c. 202 — c, 133), already
mentioned (p. 116) as the author of didactic poems on venomous
bites and on antidotes, who possibly had some sympathy with the
king's pursuits. Neglecting his royal duties, he amused himself
with gardening, taking special interest in the cultivation of
poisonous plants. He also had a fancy for making models in wax
and casting figures in bronzed Such was the degenerate form in
which the patronage of art expired in the last of the Attalids.
The inscriptions of Pergamon' credit him however with military
prowess in some victory (possibly involving a slight extension of
territory) which is otherwise unknown. In his brief reign of five
years there appears to have been nothing more notable than the
bequest of his property to the Roman people (133 B.C.). His
family had then been in power for exactly 150 years'.
Antigonus of Carystos has already been mentioned as the
leading representative of the early Pergamene school
iiklm* "***" ** (P- ^49)- Among other scholars who owed allegiance
to the rulers of Pergamon, was Polemon of Ilium, a
contemporary of Aristophanes of Byzantium {Ji. 200-177 B.C.).
He is known to have addressed a letter to Attalus, probably the
first of that name. It was doubtless in recognition of his work on
the treasures of Delphi that he was made ^proxenus of that place
in 177 B.C. He lived for some time at Athens, of which he
became a citizen, and also probably at Pergamon; but he was
specially famous for his extensive travels in all parts of Greece,
and in Italy and Sicily. He was a prolific writer on Greek
topography, and his diligence in copying, collecting and ex-
pounding inscriptions led to his receiving from an adherent of
^ Justin XXX vi 4, 3 (ap. Susemihl, ii 415).
' Frankel, nos. 146, 149.
* On the history of Pergamon, cp. Fynes-CUnton, Fasii Hell., iii 400 — 410;
Holm's History of Grttce, iv c. 13, n. 6, and c. 11; and Wilcken in Pauly-
Wissowa, s.v, Attalus. On the * will* of Attalus III cp. Mommsen, History of
Home, Bk iv c. i, and Mahaflfy in HermatAena, ix (1896), pp. 389 — 405.
IX.] POLEMON. DEMETRIUS OF SCEPSIS. 1 53
Crates in a later age the title of stelokopas^ or 'the tapper of
tablets '^ a title reminding us of the itinerant antiquary whose
care in tending the moss-grown memorials of the names of the
Covenanters led to his being known as 'Old Mortality'. Polemon
was however more widely known as the periegetes. His works
were quoted by Didymus and Aristonicus, and by Strabo and
Plutarch, the latter of whom eulogises his learning and his vivid
interest in Hellenic matters'. He devoted four books to the
Votive Offerings on the Athenian Acropolis alone. The question
how far Pausanias is directly or indirectly indebted to Polemon
has been much discussed, but his indebtedness is conclusively
disproved by Mr Frazer*. His interests were not limited to
topography. His antiquarian researches led him to the study of
Greek Comedy, and we owe to Polemon nearly all that is known
on the subject of Greek parodies^.
Antiquarian research was represented in the same age by
Demetrius of Scepsis in the Troad (bom r. 214 B.C.),
who wrote a discursive work in 30 books on the smpiIis ^*** **'
list of the Trojan forces comprised in only 60 lines
of the second book of the Iliad, In the language of Professor
Jebb, * this work appears to have been one of the most wonderful
monuments of scholarly labour which even the indefatigable
erudition of the Alexandrian age produced. The most complete
examination of every point which the subject raised or suggested
was supported by stores of learning drawn from every province of
ancient literature, from every source of oral or local tradition.
Mythology, history, geography, the monographs of topographers,
the observations of travellers, poetry of every age and kind,
science in all its ancient branches, appear to have been laid under
contribution by this encyclopaedic commentator'*. He is quoted
by Strabo in more than 25 passages, particularly in connexion
with the topography of the Troad, where his local knowledge is
described as especially valuable (p. 602, § 43). In agreement
' Herodicus ap. Athen. 434 D.
' Qu. Symp, v a, 675 R, roXv/ia^oOr irai od rvrrdforrof h rotr 'BXXi^cjcott
' Pausanias, I Ixxxiii — xc.
* Athen. 698 B. Susemihl, i 665 — 676. * /. H. S. ii 34 f.
154 THE ALEXANDRIAN AGE. [CHAP.
with the views of Hellanicus of Miletus, Polemon of Ilium had
with local patriotism identified the Greek Ilium in the Trojan
plain as the site of Homeric Troy. The Greek Ilium corresponds
to Hissarlik^ or Schliemann's *Troy', which lies only 3 miles
from the Hellespont. The pretensions of the Ilians were re-
jected by Demetrius of Scepsis in favour of a lofty site about
3} miles further inland, corresponding to the village of Bundr-
bashi^.
From Polemon of Ilium and Demetrius of Scepsis, who
belonged to the district of the Troad subject to the rulers of
Pergamon, we pass to the name of one who was closely connected
with Pergamon itself. The head of the Pergamene school during
the reign of Eumenes II (the builder of the Library)
Maiios* ^ ^^ Crates of Mallos. He was a strong opponent
of his somewhat earlier contemporary, the great
critic Aristarchus of Alexandria, being (like Chrysippus) an
adherent of * anomaly' as opposed to * analogy'*. He was also
an opponent of Aristarchus in the allegorical treatment of Homer
which (as we have seen, p. 147) was characteristic of the Stoic
school to which Crates belonged. His views were expounded in
an allegorical commentary on Homer, and also in a critical
commentary, entitled 'OfirfpiKd and 3AOf>^o>riica respectively*. Frag-
ments of these are preserved in the scholia^ which also contain
traces of a * life of Homer '. Besides these we have some stray
remarks on Hesiod, and fuller proof of the existence of commen-
taries on Euripides and Aristophanes, with a work on the Attic
dialect Whether he produced any 'edition' of Homer, as
distinguished from critical remarks on the text, is uncertain \
' Jebb*s Horner^ p. 148; cp. J, H. S. ii 33, iii 185 f; and (in fevour of
Hissariik) MahafTy, ib. iii 69 f.
' Varro, L, L, \x 1, Crates nobilis grammaticus qui fretus Chrysippo
homine acutissimo, qui reliquit MtpX innaiuiklat iiii libros, contra analogiam
atque Aristarchuro est nixus. Gellius, ii 15, draXoyJa est similium similis decli-
natio, quam quidem Latine proportionem vocant. droifiaXfa est inaequalitas
declinationum, consuetudinem sequens. Duo autem Graeci Grammatici illus-
tres, Aristarchus et Crates, summo opere ille iLtfoKoyiop, hie drw/taXioy defen-
sitavit.
' He appears to have proposed d(t for rpit in OJ, xii 106 (Ludwich's
Homtrvulgata^ p. 193 f)<
^ C. Wachsmuth, Dt Craieie Mailota (i860), p. 31 ; Ludwich, i 43 ; Maass,
IX.] CRATES OF MALLOS. 155
Among his Homeric readings several deserve mention, as in //.
xxi 323, rvfjLfiox&rf^ (for Tvfij8oxoi7<r(ou), preferred by Aristarchus),
id, 558, trpos ircSiov 'iSijcov (for 'IXi/cov), and xxiv 253, «tan;^cc«
(for Kan/^oi'cs). In xi 754 he preferred 3ta <rirc$€os to Si* dunrcS^o«
trcSiW. He agreed with Zenodotus and Eratosthenes, against
Aristarchus, in allowing Homer to combine the dual with the
plural*. He endeavoured to bring Homer into accord with the
Stoic views on geography. The stream of Oceanus was supposed
to flow through the torrid zone, sending forth two branches
towards each of the poles. The scene of the voyage of Odysseus
was accordingly laid in the outer and not (as Aristarchus thought)
in the inner (or Mediterranean) sea". Menelaus in his voyage of
seven years was deemed to have sailed from Gadeira to India \
In the description of the land of the Laestrygones, where 'the
courses of the night and day are near together' {O^. x 86), Crates
saw a reference to the short northern nights'. His interest in
geography was further shown by the fact that he constructed a
terrestrial globe, mentioned by Strabo (p. ii6)^
The controversy on 'analogy' and 'anomaly', in which Crates
was interested as a grammarian of the Stoic school, turned
mainly on matters of declension and conjugation. Aristophanes
of Byzantium had endeavoured to classify words by the application
of five tests. If two words were of the same * kind ', eg. both of
them nouns or verbs, in the same *case' or 'inflexion', and
identical in termination, number of syllables and sound, they were
'analogous' to one another; i.e. they belonged to the same
declension or conjugation. Aristarchus added a sixth test, by
which both the words compared were to be simple or both of
them compound. Crates appears to have regarded all the trouble
spent on determining the laws of declension and conjugation as
idle and superfluous, and preferred simply to accept the phe-
Aratea^ pp. 167—107. Maass (p. 173) maintains that Crates produced three
Homeric works, (i) 6i6p$iocit, (1) wtpl diopBibatw or diopB^riKd, (3) 'O/iifpucd.
' Wachsmath, 18 f. « id, 10 f.
• Cell, xiv 6, 3. * Strabo, p. 38.
' Schol. on Aratus, Pknen, 61.
• Vol, Herctd, xi 147*, tA »€^ r^% c^pow&tat 6 Kp[d]n^ (Usener, ap.
Maass, /.r., p. 169).
IS6 THE ALEXANDRIAN AGE. [CHAP.
nomena of language as the arbitrary results of custom and usage.
But he was wrong in denying all 'analogy', and in practically
opposing the accurate grammatical scholarship of the Alexandrian
school.
Crates was probably responsible for drawing up the classified
lists (iriva«tcs) of authors in the Pergamene Library, in which (as is
sometimes held) the leading writers of prose, especially the orators,
had a prominent place, just as the poets had in the lists of the
Alexandrian grammarians'. It is true that Dionysius of Halicar-
nassus mentions the Pergamene lists in connexion with a speech
of Deinarchus' ; but he also states that he had found no detailed
account of that orator written either by Callimachus, or by the
Pergamene scholars 1 This shows that the critic was equally
prepared to find what he wanted in the lists of the Alexandrian as
in those of the Pergamene school, and that the orators were not
necessarily excluded from the former. Again, Athenaeus' says of
a play ascribed to Alexis, that it was not included in the lists of
Callimachus or Aristophanes, or even in those drawn up by the
scholars in Pergamon. It will be observed that poets were not
excluded from the Pergamene lists. The poet Alcman is the
subject of the only notice which has been conjecturally identified
as a fragment of the lists of Crates'; and the only epigram
attributed to Crates (Anth. xi 218) describes the epic poet
Choerilus as far inferior to Antimachus.
Crates was sent as an envoy to the Roman Senate 'shortly
after the death of Ennius'. Now, Ennius died in 169 B.C., and
Suetonius', who connects the visit of Crates with that event, also
' Susemihl, ii 7 — 10; cp. Steinthal, ii lai — 116. On Crates in general cp.
LUbbert, Rkein, Mus, xi (1857), 448 — 443; C. Wachsmuth, /u-., and Hiibner's
Bibliographii^ § 13.
' Reiflferscheid, Breslau, i88i-a; Brzoska, ibid, 1883 (Susemihl, i 343, 531,
ii 11,484,694).
' De Dein, 11, ovror k¥ roct ncpTOfUfroct Iliva^c ^ptrvu Cn KoKKucpdrovt.
^ id, I, bpiav oMhf dxpifiit oifrt KaXM/uaxor oOrt rout iic Ilt/tydfiov ypa^ifta'
riKoi^t Mtpi airrov ypd\ffa»Tat.
* 336 E, oi rdr iw nepydfuf d^aypa^t woiiiadfupoi,
' Suldos, 'AXxfi^ Aojcwr dwb Mc^tf'^ti xard H rhv Kpdryfra wraU¥Ta{f)
AMt U Zdp8€UMf.
' />/ Grammaiicis, c. a, primus... stadium grammaticae in urbem intulit
IX.] PERGAMON AND ROME. 157
States that Crates was sent to Rome by Attalus, i.e. Attalus II,
who came to the throne in 159 fi.a Hence it is sometimes
assumed (e.g. by Fynes-Clinton) that the visit of Crates belongs
to the year 159. But it appears probable that, while Suetonius is
right in connecting it closely with the death of Ennius, he is
wrong in assigning it to the reign of Attalus. Attalus was re-
peatedly in Rome as the envoy of his elder brother Eumenes II
when the latter was on the throne. Of the five years in which he
was in Rome (192, 181, 168, 163, 160), one was 168 b.c., the
year immediately after the death of Ennius, when, after fighting
on the side of Aemilius Paulus at Pydna, he was sent to con-
gratulate the Romans on their victory. On this occasion he was
certainly accompanied by the physician Stratius (Liv. xlv 19), and
it appears probable that he was also accompanied by Crates. It
would thus appear that Crates was really sent ab Eumene rege cum
Attalo^ and not ab Attalo rege. By a curious accident the visit of
Crates had a remarkable effect on literary studies in Rome.
While he was wandering on the Palatine, he accidentally stumbled
over an opening in a drain and broke his leg. He passed part of
the time during which he was thus detained in giving lectures,
which aroused among the Romans a taste for the scholarly study
of literature, with results which will be mentioned as soon as we
reach the Roman age (p. 1 70). It may here, however, be suggested
that, in the course of his conversations with leading Romans, he
could hardly have failed to mention the halls and colonnades of
the Pergamene Library and the adjacent temple, the building of
which is assigned to Eumenes II, whose envoy he seems to have
been. As Attalus whom. he apparently accompanied to Rome
had fought at Pydna, and as Quintus Metellus was one of the
three selected to carry to Rome the despatches aimoundng the
victory (Livy xliv 45), Metellus doubtless met Crates in Rome.
In this connexion it is interesting to remember that in 146 b.c
Metellus built the colonnades of the Porticus Metelli and one of
Crates Mallotes, Aristarchi aequalis* qui missus ad senatum ab Attalo rege
inter secundum ac tertium Punicum bellum sub ipsam EnnU mortem^ cum
regione Palatii prolapsus in cloacae foramen cms fregisset, per omne legationis
simul et valetudinis tempus plurimas acroasis subinde fecit assidueque disseniit,
ac nostris exemplo fuit ad imitandum. Cp. Scioppius* Introd. to Gram. Pki*
losophica (1618), quoted in Max MUller's Lectures^ ii iio^.
158 THE ALEXANDRIAN AGE. [CHAP.
the temples which they enclosed, and that the Porticus Octaviae^
built by Augustus on its site (after 33 b.c), included within its
colonnades a library of Greek and also a library of Latin books,
which succeeded that of Asinius Pollio in the Atrium Libertatis
(37 B.C.), and preceded the Palatine Library (28 b.c.)'. Thus the
visit of Crates may have ultimately had some influence on the
structural arrangements of the public libraries of Rome.
The most famous pupil of Crates was the Stoic philosopher
Panaetius*. To his school also belonged Artemon
ofCratM***^* of Pergamon, the author of a commentary on
Pindar's Odes in honour of Sicilian princes ; Zeno-
dotus of Mallos, who defended certain Homeric passages obelised
by Aristarchus; Asclepiades of Myrleia in Bithynia (bom between
130 and 80 B.C.), who wrote a learned monograph on Nestor's
cup, with commentaries on Homer and Theocritus, a history of
Bithynia and a history of 'grammarians'; and Heracleon of
Tilotis in Egypt, the author of a commentary on the Iliad and
Odyssey*,
While there is no evidence as to any direct connexion between
Pergamon and the 'Asiatic' style of oratory represented (c. 250 b.c.)
by Hegesias, a native of the city of Magnesia ad Sipylum, about
40 miles distant, we have certainly a point of contact between
Pergamon and the Attic reaction in the first century B.C., and also
between both and Rome. Pergamon was the birth-
of^plTrgamon* P^^^^ ^^ '^^ rhetorician Apollodorus {c. 102 —
c. 20 B.C.), who, after counting *the Attic Dionysius'
among his pupils in his native place, left Pergamon for Rome,
where he was selected by Julius Caesar as an instructor of the
young Octavian (45 B.C.), and where he founded a flourishing
school of rhetoric*. Another point of contact between Pergamon
and Rome may be found in the person of the Stoic
Athenodorus
Athenodorus of Tarsus, who abused his position as
head of the Pergamene Library by attempting to tamper with
^ Cp. Middleton*8 Ancient Romt^ ii 100 f ; and J. W. Clark, The Care of
Bookst pp. II — 14.
' The friend of the younger Scipio, and the authority followed by Cicero
in the ZV OJiciis,
' Susemihl, ii 13 — 37. * Susemihl, ii 504 f.
IX.] THE SCHOOL OF CRATES. 1 59
passages in the works of the earlier Stoics differing from the views
of their successors^. He is perhaps in part responsible for the
story respecting the Peisistratean redaction of the Homeric
poems'. He was already an old man in 70 b.c when Cato
visited Pergamon, and invited him to become an inmate of his
house in Rome, where he died'. The school of Crates claims
another learned Greek who settled in Rome,
Alexander Polyhistor (c, 105 — c. 35 B.C.). Taken Alexander
prisoner in the time of Sulla, he was made a citizen
of Rome by the Dictator, after he had served as a teacher in the
house of Lentulus. His writings, which were more remarkable
for their quantity than their quality, were mainly uncritical
compilations on historical and geographical subjects. His
legendary history of Rome was followed in certain points by Livy
(i 3), Tibullus (ii 5) and Virgil {Aett. x 388); and his list of the
Sibyls and his early history of Delphi, by Pausanias. He was
interested in the nations of the East and esi)ecially in the Jews.
He appears to have aimed at supplying the imperfectly educated
Roman public with a variety of information which would enable
them to understand the learned poets of the day, and would
foster a belief in the legendary connexion between the kings of
Rome and the heroes of Troy. Among his pupils was the freed-
man Hyginus, who was appointed by Augustus to preside over
the Palatine Library*.
In comparing the scholarship of Alexandria with that of
Pergamon, we must remember that the former
passed through several phases. Under the first ,„<! Perfamon
Ptolemy, Hecataeus of Abdera, who was a historian
as well as a scholar, wrote a history of Egypt representing it as
the home of wisdom from time immemorial'. Under the first
three Ptolemies, whose combined rule extended over a century
(323-222 B.C.), scholarship of the first rank flourished at Alex-
andria and left its mark on all later ages, while the poetry of that
time, which found imitators in Rome, was of the second rank,
^ Diog. Laert. vii 34. ' Susemihl, ii 146.
• Plut. Caio Minor^ 10, 16.
^ Susemihl, ii 356 — 364; Pauly-Wissowa, i 1449 f.
' Holm, iv c. 10, n. 8.
l6o THE ALEXANDRIAN AGE, [CHAP.
except in the case of Theocritus, who was not very closely
connected with Alexandria. In the first age of Alexandrian
scholarship Philetas, Zenodotus, Callimachus and Eratosthenes
were * poets' as well as scholars. In the second, Aristophanes
and Aristarchus were scholars alone: the scholar had now
narrowed into the specialist, but had gained a new power in the
process. This second age closes with the accession of Ptolemy
Physcon (146), and the death of Aristarchus (c 143). Physcon
played at textual criticism, and yet persecuted the Greeks of
Alexandria, including the great critic himself \ The Alexandrian
Greeks are described by Polybius (xxxiv 14), who visited their
city about 1 36 b.c., as less uncivilised than the mercenary soldiers,
while, in comparison with both, the native Egyptians were ' clever
and civilised'. Physcon set his mercenaries upon the Alex-
andrians of Greek descent with the result that this class was
almost extinct when Polybius visited the place. This persecution
of the Greeks made the Jews, who had been influenced by Greek
culture, and were regarded with suspicion by Physcon, an in-
creasingly important element in the intellectual life of Alexandria.
It also 'filled the islands and cities with grammarians, philosophers,
geometricians, musicians, painters, trainers, physicians and many
other professional persons, whose poverty impelled them to teach
what they knew, and thus to turn out many notable pupils". In
the third age of Alexandrian scholarship, a pupil of Aristarchus,
Apollodorus of Athens, preferred Athens and Pergamon to
Alexandria, while Dionysius the Thracian left Alexandria for
Rhodes, and Didymus, a century later, possibly resided in
Rome.
But in all its phases the school of Alexandria was in the main
a school of verda/ criticism. Even the versatile and widely-
accomplished Eratosthenes laid himself open to the attacks of a
representative of the Pergamene school, Polemon of Ilium, who
exposed his mistakes in matters connected with Attic antiquities,
drawing from them the ironical inference that Eratosthenes, who
was actually educated at Athens, could never have visited Athens
> On Physcon (Euergetes II), see sufira^ p. 135, n. i.
* Menecles ap. Athen. 184 c.
IX.] ALEXANDRIA AND PERGAMON. l6l
at all'. This is one of the earliest indications of the literary
rivalry between Alexandria and Pergamon. The conflict between
Aristarchus, the adherent of ' analogy ', and Crates, the adherent
of ' anomaly ', is another. The feud descended to the successors
of both: pupils of Aristarchus, such as Dionysius Thrax and
ParmeniscuSy attacked the opinions of Crates, while a pupil of
Crates, Zenodotus of Mallos, attacked those of Aristarchus*. It
found an echo even in distant Babylon. A follower of Crates, of
uncertain date, named Herodicus of Babylon, doubdess recalling
the disputes of the Alexandrian critics on the epic forms of the
personal pronouns, and especially the fact that Aristarchus had
proved that Homer used only fuv, not vcv, describes the followers
of Aristarchus as 'buzzing in comers, and busy with mono-
syllables':—
While the school of Alexandria was mainly interested in
verbal scholarship, the school of Pergamon found room for a
larger variety of scholarly studies. In that school art and the
history of art were represented by Antigonus of Carystos ; learned
travel and the study of inscriptions, by Polemon of Ilium;
topography, by Demetrius of Scepsis ; chronology, by Apollodorus
of Athens ; the philosophy of the Stoics, combined with grammar
and literary criticism, by Crates of Mallos. The cosmopolitan
Stoics were readily induced to settle in Pergamon, while philo-
sophers of the Academic school remained true to Athens.
Attalus I and Eumenes I showed a special interest in that school,
and in Athens in general. The former commemorated his
conquest of the Gauls by dedicating famous works of sculpture
^ w€pl r^ *kB4fnf9» '¥»paToa$4pov9 iwiitifdat. Cp. Strabo, p. 15, with
WiUmowitz, Antigtmcs von ICarystos, p. 164 f; and Susemihl, i 670 f.
' C. Wachsmuth, /.r. 7.
' Athen. p. saa a, cp. Cobet, Mis€, Crit^^ p. 950, and Susemihl, ii 34 f.
Similarly Philip of Thessalonica (probably in the time of Trajan) satirically
describes grammarians as belonging to the pack of 2^nodotus and the troops
of Callimachusi as hunters of wretched particles, who delight in itip and v^
(Anth. xi 311), and as bookworms of the school of Aristarchus; and prays
that an inglorious night may descend on the followers of Callimachus (ib, 547) ;
cp. xi 14s, and Virgil, Catal, ii 4.
S. II
1 62 THE ALEXANDRIAN AGE. [CHAP.
on the acropolis of Athens, as well as on the lofty terraces of
Pergamon ; and, in the time of the latter, Pergamon had its own
festival of the Panathenaea. The Attalid dynasty was also
strongly attracted towards Rome. While the Alexandrian Aris-
tophanes suggested the possible spuriousness of the lines in which
Poseidon foretells the rule of Aeneas (//. xx 306-8), a belief in
the legend of Aeneas was prudently fostered by the school of
Pergamon ^
As compared with Pergamon and Alexandria, few of the cities
of the Greek world were of special importance as seats of learning
during the Alexandrian age. Under the spell of its
olden associations, Athens continued to be fre-
quented as a school of philosophy. Of the foremost representatives
of the New Comedy, which flourished there from the death of
Alexander to about 250 b.c., Philemon alone visited Alexandria.
Athens was also the home of historians. It was there that
Philochorus was engaged on the study of the history of Attica
until he met a violent end as a supporter of the cause of Ptolemy
Philadelphus against Antigonus Gonatas (261). It was there that
the half-brother of Antigonus, Craterus (321 — c, 265), the son of
Alexander's general of the same name, collected and elucidated
the historic decrees preserved in the public archives. It was
there also that Apollodorus composed his great works on chro-
nology and mythology. Among natives of other lands, Timaeus
of Tauromenium (345-249) spent the last 50 years of his life at
Athens, and Polemon of Ilium found a centre of his travels in the
world-famous city which had made him one of her honorary
citizens. In the Alexandrian age, Pella, the capital
of the Macedonian kings, was a place of literary
resort under Antigonus Gonatas alone (275-239), when the king,
who was himself a pupil of a Megarian philosopher (Euphantus),
and a friend of Zeno, attracted to his court two of Zeno's pupils ;
probably also the philosopher and poet, Timon of Phlius; and
certainly the poets Alexander Aetolus and Aratus, who is said to
have been indebted to the king himself for the theme of his great
astronomical poem. Aratus also visited the Syrian court in the
time of Antiochus Soter (287-262). Under Antiochus the Great
^ Wilamowitz, /.r., p. 158 f, esp. 161.
IX,] ATHENS AND OTHER SEATS OF LEARNING. 163
(234-181), Antioch, the newly founded capital of Syria, was
adorned with a theatre and a circus, and with works
of art and a library, which in 320 b.c. was placed
under the care of the learned epic poet, Euphorion of Chalcis,
who there remained until his death, and in the following century
became a favourite model with poets such as Tibullus, Propertius,
and Cornelius Callus, besides being the theme of a passing
reference in Virgil {£cl, x 50). Antioch is described as a home
of learning and culture in the youth of Cicero's client the
poet Archias, who was bom r. 119 B.C.* A library, with a
temple of the Muses, was also founded there by the last of the
Antiochi (after 69 b.c.). Antioch thus received from the last of
the Seleucids the gift of a 'Museum', which Alexandria had
received from the first of the Ptolemies. Tarsus
was celebrated for its schools, but only her own
citizens resorted to them, and even these finished their education
elsewhere (Strabo, p. 673). Cos, as has been already noticed
(p. 118), was a literary retreat closely connected
with Alexandria, while Rhodes, which welcomed RhSe*"**
from Alexandria the poet of the Argonautic expedi-
tion and the author of the earliest of Greek grammars, was a
school of rhetoric not only in the last few years of the life of
Aeschines, but also in the early part of the first century b.c, when
the eclectic school of Molon contributed its share to the training
of the eloquence of Cicero. Rhodes was also the scene of the
studies of Castor, the author of an important chronological work,
quoted by Varro* and by Julius Africanus, beginning with Ninus,
king of Assyria, and ending with Pompey's triumph in 61 b.c'
It was further famous as the birth-place of the Stoic Panaetius
(c, 185-110), and as the school of his pupil Poseidonius (138-45),
whose lectures were attended by Cicero in 78, and by Pompey in
67 and 62 B.C. His extensive travels in Italy, Gaul and Spain,
resulted in a continuation of Polybius from 145 to 82 b.c, a work
inspired by a keen interest in geography, ethnography and the
historical development of human society at large. Its influence
has been traced in Diodorus and Strabo; in Lucretius, livy,
^ Pro Archia^ 4. ' Augustine, Dt Civ. Dti^ xxi 8, 1.
• Susemihl, ii 365— 37a.
II — 2
l64 THE ALEXANDRIAN AGE. [CHAP. IX.
Caesar and Sallust ; in Vairo and Cicero, and, recently, even in
the Germania of Tacitus'. Lastly, it was the birth-place of
Andronicus, who presided over the Peripatetic school at Athens
shortly before the middle of the fii^t century B.C., and produced
a new edition of the 'systematic' works of Aristotle and Theo-
phrastus, with classified lists of their writings, copies of their wills,
and paraphrases of the Ca/egoriet and commentaries on certain
other works of Aristotle*. As a Peripatetic he thus rendered at
least as great a service to literature as any that had been rendered
at Athens in the Alexandrian age by Academic philosophers such
as Polemon, whose favourite poets were Homer and Sophocles';
or Crantor, the admirer of Homer and Euripides*, and the writer
not only of the first commentary on the Tit/iaau or on any part
uf Plato*, but also of a work on consolation, afterwards imitated
by Cicero and Plutarch ; or Clitomachus, who was destined to
be one of the main authorities followed by Cicero in the Ue
Divinatione as well as in the De Naiura Deorutn.
1 Gudeman, Trans. Am. PhUel. AssBt.-t.i.j\{,\^aio\\oii\ cp. Chriit, g 405*,
KoA Sutemihl, ii 118 f.
* Suiemihl, ii 301 — 5.
* VHog. LacTt. iv lo.
* ib. j6.
> Proclns on Tim. 34 A.
StLVBR Tbtradrachm of Eumrnes II
Founder of the Peigimcnc Libr«jy (see p. 149 ()■
(From the British Hateuin.)
BOOK III
LATIN SCHOLARSHIP IN THE ROMAN AGE
Grammatica Romae ne in usu quidem olim^ tudum in honore
ullo eratf rudi scilicet ac bellicosa etiam turn dvitaie^ necdum mag-
nopere liberalibus disciplinis vacan/e,
Suetonius, I?e Gramma/icis, § i.
/e treuve Rome plus vcUUante avant qu*elle feust sfavanle,
Montaigne, Essais^ i 34.
Conspectus of Latin Literature Ac, c. 300—1 B.C.
PoUtleal
Branta
SOO-
Third Samnite
War 398 — 290
372 Tarentum
taken
First Punic War
964 — 241
Second Punic
War a 18 — aoa
aoo-
Firit Macedon*
ianWar
Sjrrian war
T9>— X90
Second Mace-
donian War
171—168
Third Punic
War 1419 — ia6
NumanuneWar
143— «33
123 Ltffs Stm-
Cimbrian War
113— X02
Jugurthine Wur
III — 106
literary
Branti
840 the first
Latin play
exhibited at
Rome
100
Cato. Dt Agri
Cuitttra, the
iartitsi extant
Ufffrk in Latin
Prose
161 expuluon of
Greek rheto*
ricians and
philosophers
iSS Cntolaus,
Cameadesand
Diogenes at
Rome
Marsian War
90—88
82 Sulla dicutor
60 First trium-
virate
Gallic War
rar
Civil
44 d. of Caesar
43 Second trium<
virate
31 battle of Ac-
tium
30 Augustus
63 B.C.— 14 A.D.
92 sdiools of
Latin rhetoric
closed
c. 88 school of
Latin gram-
nur opened
by Sevius Ni>
canor, and of
Latin rhetoric
by L. Plotius
Callus
30 first Dublic
library found>
ed by PoUio
28 bibUotfuca
Patatina
22 Atn, ii, iv
and vi recited
x^CarmenSat'
cuiart
14 Vitruvius Dg
AtxAitectura
9 close of Livy's
History
Poeta
272 Andronicus
reaches Rome
240 Andronicus
e. 284 — c. 204
235 Naevius
c. 964—194
Plautus
254-1—184
204 Ennius
239—169
179 Caecilius
d. 168
Pacuvius
32
166 Terence
185—159
Ludlius
180—103
L. Accius
170— <. 90
Laberius
Lucretius
Catullus
f. 84— 54
Bibaculus
c. 83— c. 94
Varro Atadnus
8a-37
H,
Publ. Synis
Jallus 70—27
Virgil 70 — 19
Horace 65—^
TibuUus 54—19
Propcrtius
43 B.C— X8 A.O.
yrif^rtum
216 Q. Fabius
Pictorr
210 L. Cincius
Alimentus/^
195 Cato
a34— M9
i5iA.Postumius
Albinus/*
142 C Aciliiu^
115 L. Coelius
Antipater
CI. Quadri-
Snus Valerius
itias
78 Sisenna
73 Macer Com.
Nepos 99—54
Sallust 86—34
A. Hirtiusd. 43
Uvy
59 B.C.— x8a.o.
Oraton
280 Appius
Claudius
Caecus
195 Cato
a34— «49
167 L. Aem.
Paulus
Z47 Scipio Afri-
canus minor
144 Ser. Sulp.
Galba
Z40C. Laelius
137 M. Lepidus
Porcina
133 Tib. Grac-
chus 163 — 133
123 C Gracchus
I5|— 121
115M. Aemilius
Scaurus
105 P. Rutilius
Kufus
99 M. Antonius
95 L. Licinius
Crassus
88 pTsulp. Ru-
fus 124—88
c. 85 auctor ad
HtrtnniuiH
75 C. Aur. CotU
69 Hortensius
114—50
63 Cicero
106—43
59 Caesar
100—44
Calvus 8»— 47
40 PuUio
76 B.C.— < A.O.
31 MessaU
64 B.C.— 8 A.D.
Botadlani and
ontiotftc
168 Crates of
Mallos visits
Rome
133 Valerius So-
ranus b. £'.^154
Porcius Lictnus
Volcatius Sedi-
gitus
100 L. Ael. Stilo
c. 154—^. 74
Servius Clodius
d. 60
Staberius Eros
Varro 116 — 97
Orbilius
114— c. 17
Atticus 109 — 39
Santra
Tiro
c, 104—^. 4
Valerius Cato
b. c. 100
58 Nigidius Fi<
gulus <^ — 45
Atcius Praetex-
utus
98 Hyginus
64 B.C. — 17A.0.
Fenesiclla
59 B.C. — 19 A.D.
19 Q. Caecilius
Epirota
10 Verrius
Flaccus
K d4H0t€M kistariant w^ wrote in Crook,
CHAPTER X.
LATIN SCHOLARSHIP FROM THE DEATH OF ENNIUS
(169 B.C.) TO THE AUGUSTAN AGE.
The Latin alphabet was (either directly or indirectly) borrowed
at an early date from the Qreek colonists of Magna q^^^ ,^j,^
Graecia; and Latin literature, which is best regarded «nce before lOg
as beginning with the close of the First Punic War
(341 B.c), was founded mainly on Greek models. Its earliest
writers were not natives of Rome; they were not even natives
of Latium. Thus the first of Latin poets was the Greek Andro-
nicus (r. 284 — r. 204), afterwards known as L. Livius Andronicus,
who taught Greek and Latin in Rome, and produced in rude
Satumian verse a rendering of the Odyssey which was still in use
as a text-book in the youth of Horace {Ep, ii i, 65). He also
translated Greek plays into Latin, in metres approximating to
those of the Greek originals, and with a special preference for
plays connected with the tale of Troy. The first of these plays
was exhibited about 240 B.C. Next in order is Naevius (r. 264 —
194), a native of Campania, but of Latin descent, who exhibited
in 235 B.C. the first of many plays of Greek origin. Late in life
he produced in the old Satumian measure an important poem on
the First Punic War, parts of which were imitated in the Aeneid
of Virgil. In the four Satumian lines of his epitaph, he is so
conscious of his position as a Latin poet, and so forgetful of his
debt to Greece, that he describes his loss as lamented not by
the foreign 'Muses' but by the native Italian Canunae^ adding
l68 THE ROMAN AGE. [CHAP.
that on his death the old Latin tongue ceased to be spoken in
Rome.
'Mortales immortales flere si foret fas,
Flerent Divae Camenae Naevium poetam;
Itaque, postquam est Orcino traditus thesauro,
Obliti sunt Romai loquier Latina lingua *^
Naevius is followed by Ennius (239 — 169), the native of a
small town in Calabria, who was as familiar with Greek and Oscan
as with I^tin'. By a curious irony of fortune it was Cato, the
pertinacious opponent of Greek influence, who prompted Ennius
to settle in Rome (204 b.c.), where he gave lessons in Latin and
Greek. In his tragedies he was largely indebted to Greek
originals. In his great epic poem on the history of Rome,
known as the Annales^ he discarded the old Satumian measure
for the Greek hexameter, casting contempt on the rude versifica-
tion of his predecessors : —
Others have told the tale
In verses sung of yore by Fauns and Bards,
Ere my own lime, when none as yet had climbed
The Muses' cliflfs or learnt the lore of song*.
The new metre was further elaborated by Lucretius, who pays
his predecessor the noble tribute of having been 'the first to
bring down from lovely Helicon a crown of leaf unfading, destined
to flourish in fame amid the nations of Italy'^; and it was tuned
to new harmonies of cadence by Virgil, who in his Aeneid not
merely borrows here and there from the earlier poet, but is also
imbued throughout with his national spirit It was characteristic
of Ennius to write an inscription for his own bust, not in the
Satumian measure of old Rome but in the elegiac couplet lately
imported from Greece
*Nemo me lacrimis decoret, nee funera fletu
Faxit. Cur? Volito vivu* per ora virum**.
The poet who had done Latin literature the great service of
supplying it with a new epic metre, also took an interest in minor
points of scholarship, such as grammar and spelling, and is said to
^ Gellius, i 15. ' ib, xvii 17.
* Cic. Brutus 71, 76; Orator 171. ^ Lucr. i 117.
• Cic Tusc. Diip. i 34.
X.] GREEK INFLUENCE IN LATIN LITERATURE. 169
have invented a system of shorthand \ All the three early poets
above mentioned, Andronicus, Naevius and Ennius, wrote comedies
as well as tragedies, but their comedies were exclusively of the
kind called palliataey plays 'dressed in the Gruk mantle'. The
school of Ennius claims Pacuvius, his sister's son, the author of
twelve tragedies founded on the legends of Greece, and modelled
in one case on Sophocles and in another on Euripides. Greek
originals belonging to the New Attic Comedy of Philemon, Di-
philus and Menander, were the models followed by Plautus (254 —
184) and by Terence (185 — 159). Intermediate in time between
Plautus and Terence is Caecilius, who died in 168 b.c. (one year
after the death of Ennius, and two years before the production of
the Andria\ leaving to the literature of his country some forty
comedies, the titles of all of which are suggestive of Greek originals.
The debt of Latin literature to Greek in epic and dramatic poetry
was also extended to history. The earliest of Roman historians,
Q. Fabius Pictor (bom c, 254 B.C.), who belonged to the age of
Naevius and Ennius, wrote in Greek, and the same is said
(whether truly or not) of his younger contemporary, L. Cincius
Alimentus (praetor in 210 b.c.)'. Greek was certainly the lan-
guage in which A. Postumius Albinus wrote the History of Rome
which he dedicated to Ennius'. Foremost among the Roman
nobles in the study of Greek was C. Sulpicius Galus, who pre-
sided as praetor at the performance of a play of Ennius in the
year of the poet's death \ and who fought in the battle of Pydna
and predicted the eclipse of the moon which immediately pre-
ceded it'.
The defeat of the Macedonian king, Perseus, by Lucius
Aemilius Paullus at the battle of Pydna (168 b.c) marks the
* Teuffel's History of Roman LUercUurty ed. Schwabe, trans, by G. C. W,
Warr, ed. 1900, p. 137 and § 104, 5. Two books de lUteris syllabisque and de
metris are attributed to a later Ennius (Suet Gram, i), who may also be the
author of the system of shorthand mentioned by Isidore, Orig, i ii, vulgares
notas Ennius primus invenit. Cp. M. Schanz, Geschichit der Romisclun LiiU-
raiur (in I wan MuUer's Handb%uh\ f 39 ult.
' Dion. Hal. Ant, Rom, i 6 (cp. H. Nettleship, Essays^ i 341, and
Mommsen, Hist, of Romt^ Book III c. xiv note).
» Teuffel, § 117, I.
* Cic. Brutus 78. • Liv. XLIV 37.
I70 THE ROMAN AGE. [CHAP.
beginning of a new epoch, and several incidents of literary interest
ape connected with that event The conqueror of Pydna, on his
visit to Olympia, standing before the Zeus of Pheidias, knew
enough of the Homeric poems to declare that the sculptor must
have derived his inspiration from Homer ; and Aemilius Paullus
was apparently the theme of the only truly Roman play mentioned
among the works of Pacuvius (220 — 132), the nephew of Ennius.
Again, the battle of Pydna and the consequent predominance of
Rome in the Greek world led to the expatriation of 1000 men of
mark among the Achaeans, who were scattered among the Etrus-
can towns. After dwindling in seventeen years to 300, they were
restored to their native land with Polybius, the foremost of the
exiles, who afterwards returned to Rome to renew his friendship
with the younger Scipio, and ultimately to tell the story of the
conquests of Rome from the beginning of the Second Punic War
to the fall of Carthage and of Corinth in 146. Further, the Greek
library of the king defeated at Pydna was reserved for the use of
the conqueror's sons, the second of whom was the future con-
queror of Carthage, famous in literature as the centre of the
'Scipionic circle*. And, finally, the victory of Pydna led to a
further expansion of Greek influence in Latin literature by bring-
ing to Rome in the person of Crates of Mallos, and probably in
the train of those who came to congratulate the Romans on their
victory, the foremost representative of the school of Pergamon.
Our authority for the visit of Crates and its consequences is
the treatise of Suetonius De Grammaticis. He begins that treatise
with the remark that in earlier times, while Rome was still uncivil-
ised and engrossed in war, and was not yet in the enjoyment of
any large amount of leisure for the liberal arts, the study of
literature (grammatica) was not in use, much less was it in esteem.
The beginnings of that study, he adds, were unimportant, as its
earliest teachers, who were poets and half-Greeks (namely Livius
Andronicus and Ennius, who were stated to have taught in both
languages at Rome and elsewhere), limited themselves to trans-
lating Greek authors or reciting anything which they happened
to have composed in Latin. After adding that the two books on
letters and syllables and also on metres ascribed to Ennius were
justly attributed to a later writer of the same name, he states that.
X.] ACCIUS. LUCILIUS. I71
in his own opinion, the first to introduce the study of literature
into Rome was Crates of Mallos, who, during his accidental
detention in Rome, gave many recitations and lectures which
aroused an interest in the subject \ We are further informed
that the example set by Crates led to the publication in seven
books of a new edition of the epic of Naevius on the First Punic
War, and to the public recitation of the Annals of Ennius ; and
also (two generations later) to the recitation of the satires of
Lucilius. The text of Ennius was emended not long after his
death by Octavius Lampadio*.
The death of Ennius and the visit of Crates were immediately
preceded by the birth of L. Accius (170 B.C.), who
was among the first of the Romans who travelled in ''~""
Asia Minor, and was also famous as the author of numerous
tragedies on the tale of Troy. In the history of Scholarship he
concerns us only as the author of a history of Greek and Roman
poetry, especially that of the drama, written in Sotadean verse,
under the name of Didascalica^ a title probably suggested by the
8i8acr#caXitti of Aristotle*. He was the first to discuss the genuine-
ness of certain plays wrongly assigned to Plautus^. Among the
peculiarities of his orthography we are told that he never used the
letters Y and Z, and that, when A and E and U were long, he
denoted the fact by writing them double*. His interest in these
subjects is proved by the fact that Varro dedicated to him the
treatise de antiquitate litterarum*. The innovations in language
and spelling introduced by Accius are ridiculed by
, . , Lucilius
Lucilius (180 — 103 B.C.), who, besides discussing
points of orthography and prosody, satirises the bombastic language
of the Latin tragedians, criticises even Homer and Euripides, and
takes his contemporaries to task for their provincialisms and also
^ See p. 157. It b assumed by Mommsen (Bk iv c. ti) that the Homeric
poems were the theme of these lectures. On this there is no evidence, but
Homer was certainly a main subject of the literary studies of Crates.
* Gellius, xviti 5, 11.
* Madvigy Opust. i 87 f (p. 70 f, ed. 1887); Hermann, Opusc, viii 390;
Lachmann, JCl» SchrifUn ii 67.
^ GelUus, iii 3, 9.
' Mar. Vict. Gram, Lai, 6, 8; Ritschl, Opmc, iv 141.
' Teuflfel, § 134, 7 and It; Schanz, |§ 49, 50.
172 THE ROMAN AGE. [CHAP.
for their affected imitation of Greek phraseology ^ Lucilius was
succeeded by an epigrammatic poet less known to fame, Porcius
Licinus, the author of a trochaic poem on the history of Roman
literature, in the course of which he insisted on the lateness of the
origin of Roman poetry in the oft-quoted lines :
'Poenico bello secundo Musa pinnato gradu
Intulit se beUicosam in Romuli gentem feram*'.
Among the younger contemporaries of Accius and the pre-
cursors of Varro was Q. Valerius of Sora (born c. 154), a man of
distinction in linguistic and antiquarian research. When Varro
was asked the meaning oifavisae Capitolinae^ he admitted that he
knew nothing of the origin of the word favisae and took refuge in
quoting the opinion of Valerius to the effect that favisae was a
corruption oiflavisae and meant the same as thesaun\
The foremost scholar of this age was L. Aelius Stilo Praeco-
ninus (r. 154 — c. 74 b.c.) of Lanuvium, a Roman
knight, who read the plays of Plautus and others
with younger men such as Varro and Cicero. He owed the name
of Praeconinus to his father's occupation as a praeco^ and that
of Stilo (or 'Penman') to his skill in writing speeches for members
of the Roman aristocracy \ We find him designated litteris oma^
tissimus by Varro, as quoted by Gellius (i 18, 2), who himself
describes him as doctissimus eorum ttmporum^ adding that Varro
and Cicero followed his example in refraining from the use of
novissimum in the sense of extremum (ib. x 21, 2). He is charac-
terised by Cicero in the Brutus (205) as a man of the profoundest
learning' in Greek and Latin literature, and as an accomplished
critic of ancient writers and of Roman antiquities in their intel-
lectual as well as in their historical and political aspects. His
legal and antiquarian pursuits are noticed in the De Oratore*.
His grammatical and especially his etymological inquiries were
partly inspired by his devotion to the Stoic philosophy. He
appears to have been an industrious writer, and much of his
lore passed into the pages of Varro and of Verrius Flaccus,
of Pliny the elder and of Gellius. His writings included a
^ TeufTel, § 143, 7. ' Gellius, xvii 11, 45.
' ib, ii 10, 3 (Teuflfel, § 147, i). * Suet. Gram, 3.
* i 193, Aeliana (Madvig for atima) studia.
X.] Q. VALERIUS. STILO. VARRO. 1 73
commentary on the Carmina Salwrum} \ a critical list of the plays
of Plautus, in which he recognised 35 plays as genuine, and in
connexion with which he possibly passed the encomium on the
style of Plautus quoted by Varro, to the effect that, had the
Muses wished to speak in Latin, they would have used the
language of Plautus*. He also wrote a treatise on axiomatic
statements (ircpl ajio>fUKT<i)i^) apparently connected with the Syntax
of the Stoics, which Gellius (xvi 8, 3) found after diligent search
in the Library in the temple of Peace ; an edition of the works of
Q. Metellus Numidicus, whom he accompanied into exile in
100 B.C. ; probably also an antiquarian work on the laws of
the XII Tables, and lastly a glossary including articles on etymo-
logical, antiquarian and ' historical subjects'. The Satires of
Lucilius and the Annals of L. Coelius Antipater were dedicated
to Stilo. Among the scholars who succeeded Stilo^ were L. Plotius
Callus and Saevius Nicanor, early teachers of Latin rhetoric and
literature respectively; Aurelius Opilius, a student of Plautus;
Antonius Gnipho, a commentator on the Annals of Ennius;
M. Pompilius Andronicus, who wrote criticisms on the Annals,
published by Orbilius ; Servius Clodius, who married the daughter
and stole some of the papers of Stilo, and is described as the
author of a catalogue of the genuine plays of Plautus*; and
lastly Staberius Eros, the instructor of Brutus and Cassius, whom
Pliny the elder* calls with some exaggeration conditor gramtnaticae,
Stilo*s most famous pupil, M. Terentius Varro (116 — 27 rc),
is characterised by Cicero' as diUgeniissimus investi-
gator antiquitatisy by Quintilian* as vir Romanorum
eruditissimus^ and by St Augustine as one who had read so much
^ Varro, L, Z. vii 1 ; cp. Festus x.v. manuost mohurum^ P^ifi^y quoted by
Suringar, Historia CritUa Schciiastarum LaitMcrum, i 19.
' Quint X I, 99.
* Goetz in Pauly-Wissowa, i 533 f. Cp. Mommsen, //ut, of Rome^ Bk iv
c. II and 13; TeufTel, §148; Schanz« | 76.
* Suet. Gram, 3, 5 — 8 etc. Teuffel, § 159; Schanz, |§ 194 — 6.
* Gellius, lit 3, i. Cp. Cic ad Fam, ix i6t 4 (to Paetus), Servius, frater
tuus, quem litteratissimum fuisse iudico, facile diceret *hic versus Plauti non
est ; hie est', quod tritas aures haberet notandis generibus poetarum et consne-
tudine legendi.
* XXXV 199. ^ Brutus 60. * x ii 95.
174 THE ROMAN AGE. [CHAP,
that one wondered he had any time left for writing, and had
written so much that one might well believe that scarcely any one
could have read the whole of his works ^ His books numbered
as many as 620, belonging to 74 separate works. They included
XLi books Antiquitatum rerum humanarum et divinarum^ with
other antiquarian works de vita and de gente popuU Romania a
book of 'origins ' called Aetia (like the Alna of Callimachus), and
a treatise on Trojan families and on the Roman tribes. His
writings on literary history comprised works on Plautus' and on
the drama, on poetry and on style, with three books on Libraries ;
but unhappily they have not survived, and there is nothing to
show that they were seriously concerned with literary criticism.
His grammatical writings included xxv books de Lingua Latina^
of which v — X (published before 43 b.c.) are extant ; 11 — vii were
on etymology \ viii — xvi on inflexion, analogy and anomaly ; and
XVII — xxv on syntax; also a book on the origin of the Latin
language, three books on analogy (de similHudine verborum\ and
four de utilitate sermonis. Further he was the author of the first
encyclopaedic work in Latin on the 'liberal arts'. Under the
name of disciplinarum libri novem^ it comprised (i) grammar,
(2) logic, (3) rhetoric, (4) geometry, (5) arithmetic, (6) astronomy,
(7) music, (8) medicine, (9) architecture, the first seven of which
were the seven liberal arts of Augustine' and Martianus Capella,
afterwards represented by the trivium and the quadrivium of the
educational system of the Middle Ages. His poetical works in-
cluded certain saturae Menippeae^ of which fragments remain.
Lastly there were his three books de Re Rustica^, A large
' De Civ, Dei, vi a. Much the same was afterwards said of St Augustine
by Isidore (vii 179 ed. 1803), *mentitur qui te totum legisse fatetur*.
* The a i plays recognised by Varro were called the Fabulae Varronianae
(GelUus iii 3, 3), which may safely be identified with the ao extant plays and
the Vidularia^ of which fragments only have survived in the Anibrosian
Palimpsest (cent. v).
' Retract, i 6, where however 'philosophy* is substituted for 'astronomy'.
^ Teufliel, S§ 164—9. ^P* I^it^lili O^c, iii 419—505; Mommsen, Hist,
tf Rome^ Bk V c la ; Wordsworth's Early Latin^ pp. 356 — 8; and Nettleship,
ii 146 f; also Schanz, §§ 183 — 193; Wilmanns, De Varronis libris gramma-
ticit, pp. ia6, 1864; and Reitzenstein, yarro und yohantus Mauropus von
£ucJkaita, eins StudU Mur Geschichte der Sprachwissenschafiy pp. 97, 1901.
X.] ANALOGY AND ANOMALY. 1 75
portion of this varied literary activity is the theme of Cicero's
glowing eulogy in the Academica (i § 9).
But (apart from fragments) the only works which have survived
are the books de Re RusHcay and six books de Lingua Latina.
Books v — XXV of the latter were dedicated to Cicero, who had
waited impatiently for the fulfilment of Varro's promise to dedicate
to him an important work, and who thus received a recognition of
the handsome compliment paid by himself in dedicating to Varro
the second edition of his Academica (45 b.c.). Varro's treatise is
the earliest extant Roman work on grammar. The first three of
the surviving books are on Etymology, book v being on names of
places, VI on terms denoting time, and vii on poetic expressions.
To ourselves the value of these books lies in their citations from
the Latin poets, and not in their marvellous etymologies. But
Varro is right in regarding merfdies as standing for medius (and
not merus) dieSy and in connexion with this word he records the
interesting fact that he had himself seen the form in D carved on
a sun-dial at Praeneste*. The next three books are concerned
with the controversy on Analogy and Anomaly : viii on the argu-
ments against Analogy, ix on those against Anomaly, and x on
Varro's own view of Analogy.
In the first of these books we have arguments and illustrations in favour of
the charms of variety : ex dissimilitudine plus volnptatis, quam
ex siniilitudine, saepe eapitur; hence it may be inferred verbih * i^^i *"
rum dissimiUtudineniy quae sit in consueiudine^ non esse viian- Varro
iiam (31-31). In speech, it is urged by the anomalist, there
is no rule; the inflexions of similar words are sometimes similar, as, from
bcnum and nialumt b&no and tnalo; sometimes dissimilar, as, from lupus and
lepus, lupo and Upori; again the inflexions of dissimilar words are sometimes
dissimilar, as Priamus^ Paris, and Priamo, Pari; sometimes similar, as
luppiter, avif, and lavi, ovi. If analogy is not universal, argues the anomalist,
there is no such thing as true analogy. The book ends with many examples
of irregularity in declension, in the degrees of comparison, and in diminutives
and proper names. The next book (ix), in arguing against anomaly, begins
with the suggestion that that noHlis grammatieus. Crates, in accepting the view
of Chrysippus, and in attacking that of Aristarchus, hsul misunderstood both.
When Chrysippus wrote on anomaly, he meant to show that similar things
are often denoted by dissimilar words, and dissimilar things by similar words,
which is true. Again, when Aristarchus wrote on analogy, he held that we
must accept the inflexion or derivation of certain words as a pattern (or
^ Z. Z. vi 4.
176 THE ROMAN AGE. [CHAP.
paradigm) for the rest, so far as custom adniits (§ i). Varro is probably wrong
in describing Crates as having mistaken the meaning of Chrysippus and Aristar-
chus, and, when he himself admits the claims of cotisuetudo^ be virtually gives
up the case for strict analogy. All that the anomalist maintained was that
analogy very often broke down, and he accordingly concluded that it was not
analogy but consuetude that was the guiding principle of language. As Varro
was reluctant to call himself an anomalist, he takes refuge in the expedient of
bringing forward a third party, consisting of those who in loquendo ftartim
sequi iubent ttos consuetudinem^ partim rationem. So long as partim remains
undefined, this description comes to nothing, as either of the two contending
parties might claim it as representing their views. Varro regards this third
party as approximating to his own view of analogy; at the same time he
regards that party as open to the same objection as the anomalists : — consuctudo
et anahgia coniunctiores sunt inter sCt quam ii credunt (ix a)^.
Cicero's view agrees with that of Varro. He is an analogist, who never-
theless respects consuetudo. As a practical orator it would
have been impossible for him to disregard it. So he keeps
to himself his knowledge of the scientifically correct forms, and is content to
follow popular usage. He knew that in earlier Latin there had been no
aspirate in pulcros^ Cetigos^ triumpos^ Kartaginem^ but he followed popular
usage in introducing the aspirate (Orator^ 160). He uses confidens in the
sense of 'shameless', although he knows it is wrong \Tusc. Disp. iii 14); he
finds no fault with scripsere^ although he holds that scripserunt alone is right
( Orator^ 157). Usum loqufndi populo concessit scientiam mihi reservavi (ib, 1 60) .
Cicero does not follow euphony for its own sake, but simply as part of popular
usage: consuetudini auribus indulgenti iibentgr obsequor {ib. 157)'.
Analogy was the theme of a work by Caesar, written while he was crossing
the Alps', probably in 55 B.C. It was dedicated to Cicero^
and consisted of two books (i) on the alphabet and on words,
and (a) on irregularities of inflexion in nouns and verbs. It was in this work
that Caesar laid down the memorable rule : ut tafnquam scopulum^ sic fugias
inauditum atqtu insoiens verhum*. He thus admitted the claim of consuetudo
even in a work characteristic of his ruling passion for reducing everything to
law and order and uniformity. Similarly the decay and the revival of words is
made by Horace to depend on usus, quern penes arbitrium est et ius et norma
loquendi {A. P. 71 f).
The conflict between the analogists and the anomalists continued beyond
the limits of time assigned to this chapter. To complete our survey of the
subject, it may here be added that Pliny the elder (25 —
79 A.D.), among whose works were dubii semwfiis libri octo*,
was an analogist, but he allowed consuetudo its full rights (consuetudini et
«
* Steinthal, Sprachwissenschafi^ ii 130—136*. Cp. Reitzenstein, /.r. pp.
44 — 65. ' Steinthal, ii 154.
* Suet. Caes, 56. ^ Brutus 353; Gellius, xix 8, 3.
* Gellius, i 10, 4. * PHn* ^P- iii 5> 5-
X.] LITERARY CRITICISM. 1 77
suavitaii aurium onset sitmmam esse iriduendam), holding esse quidem ratienemt
sed multa iam consuetudine superari^. Although originally language may have
been entirely guided by analogy, c&nsuetudo is the natural enemy of ratio and
often drives it from the field. Pliny thus recognises the rights of ecnsueiudo
far more openly than Varro. He also recognises the force of authority^ and
accepts forms sanctioned veteti dignitaie. Authority and antiquity are the
constant allies of anomalous consuetudo^ and against these three forces analogy
must struggle in vain'.
Quintilian (c. 35 — 95 A.D. ) is also an analogist, but he limits the province
of analogy to deciding in cases of doubt (i 6, 4). With Quin-
tilian analogy rests not on reason but on precedent; it does
not legislate on language, but simply observes and notes its laws (ib* 16).
A century later in Greek literature the sceptical ph3rsician, Sextus Empi-
ricus, who flourished between 180 and soo A.D., was a spirited
champion of anomaly. He ridicules the extreme analogists of smpiricut
his day as 'scholars who, although scarcely able to string two
words together, wanted to convict of barbarism all the ancient writers who
were conspicuous for correctness of language (c^^pd^eta) and excellence of
Greek ('EXXiyri^fi^), e.g. Thucydides, Plato and Demosthenes' (adv. MatK
i98).
The struggle, however, between the two principles was mainly limited to
rather more than one century before and one century after our era. Under the
influence of the Aristarchic school of analogists, grammatical forms were in-
vestigated with great accuracy. The paradigms of grammar were the result
of this struggle, which gave ' the necessary impulse to a complete analysis of
the forms of language**. In the first effort to reduce the facts of the Greek
language to order, the observation of the vast mass of regular forms led to
their classification, and tempted the grammarian to endeavour to reduce all
irregularities into agreement with the normal types. Such was the work of
the earlier analogists. We may say of them that they held a brief for the
'rule*; while the anomalists showed cause for the 'exception*. The net result
of the struggle was the ultimate recognition of the fact that in the realm of
language, as in the world of nature, uniformity and variety are inextricably
intermingled with one another.
Literary criticism in the Roman age was partly borrowed from
Greek sources such as the Poetic and Rhetoric of
Aristotle, and the lost treatise On Style by Theo- critiSl7
phrastus. It may also have been influenced by
critics such as Aristophanes and Aristarchus, the reputed founders
of the Alexandrian 'canon' (p. 129 f), while the Ars Poetica of
^ Charisius, i p. 99* * Steinthal, ii 155.
• Cp. J. Wordsworth's Early Latin, pp. 653 — 4«
S. 12
178 THE ROMAN AGE. [CHAP.
Horace included among its sources of inspiration a lost treatise on
poetical composition by Neoptolemus of Parium \ whose date is
probably between that of Callimachus and Aristophanes'.
Early in the first century ac. we find a ' canon ' of ten Latin
comic poets drawn up by Volcatius Sedigitus ; the names included
are Caecilius, Plautus, Naevius, Licinius, Atilius, Terence, Turpi-
lius, Trabea, Lucius and Ennius". A threefold variety of style
was recognised by Varro (as by Theophrastus) ; and Pacuvius
was taken by him as a type of ubertas^ Lucilius of gracilitas^
Terence of mediocritas in the good sense of the term\ Literary
criticisms also appeared incidentally in his saturate where he says,
in one passage, that the palm is claimed by Caecilius for his plots,
by Terence for his delineation of character, and by Plautus for
his dialogues; and, in another, that truth to character is the
special merit of Titinius, Terence and Atta ; while the excitement
of the emotions is that of Trabea, Atilius and Caecilius*. The
criticisms on ancient poets current in the youth of Horace* have
been attributed to Varro'.
Literary criticism in Cicero (106 — 43 b.c) has a conventional
and borrowed element, as in the frequent comparison
between literature and the arts of painting and
sculpture*. In this he had been preceded by Neoptolemus and
he was succeeded by Dionysius* and Quintilian ^*. The late
Greek criticism also produced many new technical terms, several
of which passed into the Latin of the Ciceronian and Augustan
ages^'. The critical vocabulary of the Latin language was largely
extended by Cicero, who shows a special fondness for discriminat-
ing between varieties of style by means of metaphors borrowed
either from moral qualities or from the physiology of the human
* Porphyrion discussed by Nettleship, Essays, i 173, ii 46—48.
* Susemihl, i 405. * Gellius, xv 74,
^ id. vi (vii) 14, 8.
* Nettleship, ii 50 — 3 ; q). Saintsbury's History of Criticism, i 340 f.
* Rp,\\ 1,55.
7 NetUethip, ii 5a.
* Brutus 70, 75, aa8, a6i, 398; Oraior 36 (with the present writer's Intro-
duction^ pp. Ixxi — Ixxiii).
* Do Comp, 11, Dt Isocr. 3, De Isaco 4.
»• xii 10, I— 10. » Nettleship, ii 56.
X.] LITERARY CRITICISM IN CICERO. 1 79
body*. Whenever he is original in his criticisms on poetry, he
has a marked preference for the grand and free style of the older
poets, such as Accius, Ennius and Pacuvius. In his criticisms on
oratorical prose, in the Brutus and the Orator^ he vindicates his
own literary principles against a new school, that of the Roman
Atticists, comprising orators like Calvus, whose models were
Lysias and Thucydides. As a test of the truth of these divergent
views he lays down the principle that, 'given time and opportunity,
the recognition of the many is as necessary a test of excellence in
an artist as that of the few". A great style must therefore 'com-
bine all the elements of excellence ' '. Cicero's genius as a critic
is revealed in his review of the styles of Galba and Gaius Gracchus,
of Antonius, Crassus and Scaevola, of Cotta and Sulpicius; of
Caesar, Calidius and Hortensius^. In a few terse phrases he
summarises the literary qualities of the speakers whom he passes in
review, displaying a fulness of insight, a perfect mastery of thought,
and a power of self-controlled expression standing in strong con-
trast with his usual prolixity. In the De Legibus (i 5), as in the
De Oratore (ii 51 f), history, in accordance with the traditional
Greek view dating from the time of Ephorus and Theopompus, the
pupils of Isocrates, is regarded as a branch of oratory. The idea
of a painful study of authorities undertaken with the simple purpose
of ascertaining the truth, is unfamiliar to his age. It might have
been developed among the philosophers or the scholars of the time,
but philosophy turned towards 'problems of speculative ethics,
while scholarship satisfied itself with verbal and textual criticism".
In the De Republica (iv 13) Cicero happily describes Comedy as
the imitatio vitae^ the speculum eonsuetudinis, the imago veritatis.
In the De Oratore (iii 27 f ) he touches on the varied excellences
of Greek and Roman poets and orators, and {ib, 149 — 207) unfolds
a detailed theory of beauty of speech depending either on words
themselves and their combinations or on figures of speech and
1 Cp. the present writer's notes on Cic. Orator, §§ 15, 76; also Causeret's
£tude (1886), pp. 155 — 8, and Saintsbury, i 310.
> Brutus 183 f (Nettleship, ii 58 f).
• Di Or. iii 96 f, loi.
• Brutus §§ 93, ia5, 139, 143, 148, «oi, a6i, 174, 301.
• Nettleship, U 56—68.
12 — 2
l8o THE ROMAN AGE. [CHAP.
thought In the Pro Archia he shows a personal interest in.
eulogising literature in the presence (as we know from the
scholiast) of his brother Quintus. He also supplies us with
valuable evidence as to the state of Greek culture in Southern
Italy, and also in Latium and Rome, shortly before 102 b.c* In
the Letters the only important piece of literary criticism is the
much discussed phrase in which Cicero expresses his agreement
with his brother as to the 'poems' of Lucretius: — 'Lucretii
poemata, ut scribis, ita sunt; multis luminibus ingenii, multae
tamen artis' {ad Qui'ntum, ii 11), where it has (perhaps unneces-
sarily) been proposed to insert a non either before mu/tis or before
multae*. It is disappointing to find in Cicero so vague a criticism
of the merits of a poet who had done him the honour of studying
and imitating his own translation of Aratus'.
The Orator^ which supplies some of the best examples of
Cicero's taste as a literary critic, also affords us valuable evidence
as to the nature and extent of his knowledge of the philology of
the Latin language. In the course of an excursus on the proper
collocation of words, in accordance with the laws of euphony
(§§ 146 — 162), we find him regarding vexiiium as the earlier form
of velum (§ 153) instead of being a diminutive of it; capsis as
standing for cape si vis (§ 154), an opinion rightly rejected by
Quintilian ; and the compound words ignoti^ ignavi and ignan\
as preferred for reasons of euphony to innoti^ imiavi and innari
(§ 158), whereas gnoti^ gnavi and gfiari are obviously the original
forms of the simple words.
Asinius Pollio (76 b.c. — 5 a.d.) wrote a severe criticism on
the archaisms of Sallust^ who in this respect was
regarded as having imitated and even plagiarised
from the elder Cato*. On the other hand he expressed a very high
opinion of Cicero : — ' huius viri tot tantisque operibus mansuri in
^ Pro Archia 5, erat Italia turn plena Graecarum artium ac disciplinarum,
studiaque haec et in Latio vehementius turn colebantur quam nunc isdem in
oppidis, et hie Romae propter tranquillitatem rei publicae non neglegebantur.
* Introd. to Munro's Lucr, vol. i pp. 515 — 5, ed. 1873; cp. Saintsbury,.
pp. 114— 7-
* Munro on Lucr, v 619; cp. Mackail*s Latin Literature^ p. 50.
^ Suet. Gram, 10. ' Suet. Aug, 86 ; Quintilian viii 3, 19.
X.] CONTEMPORARIES OF CICERO. l8l
omne aevum praedicare de ingenio atque industria supervacuum
est'».
An account of the consulship of Cicero was written in Greek
during his life-time by his friend Atticus"(io9 — 32),
whose liber annalis^ a chronological work covering ^j^ *"* *"
seven centuries of Roman history ', is probably the
source of the Fasti Capitolini and of the 'Chronograph' of
354 a.d/ He also played an important part in literature as the
head of an establishment of learned slaves engaged as copyists*.
We still possess the Life of Atticus by Cornelius Nepos, while
that of Cicero is unfortunately lost. Cicero's Life was also written
by his freedman Tiro, and it is to Atticus and Tiro that we are
doubtless mainly indebted for the survival of his works. Tiro is
specially named in connexion with the letters and the Speeches*.
He wrote several works on the Latin language^, and invented a
system of shorthand, which was carried further by Philargyrus, a
freedman of Agrippa, and Aquila, a freedman of Maecenas, and
also by Seneca*. After flourishing in the Carolingian age, it
became less common at the beginning of the tenth century, and
vanished after the twelfth*.
Among the younger contemporaries of Cicero, the Neo-
Pythagorean P. Nigidius Figulus (c. 98 — 45 B.C.),
the praetor of 58 B.C., was ranked by a later age pjiiit*"*
as second to Varro in learning". His commentarii
grammatici dealt with grammar in general, and especially with
orthography, synonyms, and etymology. They are often quoted
by Gellius, who complains of their being more obscure and less
popular than the corresponding works of Varro". He was perhaps
' Seneca, Stias* vi 14.
' Ad Ait, ii 41 ; Nepos, Ai/ieus, 18.
' Nepos, i.c; Cic. Oraiar no, Brutus 14, 19.
^ Schanz, § 116.
' Nepos, /.r., 13, 3 ; Cic. ad Ait, xiii 31, 3 ; 44, 3; Fronto, Ep* 10. Hul-
leman's Atiicus^ p. 173.
* Ad Att, xvi 5, 5; Gellius, i 7, i ; xtii. it, 16; cp. Quint, x 7, 30.
' Gellius, xiii 9, a. ' Isidore, Orig, in.
* Schanz,! 178, ult.
«» Gellius, iv 9. I.
» xvii7, 5; xix 14, 3.
1 82 THE ROMAN AGE. [CHAP.
the inventor of the method of denoting the long vowel by an
apex^ L. Ateius Praetextatus, who was born at
Praetextatut Athens and became a Roman freedman, assumed
(like Erastosthenes) the name of Phiiologus. He
was a student of style and of Roman history, and a friend of
Sallust and Asinius Pollio*. Valerius Cato, who
Valerius Cato . , , - , ,
had a great reputation as a teacher of young noble-
men with a taste for poetry, closed his life in extreme poverty;
but even the satirical lines of Bibaculus unconsciously do him
honour by comparing him as a summus granimaticus with the
scholars of Alexandria and Pergamon : — tn cor Zenodoti^ en iecur
Crateti5\
Latin grammar owes its terminology, in the first instance, to
Varro ; and, in the next, to Nigidius Figulus. In
termim)U)i^*** the middle of the first century B.C. the Gender or
genus of a noun or twmen substantivum was distin-
guished by the terms tnrile^ muliebre and neutrum (tnasculinum
and femininum not occurring earlier than the second century
A.D.)*. The Number or numerus was described by Varro as
either singularis or multitudinis^ while pluralis is found later in
Quintilian (who represents the teaching of Remmius Palaemon),
iSidi plurativus in Gellius. A Case (as with the Stoics) might be
either rectus or obliquus ; the casus rectus was also known to Varro
as the casus nominandei or nominativus \ the Genitive was called
by Varro the casus patricus^ by Nigidius the casus ifUerrogandi \
the Dative was described by both as the casus dandi^ while gene-
tivus and dcUivus occur in Quintilian ; the Accusative is in Varro
the casus accusandei or accusativus ; the Vocative the casus vacan-
dei^ while vocativus is found in Gellius; the Ablative, recognised
by Quintilian, possibly owes its name to Caesar, Varro's name for
it being the sextus or Latinus casus, as it was not found in Greek.
The Declensions and Conjugations are unrecognised by Varro.
He divides each of the three times, past, present and future, into
^ TeufTel, § 170; Hiibner, Homische LiiL § 45* (p. 44 Mayor); Mommsen,
Hist, of Rome^ Bk V c. 13 ; also Schanz, R'dm, Litt.^ S 181.
' Suet. Gram, to; Schanz, § 195, 5.
* f^. 11; Teuffel, § aoo.
^ First found in Caesellius Vindex (Gellius vi (vii) 3).
X.] GRAMMAR. LITERARY CRITICISM IN HORACE. 1 83
a tempus infectum and a tempus perfecium \ but he knows nothing
of any technical sense of modus^.
The earliest of the literary criticisms of Horace (65 — 8 b.c)
are those of the fourth and tenth of his first book
o / \ Literary
of Satires (35 B.C.). He there asserts his own prin- criticism in
ciples under the guise of a polemic against Lucilius. ^^^
His predecessor's style, he says, is too hasty and too slovenly,
while the Old Attic Comedy is too narrow in its scope to serve
as a model for his own satura. Poetry, he insists, is not a matter
for the crowd; it is the gift and privilege of the few". About
19 B.C. we have the criticisms of his Ars Poetica^ founded in part
on Greek originals and prompted apparently by a desire to recall
his countrymen from the critical principles of the Ciceronian and
the Alexandrian ages, to those on which the great works of Hellas
were founded. Mr Saintsbury, who justly describes it as 'the
only complete example of literary criticism that we have from any
Roman \ criticises its desultoriness and its arbitrary convention-
ality, while he fully recognises its brilliancy, its typical spirit, and
its practical value*. In the two Epistles of the Second book
Horace discards the framework of Greek works and Greek texts,
and relies on his own genius. In poetry he insists on the worth-
lessness of mere antiquity, and on the importance of perfect finish.
The older Latin poets, admired by Varro and Cicero, are more
coldly regarded by Horace, while they meet with a warmer appre-
ciation in Ovid^ Virgil and Horace became classics soon after
their death, driving out the taste for the older poets, and finding
admirers and imitators in Lucan and Persius respectively.
While Virgil's Eclogues and Georgia were published during his
life-time, the Aeneid was first edited by Varius and
Tucca after his death (19 B.c). He was attacked Jtvit^^^^
by Carvilius Pictor in his Aeneidomastix ; his vitia^
or supposed faults of style, were collected by Herennius; his
^ Cp. Lersch. Sprcuhphilosophie^ \\ 333 — 356; Griifenhan, ii 391 — 306;
and L. Jeep, Zur Geschickte XHtn den Redetheilen hti den Latiinischen Gramma"
fiAem, pp. 114 — 159.
* i 4, 40 and 71 : Nettleship, ii 70.
* //;>/. 0/ Criticism^ i aai — 8.
* A mores, i 15 — 19, Trisiia, ii 413; Nettleship, 1170—73.
1 84 THE ROMAN AGE. [CHAP.
furia^ or alleged plagiarisms, by Perellius Faustus ; and his trans-
lations from the Greek, by Octavius Avitus ; while his detractors
were answered by Asconius, better known as the earliest commen-
tator on Cicero ^ The first to expound Virgil in the schools of
Rome was a freedman of Atticus, named Q. Caecilius Epirota,
who opened a school after the death of his second patron, the
poet Cornelius Callus (27 b.c.)*. Virgil was criticised by Hygi-
nus, the librarian of the Palatine Library, and by Comutus, the
friend of Persius. In the time of Quintilian' and JuvenaP he
shared the fate, which Horace' had feared for himself, of being a
textbook for use in schools. The first critical edition of Virgil
was that of Probus in the time of Nero. Among his interpreters
were Velius Longus, under Trajan; Q. Ter. Scaurus, under
Hadrian ; Aemilius Asper (towards the end of the 2nd century) ;
and Aelius Donatus (^. 353 a.d.). The earliest extant commen-
taries are those in the Verona scholia^ including quotations from
Comutus, Velius Longus, Asper, and Haterianus (end of 3rd
cent.); that on the Eclogues and Georgics bearing the name of
Probus (fl. 56 — 88 a.d.); that on the Aeneid by Tib. Claudius
Donatus (end of 4th century), which is simply a prose paraphrase
exhibiting the rhetorical connexion of the successive clauses ; and
that on the whole of Virgil by Servius (late in 4th century), which
includes references to the lost commentary by Aelius Donatus,
who appears to have been deficient in knowledge and judgement
and far too fond of allegorising interpretations, and in these
respects inferior to the learned and sober Servius ^ The earliest
Mss of Virgil belong to the 4th or 5 th centuries.
The first critical edition of Horace was that of Probus; the
first commentary that of Q. Terentius Scaurus,
of^Horlce"**^ followed (late in the 2nd century) by Helenius
Aero, who also expounded Terence and Persius.
The only early commentaries now extant are the scholia collected
by Pomponius Porphyrio (3rd cent.), and by Pseudo-Acro, and
those compiled for various mss by Prof. Cruquius of Bruges. It
* Nettleship in Conington's Virgil, \^ pp. xxix— cix.
* Suet. Gramm, 16. * i 8, 5—6.
* vii aa6 f. • Ep, i 30, 17.
* NeUleship, /.r.; cp. Schanz, | 348.
X.] EARLY STUDY OF VIRGIL AND HORACE. 18$
is only through Cniquius (1565) that we know anything of the
codex aniiquissimus BlandiniuSy borrowed from the library of a
Benedictine monastery near Ghent, and burnt with the monastery
after it had been returned to the library. It represented a recen-
sion earlier than the date of Porphyrio, as, in Sat. 16, 1 26, instead
oi fugio rabiosi tempora signi (recognised by Porphyrio), it had
the true text:— /ugio campum lusumque trigonem. The only MS
which retains the latter is the codex Gothanus (cent 10). In this,
and seven other mss, we find a record at the end of the Epodes
showing that, at the close of the Roman age, there was a recen-
sion of Horace produced, with the assistance of Felix, orator
urbis jRomaCy by Vettius Agorius Basilius Mavortius (the consul of
527)*. The earliest extant ms belongs to the eighth or ninth
century.
In the next chapter we shall turn to the Grammarians and
Scholars of the Augustan age.
' Cp. Schanz, §§ 363 — 5; and TeufTel, { 340, 6 and 477, 3.
I DALIAELVCOS'VB I M
FLOW BVSETDVLCIAD
ihhAQ:} BATD ICTOPAA
From Codex Sanoallknsis 1394 (Century iv or v) dp Virgil
(Aen. \ 693 f).
(E. M. Thompson's Palaeography^ p. 185.)
Conspectus of Latin Literature, &c., i — 300 A.D.
Roman
Bmparon
AJ>.
14'nberiut
37 Caligula
41 Claudius
S4 Nero
68Galba
69 0tho
69 ViteUiua
69 Vespasian
79 Titus ^
81 Domitian
96 Nerva
98 Trajan
100
PMtt
Gennanicus
15 B.C. — 19 A. D.
c, 14 Manilius
30-40 Phaedrus
L. Ann. Seneca II
4 B.C— 65 A.O.
«4 Calpumius
rersius 34— <ia
Lucan 39--65
Valerius FUccus
d. c. 90
Sutius d. c. 95
Silius as — loi
Martial
c. 40—104
HiBtorlans,
Btoffrapben
9 Pompeius
Trogus
30 Velleius Pat-
erculus
31 Valerius
Maximus
41 Q. Curtius
117 Hadrian
138 Antoninus
Pius
161 M. Aurelius
<i6i-9 L. Verus)
x8o Commodus
193 Pertinax
193 Julianiu
193 Septimius
Severus
aoo
ail Caracalla
ai7 Macrinus
ai8 Elagabalus
aaa Alexander
Severus
a3$ Maximin
a38GordianI,II
„o/Pupienus
'^^iBalbinus
338 Uordian III
344 Philippus
a49 Decius
asi Callus
as3 Aemilianus
as3 Valerian &
Gallienus
a68 CUudius II
STO Aurclian
a7S Tacitus
370 Florianus
36 Probus
a Carus
a83Carinus &
Numerian
a84 Diocletian
(a86 Maximian)
"»00
Juvenal
c. 550r6o— 140
poetat tucUrici
a49 Commodia*
nus
Tacitus
c. 55— >«>
lao Suetonius
<r. 75—160
137 rlorus
Justin
aa3 Marius
Maximus
Oraton,
Bhetorldftni
L. Ann. Seneca I
54 B.C.— 39 A.D.
P. Rutilius
Lupus
68-88 QuinUlian
f. 35—95
too Younger
Pliny 61 — 105
143 Fronto
c. 90 — 168
158 Apuleius
a84 Nemesianus
350 Junius Cor-
dus
Spartianus
Capiiolinus
Vulcatius GalU-
canus
TrebeUiusPollio
Aquila
Roouuitts
a95 Amobius
a97 Eumenius
Lactantius
SduOan,
Orittoi, fto.
OtlMTlMtan
of
35-70 Palaemon
54-7 Asconius
56—80 Probus
c. i4C«lsua
43-4 PompoiUtu
Mela
L. Ann. Seneca II
4B.C.— 6SA.D.
Petronius d. 66
64-5 Columdla
76 Elder Pliny
83—79
%
L. Caesellius
Vindex
.Ter. Scaurus
elius Longus
c. 150 C. Sulp.
Apollinarift
d. c. 160
169 Gellius
b. c, 130
Aemilius Asper
Flavius Caper
Sutilius
Maximus
Terentianus
Maurus
Helenius Aero
Festus
Porphyrio
C. Julius
Romanus
338 Censorinus
Mar. Plocius
Sacerdos
70-97 Frontinus
d. c. X03
Gains xio — 180I
Tertullian
f. 150— «3o
ai8 T Solinus
C>*prian
c. 9oo->a5S
CHAPTER XI.
LATIN SCHOLARSHIP FROM THE AUGUSTAN AGE
TO 300 A.D.
The Temple of the Palatine Apollo, founded in memory of
the victory of Actium, was dedicated by Augustus in 28 a.d.
Like the Temple of the 'Victorious Athena' at Pergamon, it was
surrounded by colonnades giving access to a Library. The
Library consisted of two apartments, one for Greek and the other
for Latin books, with a spacious hall between; and we are
informed that the books were collected by Pompeius Macer\
and that the Head Librarian was C. Julius Hyginus^
Hyginus (r. 64 B.C. — 17 A.D.), the pupil of Alexander Poly-
histor (p. iqo) and the friend of Ovid, was one of
the foremost scholars of the Augustan age. In his
studies he followed the traditions of Varro as well as those of
Nigidius Figulus. Among the most important of his multifarious
works were (i) his commentary on Virgil, and (2) his treatise on
the Url^s Italiae^ repeatedly cited by Servius". Hyginus was
succeeded by his own freedman Modestus, who is mentioned in
Quintilian (i 6, 36) and Martial (x 21, i); and by M. Pomponius
Marcellus, who began life as a boxer and ended it as a pedant
During a discussion in court as to whether a word used by the
emperor Tiberius was good Latin or not, he had the courage to
say to the emperor : ' civitatem dare potes hominibus, verbo non
^ Suet. Caaar 56. * Suet. Gram, ao.
* Teuffel, § a63 ; Schanz, §§ 343—6; he is not the author of the extant
works on Astronomy and Mythology which bear his name (Schanz, |$ 347 —
350). For most of the scholars mentioned in this chapter and the next, cp.
Grilfenhan, iv 57 — 94.
1 88 THE ROMAN AGE. [CHAP/
potes'*. Varro was the model set up by Fenestella (52 b.c — 19 a.d.)«
the author of more than 22 books of Annals, which
became the source of a vast variety of later erudi-
tion connected with Roman antiquities and literary history. He
is described by Lactantius as a * diligentissimus scriptor". In the
same age Verrius Flaccus i^fi, 10 b.c.) produced his
Fiaccu"* %^^^^ work De Verborum SignificatUy the first Latin
lexicon ever written. This survives in the incom-
plete and fragmentary abridgement by Pompeius Festus (2nd cent
A.D.), which in its turn was further abridged by Paulus, who
dedicated his epitome to Charles the Great. We learn from
Suetonius that Verrius Flaccus introduced among his pupils the
principle of competition. He was made tutor to the grand-
children of Augustus and died as an old man in the reign of
Tiberius. The remains of his work may still be traced in
Quintilian, Gellius, Nonius, Macrobius and other writers'. It
appears to have been of the nature of an encyclopaedia, including
' not only lexicographical matter, but much information on points
of history, antiquities, and grammar, illustrated by numerous
quotations from poets, jurists, historians, old legal documents,
and writers on religious or political antiquities '\ Much of his
treatise De Orihographia can be recovered from the works on
the same subject by Terentius Scaurus and Velius Longus, who
wrote under Trajan and Hadrian, and from Quintilian i 4 and 7 *.
At Praeneste, a statue was erected in his honour with a semi-
circular marble recess inscribed with his Fasti^^ partially preserved
in the Fasti Fraenestini'' .
A name of note in the history of Latin Grammar is that of
Q. Remmius Palaemon (fl, 35-70 a.d.) of Vicentia.
By birth a slave, and by trade a weaver, he learnt
the elements of literature, while accompanying his master's son
on his way to school ; and, after obtaining his freedom, he held
the foremost place among teachers of Grammar in Rome. He
^ Suet. Cram, 22,
* ItuL Div. 16, 14, ap. Teuflfel, § 343, a. Cp. Schanz, § 331.
* Nettleship, i aoi — 347.
* id. p. 2oy • id, ii 151 — 8.
* Suet Ve GrofH, 17. Teuffel, f 74, 3.
' Teuffel, i 74, 3 and § 161 ; Schanz, |$ 340— i.
XL] VERRIUS FLACCUS. 1 89
was bom towards the end of the reign of Augustus, and lived
under Tiberius and Claudius, both of whom declared that morally
he was the last man to whom the education of youth ought to be
entrusted. His popularity was due to his marvellous memory, his
readiness of speech, and his power of improvising poetry. His
Ars Grammatical probably published between 67 and 77 A.D.,
was the first exclusively scholastic treatise on Latin Grammar.
We infer from Juvenal (vi 452 f, vii 215) that it contained rules
for correct speaking, examples from ancient poets, with chapters
on barbarism and solecism. The scholia on Juvenal (vi 452)
inform us that Palaemon was the preceptor of Quintilian, and
it is highly probable that (in i 4 and 5 ^ i — 54) Quintilian is
paraphrasing from his preceptor's treatise. He was the first to
distinguish four declensions ; and part of his grammatical teaching
is preserved by Charisius (4th century). Palaemon humorously
regarded his own advent as an arbiter of poetry as predicted by
Virgil in the phrase, venit ecce Palaemon ; and he vain-gloriously
asserted that letters had been bom at his birth, and would die at
his death* .
The elder Seneca, L. Annaeus Seneca of Corduba {c, 54 b.c. —
39 A.D.), is a link between the republican and the
imperial times. In the first half of his life he was elder**** ****
an admirer of the style of Cicero and of Pollio and
Messala, while in his old age he recorded his earlier recollections
in works which illustrate the history of oratory under Augustus
and Tiberius, and are interesting in connexion with matters of
rhetorical criticism*. He mentions Apollodorus of Pergamon
(who included Augustus among his pupils), and he supplies some
reminiscences of Ovid as a declaimer*. In the latter part of his
life we may place P. Rutilius Lupus, the author of an abridgement
of a work on the figures of speech by the younger Gorgias (44 b.c)
containing well-chosen examples translated from speeches of Attic
orators which are no longer extant^
' Suetonius, Gram, 13 ; TeufTel, § aSi ; Nettleship, ii 149, 163 — 9 ; Schanz,
§ 475 ; also K. Marschall, De Q, Remfnii Paiaemonis libris grammaticis^ 1887;
Bursian*s Jahrtsh, vol. 68 (1891 ii), p. 133 f; and Jeep*s RedetheiU^ p. 17a f.
* Cp. Saintsbury, i 130 — 9. • Controv, ii 1, 8.
^ TeufTel, f 370 ; Schanz, f 480; Halm, Rhet, LaL Min,^ 3—91.
I90 THE ROMAN AGE. [CHAP.
The younger Seneca^ (c, 4 b.c. — 65 a.d.) is absorbed in the
philosophy of the Stoics, but does not share their
youfiVe?**** interest in Grammar. He criticises Cicero and
Virgil for their admiration of Ennius', and notes
the obsoleteness' of the language of Ennius and Accius, and even
of that of Virgil, whom he nevertheless cites very frequently,
calling him a 'vir disertissimus '^ and a 'maximus vates'*. He
quotes Horace occasionally, especially the Satires, and Ovid far
oftener, especially the Metamorphoses^ describing their author as
'poetarum ingeniosissimus, ad pueriles ineptias delapsus'*. He
casts contempt on those who are wholly engaged in the study of
'useless letters', and satirises the craze of the Greeks for inquiring
as to the number of the oarsmen of Ulysses, and whether the
Iliad was written before the Odyssey, and whether the same poet
was the author of both^. In the 88th of his Letters, he sneers at
the ' grammatici ' (§ 3) ; he justly ridicules the attempts to make
out Homer to have been a Stoic, an Epicurean, a Peripatetic or a
Platonist (§ 5) ; he does not even care to inquire whether Homer
or Hesiod was the earlier poet (§ 6); and he pities the 'super-
fluous ' learning contained in the 4000 volumes of Didymus, with
their discussions on the birthplace of Homer, and the moral
character of Sappho and Anacreon (§37). In his io8th Letter he
complains that the spirit of disputatiousness has turned 'philo-
sophy' into 'philology' (§ 23), and also points out that the
'grammarian' examines Virgil and Cicero from a point of view
different from that of the 'philologer' or the 'philosopher'
(^ 24 — 34 ; supra p. 9). He is almost afraid of taking an undue
interest in such matters himself (§ 35), though elsewhere he is
generous enough to describe the 'grammarians' as the custodes
Latini sermonis (Ep, 95 § 65). Lastly, in making the earliest
mention of the alleged destruction of 40,000 mss at Alexandria
(p. 112 f ), he leaves it to Livy to praise the Alexandrian Library
as 'a noble monument of royal taste and royal foresight', himself
1 Cp. Saintsbury, i 346 f ; Teuffel, S§ 387—190; Schanz, §§ 453—473.
* Gellius, xii a (Seneca, Frag. 1 10—3) and Dial, v 37, 5.
» £p, 58, 1—6. « Dial, viu i, 4.
* ib. X 9, a. * Nat. Q. iii 37, 13.
' Dial. X 13, 1—9; cp. Nat. Q. vr 13, i.
XL] SENECA. PETRONIUS. PBRSIUS. I9I
regarding it as a monument of learned extravagance, and even
withdrawing the epithet * learned ' ; for the books (he maintains)
had been bought for mere show and not for real learning {Dial.
ix 9> 5)-
Much more interest in literature seems to be shown by another
victim of Nero, a far less moral writer, Petronius
(d. 66 A.D.). His extant work is m form a satura
Menippea^ in which prose is interspersed with verse in various
metres parodying the style of Seneca, Lucan and Nero'. Literary
criticism is here incidentally represented in the opening protest
against the bombastic language which results from the practice of
declamation (^ i, 2). It is also exemplified in a later passage
warning the poet against allowing any particular sentence to be
too obtrusive for its context, insisting on the use of choice
language and the avoidance of vulgarity, and justifying this view
by appealing to Homer and Virgil, as well as the Greek Lyric
poets, and Horace with (what Petronius happily describes as) his
curiosa felicitas (§ II8)^ Literary criticism also finds its place in
the Satires of Persius (34-62 a.d.), who touches on
the interest felt by the descendants of Romulus for
the after-dinner discussion of literary topics (i 31). His highly
satirical and allusive prologue is followed by a satire on the
professional poet and on the mania for poetic recitation, with
parodies of the * precious ' style affected by the poetasters of the
day. There is also a critical element in the opening passages of
the fifth and sixth Satires, his general attitude being a protest
against a fantastic pursuit of Greek themes, and a preference for a
manly Roman style*.
One ,of the most competent commentators of the first century
was Q. Asconius Pedianus (c, 3-88 a.d.), who was
certainly acquainted with Livy, and was probably,
like Livy, bom at Patavium. He was the author of a lost work in
vindication of Virgil*, but is best known as the writer of a learned
historical commentary on Cicero's speeches. All that has survived
is certain portions of the commentary on the Speeches in Pisonem^
1 Tcuffcl, § 305, 4 ; Schanz, §§ 393—6.
* Saintsbury, i i^i — 5. • ib, i 948 — 153.
^ Contra obtrectatares Vergilii^ quoted by Donatus in his Life of Virgil.
192 THE ROMAN AGE. [CHAP.
pro Scauro^ pro Mihne^ pro Comelio^ and in toga Candida, It
abounds in historical and antiquarian lore, and shows familiarity
with even the unpublished works of Cicero, and the speeches of
his partisans and his opponents. It was composed about 55 a.d.,
and is only preserved in transcripts of the ms found by Poggio at
St Gallen in I4i6\
Grammar was one of the many subjects which attracted the
attention of the elder Pliny (23-79 a.d.), who, in
cidil"^ the ^^^ Preface to his Naturalis Historia (§ 28), men-
tions what he modestly calls certain lihelli which he
had written on this subject. His nephew, Pliny the younger
(iii 5, 5), names in the list of his uncle's works eight libri on
dubius sermo (or Irregularities in Formation), written in the time
of Nero. It is probably this work that is the source of a large
part of Quintilian i 5, 54 to i 6, 287 '. It is also probably the
same work that is meant by the Ars Grammaiica attributed to
Pliny by Priscian and by Gregory of Tours. Pliny, as we have
already noticed (p. 176), is an analogist. Little else is known of
his views, but there is reason to believe that the work by Valerius
Probus de nomine is founded on the grammatical writings of the
elder Pliny*. The books of his encyclopaedic Naturalis Historia
which deal with Ancient Art are (with all their imperfections) the
foundation of our knowledge of that subject. The work has sur-
vived in many mss, having been very popular in the Middle Ages.
Extracts from the geographical portions appear in Solinus, and
other excerpts in the Mtdicina Plinii,
M. Valerius Probus of Beyrut (fl, 56-88 a.d.) was the foremost
grammarian of the first century a.d. Weary of the
career of a soldier, he resolved on becoming a
scholar. His interest in literature was first excited by certain
ancient Latin authors which he had read before arriving in Rome,
and here he continued his studies and gathered round him a num-
^ Madvig (1818) ; Teuffel, § 395, 3—3 ; Wissowa in Paufy- IVisstnoa s,v, ;
ed. in Orelli's Cicero v 2 pp. i — 95, and by Kiessling and Scboll (1875). Cp.
Suringar, Hist, Critica^ i 117 — 146; also Schanz, § 476, esp. p. 431^ ad fin.
* Nettleihip, ii 158— 161.
* O. Froehde, Vaterii ProH di nomim liMlum Plinii Secundi doctrinam
C0Htinir§ dimonstraiur^ 189a; qp. Nettlethip, ii 146, 150; Schanz, | 494, 5.
XI.] ASCONIUS. PUNY. PROBUS. I93
ber of learned friends, with whom he spent several hours a day in
discussing the Latin literature of the past*. Martial, in sending
into the world his third book of epigrams, bids it farewell with
the words : nee Probum Hmeto (iii 2, 1 2). Gellius, among several
eulogistic references, describes him as an ' illustrious grammarian '
(i 15, 18), and Sidonius Apollinaris calls him 'a pillar of learning'
( Carm, ix 334). He published a few unimportant criticisms, besides
leaving behind him a silva ohservationum sertnonis antiqui. Speci-
mens of his conversational teaching on this subject are preserved
by Gellius, who cites at second-hand his remarks on Plautus,
Terence, Virgil, Sallust and Valerius Antias, mentions some of his
writings, e.g. on the Perfect form occecurri, and also states that he
made the penultimate of the Accusative of Hannibal and Basdru-
^a/long, on the ground that it was so pronounced by Plautus and
Ennius (whose pronunciation of these forms has not been followed
by Horace or Juvenal). He produced recensions of Plautus (?),
Terence, Lucretius, Virgil, Horace and Persius, with critical
symbols like those used by the Alexandrian Scholars. These
symbols, which were 21 in number, had already been used by
Vargunteius and by Aelius Stilo*. He also wrote a work on
the ancient contractions used in legal Latin. In settling the
text of Virgil, he went back to the earliest authorities. We are
told that he had himself examined a ms of the First Georgic
corrected by Virgil's own hand", and traces of some of his
critical signs survive in the Medicean ms of Virgil, while we
may ascribe to him the nucleus at least of the extant commentary
on the Bucolics and Gtorgics^ which bears his name. Among the
grammatical works assigned to Probus is one on anomaly (de
inaequalitate consuetudinis)^ another on tenses, and on doubtful
genders. Two treatises have come down to us under his name :
(i) Catholica^ dealing with the noun and the verb; (2) a prolix
and feeble treatise on Grammar (to which the title Instituta
Artium has been given) with an appendix de difftrentiis and de
nomine excerpta. It is supposed that these are ultimately founded
* Suet. Dt Gram, 14.
' Reifferscheid, Suttoni Rtliquiae^ p. 157 f. Teuflel, § 41, 9. Grafenhan,
iv 37«» .^80.
* Gellius, xiii ii, 4.
s. 13
194 THE ROMAN AGE. [CHAP.
on the remains of the teaching of Probus which may have been
reduced into the form of a textbook in two parts : — (i) the InsH-
iuta Artiutn^ dealing with letters, syllables and the eight parts of
speech; and (2) the CathoUca^ dealing with nouns and verbs*.
Pliny and Probus are probably responsible for most of the remarks
on irregularities of declension and conjugation found in the later
grammarians. To these two writers, and to Palaemon, may be
ascribed the main outlines of the traditional Latin Grammar'.
From Probus we turn to a name of far greater note. Fabius
Quintilianus (c, 35-95 a.d.), born at Calagurris on
"" *° the Ebro, was the pupil of Palaemon and the
preceptor of Tacitus and the younger Pliny. His father was
a teacher of rhetoric in Rome, where he himself passed the
greater part of his life as a pleader in the law-courts and as a
professor of rhetoric. In 88 b.c he was placed at the head
of the first State-supported school in Rome, and probably three
years afterwards he began his great work, the Institutio Oratoria,
The study of literature (d^ grammatica) is the theme of chapters
4 — 8 of his first book, while c. 9 is ^ officio grammatid. There
is reason to believe that c 4 and c. 5 ^ i — 54 are founded on
Palaemon; c. 5 § 54 to c. 6 § 27 on Pliny, and c. 7 §§ i — 28 on
Verrius Flaccus'. In the controversy between analogists and
anomalists, Quintilian, as we have seen, was on the side of the
former without adhering to them very strictly (p. 177). In the
first chapter of the tenth book he suggests a course of reading
suitable for the future orator, including (i) the Greek and (2) the
Latin classics arranged under the heads of poetry, the drama,
history, oratory and philosophy. In (i) he virtually admits that
he is giving the criticism of others, not his own. These criticisms
have so much in common with those of Dionysius of Halicar-
nassus that it is practically impossible to dispute Quintilian's
indebtedness to that author, though an attempt has been made
to show that the identity is due to both having borrowed from the
same earlier authority*. In part of his criticisms on the Greek
» Tcuffcl, § 300; Schani, |§ 477—9.
• Netilcship, ii 170 f ; Schanz, ^ 494—5- * Nettlcship, ii 169.
* Usener, Dion, Hal, dt ImitaiioM^ p. 131. Heydenreich, De Quintiliani
...lihro X (1900), maintains that Quintilian was directly indebted to Dionysius.
XL] QUINTILIAN. TACITUS. YOUNGER PLINY. I95
poets, historians and philosophers, he appears to be indebted to
Theophrastus and the Alexandrian critics, such as Aristophanes
and Aristarchus*. In (2) his aim throughout is to make canons
of classical Latin authors corresponding as closely as possible with
the canons of Greek authors. He gives no independent opinion
on Pacuvius and Accius, and hardly notices Plautus, Caecilius,
and Terence; he misconceives Lucretius; and although his
criticisms on post-Ciceronian writers are sound and well-expressed,
they are generally brief. It is clear that literature before and
af^er Cicero has comparatively little attraction for Quintilian.
His refined and carefully written criticism on Cicero is a monu-
ment of trained insight, grounded on manly and sober sense.
While Quintilian is concerned with the literary and professional
aspects of the question as to the reading which is best suited for
the formation of a good oratorical style, Tacitus
Tacitus
(c. 55-120 A.D.) in his Dialogue JDe Oratoribus
(81 A.D.) takes a loftier view, seeing clearly that literature must
be 'judged as the expression of national life, not as a matter of
form and of scholastic teaching". The doubts as to the Tacitean
authorship of the Dialogue have been partly met by the fact that
a phrase there found (9 and 12)' is mentioned as expressing the
opinion of Tacitus in a letter addressed by Pliny the younger
(61-105 A.D.) to Tacitus himself (ix 10, 2)*. The
criticism of oratory has also an attraction for the pn^y y®""»«'
younger Pliny, He writes a long letter to Tacitus,
in the course of which he refers to the typical orators in
Homer, and quotes the ancient eulogies on the style of Pericles
(i 20). He also refers to the De Corona and the Meidias of
Demosthenes (ii 3 10; vii 30, 4), and quotes several passages
from his public speeches as examples of happy audacity of phrase
(ix 26, 8— 12)».
^ Nettleship, ii 76 — 85 ; and Peterson*8 Quiniil, X, pp. xxviii — xxxvii.
* Nettleship i,c. p. 87 AT. TeufTel, § 315 (Quintilian); § 554 (Tadtus); cp.
Schanz, § 483 f and § 418. For t^ facsimile from a MS of Quintilian (x i, 87),
see p. 303.
' in nemora et lucos ; nemora et luci.
* poemata...quae tu inter nemora et lucos commodissime periici patas.
' Teuflfel, § 340 ; Schanz, | 444 f. Literary criticism in Pliny, Tadtus and
Quintilian is fully treated by Saintsbury, i 370^311.
>3— 2
196 THE ROMAN AGE. [CHAP.
Pliny was bom in about the same year as Juvenal, and died in
about the same year as his earlier contemporary
Martial Of these two poets, Martial {c. 40 —
c, 102-4 A.D.) shows a high appreciation of Catullus (x 78 etc.)
who was beyond the reach of the flattery which he lavishes on
his own contemporary Silius Italicus (iv 14 ; vii 63). In criticising
another contemporary, whose verses were so obscure as to call for
a scholiast, he expresses a hope that his own poems may give
pleasure to grammarians, but may be intelligible without their
aid^ In many other epigrams, as has been fully shown by
Mr Saintsbury', *we have a very considerable number of pro-
nouncements on critical points or on points comiected with
criticism *. In Juvenal {c, 55-60 — 140 a.d.) there is
much mention of literature, but literary criticism
is hardly to be found. He satirises the learned ladies who prefer
talking Greek to Latin (vi 185 — 7), and weigh the merits of
Homer and Virgil (435—6).* In the seventh Satire he describes
the ideal poet, and pays a passing compliment to Quintilian (53 f,
186 f); in the tenth (114 — 132) he 'points a moral' as to the
perils of a political career by referring to the fate of Demosthenes
and Cicero, but he does not permit any of these themes to tempt
him into the criticism of literature'. Juvenal is the
only contemporary of Statius {c, 40 — c, 96 a.d.) who
mentions that poet^, and there are some fine touches of criticism
in the poem by Statius on the birthday of Lucan, where Ennius
and Lucretius (amongst others) are briefly characterised : —
'Cedet Musa rudis ferocis Enni,
£t docti furor arduus Lucreti'^
From this group of poets we turn to the name of a writer
of prose, who is our main authority on the history of Latin
Scholarship from 168 B.C. to the time of Probus, and whose
varied erudition made him a favourite author in the early Middle
Ages. C. Suetonius Tranquillus (c. 75-160 A.D.),
who was an advocate under Trajan, and private
secretary to Hadrian, spent the latter part of his life in preparing
^ X 91, grammatids placeant, sed sine grammaticis.
• i 156 — 16%, • ib. 153 — 6. * Juv. vii 81 — 7.
* Sih/iu, ii 7, 75 f; cp. Saintsbury, i 368 f.
XI.] MARTIAL. JUVENAL. STATIUS. SUETONIUS. I97
encyclopaedic works on the history of language and literature.
Apart from his extant work de vita Caesarum^ he wrote a series of
biographies entitled de viris illustribus under the headings of
'poets*, 'orators', 'historians', 'philosophers', 'scholars' {gram-
matici\ and 'rhetoricians'. Of the early part of this work we
possess excerpts alone. From the book on 'poets', we have short
lives of Terence, Horace, Lucan, Virgil and Persius, and some
remnants of the life of Lucretius *; from that on 'historians', a few
remains of a life of the elder Pliny. Of his 36 biographies of
'scholars and rhetoricians*, no less than 25 have survived. He
also wrote a work on Roman institutions and customs. It was
probably in another lost work entitled Pratum or Praia that
(among many other topics) he treated of various notations of
time in connexion with the Roman year, being one of the
authorities followed on this point by Censorinus and Macrobius^
besides being one of the main sources of the erudition of Isidore
of Seville. The works of Suetonius included a defence of Cicero
against the attacks of the Alexandrian Scholar, Didymus, and a
treatise on the critical signs used in the margins of mss'. Most
of our knowledge of the meanings of these symbols is due to
Suetonius*.
Among the Scholars of the second century a.d. were Caesellius
Vindex, a learned analogist* ; Q. Terentius Scaurus,
who wrote on orthography as well as Grammar and veiiui Lonfut
Poetry, and was also a commentator on Plautus and
Virgil, and probably on Horace'; Velius Longus and Flavius
Caper ^ both of whom wrote on orthography ; and
Aemilius Asper, the learned and acute commen-
tator on Terence, Sallust and Virgil'. A special interest attaches
* J. Masson \nJourntU of Philology^ xxxiii aio — 137.
* ReifTerscheid, Suetoni Reliquioi^ p. 149 f.
' irtpli r^t KiWpovof roXircfat, and irtpi TOf iw rots pifi>dois ofifi/Hwf
(Suldas).
* ReifTerscheid, p. 155 f. — On Suetonius in general, cp. Teuflel, | 547,
Schanz, §§ 519—556; and Mace, Sur SuitopUt 1900.
» Teuffel, § 343 ; Schanz, § 593.
•* ib- § 35« ; Schanz, § 594 f.
' '*. § 343; Schanz, §8 596, 599.
> ib, § 318 ; Schanz § 598.
198 THE ROMAN AGE. [CHAP.
to M. Cornelius Fronto of Cirta {c. 90-168 a.d.), the tutor of
M. Aurelius and the admirer of the earlier Roman
Pronto
literature as represented by Plautus, Ennius, Cato,
Gracchus, Lucretius, Laberius and Sallust. He never mentions
Terence or Virgil, though he betrays occasional reminiscences not
of Virgil only but also of Horace and Tacitus. He depreciates
Seneca, but bestows frequent encomiums on Cicero, though he
cares more for his letters than for his speeches, in which he finds
very few of those rare words for which Fronto himself had an
excessive partiality \ In literary criticism 'his utterances do not
go beyond neatly formulated criticisms of the old
A^ifinLrit'*^ scholastic type**. Mention may here be made of
C. Sulpicius Apollinaris of Carthage, the teacher of
Pertinax and of Gellius, and the author of the quacstiones episto-
licae^ and of metrical summaries of Plautus, Terence
Ceiiiu«° "* ^"^^ ^^ Atneid^ ; and Arruntius Celsus, an anno-
tator on Plautus and Terence*.
More important than either of these is Aulus Gellius* (bom
c, 130 A.D.), the author of the Noctes Atticae^ an
interesting and instructive compilation of varied
lore on the earlier Latin Language and Literature, and on Law
and Philosophy, deriving its name from the fact that the author
began it, about the age of thirty, in the winter evenings near
Athens. Its main importance is due to its large number of
citations from works which are now no longer extant. At Athens
the author became acquainted with the mysterious philosopher,
Peregrinus Proteus (xii 11, i), and was often invited to the
country-house of that distinguished patron of learning, Herodes
Atticus (i 2, I ; xix 12); he attended the monthly meetings of
the students (xv 2, 3), and made excursions to Aegina and Delphi
(ii 21, xii 5). In his extant work he shows himself a most
industrious student and a typical Scholar. He frequents Libraries,
whether in the dotnus Tiheriana on the Palatine, or in the Temple
» Teuffel, i 355, 5; Schanz, ^^ 549 f, csp. § 551.
' NetUethip, ii 91. * Teuflfel, § 357, i — 1; Schanz, § 597.
* »*• 357» 3 ; Schanz, i 605, 5.
' ib» 365 ; Schanz, i (^7 — 9; Nettleship, i 348 — 376 ; cp. Boissier, Fin du
Faganismtt ed. 3, 1898, i 178 — 180; and Saintsbury, i 313 — 9.
XI.] FRONTO. AULUS GELLIUS. I99
of Peace founded by Vespasian, in the Temple of Trajan, or in
that of Hercules at Tibur, or even at Patrae in Greece, where he
finds a 'really ancient ms' of Livius Andronicus^ The reading
aloud of a passage on melted ice or snow from a ms of Aristotle,
borrowed by a friend from the Temple at Tibur", leads him to
forswear cold drinks for the rest of his life. He has pleasant
memories of his teacher Antonius Julianus, who paid a large sum
for the purpose of verifying a single reading in an ancient MS of
Ennius (xviii 5, 11)"; he refers to good mss of Fabius Pictor, Cato,
Catullus, Sallust, Cicero and Virgil, but in these references it is
possible that he may be really borrowing from Probus who,
according to Suetonius, 'gave an immense amount of attention
to the collection of good mss of classical authors '\ In matters
of style, he has some general remarks accompanying a short
comparison between Plato and Lysias (ii 5), also between
Menander and Caecilius (ii 23), and C. Gracchus and Cicero
(x 3). He tells the story of the meeting at Tarentum between
the aged Pacuvius and the youthful Accius, when Pacuvius, after
hearing Accius read his Atreus^ pronounced it grand and sonorous,
but perhaps harsh and crude, and Accius replied that he hoped
his poems would improve in time, like apples that were harsh and
crude at first, but afterwards became sweet and mellow (xiii 2).
He quotes a comparison between the eruption of Aetna as
described by Pindar and by Virgil (xvii 10). He also defends
Sallust and Virgil against their detractors, and discusses the
style of Seneca (xii 2). More than a fourth of his work is
concerned with Latin lexicography, e.g. the singular use of milie
(i 16), with notes on pedarii senatores (iii 18), on the different
senses of obnoxius (vi 17), on proletarii and adsidui (xvi 10), on
the exact meaning of the phrase in Ennius, ex iure tnanum
consertum (xx 10), and on Cicero's use oi paenitere (xvii i). He
also discusses synonyms, words of double meaning, derivations,
and moot points of Grammar, such as the pronunciation of h and
^ xiii 10, I ; xvi 8, 3 ; xi 17, i ; ix 14, 5 ; xviii 9, 5.
» xix 5, 4 ; cp. ix 14, 3.
' It was Julianus who, in the summer holidays, took Gellius and his other
pupils to hear a recitation from the Annals of Ennius in the theatre of Puteoli
(xviii 5, 1—5).
* Suet. Gram, 14 (Nettleship, i 174).
200 THE ROMAN AGE. [CHAP
V (ii 3 ; X 4), the quantity of in and con in composition (ii 1 7),
the question whether one should say tertium or teriio^ curam vestri
or vestrum (x i; xx 6), and the difference between multis homini-
bus and multis tnortalibus (xiii 28). He quotes a large variety of
Greek and Latin authors, taking a special interest in the earlier
Latin Literature and in Latin 'grammarians'. But he rejects a
friend's suggestion that he should discuss (among many other
minor matters) the question what was the name of the first
* grammarian ' (xiv 6, 3). Among the more miscellaneous con-
tents of his work, readers of Sandford and Mertan may be
interested to find the original text of the story of * Androclus and
the Lion,' here quoted from the Alexandrian ' grammarian ' Apion
(v 14, 10 — 30). In a history of Classical Scholarship it may be
worth noticing that, while Cicero* describes Cleanthes and Chry-
sippus as quintae classis in comparison with Democritus, Gellius
contrasts a 'scriptor classicus* with a 'scriptor proletarius**^
obviously deriving his metaphor from the division of the Roman
people into classes by Servius Tullius, those in the first class being
called classici*^ all the rest infra classem^ and those in the last
proletariu As infra classem and classici testes are explained by
Paulus^ in his abridgement of Festus (the epitomiser of Verrius
Flaccus), it is probable that Verrius is also the authority followed
by Gellius. In any case it is from this rare use of classicus that
the modem term ' classical ' is derived.
To the close of the 2nd century may be assigned Terentianus
• ^ Maurus, the writer of a manual in verse on ' letters,
Aero. Pestut. Syllables and metres', the metrical portion of which
orp yrio .^ founded on a work by Caesius Bassus, the friend
of Persius' ; also Aero, the commentator on Terence and Horace ;
and Festus, the author of the abridgement of Verrius Flaccus just
mentioned. Porphyrio, whose scholia on Horace are still extant,
probably belongs to a later date than Aero, whom he quotes on
Sat, i 8, 25, and whose name is wrongly given to a number of
* Acad, ii 73.
' xix 8, 15, classicus adsiduusque scriptor, non proletarius.
' vi (vii) 13, I where Cato is quoted.
^ pp. 113 and 56 (Nettlekhip, i 169I.
• Teuflfel, ft 373*; Schaiu, § 514.
XI.] AULUS GELLIUS. ACRO AND PORPHYRIO. 20I
miscellaneous scholia on Horace founded partly on Aero and
Porphyrio with some additions from the Ranui of Suetonius*.
Statilius Maximus is known to have revised a MS of the Second
Agrarian speech of Cicero with the aid of the text edited by
Cicero's freedman, Tiro', whose libri Tironiani are mentioned by
Gellius (i 7, i ; xiii 21, 16) in connexion with the Verrine orations.
Statilius, who is also known to have commented on peculiarities
in the diction of Cato, Sallust and Cicero, falls between the time
of Gellius, who never quotes him, and that of Julius Romanus,
who quotes him repeatedly.
The Scholars of the 3rd century include the learned gram-
marian, C. Julius Romanus, extensively quoted by Charisius'; and
the writer of several grammatical works, Censorinus*,
whose extant but incomplete .treatise De die natali
(238 A.D.), mainly compiled from a lost work of Suetonius, contains
much valuable information on points of history and chronology.
In the second half of this century we may place Aquila Romanus,
the author of a work on figures of speech, adapted from Alexander
Numenius*; and Marius Plotius Sacerdos, the author of an Ars
Grammatica in three books, the second of which is mainly iden-
tical with the Catholica ascribed to Probus {supra^ p. 193)*.
A characteristic product of this age is the epitome of Pliny
bearing the name of Solinus, which afterwards became popular in
a new form and under the pretentious title of Poiyhistor, Just
before the last quarter of this century the emperor Tacitus (275-6)
provided for the preservation of the works of his * ancestor * the
historian by causing a copy to be placed in each of the public
libraries and by arranging for the transcription of further copies in
the future ^
As we glance over the three centuries from the age of Augustus
to that of Diocletian, which have been rapidly traversed in this
* Teuffcl, § 374; Schanz, § 601—1.
• Statilius Maximus rursus emendavi ad Tyronem etc (A. Mai, CiV. <■«/.
Amhros,y p. 131, ap. Jahn. Saths, BerUkte^ 1R51, 319).
' «^. § 379. I ; Schanz, \ 603.
* ih. 6 — 8 ; Schanz, § 631.
' ib. § 388 ; Halm, Rhtt, Lnt, Mm, 11 f.
• Teuffcl. § 394 ; Schanz, 1 604 f ; Jeep, RtdethtiU^ pp. 73 — 81.
^ Vopiscus, Tac, 10.
202 THE ROMAN AGE. [CHAP.
chapter, we are bound to recognise that, in the first century a.d.,
grammatical studies are more systematic, but at the same time
more narrow, than in the last century of the republic. The
preparation of practical manuals for educational purposes has
superseded the scientific and learned labours of a Varro, and
has ultimately led to the actual loss of the greater part of his
encyclopaedic works; but we may well be thankful to the
grammarians of the first century for all the lore that they have
preserved*, and we cannot forget that in that century learned
comment on Cicero, who is already a Classic, is represented by
the sober sense of an Asconius, and literary criticism by the
sound judgement and good taste of Cicero's admirer, Quintilian.
The second century, in which Suetonius with all his varied
learning must be regarded as little inore than a minor counterpart
of Varro, was in matters of Scholarship an age of epitomes and
compilations. Learning became fashionable, but erudition often
lapsed into triviality, and the ancient classics were ransacked for
phrases which ill assorted with the style of the time. In the
domain of Scholarship the most interesting personalities in this
century are those of Cornelius Fronto and Aulus Gellius. It is
characteristic of this age that, when Gellius calls to inquire after
Fronto, who has been kept at home by the gout, the question as
to the * approximate' cost of the construction of a new bath for the
relief of the learned patient leads to a scholarly discussion, in the
course of which it is shown that the supposed vulgarism praeter-
propter ('thereabout', *more or less') was actually used by Varro
and Cato and was really as old as Ennius*.
In the third century the only scholar worthy of consideration
has been Censorinus, yet even he owes his learning mainly to
Suetonius, the inheritor of the traditions of Varro. But while
Varro, who did not condescend to sacrifice to the Graces, has
been punished for his lack of style and for his prolixity by the
loss of by far the larger part of all his learned works, and while
Suetonius, with his wide range of scholarly research, scarcely
survives except in his biographies, the diminutive work of
Censorinus, a mere birthday gift with its borrowed erudition,
' Nettleship, ii 171. ' Gellius, xix 10.
XI.] CENSORINUS. 203
and its citations from authors, many of which the writer never
saw, has succeeded in descending to posterity, thanks in part
to its brevity and perhaps to its saving grace of style. The great
argosies have foundered, but the tiny skiff has suffered little
damage in drifting down the stream of time.
pcntimafTeettrt arrvT lan^ fi^fueiv
turjnX mAeerer tucrcci tif-Umendi
nic ad {leutixrvtqfrxrcpenfali^^
tC if^erneadoTqutdf. lunifau^imdA
From Codex Laurentianus xlvi 7 (Century x) ofQuintilian (x i, 87).
(Chatelaines PaUographie des Classiqtus Latins^ pi. clxxvii.)
(aequalita)te pensamns, ceUri omnts hnge sequentttr, nam Afacer it Lucrt'
tius Ugendi qui/em^ sed non ut phrasin, id est corpus eloquentiae faciant;
elegantes in sua quisque materia sed alter humilis alter difficilis. Ataeinus
Varro in hisy per quae nomen est adseeutust interpres operis alieni^ non tper-
nettdus quidem^ verttm ad augendam facultatem dicendi pamm locuples.
Conspectus of Latin Literature &c., 300 — 600 A.D.
Boaum
Bmparon
Poet!
305CoascAntiiuI
SopOmsumtiDcI
337 1^
-40 1 Constan-
I tine II
-61 iConstan*
tiu« II
-50 ICoiwutDsI
361 Julian
363 Jovian
364-75 Y»lenti-
nian I
367-S3 Gratian
375 Valenti*
nian II
39fl llieodotius I
395 Honorius
400
330 Juvencus
433 lohn
425 Vi
alenti'
nian III
Gothic King*
476 Odoacer
493 Theodoric
000
5a6 Athalaric
53^ Theodaliad
530—9 Vitiges
541 — 5a Tocila
537 Justinian I
565 Justin II
S78 Tiberius II
58a Mauridits
350 AvienuA
Hlitoriftni Ifc
Blographen
Voplscus
Lampridius
360 Aurelius
Victor
363 Eutropius
379 AuNonius
t, 310— c. 393
CUudian
455 Petronius
Maximus
455 Avitus
457 Majorian
461 Libius
Sevcrus
467 Anthcmius
473 Olybrius
473 Glycerius
474juiiusNcpos
475—6 Romufus
Augustulus
404 Prudentius
348 — c. 410
409 raulinus
353-43«
4i6Namatianus
CI. Marius Vic-
tor, d. 435-450
435 MerObaudes
e. 440 Scdulius
390 Ammiantu
c. 330—400
Vegetius
Sulp. Sevcrus
^•365r4»5
417 Orosius
b.c. 390
439— 45« Salvian
455 Prosper
c. 400—463
470 Apollinaris
Sidonius
c. 430~-48o
484—96 Dra-
coo tins
490 Avitus
460—^,595
Cyprianus
c. 475—550
"too
Gennadius
511 Eujipppius,
vita Srverini
Maximianus
Arator
550 Corippus
Fortunatus
c. 535—600
Oratonand
369 Claudius
Mamertiniu
389 Pacatus
391 Symmachus
C' 345—405
Chirius Fortu*
natianus
C.Julius Victor
5<i lordanis
uiklas 516—573
571 Gregory of
Tours 538— 593
Isidore or Seville
c, 570—636
Boholani and
OrlUot
333 Nonius
353 Marius
Victorinus
353 Aelius
Donatus
Chariiiius
Diomedes
Scrvius
Ti Claudius
Donatus
Macrobius
OthttrWUtara
of ProM
401 Torq. Gen-
nadius revises
text of Martial
Nicomachus
Flavianus and
his son
Nicomachus
Dexter •
revise te^t of
Livy
Coosentius
Phocas
507 Ennodius
514 CasKiodorus
c. 480-^. 575
494 Astcrius re-
vises text of
Virgil
Fulgentius
tf.4807-550
519 Prisaan
537 Vettius
Agorius
Mavortius
revises text of
Horace
350 Hilary of
Poitiers d. 367
373 Ambrose
f' 340—397
386 Jerome
33«-4«o
395 Augusune
354—430
415 cassianus
f. 360— 435
Manuinus
CMDella
439 Hilary of
Aries d. c. 450
434 Vincentius
Leruius
440 Leo I
395—461
470 Claudianus
Maroertus
510 BoCthius
c. 480—514
539 Benedict
480—543^
539 MphU Gu*
stMo/inmtUd
590 Gregory I
f . 540—604
CHAPTER XII.
LATIN SCHOLARSHIP FROM 300 TO SCO A.D.
Early in the third century (212 a.d.) Caracalla had extended
the title and the obligations of Roman citizenship
to all the free inhabitants of the empire; and ccnfuiy'*'*'
throughout that century (though in no connexion
with this important constitutional change) the most memorable
contributions to Latin literature had come, not from Rome, but
from the provinces ; not from pagans, but from Christians. The
first half of the century had included the closing years of Tertul-
lian {c, 150-230) and nearly the whole of the life of Cyprian
{c. 200-258), both of them closely connected with Carthage;
while, towards the end of the century, Numidia had been
represented in Latin literature by Amobius, and Bithynia by
J^ctantius, who had been summoned from Africa by Diocletian
to teach Latin rhetoric in his new capital of Nicomedia. Under
the rule of Diocletian (285-305) Rome ceased to
be the residence of the emperor and its importance century ""^
was for a time still further diminished by the transfer
of the imperial capital to Constantinople (330). But it continued
to be a centre of world-wide interest during the struggle between
the adherents of a gradually receding paganism and a slowly but
surely advancing Christianity. In 362, by a decree of Julian the
Apostate, which is denounced even by a pagan historian as
deserving perpetual oblivion*. Christians were forbidden to teach
grammar and rhetoric, on the ground of their disbelief in the
gods of Homer, Thucydides and Demosthenes. The decree
resulted in the resignation of an eminent teacher, Victorinus,
and in the short-lived production of purely Christian text-books.
' Amm. Marc, xxti 10, 7i obruendum perenni silentio.
206 THE ROMAN AGE. [CHAP.
Twenty years later, in the conflict that raged round the question
as to the emperor Gratian's removal of the Altar of Victory from
its immemorial position in the Senate House, the old order was
represented by Symmachus and Praetextatus, and the new by
St Ambrose and Pope Damasus, and, shortly afterwards, by
Prudentius. Towards the end of the fourth century (390) the
ruin of the ancient religion of Rome was completed by the decree
of Theodosius, by which death was the penalty for offering sacri-
fice. About the same year, a Greek of Antioch, Ammianus
Marcellinus, was completing in Rome itself, and in a strange
variety of Latin, blended with many reminiscences of the ' sayings
of Cicero ', his continuation of Tacitus, the extant portion of which
is invaluable as an authority for the years 353 to 378, besides
including interesting glimpses of contemporary life in Rome, as
where he writes of certain leisurely Romans who ' hated learning
like poison' \ and whose ' libraries were closed for ever like the
tomb' •. A little later (395-405) in the first decade of the division
of the empire of Theodosius between his two sons, Arcadius in
the East and Honorius in the West, Claudian of Alexandria, the
last representative of paganism' among the greater Latin poets,
was living in Italy, at Rome and Milan. The latest date to which
any of his poems can be assigned is 404 or 405. The former of
these years saw the publication of the first collected edition of the
poems of one who had been bom in Spain and had only recently
arrived in Rome, the* great Christian poet, Prudentius ; and the
latter was the date of the completion at Bethlehem of St Jerome's
Latin version of the Bible, which he had begun in Rome more
than twenty years before.
Meanwhile the study of Grammar in the fourth century begins
in northern Africa with the name of the Numidian tiro. Nonius
Marcellus, and culminates at Rome about the middle of the
century with the far greater name of Donatus, the commentator
on Terence and the preceptor of St Jerome. It was continued at
an uncertain date by less original grammarians, such as Charisius
and Diomedes, who have the modest merit of preserving for
^ xxviii 4, 14, detestantes ut venena doctrinas.
' xiv 6, i8f bybliothecis sepulcronim ritu in perpetuum clausis.
' Claudian was possibly a nominal Christian (Pauly-Wissowa, iii 2656).
XII.] THE FOURTH AND FIFTH CENTURIES. 20/
■ — * -I - I I M J I
posterity the grammatical teaching of an earlier age. The general
state of learning in this century is best illustrated by the names of
Ausonius (himself a teacher of grammar and rhetoric) and his
distinguished friend, Q. Aurelius Symmachus; also by those
unwearied expositors of Virgil, Servius and Macrobius; and,
lastly, by St Jerome and St Augustine, whose lives extended to
the twentieth and thirtieth years respectively of the following
century.
In the fifth century the controversy as to the religious causes
that led to the capture of Rome by the Goths
under Alaric in 410 inspired the greatest of the cenufry*^
works of St Augustine, the De Civitate Dei\ and
St Augustine in his turn prompted a young Spanish priest, Orosius,
who reached Hippo about 414, to supplement that work by
writing a history of the world, which barely mentions Pericles
and refers to Demosthenes only as the recipient of Persian bribes,
and is founded mainly on the Bible, Livy, Tacitus, Suetonius,
Justin, Eutropius, and . possibly St Jerome's rendering of the
Chronicle of Eusebius. Before the end of the fourth century,
owing to an impulse first given by St Athanasius at Trier in 336,
monasteries had been established in Gaul in 360 and 372 by
St Martin of Tours (d. 400) ; in 405 the monastery of L^rins (oflf
Cannes) was founded by St Honoratus; and, about 415, monastic
discipline was introduced into Gaul from the East by Cassian,
the founder of the monastery of St Victor at Marseilles. In his
Monastic Institutes he recognises manual labour as a remedy for
ennuiy quoting with approval the saying sanctioned by the 'ancient
fathers ' in Egypt, that * a monk who works is troubled by one
devil only, but a monk who is idle by many'*; but he mentions
the copying of mss only once, and that in the case of an Italian
monk, who confessed he could do nothing else*. In a sequel" to
this treatise he reports his conversations with the hermits of the
Thebaid, dwelling on the ideal of the monastic life and thus
supplying that incentive towards intellectual studies which led
' De institutis coenobiorum et de octo prifuipalium viticrum remediis^
Lib. X (on acedia or iaedium sive anxietas cordis) 33, operantem monachum
daemone uno pulsari, otiosum vero innumeris spiritibus devastari.
« ib. V 39 (Ebcrt, i« 35 1 ).
' CoUationes Patnim (Ebcrt, 35a — 4).
208 THE ROMAN AGE. [CHAP.
to the monasteries of the West becoming the homes of learning
and literature and even of classical scholarship in the Middle
Ages. The Vandals had not yet invaded Africa in 429, when a
work whose influence lasted throughout the Middle Ages had
been there composed by Martianus Capella. Between the capture
of Carthage by the Vandals in 439 and the inroad of Attila and
his Huns into Gaul in 451, Salvian, the presbyter of Marseilles,
who attained a hale old age in 480, was prompted by the
calamities of his country to compose the memorable treatise
De Gubematione Dei with its gloomy presage of the approaching
end of the constitution, the civilisation and the learning of Rome.
The quarter of a century that elapsed between the defeat of
Attila by Aetius on the Catalaunian plains in 451, and the
extinction of the Western Empire by Odoacer, the son of one
of Attila's officers, in 476, corresponds in Latin literature to the
active life of the Gallic poet and letter-writer, the accomplished
bishop of Auvergne, Apollinaris Sidonius, who saw his diocese
annexed by the Visigoths in 475, and died less than nine years
later.
In the history of Scholarship the fourth century opens with
the name of Nonius Marcellus of Thubursicum in
Numidia (yf. 323 a.i>.), the author of an encyclo-
paedic work compiled for the benefit of his son, and entitled De
Compendiosa Doctrina, It is divided into three parts, lexico-
graphical, grammatical and antiquarian. In the grammatical
portion the compiler is largely indebted to Probus, Caper and
Pliny ; and, in the lexicographical, to the scholars and antiquarians
from the reigns of Nero and Vespasian to those of Trajan and
Hadrian, and especially to Verrius Flaccus*. Nonius frequently
copies Gellius, but never mentions his name. The value of his
work lies mainly in its numerous quotations from early Latin
literature*. All who have studied it speak of the compiler with
the utmost contempt He is actually so ignorant, or so careless,
as to imply that M. Tullius was not the same person as Cicero^,
* Nettleship, i ii% — 131, 177 — 311 ; Tcuffel, § 404*.
' See esp. W. M. Lindsay, Nonius Marctllus^ 1901.
* r. Schmidt (1868) p. 92. ap. Teuffel, § 404% 4*
XII.] NONIUS. AUSONIUS. 209
During this century Latin Scholarship flourished far less
vigorously in Africa than in Gaul, where it is well
represented by Ausonius and his circle, who had
a direct and intimate knowledge of the Latin Classics. The life
of Ausonius {c» 310-^. 393)* extends from near the beginning to
near the end of the century; so that in Latin literature the
fourth century may be described as the century of Ausonius.
Born at Bordeaux, he there went through the early stages of
a 'grammatical' education which included Greek, though he
admits that in that language he had been a dull pupil'. His
education was continued under his uncle at Toulouse {c» 320-328);
about 334 he became professor, first of * grammar', and afterwards
of rhetoric, in his native town ; and, thirty years later, he was
summoned to Trier to teach * grammar' and rhetoric to the
youthful Gratian. After his pupil had ascended the throne (late
^" 375)) Ausonius was appointed to several high offices, becoming
praefectus Galliarum in 378 and consul in the following year. On
the death of Gratian (383) he returned to Bordeaux, where he
was actively engaged in a variety of literary work. It is to this
period that nearly all his extant writings belong. Most of his
poems are marked less by poetic power than by skill in versifica-
tion. He is well described by M. Boissier* as *an incorrigible
versifier', and his verses are usually of a trivial type. But they
present us with a graphic and varied picture of the personalities
and the general circumstances of his time, with eulogistic accounts
of his own relations, and his former instructors or colleagues at
Bordeaux, whether professors of Rhetoric, wholly concerned with
Prose, or 'grammarians', i.e. professors of Literature, mainly
concerned with Verse. One of these, *a second Quintilian', is
famous for his marvellous memory, and rivals Demosthenes in
delivery {Commem. i); a second, we are assured, will (apparently
* Teuffcl, § 431 ; chronology in Pcipcr*s ed. pp. 90 — 114.
■ Commtm, Fro/, Burdigaiensium^ viii 13 — 16 : —
'Obstitit nostrte quia, credo, mentis
Tftrdior sensus neque disciplinis
Adpulit Graecis puerilis aevi
Noxius error*.
• La Fin du Paganisme {\%^\)^ i 105 = 1 75*.
s. 14
2IO THE ROMAN AGE. [CHAP.
by his literary works) add to the fame of the emperor Julian, and
to that of Sallustius, his colleague as consul in 363 a.d. (2); a
third is compared to Aristarchus and Zenodotus (13); a fourth
knows Scaurus and Probus by heart (15); a fifth is familiar not
only with these grammarians, but also with Livy and Herodotus,
and the whole of Varro (20). In the verses addressed by Ausonius
to his young grandson, who is just going to school, his motto is
disu libens'y by a quotation from Virgil, degeneres ofiimos timor
arguit^ he encourages his grandson not to be afraid of his master ;
he exhorts him to read, in the first place. Homer and Menander,
also Horace and Virgil, Terence and Sallust {^IdyL iv 46 — 63).
Writing to his younger contemporary, the celebrated Symmachus,
he flatteringly describes him as combining the merits of Isocrates,
Cicero and Virgil {Ep, ii) ; he similarly assures Tetradius that his
satires will rival those of Lucilius (Ep, xi); he invites the rhe-
torician Axius Paulus tp come with haste 'by oar or wheel',
bringing with him his own poems of every kind, to some quiet
country-place on the estuary of the Garonne, to which Ausonius
proposes to escape after he has visited the crowded streets of
Bordeaux on Easter Sunday. On New Year's day he sends the
same friend a macaronic epistle in a strange mixture of Greek and
Latin i^Ep, viii); and, in a third letter beginning in Latin and
ending in Greek, tells him this time to leave all his own poems at
home, as he will find at his host's every variety of verse, not to
mention Herodotus and Thucydides and other works in prose
(Ep, ix). This last letter closes with the happy ending : — ' vale ;
valcre si voles me, iam veni'. But the only poem of Ausonius
that rises to a distinctly high level is his Mosella with its fascinating
description of the crystal waters and the vineclad banks of the
river between Berncastel and Trier, where the poem was written
about the end of 370 a.d. The poet's correspondent, Symmachus,
while he makes merry over the minute description of the fishes
of the stream (a description which has proved sufficiently precise
to enable a Cuvier to identify the fifteen species enumerated by
the poet), goes so far as to rank the poem with those of Virgil*.
As a specimen we may here quote (and render) four lines alone,
marking in italics the phrase especially admired by Edward Fitz-
^ Ep, 114, ego hoc tuum carmen libris Marouis adiungo.
XII.] AUSONIUS. 211
Geralds who owed to Professor Cowell his first knowledge, not of
Omar Khiyyam only, but also of Ausonius : —
'Quis color ille vadis, seras cum propultt umbras
Hesperus, et viridi perfundit monte Mosellam 1
Tota natant crispis iuga motibus, et tremii absens
Pampinus^ et vitreis viiidemia turget in undis'. (191 — 5.)
What a glow was on the shallows, when the shades of Evening fell,
And the verdure of the mountain bathed the breast of fair Moselle I
In the glassy stream reflected, float the hills in wavy line,
Swells the vintage, sways the trembling tendril of the absent vine.
Apart from its purely original passages, which are inspired with a
love of Nature striking a new note in Latin literature, the poem
abounds in happy reminiscences not of Virgil only but also of
Horace, Lucan and Statius' ; and (as we know from the Cento) it
is far from being the only proof of its author's intimate knowledge
of the text of Virgil. As a teacher of ' grammar ', he had neces-
sarily been long familiar with Latin literature. Among his great
precursors as 'grammarians' he mentions men like Aemilius
Asper, Terentius Scaurus, and Probus*. He even compares a
now unknown 'grammarian' of Trier with Varro and Crates and
the grammarians of Alexandria S among whom he elsewhere names
Zenodotus and Aristarchus and the symbols which they used in
the criticism of Homer*. He states that his father, who was
eminent as a physician, knew Greek better than Latin (/^. ii 9).
His own epigrams include several in Greek, and also (as already
noticed) in Greek and Latin combined, with Latin renderings
from the Greek Anthology. As a specimen of these last the
following epigram on the Greek games may be quoted:
'Quattuor antiquos celebravit Achaia ludos;
Caelicolum duo sunt et duo festa hominum.
Sacra lovis Phoebique, Palaemonis Archemorique
Serta quibus pinus, malus, oliva, apium **.
He is the one Latin poet who has exactly imitated the 'greater
^ Litters (1846), t ao5 (ed. 1894). The original is obviously imitated in
Pope*s Windsor Forest^ i\\ — 6.
' See ref. in Peiper's ed. pp. 457 — 466.
• Praif. \ 10. * Ep. xiii 17 — 30.
• Ludus Sept, Sap, in. • Antk. Gr. ix 357.
14—2
212 THE ROMAN AGE. [CHAP.
Sapphic' metre, which is only approximately copied by Horace'.
Many of his verses, especially those comprised in his Techno-
paegnion^ are mere efforts of technical skill. Among these we
have a long series of lines ending with a monosyllable, including
a useful couplet distinguishing vas and praes : —
'Quis subit in poenam capitali iudicio? vas.
Quid si lis fuerit nummaria, quis dabitur? prats'*.
Of his lines on the letters of the alphabet the following are perhaps
the most interesting : —
' Cecropiis ignota notis, ferale sonans V.
Pythagorae btvium ramis pateo ambiguis Y\
It is difficult to imagine that a man capable of writing such
trifles as these (not to mention his lines on the Caesars and on
celebrated cities) had some ten years previously (in 378 a.d.)
filled the splendid position of praetorian praefect of the provinces
of Gaul (an official whose sway extended even over Spain and the
opposite coast of Africa, and over the southern part of Britain),
and, in the four years between 376 and 380, had seen his father
honorary praefect of Illyricum, his son and son-in-law proconsuls of
Africa, and his nephew praefect of Rome'. It seems as if, on his
return to the scenes of his early work as a professor at Bordeaux,
the praefect relapsed into the ' grammarian ', spending his time on
learned trifles, which are among the least important products of
scholarship, and consoling himself in his tedious task by recalling
Virgil's famous phrase: — 'in tenui labor, at tenuis non gloria'*.
We may regret that Ausonius does not appear to have used his
great opportunities for reforming the educational system which
prevailed in the schools of the Western Empire, and thus rendering
a lasting service to the cause of learning^ ; but we may allow him
the credit of having possibly inspired the memorable decree
promulgated by Gratian in 376, which improved the status of
public instructors by providing for the appointment of teachers of
^ Sappho, y^i^f. 60; Horace, Conn, i 8; and Auson. /</. vii, p. 116 Peiper^
Bissula, nomen tenerae rusticulum puellae.
* Seeck's Introd. to Symmachus (in Man. Germ. Hist.)^ p. Ixxix f.
' Georg. iv 6, loosely quoted in Praef. to Technopaegnion.
^ Mullinger's Schools of Charles the Great, pp. 13 — 16.
XII.] AUSONIUS. PAULINUS. 21 3
rhetoric and of Greek and LAtin 'grammar' in the principal cities
of Gaul, and fixing the amount of their stipends ^
Whatever doubts may be felt as to the religion of Ausonius,
who was apparently a heathen at heart, though a Christian by
profession, there are none as to that of either of his younger
contemporaries and correspondents, Paulinus' and Symmachus'.
Paulinus (353-431)1 a man of noble birth, a favourite pupil of
Ausonius, gave early proof of his metrical skill in a
poetic version of a work of Suetonius, De RegibuSy
and a fragment of that version is still extant \ He was consul
and governor of a province before the age of thirty. His conver-
sion to Christianity (c. 390) prompts his former instructor to pray
the 'Muses of Boeotia* to restore his friend to the poetry of
Rome'; but Paulinus firmly replies that hearts consecrated
to Christ are closed to Apollo and the Muses'. He became
bishop of Nola in 409, but even his Christian poems retain the
traces of his early training in their reminiscences of Horace and
Virgil. He is especially fond of the Sapphic stanza and the
metres of the Epodes, and the second Epode in particular is
obviously imitated in his paraphrase of the first Psalm : —
*Beatus ille qui procul vitam suam
Ab impiorum segregarit coetibus*.
His attitude towards pagan literature is clearly shown in a letter
to his friend Jovius, whom he rebukes for attributing the unex-
^ Cod. Theodos. xiii 3, 11, ...frequentissimis in civitatibus...praeceptoram
optiini qiiique erudiendae praesideant iuventuti, rhetores loquimur et gramma-
ticos Atticae Roinanaeque doctrinae (printed in full in Peiper*s Ausonius, p. c).
On Ausonius cp. also SchenUrs ed. (in Mon, Germ. HistJ)\ also Boissier's
Fin dti Paganisme^ i 175' f, ii 66—78'; Dill's Roman Society in the Last
Century of the PVestern Empire^ pp. 159, 40a, with pp. 167 — 188, 'The
Society of Ausonius'; and T. R. Glover's Life and Letters in the Fourth
Century^ pp. 101 — 114. The best of the earlier accounts is in the Histoire
Litteraire de la France^ \ 1 (1733), pp. 181 — 318.
• Pciper's Ausonius, pp. 166—309 ; Ebert, Lit. d. MUtelaiiers, i' 193 — 31 1 ;
Teuffcl, § 437, and Boissier, ii 49 — 103'; also Dill, p. 396 f.
• ed. Sceck in Mon. Germ. Hist,\ TeuflTel, | 415; Boissier, ii 167' f; Dill,
pp. 143 — 166; T. R. Glover, pp. 148 — 170.
* Ausonius, Ep. xix (p. 167 Peiper).
" Ep. XXV (p. 189) Latiis vatem revocate Camenis.
* Carftt. X a a, negant Camenis, nee patent Apollini | dicata Christo pectora.
214 THE ROMAN AGE. [CHAP.
pected recovery of a large sum of money to the favour of Fortune
instead of the over-ruling of Divine Providence. He regretfully
observes that his friend had found time for the study of Xeno-
phon, Plato and Demosthenes, and for the pursuit of philosophy,
but had no leisure for being a Christian. He compares the
charms of literature to the fruit of the lotus and the songs of the
Sirens, which made men forget their true home. He would not,
however, have his friend lay aside his philosophy, but season it
with faith and religion. Like St Augustine and St Jerome, he
would have him regard the powers of language, that he had .
gained from the study of pagan literature, as spoils won from the
enemy to be used to lend fresh force to the cause of truth. In
the course of the letter Paulinus himself quotes Virgil, and the
pleadings of his prose for the recognition of Divine Providence
are reinforced in a set of i66 lines of verse*.
Q. Aurelius Symmachus {c, 345-405), prefect of Rome in
384-5, and consul in 391, was a devoted adherent
of the old order. It was in that spirit that, in 384,
he addressed to Theodosius in his third Relatio* a dignified appeal
for the restoration of the Altar of Victory to its place in the Senate
House, impressively pleading for religious toleration on the ground
that ' the great mystery might well be approached in more ways
than one '. His general character resembles that of Cicero, while
his letters are modelled on those of the younger Pliny, whose
genus dicendi pingue et floridum was regarded by Macrobius' as
surviving in the 'luxuriance' of his own earlier contemporary,
Symmachus. 'But the luxuriaucy of Symmachus' (says Gibbon)
' consists of barren leaves, without fruits, and even flowers ; few
facts, and few sentiments, can be extracted from his verbose
correspondence'. As he is apparently restrained by the fear of
dulness from relating incidents of the day, which would have
been interesting to posterity, his letters are in fact rather colourless
compositions^; but in the times of the Renaissance they were
* Ep. 16 and Carm. 12. Cp. Boissier, Fin du Pagatnsme^ ii 83 — 5';
J. E. B. Mayor, Latin Heptateuch^ p. liv note.
' Bury's Gibbon, iii 191 (c. aS) ; cp. Boissier's Fin du Paganisme, ii 374',
and abstract in T. R. Glover, p. 154 f.
' Saturnalia, v i, 7.
* In writing to his brother (iii 35) he says (apparently of a postscript,
XII.] SYMMACHUS. 21 5
much admired by Politian and Pomponius Laetus. Eminent as
a scholar, a statesman, and an orator, he aims in general at a
correctly classical style, though he sometimes lapses into such
words as genialitas and optitnitas^ and into such constructions as
fungi offuium and honoris tui deUctor, But almost every page of
his letters betrays his familiarity with the great writers of the past
He describes himself as 'always loving literature' (iv 44). He
gives a Latin rendering of a sentence in Demosthenes ^ He
quotes repeatedly from Cicero, Terence and Virgil, once from
Plautus and Horace, and twice from Valerius Maximus*. His
father mentions Varro as *the parent of Roman erudition' (Ep,
i 2), and assumes that the son is familiar with Varro's epigrams.
After 369 A.D., Symmachus sends Ausonius a copy of part at
least of Pliny's * Natural History"; in 396, he proposes to find for
his distinguished friend Protadius a copy of Pliny*s 'German
Wars ', and offers him Caesar's * Gallic War ', if he is not satisfied
with the account of Caesar in the last book of Livy^. It is clear
that, in the time of Symmachus^ the whole of Livy was still extant
In 401 he presents his friend Valerianus with a complete tcan-
script^; and the interest in Livy, which was inspired by Symmachus
and his family, is still attested by the subscriptions to all the books
of the first decade*. Three of them bear the further subscription
of one of the Nicomachi, and three that of the other', both of
which has not been preserved): — 'subieci capita rerum, quia (quae?) complecti
\\\\tt\& fasiidii fuga nolui '. Elsewhere he relegates the news of the day to an
index or indicuius or breviariumt which is unhappily lost.
' ^^* 3 S 39i parvis nutrimentis quamquam a morte defendimur, nihil tamen
ad robustaro valetudinem promo vemus (v, /. promo vemur), Ep» i 33 p. 14
Secck.
' Seeck's Index. Cp. Kroll, De Symmeuhi studiis Graecis et Latinis (1891).
' Ep. i 13, Si te amor habet naturalis historiae, quam Plinius elaboravit,
en tibi libellos, quorum mihi praesentanea copia fuit. In quis, ut arbitror,
opulentae eruditioni tuae neglegens veritatis librarius displicebit. Sed mihi
fraud i non erit emendationis incuria. Malui enim tibi probari mei muneris
celeritate, quam alieni opens examine. Vale.
* Ep. iv 18 p. 104.
' Ep. \x 13, munus totius Liviani operis, quod spopondi, etiam nunc
diligentia emendationis moratur.
* Victorianus v. c emendabam domnis Symmachis.
' Nicomachus Dexter v. c. emendavi ad exemplum parentis mei Qementiani
2l6 THE ROMAN AGE. [CHAP.
these revisers of the text being connexions of Symmachus by
marriage. About the same time, and inspired perhaps by his
example, other aristocratic Romans interested themselves in the
revision of Latin mss. In 401 Torquatus Gennadius revised
the text of Martial ; in 402 Fl. Julius Tryfonianus Sabinus, that
of Persius at Barcelona, and even that of Nonius Marcellus at
Toulouse*. Symmachus also lives in literature as one of the
principal interlocutors in the Saturnalia of Macrobius, and their
friendship descended to the third generation, for we find the
great-grandson of Symmachus revising at Ravenna a copy of
the commentary of Macrobius on the * Dream of Scipio ', in the
company of another Macrobius, doubtless a descendant of the
author*.
To the age of Symmachus are assigned the rhetorical treatises
^^ _, , of (0 Chirius Fortunatianus, the author of a
catechism of rhetoric founded on Quintilian, with
illustrations from Cicero'; (2) Sulpicius Victor, a practical jurist
rather than a scholastic rhetorician ; (3) Julius Victor, who closely
follows Quintilian ; and (4) Julius Rufinianus, the author of a
supplement to Aquila Romanus, in which figures of speech are
exemplified from Ennius and Lucilius, as well as from Cicero and
Virgil*.
But Virgil was not exploited by rhetoricians alone. After the
first quarter of the fourth century Virgil (to a far
vir^/* greater degree than Lucretius, Ovid, Lucan and
Horace) was imitated by the sacred poet Juvencus
(^' 33o)> who was highly popular in the time of Petrarch as well
as in that of Charles the Great*. He was tortured into a sacred
cento by Proba, the * incomparable wife * of a praefect of Rome,
(eDd of Books iii, iv, v): Nicomachus Flavianus v. c. iii praefect. urbis
emendavi apud Hennam (end of Books vi, vii, viii). Teuffel, § 356, ii;
I 428, a. Sec/acsiMt/e on p. 156.
^ Teuffel, § saa, 8 and § 30a, 5 (also § 404*, 5); cp. Gr&fenhan, iv 383 f.
' i6, § 444, 8. On subscriptiofus in general, see Jahn in Sacks, Btrickte^
1851, pp. 317 — 371. A MS of Apuleius was revised by one Crispus .Salustius
in 395 in Rome, and again in 397 in Constantinople (t^. p. 331).
' Saintsbury, i 346.
^ Teuffel, § 417 ; texts of all these in Halm, Htut, Lat. Min,
• Ebert, i* 117.
XII.] THE STUDY OF VIRGIL. 21/
about the middle of the century', and into a profane cento by
Ausonius towards its close. He was the theme of commentaries
(as we shall shortly see) by Servius and Macrobius. He was the
favourite poet of the schoolmaster; and fathers of the Church,
like St Jerome and St Augustine, confess how deeply they had
been interested in him in their youthful days'. A pleasant picture
of the interest in Virgil, which was felt in Gaul late in this century,
is presented to us in a letter written by Rusticus (possibly the
bishop of Narbonne from c, 430 to 461) to Eucherius, bishop of
Lyons from 435 to 450 a.d. The writer recalls what he had read
as a boy (probably about 400 a.d.) in the library of a student of
secular literature. The library, he tells us, was adorned with
* portraits of orators and poets, worked in mosaic, or in wax of
different colours, or in plaster ; and under each the master of the
house had placed inscriptions noting their characteristics; but,
when he came to an author of acknowledged merit' (as for in-
stance, Virgil) 'he began as follows' (adding three lines from
Virgil himself): —
Virgilium vatem melius sua carmina laudant ;
* In freta dum fluvii current, dum montibus umbrae
Lustrabunt convexa, polus dum sidera pascet,
Semper honos nomenque tuum laudesque manebunt'.
Virgil is lauded best in Virgirs lays: —
' As long as rivers run into the deep,
As long as shadows o*er the hillside sweep,
As long as star^ in heaven's fair pastures grate,
So long shall live your honour, name, and praise*'.
The middle of the fourth century marks the date of a gram-
marian and rhetorician of African origin, C. Marius
Victorinus*, the author of several philosophical and
rhetorical works (including a prolix commentary on Cicero De
Inventione^\ and also of a treatise on metre in four books, founded
* Corp. Inscr. Lat. vi 1711. Ebert, i' 115.
' Comparetti, VirgUio nel Medio £vo, i cap. i — 5 ; Schanz, 1 147 ( Vergiit
Fort Men im A Her turn),
' Conington's rendering of Aen, i 607 f. Cp. Migne, Iviii 489 ; Landani's
Ancient Rome (1888), p. 196; and J. W. Clark's Cart of Books ^ p. 43.
* TeufTel, § 408, I ; Jeep's RedetheOt, pp. 81—9.
' Halm, Rket. Lai, Afin. 155 — 304; cp. Saintsbury, i 348.
21 8 THE ROMAN AGE. [CHAP.
mainly on the Greek of Aphthonius. He received the literary
distinction of a statue in the forum of Trajan. It is interesting to
remember that the study of his Latin rendering of certain 'Platonic'
works had an important influence on the religious development of
St Augustine ^ who records the fact that late in life their translator
became a convert to Christianity*. The illiberal decree of Julian
(as already mentioned) led to the resignation of his appointment
as a Christian teacher in 362'.
Among his distinguished contemporaries was the grammarian
_ and rhetorician Aelius Donatus, the author of a
Donatus
Grammar, which has come down to us in a shorter
and in a longer form^; also of a valuable commentary on Terence*,
which has been combined with one or two others in the extant
scholia on Terence, and of a commentary on Virgil, frequently
cited by Servius*. Two other grammarians, who were contem-
poraries with one another, and had much in common, are Charisius
and Diomedes, the former of whom transcribed
Diomedes ^^^%^ portions of the works of Julius Romanus,
Cominianus, and Palaemon, and thus preserved for
us much of the earlier grammatical teaching, while the latter
borrowed much from the lost work of Suetonius, de poetis\ Pas-
sages from the grammatical treatises of Varro are included in the
works of both*.
In the latter half of kht fourth century Maurus (or Marius)
Servius Horxpratus (born c. 355) was famous as a
Servius ^ ojjf
Virgilian commentator, whose work owes much of
its value to its wealth of mythological, geographical and historical
learning. It has come down to us in two forms, a longer and a
shorter. The longer was regarded as the genuine commentary by
* Con/, vli 9.
■ ib» viii a. • ib, viii 5.
* Jeep, pp. 14 — 8. It is the theme of extant commentaries by Servius and
others {ib. 38 — 56) ; and continued to be a text-book throughout the Middle
Ages. In old French, and in the English of Longland and Chaucer, Donai
or Dofut is synonymous with 'grammar', or indeed with any kind of 'lesson*
( Warton's i?ff//iM Poetry ^ sect. viii). * ed.* Wersner, 1902.
* Teuffel, § 409; Nettleship in Conington*s Virgil^ t* p.c.
^ ib,\ 419.
' Wilmanns, De Varronis libris grammtLticis^ pp. 151 — 5, 173.
XII.] VICTORINUS. DONATUS. SERVIUS. 219
Scaliger and Ribbeck ; the shorter by Ottfried Miiller and Thilo
(ed. 1878-87). It has been shown by Nettleship that Servius
and Isidore used the same original authorities, especially Suetonius,
and that passages in which Servius seems to be copying from
Donatus are probably copied from an earlier authority, Nonius,
and ultimately from Verrius Flaccus\ His commentary is further
founded on materials borrowed, possibly at second or third hand,
from Cato, Varro, Nigidius and Hyginus. It is a vast treasure-
house of traditional lore. The author displays great erudition, as
well as a certain aptitude for verbal exposition, and perhaps an
over-fondness for pointing out the rhetorical figures used by the
poet; but he supplies practically nothing that is worth calling
literary criticism. He tells us that the fourth Aeneid is borrowed
from Apollonius Rhodius ; and, in the introduction to the Georgics^
notes that Virgil has followed Homer at a distance in the Aeneid^
has proved himself second to Theocritus in the EclogueSy and
has greatly surpassed Hesiod in the Georgics*,
In the same century the most scholarly representative of
Christianity was Hieronymus, commonly called St
Jerome (331-420 a.d.), who is celebrated as the
unwearied translator and expositor of the Old and New Testa-
ments. As a youth he was sent to Rome, where he became a
pupil of Donatus'. He has himself recorded in his commentary
on the book of Ecclesiastes (i 9) that his teacher, in expounding
the line in Terence, nullum est tarn dictum^ quod twn dictum sit
prius^y used the words which have sincQ passed into a proverb :
pereant qui nostra ante nos dixerunt. He also studied the Greek
philosophers, and laboriously* formed for himself a library. From
Rome he went to Trier, where he studied theology, and felt
himself called to a new life. After continuing his studies at
* Essays^ \ 311 — 340, and in Conington's VirgiU i* pp. ciii— cvii.
' Cp. Suringar, ii 59 — 93; Thomas, Essai (1880); Teuflel, §431; and
Schanz, § 148 ; also Saintsbury, i 334 — 340.
' Apol. adv. Rufinum^ i 161 puto quod puer legeris...commentmrios...in
Terentii comoedias pratceptoris nut Donati, aeque in Vergilium; Ckrcn,
356—7 A.D., Victorinus rhetor et Donatus praeceptor nuus Romae insignes
habentur.
* Eunuchtis^ prol* 41.
' Ep. iiy c. 30, suramo studio et labore.
220 THE ROMAN AGE. [CHAP.
Aquileia, he embarked for the East, where he lay ill for a long
time in Syria, reflecting with remorse on the past, but finding
some respite in reading his favourite authors, such as Plautus
and Cicero, while he cared little (as he confesses) for the uncouth
Latin of the Psalms. At last he fell into a fever and dreamt that
he was dead, and that he was being dragged before the tribunal
of the Judge of all men. Falling on his face to hide himself from
the brightness of the vision, he heard an awful voice demanding,
' Who art thou ? ' On his answering, * A Christian ', he heard with
trembling the terrible reply : — * It is false ; thou art no Christian ;
thou art a Ciceronian ; where the treasure is, there is the heart
also'*. From that hour (in the year 374 a.d.) he renounced the
reading of the ancient classics, buried himself in the desert
between Antioch and the Euphrates, leading a hermit's life for
five years and engaging after a while in manual labour and
ultimately in the transcription of mss. As a further means of
self-discipline, he devoted himself to the study of Hebrew.
Returning to Antioch, he went to Constantinople (380), where
he studied under Gregory of Nazianzus, and also completed his
knowledge of Greek. One of the most important fruits of this
study was his translation of the Chronicle of Eusebius, which,
in its original Greek, now survives in fragments alone. Two
years afterwards he returned to Rome, where he lived for three
years as the Secretary of pope Damasus (382-5). Near the
theatre of Pompey in the Campus Martius that Pope had built a
library for the archives pf the Latin Church, and this building,
which is called by Jerome the char tar ium ecclesiae Romana€\ is
supposed by some' to have been connected with colonnades after
the manner of the great pagan libraries of Rome, which had been
modelled on that of Pergamon (p. 157 f). At the instance of the
pope, Jerome now began his revision of the Latin Bible, and in
due time completed his rendering of the Gospels and the Psalms.
In 385 he left for Palestine, where he founded a monastery at
Bethlehem (386). There, as in the desert, he set the example of
a monastic life mainly devoted to literary labour. In his cell at
^ Ep. aa, c. 30.
* Apol. adv. Rufinum^ \\ ao (J. W. Clark's Care 0/ Books, p. 4a).
* De Rossi and LanciaDi (ib. p. 43).
XII.] ST JEROME. 221
Bethlehem (a subject which has caught the fancy of Diirer^) he
was constantly adding to his store of books. He lectured his
monks on theology, and gathered round him a school of boys,
whom he instructed in grammar and in the classical authors,
especially in Plautus, Terence and, above all, in Virgil. Here
the learned scholar was in his true element: the 'Ciceronian'
and the 'Christian' were reconciled with one another. He
resumed his study of Hebrew and worked at his Latin rendering
of the Old Testament, his treatise De viris iilustribus (in imitation
of that of Suetonius), and much besides. His monastery was
attacked by Pelagians in 416, and his last years at Bethlehem
(where he died in 420) were embittered by the incursions of
barbarians'.
His Letters^ extending from 370 to 419, were very popular
during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. They abound in
quotations from his favourite classical authors, and from Virgil in
particular. The suicide of Judas, the wiles of the Tempter, the
inroads of the barbarians, the enmity of the monks, and the gloom
of the catacombs, are all of them suggestive of quotations from
Virgil (35' and 49). He also cites Ennius and Naevius, Plautus
and Terence, Cicero and Sallust, Horace and Juvenal. In the
very letter (34) in which he regrets an excessive use of rhetoric,
and is penitent for an undue partiality for scholastic learning, he
lapses into references to Greek philosophers such as Pythagoras,
Democritus, Xenocrates, Plato, Zeno and Cleanthes ; Greek poets
such as Homer, Hesiod, Simonides, Stesichorus and Sophocles ;
not to mention Roman writers such as Cato the Censor, and
others". In one of his letters (70) he justifies his frequent
citations from secular literature; in another (60, 5) he shows
himself fully conscious of the merits of the famous generals,
'whose manly virtues illuminate the history of Rome*; in a
third (57) he discusses the best method of translation, defending
his own plan of rendering the Scriptures according to their sense
rather than in the slavish spirit of a merely verbal literalism. * In
his fearless determination to ascertain the precise meaning of the
' For its treatment by other artists, cp. J. W. Clark, Care of Books^ figs.
140, i49« '53-
• Ebcrt, i* 184 — 191. • Boisster, i 317 — 334*.
222 THE ROMAN AGE. [CHAP.
sacred text, he offers a splendid example of rare candour and
patient industry". In sacred literature his most famous achieve-
ment is the Latin Vulgate \ in general scholarship, his translation
and continuation of the Chronological Canons of Eusebius, with
additions from Suetonius and his successors down to 325, and
from' his own researches between that date and 378 a. d. These
additions can be identified with the aid of the Armenian translation
of Eusebius, discovered in 1787'. We catch a glimpse of the
literary methods of the age in the preface to Jerome's translation,
which he describes as a hasty production very rapidly dictated to
a shorthand writer. He concludes his treatise De viris illustribus
by translating from Irenaeus* a solemn adjuration requiring every
future copyist to compare* his transcript with the ms from which
he makes his copy, and to correct' it, and also to transcribe the
form of adjuration. A similar form, described as the obtestatio
£use6a\ appears at the* beginning of certain mss of Jerome's trans-
lation of the Canons'.
St Augustine (354-430) must here be noticed very briefly, and
solely in connexion with the subject of the present
work. The story of his life is unfolded to us in his
immortal Confessions, He there tells us that, as a boy, he liked
Latin, as soon as he had got beyond the elements ; while he hated
Greek, though he could assign no sufficient reason for his hatred ^
He admits, and regrets, his early fondness for Virgil, lamenting
(above all) the tears that he had shed over the death of Dido, and
recalling with penitence his boyish delight in the story of the
'wooden horse' and the burning of Troy and the ghost of
^ Dill's Roman Society ^ p. 115.
' A. Schone, Eusebi ckronicorum lihri duo^ 1866—75. — Cp. Teuffel, § 434,
9, and Ebert, i* 107 — 110.
* ap. Euseb. Hist, Reel, v 10.
^ dm/3dXi7f is the word used by Irenaeus; cp. Strabo, 609.
' emencUs (in the lower sense); cp. Ep. 51; Suet. Dom, 10; Symmachus,
i 18.
* Jahn, in Sachs, Berichte^ 1851, p. 367.
' Conf, i 13, 10, Quid autem erat causae cur Graecas litteras oderam,
quibus puenilus imbuebar, ne nunc quidem satis exploratum est. Adamaveram
enim Latinas, non quas primi magistri, sed quas docent qui cnunmatici
vocantur.
XII.] ST AUGUSTINE. 223
Creusa*. Homer he hated, apparently because the language
(unlike his native Latin) was strange to him*. At the age of
19 he received his first serious impressions from the Hortensius
of Cicero', an eloquent call to the study of philosophy, which
is now lost with the exception of a few fragments. At 20 he
studied for himself the Categories of Aristotle \ and a series of
works on the Miberal arts'*. In 383 he left Carthage for Rome,
and, half a year later, on the recommendation of Symmachus,
then praefect of Rome, was appointed teacher of rhetoric at Milan.
He there found a friend in Ambrose. At the age of 31 we see
him studying, in the quest of truth, certain 'Platonic' works
translated into Latin by Victorinus'. In the autumn of the
following year he resigned his appointment, and withdrew with
his mother and son and a few friends to a country-house
(Cassiacum) near Milan, there to prepare himself for his baptism,
which took place at Easter, 387. Part of his time during this
period of retirement was occupied in the study of Virgil and in a
general survey of the Miberal arts', and the literary work, which
he had thus begun, was resumed on his return to Milan. But we
are here concerned only with the cyclopaedia of the liberal
arts, which he now began in imitation of Varro's Disdplinae, It
was intended to be a survey of all the arts, viz. grammar, logic,
rhetoric, music, geometry, arithmetic and philosophy (this last
taking the place of astronomy) ; but only the part on grammar
was then completed, while a portion of that on music, and intro-
ductions to the rest, were finished at a later date'. All that has
survived is the dialogue on music, and abridgements of the work
on grammar, with parts of the introductions to rhetoric and logic,
though the authorship of the last two has been disputed. The
work on rhetoric' is founded on Hermagoras, the Rhodian
instructor of Cicero, and on Cicero himself; it is only preserved
in MSS of Fortunatianus (p. 216); while the work on logic
• Conf, \ §§ 10— %i,
' ib. 13, Cur ergo Graecam grammaticam oderam talia cantantem ? Nam
et Homerus peritus texere tales fabellas, et dulcissime vanus est, et mihi tamen
amarus erat puero etc.
• ib. iii 4, 7, viii 7, 17. * ib, iv 16, 18.
• ib. iv 16, 30. • ib, vii 9, 13; viii 1, 3 (^/fv, p. 117).
' Retroft. i c. 6. • Halm, Rhet. Lot, Min. 137— 151.
224 THE ROMAN AGE. [CHAP.
(Principia DiaUcticae\ in the course of which Augustine is
mentioned as the author, is one of our authorities on the
Grammar of the Stoics^ In 388 Augustine returned to Africa,
where he became Presbyter of Hippo in 391 and Bishop from
396 to his death in 430. He lives in general literature as the
author of the Confessions (a favourite book with Petrarch and
many since his time), and the De Civitate Dei^ which was finished
in 426 A.D. In the latter he quotes largely from Varro's Antiqui-
tates (especially the account of the distinctively Roman divinities*),
and from Cicero's treatise De Republica, He has thus preserved
for us considerable portions of both of those important works'.
To the end of the fourth and the beginning of the fifth century
belongs Macrobius, the author of an extant com-
MAcrobius
mentary on Cicero's Dream of Scipio (in the sixth
book of the De Republica\ and of a miscellaneous work in seven
books under the name of Saturnalia, The latter is in the form
of a dialogue dealing with a vast number of topics connected
with the earlier Roman literature and religion. The scene of the
dialogue is the house of Vettius Agorius Praetextatus, an expert
in augural and pontifical law, who died in 384. As statesman,
scholar, antiquarian, philosopher and mystic, he was then one of
the most eminent in the heathen world of Rome. He translated
the Analytics of Aristotle, and spent part of his leisure in emending
the text of the ancient Classics*. He is now best known as the
restorer in 367 of the Porticus Deorum Constntium^ still to be
seen near the Clivus Capitolinus. He also lives in the interesting
inscriptions addressed by himself to his wife, and by his wife to
^ Supra^ p. 146. The work must have been founded either on the corre-
sponding part of Varro's LHsHplinae^ or on the first book of the Dt Lingua
Laiina (Wilmanns, De Varronis libris grammaticis^ pp. 16 — 19); and, in
either case, Varro's own authority was probably a grammarian writing under
Stoic influence, possibly Philoxenus, who may weU have been a contemporary
of Varro (Reitzenstein, M. Ter, Varro% p. 87).
' Francken's FreigtiuHta Varronis (1836).
' Teuflel, % 440, 7 and 10; Ebert, i' a 13 — 351. On St Augustine's attitude
towards literature, cp. Saintsbury, i 378 f; and on his Conftssions^ T. R.
Glover, Life and Litters in the Fourth Century ^ 194 — 313.
^ *meliora reddis quam legendo sumpseras' (BUcheler*s Anth, Lat,^ no.
Ill, 1. la).
XII.] MACROBIUS. 225
her husband, which present us with a pleasant picture of their
devotion to each other and to the varied religious rites of their
time\ Among the interlocutors are the scholar and statesman
Symmachus (p. 214), and Servius, here represented as a modest
student of Virgil, who naturally takes an important part in the
lengthy discussions on that poet The author is sometimes identic
fied with Macrobius the Praefectus praetorio Hispaniarum (399),
the proconsul of Africa (410), the vir iUustris and Utit praepositus
sacri cudicuii of 422 A.D.^ The first of these dates is connected
with an edict forbidding the destruction of the treasures of art in
the temples of Spain and Gaul, and the praefect of that date may
well have been a pagan. But the holder of the office named in
422 must have been a Christian ; whereas, at the dramatic date of
the Saturnalia {c, 380), its author was an admirer of Symmachus
and others of the pagan party, and a devout worshipper of the
gods of polytheism, with a strong inclination towards Neo-platonic
views. Thus, unless we assume either a c6mplete change of belief
or a merely nominal acceptance of Christianity at a later date
than that of the composition of the Saturnalia^ there are great
difficulties in the proposed identification. The fact remains that
the extant works of Macrobius contain no mention of any person
or thing connected with Christianity. Their author was not a
native of Rome; he may have been bom in Africa or (more
probably) in Greece. At any rate his name is Greek, he has
some knowledge even of recondite portions of Greek literature,
and he is the writer of a grammatical treatise on the differences
between the verb in Latin and the verb in Greek*.
In the Saturnalia he deals largely with matters of mythology
and grammar, including etymology (naturally of a praescientific
type); but the discussion turns mainly on the varied and
comprehensive merits of Virgil. This discussion is started in
an interesting passage at the end of the first book, and is
continued (after an interval) throughout books in to vi. The
^ Corp. Inscr, Lat, vi 1778 — 9 (Bttcheler, U.\, Cp. DilFs Roman Society^
pp. 17, 18, 77, 154 f; and Glover, pp. i6« — 4.
* Teuflel, S 444f > and 7.
' ib, 9; Glover, pp. 171 — 1. Erasmus, Ciaronianust p. 148, regards
Macrobius as a Graeculus, The treatise on the Greek Verb was abridged by
Erigena (Tillemont, Emp» v 664).
s. 15
226 THE ROMAN AGE. [CHAP.
first of these books proves the poet's accurate knowledge of
religious ritual ; the next gives examples of his command of the
resources of rhetoric; book v compares him with Homer and
includes (as in Gellius) a parallel between Pindar's description of
Aetna and Virgil's, while book vi dwells on Virgil's indebtedness
to the earlier Latin poets, and concludes with a long series of
verbal criticisms assigned to the character of Servius (vi 6-^)'.
Book vii, which owes much to the Convivial Questions of
Plutarch, includes (among many other matters) a lengthy account
of the Roman calendar.
The author once borrows tacitly from Seneca' and far more
frequently from Gellius and Suetonius, and certain ancient com-
mentators on Virgil, besides citations from Plutarch and Athenaeus,
with extracts from Didymus. He also has a number of references
to Cicero, but only two to Catullus and Horace, one to Persius,
three to Juvenal and many to minor grammarians, his main
interest being reserved for Virgil and his predecessors. But ' it is
Virgil's learning that appeals to him rather than his poetry, and
while there is much truth in what he says of Virgil's felicity in
using his knowledge of antiquity and literature, it is absurd to
make it, as he does, Virgil's chief claim to distinction'*. The
Satumaliay notwithstanding its misconception of Virgil's poetry,
has naturally been largely quoted by modern editors of the poet*.
At the dramatic date of the dialogue Servius was a young man
who had not yet written his Commentary on Virgil, but he
may have written it before the composition of the Saturnalia^.
Between the Saturnalia and the Commentary there are some
points in common ^ and it is questioned whether Macrobius is
* Cp. Saintsbury, i 319 — 334, and Glover, 173—185.
• Ep» 47 § 5, in StU, i 1 1, 13.
• Glover, p. 181.
^ Cp. Nettleship on Virgil and his ancient critics in Conington's Virgil,
ed. 1881, i pp. xxix — Ivi.
' His oral teaching alone is mentioned by Macrobius: — i 9, 15, Servius
inter grammaticos doctorem recens professus; vi 6, i, nunc dicat volo Servius
quae in Vergilio notaverit... ; Cotidit enim Romanae indoli enarrando eundim
vattm necesse est habeat huius adnotationis scientiam promptiorem.
* Sat, iii 10— 19, and Servius on Am, iii 11, iv 57, viii 179, 185; also SaU
i 15, 10 and 17, 14, and Servius on A§n, viii 654 and i 8.
XII.] MACROBIUS. 227
borrowing from Servius, or whether our text of Servius has been
interpolated from that of Macrobius^ As a point of modem
interest we may remember that Dr Johnson, at the age of 19 and
on the evening of his arrival as a freshman in Oxford, sat silent
in the presence of his father and his tutor, but, in the course
of their conversation, 'suddenly struck in and quoted Macrobius".
Whether it was a precept of conduct in social life, or an ap-
propriate anecdote, or a criticism on Virgil which was then
quoted, we cannot tell; but we may be certain that on that
occasion the future commentator on Shakespeare could not have
been better described than in the words applied by Macrobius
to the future commentator on Virgil, who is characterised in
the Saturnalia as iuxta doctrina mirabilis et amabilis verecundia
(> 2, 15).
The Commentary on the Dream of Scipio is many times
longer than the text, which it has happily preserved. It includes
not a few digressions on Neo-platonic topics, as well as on myths
and matters of astronomy, including the ' music of the spheres '
(ii 3, 7, 11). Here, as in the Saturnalia^ the author is not original,
but admits his obligations to Plotinus and others'. His general
aim is to support Plato and Cicero in maintaining the existence
of a life beyond the grave, and incidentally he sees in Homer's
' golden chain ' suspended between heaven and earth a series of
links successively descending from the supreme God to the lowest
of his creatures. We are not here concerned with the rest
of the contents of the Commentary^ It may be added, how-
ever, that the treatise was much admired in the Middle Ages.
Its author is described as *no mean philosopher' by Abelard,
and is quoted as an authority on Neo-platonism by St Thomas
Aquinas*.
^ It seems most probable that ' both Macrobius and Servius were drawing
upon older commentaries and criticisms,* such as the Aetuidomash'x of Carvi-
lius Pictor, the viUa of Herennius, i\itfuria of Perellius Faustus, and the liber
contra obtrectatores Vergilii of Asconius (Nettleship, in Conington, i* Ii — liii).
' Boswell (31 Oct. 1718), i 31 ed. Napier.
' He owes much to Porphyry On the Timaeus (Linke, Abh,f, M, fftrtM),
^ They are well analysed in Dill, 106 — 11 9, and in Glover, 186 — 193.
^ Petit, De Macrobio Ciceronis Interfrtte (1866) c. ix and pp. 79, 79
(Glover, p. 187 note i).
15—2
228 THE ROMAN AGE. [CHAP.
In northern Africa, before its conquest by the Vandals,
Martianus Capella produced {c. 410-427)* an ency-
capeiu clopaedia of the seven liberal arts in the form of
an all^ory representing the marriage of Mercury
and Philologia, who is attended by seven bridesmaids personifying
the liberal arts. The work is chiefly founded on Varro's Disa-
piinae-, the book on Rhetoric (v) is mainly taken from Aquila
Romanus ; that on Geometry and Geography (vi), from Solinus
and Pliny ; and that on Music (ix), from Aristides Quintilianus.
As in Varro's Satura Menippea^ the prose is often varied with
verse; and the verse, in spite of certain 'false quantities', is
pleasanter reading than the prose, which oscillates between the
two extremes of being, at one time tame and jejune, at another
over-florid and bombastic The story of the allegory is introduced
in the flrst two books. Mercury, having resolved on wedding a
wife, consults Apollo, who speaks in the highest terms of a
dactissima virgo named Philologia. The bride is raised to divine
rank and, after she has been compelled, with some reluctance, to
abjure all her learning, is carried ofl" to heaven amid the songs of
the Muses. The seven following books are devoted to a descrip-
tion of the persons and attributes of the seven bridesmaids,
Grammar, Logic, Rhetoric, Geometry, Arithmetic, Astronomy,
and Music. The order is the same as in Varro, and the number
of the books is also the same, the only difference being that
whereas Varro devotes two further books to Medicine and Archi-
tecture, Martianus Capella omits these and uses the flrst two
books to introduce his allegory. In the heavenly Senate of the
second book Homer, Virgil, and Orpheus are described as
sounding the lute, while Archimedes and Plato are turning
spheres of gold ; Thales is in a watery mist, Heraclitus aglow
with Are, and Democritus wrapped in a cloud of atoms, while
Pythagoras threads the mazes of certain celestial numbers,
Aristotle is in constant quest of Entelecheia, and Epicurus
appears amid roses and violets^ In the book on Rhetoric the
^ * Roma quam diu viguit ' (vi 637) suggesU a date later than Alaric*s cap-
ture of Rome in 410; * Carthago nunc felicitate reverenda' (vi 669) a date
earlier than the Vandal invasion of Africa in 419.
* ii 111 (Dill, p. 415).
XII.] MARTIANUS CAPELLA. 229
examples are mainly from Cicero, also from Terence and Virgil,
and, to a less extent, from Ennius and Sallust But the author
adds fantastic touches of his own : for example, the kiss with
which Rhetoric salutes Philologia is heard throughout the
assembly, nihil enitn sHens^ ac si cuperet^ faciebat^. The Arts in
general, and Grammar in particular, are allowed to talk undiluted
and unmitigated text-book, and the dramatic form of the work
as a whole is often lost in dull and dry detail.
The work is probably later in date' than the discipiinarum
libri of St Augustine which belong to 387. In the earlier Middle
Ages it was the principal, often the only, text-book used in schools,
and it exercised a considerable influence on education and on
literary taste. The Christian rhetorician, Securus Memor Felix,
Professor of rhetoric in Rome (who took part in the Mavortian
recension of Horace in 527), revised the text with the aid of his
pupil, the grammarian Deuterius, either in 498 or more probably
^^ 535 '• I^ is mentioned as early as Gregory of Tours (d. 595)*,
is often quoted by John of Salisbury (d. 11 80), and is repre-
sented by many mss, including one at Cambridge of the eighth
century, and others once belonging to the monasteries of Bamberg
and Reichenau at the beginning and the end respectively of the
tenth'. The last seven books (as has been recently observed)
^ Liber v, prope finem.
' DiscuKsed by H. Parker, 'The Seven Liberml Arts,' English HisUrical
Review^ 1890, pp. 417 — 461. Mr Parker, while rightly opposing the late date
470, seems to make far too much of the mention of * Byzantium' in vi 657 as
denoting a date earlier than 330.
' Jahn, in Sachs, Berichte^ 1851, p. 351. Denk, p. 109 (I know not on
what authority), assigns Felix to Clermont and Deuterius to Pisa. The latter
may have taught at Milan (note on Ennodius, Ixiii 179 Migne). Tillemont,
Emp. V 665, connects Felix with Clermont ; hut the Hisi. Utt. de la France^
iii 173, admits that his native place is unknown.
^ Hist, Franc, x ad fin., si te...Martianus noster septem disciplinis erudiit.
It was expounded by Erigena (d. 875), and is mentioned in 1 149 by Wilibald
(Jaffi6, Aton, CarMensia i 975 — 9). It is also followed in a poem by Theo-
dulphus, Bp of Orleans under Charlemagne, entitled De septem Hhtralibus
artihns in qnadam pictura depictis^ Migne, cv 333, and M^n, Hist. Germ.,
Poitae Lattniy i 544.
' Teuffel, § 451 ; Ebert, i 481 — 5. Cp. Mullinger's Univ, of Cambridge^
i 33—36, 100; Saintsbury, i 349 — 354, and Dill, 411 f.
230 THE ROMAN AGE. [CHAP.
'are strictly instructive, and sapless as the rods of mediaeval
schoolmasters. The all^ory of the first two books is pleasingly
pedantic and the whole work presents the sterile union of fantasy
and pedantry, so dear to the closing years of pagan scholarship,
when the old straw was thrashed, re-tied in queer-shaped bundles,
and then thrashed again. The process produced pabulum for
coming generations''. But its influence on mediaeval poetry and
art must not be forgotten. That influence may be traced in the
Anticlaudianus of Alanus ab Insulis in the twelfth century', in the
sculptured representations of the seven liberal arts in the thir-
teenth*, and in Attavante's illuminations of the ms of Martianus
in the Library of St Mark's at Venice, executed for Matthias
Corvinus, king of Hungary (c. 1460).
The year 450 marks the death of Theodosius the younger,
the emperor of the East who condescended to be
Recensions , . . .
of SoUnus, a copyist and was celebrated for his calligraphy.
ege us etc. Even while he was presiding over the races of the
Circus, he passed the time in producing specimens of beautiful
handwriting. The record of his having copied a ms of Solinus is
still preserved in transcripts of that copy bearing the subscrip-
tion : — opera d studio (or studio et diligeniia) Theodosii invictissimi
principis. In the same year we have a recension of Vegetius at
Constantinople by one Eutropius, while, in the subsequent half-
century, we have recensions of Pomponius Mela and of abridge-
ments of Valerius Maximus, produced at Ravenna by Rusticius
Helpidius Domnulus, either the correspondent of Ennodius and
Cassiodorus, or that of Apollinaris Sidonius, who will next engage
our attention ^
In the latter half of the fifth century the foremost repre-
sentative of Scholarship in Gaul was Gaius Sollius
^sidonhli' Apollinaris Sidonius {c. 431—^. 482-4). He was
bom at Lyons, where he was educated in poetry,
^ H. O. Taylor, Ths Classical Heritagt of the Midtlle Ages (1901), p. 51.
* Migne, ccx,
' Male, /*ar/ religieux du xiii* siicU, pp. loa — lai (1898). The earliest
sculptured representations of the liberal arts are found on the facades of
Chartres (1145 A.D.) and LAon (VioUet le Due, Diet, de CArch,^ s.v. Arts
Libiramx)*
^ Jahn, in Sdcks. BerickU, 185 1, 34i'-7.«
XII.] RECENSIONS OF SOLINUS, VEGETIUS, ETC. 23 1
rhetoric and philosophy. His father and grandfather were
Christians, and held high office in the State. His wife's father,
Avitus, became emperor of Rome in 455, and caused a statue
of Sidonius to be placed among those of literary celebrities in
the library of Trajan {Carm, vii). Similarly, in recognition of
his panegyrics, he was honoured with a laurelled bust by Majorian
(461), and with a second statue by Anthemius (467), who made
him praefect of Rome. From about 472 to his death, about 484,
he was bishop of the urbs Arvema^ now known as Clermont
Ferrand. He was a layman of high estate when he was unani-
mously elected bishop ; in times of trouble due to the aggressions
of the Visigoths under Euric, who annexed Auvergne and im-
prisoned its bishop in 475, he discharged the duties of his office
in an exemplary manner ; and, when he lay a dying in his cathedral
church, a vast crowd of men, women and children was heard
lamenting and exclaiming : cur fws deseriSy pastor bone^ vtl cut nos
quasi orphanos derelinquis^ ? He survives in his poems and his
letters. His poems are written in hexameters, elegiacs and hen-
decasyllables, a favourite metre in this age. One of these last
{Carm, ix) shows a wide, though possibly superficial, familiarity
with classical literature. In his hexameter poems the mythological
element is predominant. On becoming a bishop he professed to
give up writing verses^ but he not unfrequently relapsed into that
form of amusement. He mainly imitates Virgil and Horace,
Statius and Claudian*, and he was himself imitated by learned poets
in the Middle Ages, but in the dawn of the Renaissance he was
deemed a difficult writer by Petrarch. His letters are modelled
on those of the younger Pliny, resembling in this respect the
letters of Symmachus, but far excelling them in vivid colouring
and varied interest. Like Pliny's, they include elaborate descrip-
tions of several country-houses (ii 2 and 9). Above all, they
supply us with many graphic details as to the state of society
and of learning in Gaul, and as to the literary tastes of the writer
himself, which are also suggested in his poems. He quotes from
* Greg. Tur. Hist, Franc, ii 33.
• Ep. ix 17, a; 16, 3, 11. 45 — 64.
' Cp. Geisler, Lod similes auetorum Sidonio anteriorum in Lnetjohann's
«lt pp. 35 » f. 384—4*6-
232 THE ROMAN AGE. [CHAP.
Virgil and Horace, from Cicero and Tacitus ; he is an admirer
of Sallust {Cartn. ii 190, xxiii 152); with his son he reads
Menander and Terence {Ep. iv 12) ; in his youth he has studied
the Categories of Aristotle (iv i) ; one of his friends is devoted to
the study of Plato (iv 11); but the only dialogue named by him-
self is the PhaedOj and that in the Latin translation of Apuleius
(ii 9; Carm. ii 178). He tells us of the Latin authors in the
library of a noble friend near Ntmes, which included Varro and
Horace, as well as Augustine and Prudentius and a Latin transla-
tion of Origen (ii 9, 4)^ His friend Lampridius of Bordeaux
(whom he has special reasons for humouring) is described as
declaiming with equal facility in Greek and in Latin (ix 13);
another friend, Consentius of Narbonne, composes in Greek as
well as Latin verse (ix 15, 1. 21), while Magnus, the father of
Consentius, is flatteringly compared with Homer and Herodotus^
with Sophocles, Euripides and Menander, and with a series of
Latin authors from Plautus to Martial {Carm, xxiii). When he
hears of a monk, who has passed through the town, carrying off
to Britain, the native land of Faustus (the semi-pelagian bishop of
Riez in Provence), a mysterious ms written by Faustus himself, he
drives after him with all speed and does not rest until he has had
the MS copied by his secretaries at his dictation (ix 9, 16). A treatise,
in which Faustus maintained the corporeal nature of the soul, was
answered by Mamertus Claudianus, who translates large portions
of the dialogues of Plato, besides referring to Thales, Pythagoras,
Zeno, Epicurus, Porphyry and other philosophers*. This reply
he dedicated to Sidonius, who exhausts the vocabulary of literary
allusion in acknowledging the compliment, but never approaches
the point at issue between his friends (iv 3). It is Sidonius Vho
preserves for us the familiar example of a ' recurrent ' verse, which
is the same whether read backwards or forwards, Roma tibi subito
tnotibus ibit amor (ix 14, 4). He sends to a friend the Mogistoric'
works of Varro, and the chronology of Eusebius (viii 6, 18). He
^ Other libraries are mentioned in viii 4 and 11 § a, Cartn, xxiv 9a, and a
bybliopola in Ep. v 15.
' C. xxiii 134, primos vix poterant locos tueri | torrens Herodotus, tonans
Homenis.
' ed. Engelbrecht, 1885.
XII.] APOLLINARIS SIDONIUS. 233
regrets that literature is held in esteem by few, pauci studia nunc
honorant (v 10, 4); but he rejoices that the literary spirit, 'now
dying out', has found a refuge in the noble heart of a friend
(iv 17). He laments the inroad of barbarisms into the classical
idioms of the Latin language ^ In contrast with Latin, he regards
Celtic and German with contempt (iii 2 ; v 5, x). He is not
attracted even by the best of his German neighbours (iv i ; vii 14).
His Muse falters in the presence of barbarous Burgundians;
* how *, he asks, * can I write six-feet hexameters when surrounded
by seven-feet barbarians?' {Cartn, xii). We cannot part with
Sidonius better than in the terms of grateful appreciation recently
applied to himself and his literary contemporaries. He fully
deserves to be called the foremost of those who 'in a period of
political convulsion and literary decadence, softened the impact
of barbarism, and kept open for coming ages the access to the
distant sources of our intellectual life".
The interest in Latin literature survived longest in Gaul, where
schools of learning were flourishing as early as the « h 1 f
first century at Autun, Lyons, Toulouse, Nlmes, learning in
Vienne, Narbonne and Marseilles; and from the
third century onwards, at Trier, Poitiers, Besan9on and Bordeaux*.
In the schools of Gaul three tendencies may be traced^: (i) that
^ ii 10, I, tantum increbniit muUitudo desidiosonim, ut, nisi vel paucissimi
quique meram Latiaris linguae proprietatem de trivialium barbarismonim robi-
gine vindicaveritis, earn brevi abolitam defleamus intereniptamque.
* DilPs Roman Society, p. 451. On Sidonius, cp. Luetjohann*s ed. (in
Mon, Germ. Hist.)\ also the Benedictine Histcire Littiraire de Fratut^ vol. ii;
Teuffel, §§ 466, I and 467; Ebert, i' 419 f; the works of Germain (1844),
Kaufmann (1864-5), and Chaix (1866), and Mullinger's Schools of Charles the.
Great (iStj), pp. 16 — ao; I>enk*s Gallo-Franhisehes Unterrkhts- und Bildttngs*
ivesen (1891), pp. 141 — 153, 160 — 3; Saintsbury, i 383 — 9; and Dill, 187 —
113, 410 f, 434 — 451. Cp. Hodgkin*s Italy and her Invaders, ii 198 — 374.
* Denk, 81 — 93. The celebrated school at Augustodunum (Autun) is
noticed by Tacitus, Ann, iii 43 (11 A.D.); its decline began in 970; and, after
its destruction by the barbarous Bagaudae, its restoration was warmly urged in
197 by the rhetorician Eumenius, who gives an interesting account of its posi-
tion in the midst of the finest buildings of the city, with its class-rooms for the
teaching of Grammar, Rhetoric and Philosophy, its colonnades adorned with
illustrations of History and Geography, and its baths, gymnasium and palaestra
(Or. iv in Panegyrici Latini, ed. BMhrens).
« J. E. B. Mayor, Latin Hepiatetuh, 1889, p. liv f.
234 THE ROMAN AGE. [CHAP.
of Sidonius, whose relations to the Classics have been already
reviewed; of Ennodius (d. 521), who was bom in Gaul, and in
his earlier years regarded the pursuits of literature as the cure for
the troubles of his time', but, after becoming bishop of Pavia,
detested the very name of 'liberal studies"; and of Venantius
Fortunatus (c, 535 — 600), an Italian by birth, who became pres-
byter of Poitiers and wrote an epic on St Martin of Tours,
modelled on Virgil and Claudian. This tendency may be de-
scribed as 'essentially heathen, with a veneer of churchmanship'.
(a) The second tendency is that of men like Paulinus of Nola,
which, while introducing into the Church 'a new Pantheon' of
locally important saints (such as Felix of Nola), ' jealously guards
its pupils from the contagion of the gentile Classics'. (3) The
third tendency is 'that of the wiser, more truly catholic teachers',
such as Hilary of Poitiers (d. 367), who, as noticed by Jerome
(£p. 83), is an imitator of Quintilian ; Sulpicius Severus (d. 425),
who, in his Chronica^ imitates Sallust, Tacitus and Velleius, and,
in his works on St Martin of Tours, makes Cicero his model, and
has reminiscences of Virgil; Claudius Marius Victor (d. c, 425 —
450), who ascribes all the disasters of his time to the rhetorical
education of the day with its abandonment of Paul and Solomon
for Terence, Virgil, Horace and Ovid'; Hilary of Aries (d. c. 450),
who succeeded Honoratus as bishop of Aries and wrote his life,
and found his chief delight in expounding difficult passages to his
pupils*; Alcimus Avitus, bishop of Vienne (d. ^.525), who imitates
Virgil, Horace, Juvencus, Claudian, Sedulius and Sidonius ; and
lastly Cyprianus, bishop of Toulon {c. 475 — 550), the author of a
rendering of the Heptateuch in Latin verse. These last, 'while
borrowing from the Roman models their language, their taste and
their examples of primitive virtue, endeavour to create a reformed
literature, not ashamed to draw its inspiration and topics from
Hebrew and Christian tradition'*. In the same spirit Ambrose
(d. 397), who was the son of a Prcufectm Galliarum and was
^ Eucharist, de vita sua, vi 394. ' £^, tx i, ed. 1892.
' Denk, p. 134. His own models include Virgil, and also Lucretius and
Ovid.
* Denk, p. 191 (quoting /fist, Litt, iii 33).
" J. £. B. Mayor, /. r.
XII.] THE SCHOOLS OF GAUL. GRAMMARIANS ETC 235
probably born at Trier, but completed his education at Rome,
borrows the substance of large parts of his Hexaimeron from
Basil, and is specially fond of quoting Virgil ; while his model in
the De Officiis Ministrorum is obviously the De Officiis of Cicero.
To the age of Sidonius may be ascribed two treatises by a
Gallic Grammarian bearing the same name as (and
possibly identical with) his poetical friend, Con- and commen.
sentius'. To the same age, but to other lands, ***"
may be assigned certain commentaries on the Grammar of Dona-
tus, one of which (that of the Mauretanian Pompeius) was popular
in the Middle Ages ; also a glossary, with quotations from Plautus
and Lucilius, by Luctatius Placidus, probably a native of Africa ;
and expositions of the Eclogues and Georgirs of Virgil by Philar-
gyrius and others'. About ten years after the death of Sidonius
we find the consul of 494, Turcius Rufius Apronianus Asterius,
who was the first to publish the Carmen Paschale of the Christian
poet Sedulius, revising a text of Virgil in Rome, as is proved by a
'subscription' in the Medicean MS at the end of the Eclogues^,
Sidonius describes one of his friends as a happy Tityrus who
had recovered the lands which he had lost to the barbarians \
Their ever-threatening incursions might well have tempted him
in his latter days to say with Virgil : — impius haec tarn culta
naifalia miles habebit ? barbarus has segetes f But the * barbarians '
of his own day were soon to be superseded by victorious invaders,
who were ultimately to change the name of Gaul into that of
France. Only a few years after his death, the Franks under
Clovis defeated Syagrius and his Belgians at Soissons (486) ; ten
years later the defeat of the Alemanni* was immediately followed
by the baptism of Clovis (496); and the subsequent victories
over the Armoricans, Burgundians (500) and Visigoths (507)
led to the practical termination of the Roman power and the
establishment of the Merovingian dynasty in Gaul, a change
' De nomine et verho^ and De barbarismis ei metaplasmis (Keil, Gr. Lot,
V «. 338).
» Tcuffel, §47J-
' Jahn, in ScUhs. Beruhie^ 1851, p. 548 f; Tenflel, S ^3i* gi /nesimHe in
Ribbcck's Virgil^ iv 106.
* Ep. viii 9, 5 1. I a.
* Assigned to 492 in Bury's Later Roman Empire^ i 384.
236 THE ROMAN AGE. [CHAP. XII.
formally ratified by Justinian in 536. Meanwhile Odoacer, who
had put an end to the Western Empire in 476, was himself
superseded in 493 by Theodoric, king of the Ostrogoths, who
ruled over Italy till his death in 526. In the years covered
by the reign of Theodoric, which may be regarded as a time
of transition between the Roman Age and the Middle Ages,
Scholarship is represented by the great names of Boethius and
Cassiodorus in the West, and Priscian in the East These names
are reserved for the following chapter.
\fiuczorc\Tccur "
jLSVIIl'OcfL?/IN#VF«t:
^^^nolnuCcLAde- romxnx cxudi-nX.-
From Codkx LaurkNtianus lxiii 19 (Cent, x) of Livv viii ult.
(Chatelain's PaUographie des Ciassiques Latins^ pi. ex.) See p. 115 f.
CHAPTER XIII.
LATIN SCHOLARSHIP FROM 5OO TO S30 A.D.
In the first quarter of the sixth century, which is the close of
the Roman period and the prelude of the Middle
Ages in the West, no name is more eminent m
Latin literature than that of Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius
{c. 480 — 524). He was the head of the noble Anician house,
which had been famous for six centuries ; of his four names, the
second recalled a hero of the Roman Republic, and the third a
saintly hermit of Noricum * ; while his wife was the daughter of the
senator Symmachus, the great-grandson of the orator of that
name (p. 214). A student from his early years and renowned for
the wide range of his learning, which included an intimate
knowledge of Greek, he formed the ambitious resolve of rendering
and expounding in Latin the whole of Plato and Aristotle, with a
view to proving their substantial agreement with one another*.
Though only a part of this vast scheme was completed, his success
in that part was immediately recognised. One of his correspon-
dents, Ennodius, bishop of Pavia, assured him that * in his hands
the torch of ancient learning shone with redoubled flame' {£p. vii
13) ; while Cassiodorus, writing about 507 a.d., as the secretary of
Theodoric, paid homage to his high services as an interpreter of
the science and philosophy of Greece : — * through him Pythagoras
the musician, Ptolemy the astronomer, Nicomachus the arithme-
tician, Euclid the geometer, Plato the theologian, Aristotle the
logician, Archimedes the mechanician, had learned to speak the
* Bury, La/er Roman Empiric i ^85 f.
' Boethius on Aristotle, Dt Inteffr* ii 9, 3 p. 79 Meiser (=Migne, Ixiv
433)-
238 THE ROMAN AGE. [CHAP.
Roman language *^ So varied were his accomplishments that he
was requested by Theodoric to construct a sundial and a water-
clock for the king of the Burgundians ( Far, i 45), to nominate a
musician for the court of Clovis (ii 40), and to detect a fraud in
the currency of the realm (i 10). When he received these requests
he already bore the designation of iilustris and fatricius. He
became sole consul in 510, and, even in the year of his consul-
ship, he was inspired by patriotic motives to continue to instruct
his fellow-countrymen in the wisdom of Greece*. He reached
the height of his fame in 522, when the consulship was held by
his two sons, and their father pronounced in the Senate a panegyric
on Theodoric. Not long afterwards, he and his father-in-law,
Symmachus, were charged with the design of liberating Rome
from the barbarian yoke. The grounds of the charge are
obscure"; he was condemned by the Senate unheard; and the
student of philosophy, who had unfortunately been prompted by
Plato to take part in the affairs of the State, found himself com-
pelled to bid farewell to the scene of his studies, leaving his
library, with its walls adorned with ivory and glass \ for the gloom
of a prison between Pavia and Milan, where, after some delay, he
was put to a cruel death in 524. His fate was shared in the
following year by Symmachus ; and, a year later, the dying hours
of Theodoric are said to have been troubled with remorse for
these deeds of wrong (526). In 722 a tomb was erected in his
memory by Luitprand, king of the Lombards, in the same cen-
tury he was venerated as a 'martyr', and in 1884 canonised as a
* saint *.
Boethius holds an intermediate position between the ancient
world and the Middle Ages. He was the last of the learned
Romans who understood the language and studied the literature
^ Fariiu, i 45 (Milman, //isf. Lot, Christ, i 413, ed. 1867).
' Comm, in Ar, Cattg, ii (Migne, Ixiv aoi), Etsi nos curae officii con-
suUris impediunt quominus in his studiis omne otium plenamque operam
consumamus, pertinere tamen videtur hoc ad aliquam reipublicae curam,...cives
instniere etc.
* His own account of the charge is given in PhiL Cons, i uprose ^^ senatum
dicimur salvum esse voluisse etc The whole question is discussed in Hodgktn's
Italy and fur Invaders, ill iv c. 11.
^ Phil, Cons, i 5 /r. 10, bybliothecae comptos ebore ac vitro parietes.
XIII.] BOfiTHIUS- 239
of Greece ; and he was the first to interpret to the Middle Ages
the logical treatises of Aristotle. }l\s pMlosopMccU works^ include
a commentary on Porphyry's Introduction to the Categories as
translated by Victorinus; a translation of that Introduction by
Boethius himself, with a still more extensive commentary; a
translation of the Categories^ with a commentary in four books
(510 A.D.); a translation of the De Interpretatione^ with a com-
mentary in two, and another in six (507-9 a.d.) ; renderings of
the first and second Analytics^ the Sopkistici EUnchi and the
Topics of Aristotle ; fragments of a commentary on the Topics of
Cicero, with several original works on division, definition, and on
various kinds of syllogisms. We also possess his treatise on
Arithmetic (which is highly esteemed), on Geometry (a Latin
transcript from parts of Euclid), and on Music (which is held to
have even retarded the scientific development of the art by re-
verting to the Pythagorean scale*).
In the history of Scholarship the main importance of Boethius
lies in the fact that his philosophical works on Aristotle gave the
first impulse to a problem which continued to exercise the keenest
intellects among the schoolmen down to the end of the Middle
Ages. The first signal for the long-continued battle between the
Nominalists and the Realists was given by Boethius. Porphyry,
in his 'Introduction to the Categories', had propounded three
questions : ( i ) * Do genera and species subsist *, i.e. really exist, * or
do they consist in the simple conception of the subject?' (2) 'If
they subsist, are they corporeal or incorporeal?' (3) In either
case, *are they separate from sensible objects, or do they reside
in these objects, forming something coexistent with them?'*.
These questions Porphyry had set aside as requiring deeper
investigation. Boethius in his first commentary on Porphyry, in
which he had accepted the translation by Victorinus, stated that
it was impossible to doubt the real existence of genera and
' Migne, Ixiv i — 1115.
' Macfarren in Enc, Brit, quoted by Hodgkin, iii 539.
' In Porph, Comnunt, i 83 Migne (de generilras et speciebus), sive subsistant,
sive in solis nudis intellectibus posita sint, sive subsistentia corporalia sint an
incorporalia, et utnim separata a sensibilibns an in sensibilibus posita. Cp.
Haureau, Ilistoire de la PhilosophU Scoiattiqtu^ i 47 — 51, with H. F. Stewart's
Boithius^ c. vii, esp. p. 148 f.
240 THE ROMAN AGE. [CHAP.
Species^', but, towards the close of the first book of his second
commentary, founded on his own translation of Porphyry, we find
him weighing and comparing the opinions of Plato and Aristotle: —
'according to Plato, genera and species are not merely conceptions,
in so far as they are universals ; they are real things existing apart
from bodies; according to Aristotle, they are conceived as in-
corporeal, in so far as they are universals, but they have no real
existence apart from the sensible world '^ He now inclines
towards the opinion of Aristotle, whereas formerly he had pre-
ferred that of Plato; but, like Porphyry himself, he leaves the
question undetermined, deeming it unbecoming to decide be-
tween Plato and Aristotle. A rhymer of the twelfth century,
Godefroi de Saint Victor, has happily described Boethius as
remaining silent and undecided in this conflict of opinions : —
*Assidet Boethius, stupens de hac lite,
Audiens quid hie et hie asserat perite,
£t quid cui faveat non discernit rite,
Nee praesumit solvere litem definite*'.
But this vacillating judgment could not satisfy the keen intellects
of the schoolmen, and we find the Aristotelian tradition resolutely
maintained in the eighth century by Rabanus Maurus, and as
resolutely opposed in the ninth by John Scotus Erigena, the
champion of Plato and Realism, and the opponent of the vaguely
Aristotelian teaching of Boethius ^ The conflict continued in
various forms (in discussions whether universals are realia ante
rem^ or nomina post rem^ or realia in re) down to the end of the
Middle Ages.
The interests of Boethius were primarily philosophical and
secondarily theological ; and his study of dialectic was combined
with some attention to abstruse points of theoretical theology.
The Mss credit him with five brief theological treatises*, and the
question whether they can be ascribed to the same authorship as
the Philosophiae Consolatio has long been debated. A fragment
^ Migne, Ixiv 19 c, si rerum veritatem atque integritatem perpendas, non
est dubium quin verae (vere?) sint. Cp. F. D. Maurice, Mediaeval Philosophy ^
p. II.
' Migne, Ixiv 86 a; Stewart, p. 353.
* Fo9U Phihsophioi (Haur^u, i 1 30).
* Haur^au, i 144, 173. • Migne, Ixlv 1947—1419.
XIII.] BOfiTHIUS. 241
of Cassiodorus discovered in 1877 supports the genuineness of
four of the five, including the De Trinitate addressed to his
father-in-law Symmachus. All the four treatises appear to belong
to his early life, and his interest in his theme is mainly dialectical*.
While his translation of the Categories did not supersede *St
Augustine's' until the end of the tenth century', and his renderings
of the Analytics^ Topics and Sophistici Elenchi were apparently
unknown until the twelfth", his theological treatises were familiar
to Alcuin (734 — 804) and to Hincmar, bishop of Rheims (850).
The fact that they were expounded by Gilbert de la Porr^e, bishop
of Poitiers from 1141, is another link connecting Boethius with
the Middle Ages.
The crowning work of his life, the Philosophiae Consolatio^
was composed in prison not long before his death. It is in the
form of a dialogue, and includes 39 short poems in 13 different
metres, intermingled with prose after the Menippean manner,
which had been applied to lighter themes by Varro, by Seneca
and Petronius, and by Martianus Capella, but is here raised to a
far higher dignity. The work begins with an elegiac poem
inspired by the Muses who are described as actually present in
the prisoner's cell, when the queenly form of Philosophia appears,
and, bidding them depart, herself consoles the prisoner's sorrows.
In the phraseology of the poetical passages Seneca is the author
mainly imitated, but there are some reminiscences of Virgil and
Horace, Ovid and Juvenal*. One of the poems (iii 11) ends with
the Platonic doctrine of reminiscence ; another (iii 9) is entirely
inspired by Plato's lYmaeus, which is repeatedly quoted in the
prose passages, with obvious echoes of the Gorgias (iv 2 and 4).
There are also indications of indebtedness to the lost Protrepticus
of Aristotle'; and direct quotations from Aristotle's Physics and
De Caelo^ and from the De Divinatione and the Somnium
Scipionis of Cicero. As an eclectic philosopher, the author also
borrows from the Stoics. Throughout the work there is no
' H. Usener on the Anecdatan Holdiri (Pftuly-Wissowa, s.v. Boethiui^
p. 600). Cp. Hodgkin's Cassiodorus ^ pp. 73 — 84, and Stewart, pp. u — 13,
108—159.
' Haur^au, i 97. ' Prantl, Gesch. der LogiA^ 11 4.
* Pp. «a8— 331 ed. Peipcr. • Bjrwater injoum, Phil, ii 59.
s. 16
242 THE ROMAN AGE. [CHAP.
evidence of distinctively Christian belief, but there are a few
phrases of apparently Christian origin. Neo-platonism and
Christianity are respectively implied in the mention of human
destiny as influenced either daemonum varid soUertid^ or angelicA
virtutc (iv 6/r. 51). The utterances of Philosophia are described
as vert praevia luminis (iv i); the world is under the beneficent
rule of a rerum bonus rector (ib.) ; the writer regards heaven as his
'home', his domus (ib.) and his patria {ib. and v i), and as the
realm where the sceptre is held by the dominus regum and all
tyrants are banished. Biblical reminiscences are suggested by
passages such as the description of the sumtnum bofium, quod
regit cuncta fortitcr^ suaviterque disponit {^\\ pr, 12 and Wisdom viii
x), by vasa vilia et vasa pretiosa (iv /r. i) and by hue omnes
pariter vetiite (iii m, 10). But the absence of all reference to the
consolations of religion is much more remarkable than the presence
of a few phrases such as these. The author's belief in prayer and
in providence implies that his mind was tinged by Christian
influence, and is probably due to a Christian education. In
fact he could hardly have held public office in this age without
having been a Christian, at least by profession. He does not
oppose any Christian doctrine, but his attitude is that of a Theist
and not that of a Christian. He supplied the Middle Ages with
an eclectic manual of moral teaching severed from dogma and
endued with all the charm of exquisite verse blended with lucid
prose ; and, as the latest luminary of the ancient world, he remained
long in view, while the sources of the light which he reflected
were forgotten. The masterpiece which was his last legacy to
posterity was repeatedly translated, expounded and imitated in
the Middle Ages, and these translations were among the earliest
literary products of the vernacular languages of Europe, — English,
French, German, Italian and Sf>anish, among the translators
being names of no less note than king Alfred, Chaucer and
Queen Elizabeth. It was also translated into Greek by Maximus
Planudes (d. 13 10). The emperor Otho III, who died in 1002, a
hundred years after Alfred, placed in his library a bust of
Boethius, which was celebrated by the best Latin poet of the age,
the future pope Silvester II'. Three centuries later, he is quoted
^ Peiper's Boithitts^ p. 40.
XIII.] BOfiTHIUS. 243
more than 20 times in the Conviio and elsewhere by Dante S
whose best-known lines, Nessun maggior dolore Che ricotdarsi del
tempo felice Nella miseria (Inf, v 121), are a reminiscence of
Boethius (n iv 4) : — in omni adversitate fortunae infelicissimum est
genus infortunii fuisse felicem*. Dante places him in the Fourth
Heaven among the twelve Miving and victorious splendours'
which are the souls of men learned in Theology (Paradise^ x
124):—
Here in the vision of all good rejoices
That sainted soul, which unto all that hearken
Makes manifest the treachery of the world.
The body, whence that soul was reft, is lying
Down in Cieldauro', but the soul from exile
And martyr's pain hath come unto this peace.
Two hundred years after Dante, the book of Consolation com-
posed by Boethius in the 'Tower of Pavia' brought solace to
Sir Thomas More in the Tower of London. It has since won the
admiration of the elder Scaliger* and Casaubon, and has been
described as a 'golden volume' by Gibbon, who eulogises its
author as 'the last of the Romans whom Cato or Tully could
have acknowledged for their countryman*'.
* Moore's Studies ^ i «8«— 8.
* Boethius had been anticipated by Synesius, Ep* 57, Ixvi 1391 Migne,
dyaBCbp, i^ ottap Apa 4p ofocf ytyhptLfAtw,
* The (now desecrated) Church of St Peter's of the Go/den Ceiling, in
Pavia.
^ Poit'ces liber z/i, Quae libuit ludere in poesi divina sane sunt; nihil illis
cultius, nihil gravius, neque densilas sententiarum venerem, neque acumen
abstulit candorem. Equidem censeo paucos cum illo comparari posse. Id.
Hypercriticusy ap. Migne, Ixiii 573, where Lipsius and G. J. Vossius are also
quoted.
* Bury's Gibbon iv 197 — 204 (c. 39). Cp. also Hodgkin's Italy and her
Invadersy III iv c. n; A. P. Stanley in Smith's Z?/V/.; Hartmann in Pauly-
Wissowa; Teuffel, § 478; Ebert, i* 485 — 497. Boithii Opera in Migne, vols.
Ixiii, Ixiv; Comm. in Arist, wtpl ipftJi^ttaSf ed. Meiser (1877 — 80); PAi/c-
sophiae Consolationis libri Vy ed. Peiper (1871); Anglo-saxon trans, by King
Alfred, ed. Sedgefield (18990; best English trans. H. R. James (1897). On
mediaeval translations, and on Boethius in general, cp. H. F. Stewart's (Hulsean)
Essay (1891). On his relation to Christianity, Nitzsch (i860); Hildebrand
(1885); Usener's Holderi Anecdoton (1877) ; and, on his relation to the Middle
Ages, Haur^au, Histoire de la Philosophie Scolastique, i iiaf (1871); Prantl's
16—2
244 THE ROMAN AGE. [CHAP.
While the life of Boethius was prematurely cut short by a
violent death, that of his contemporary Cassiodorus,
CftMlodonis
the skilful and subservient Minister of the Ostro-
gothic dynasty, was prolonged beyond the age of ninety. He
was bom between 480 and 490 B.C. at Scyllacium (Squillace) in
southern Italy. His full name was Flavius Magnus Aurelius
Cassiodorus Senator^ the last of these names alone being used by
himself in his official correspondence. Cassiodorus is there the
designation of his father, and is not applied to the son before the
eighth century, when it is found in Paulus Diaconus\ and also in
Alcuin's list of the library at York : — * Cassiodorus item, Chryso-
stomus atque loannes", a line supplying evidence against the
form CassiodoriuSj which once found favour with certain scholars.
His father, as Praetorian Praefect in 500, conferred on him the
post of Consiliarius, or Assessor in his Court A brilliant oration
in honour of Theodoric led to his being appointed Quaestor, and
thereby becoming, in accordance with the new meaning of that
office, the Latin interpreter of his sovereign's will and the drafter
of his despatches. The duties of the office are thus described in
the * Formula of the Quaestorship * drawn up by himself : — * the
Quaestor has to learn our inmost thoughts, that he may utter
them to our subjects... He has to be always ready for a sudden
call, and must exercise the wonderful powers which, as Cicero
has pointed out, are inherent in the art of an orator. . . He has to
speak the King's words in the King's own presence '. He has to
set forth every subject on which he has to treat, *with suitable
embellishments '. He has to receive and to answer the petitions
of the Provinces'. The extant letters written by Cassiodorus as
Quaestor extend from 507 to 511 a.d. Like his father, he
became governor of Lucania and the region of the Bruttii, the
land of his birth. He was sole consul in 514, published his
QeschichU der Logik^ ii 4; MuUinger's Univ, of Cambridge \ 37 — 9; and H. O.
Taylor's Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages, 51—6.
^ Ifist. Langvd, i 15 (Justiniani) temporibus Cassiodorus apud urbem
Romam tarn saeculari quam divina scientia daniit.
• Migne, ci 843.
' Variae, vi 5, p. 300 f of Ilodgkin's (condensed translation of the) Letters
of Cassiodorus*
XIII.] CASSIODORUS. 245
Chronicon in 519, and, at the death of Theodoric in 526, was
holding (probably not for the first time) the high position of
Af agister Offidanitn^ or 'head of the Civil Service', which he
continued to hold as virtually Prime Minister to Theodoric's
daughter, Amalasuentha, while she acted as regent for her son
Athalaric. Though formally Magister only, he also acted as
Quaestor: — erat solus ad universa sufficiens (ix 25, 7); 'when-
ever eloquence was required, the case was always put into his
hands' (ix 24, 6). Between 526 and 533 he wrote his History of
the Goths, From 533 to 536, under the three short-lived suc-
cessors of Theodoric, he was Praetorian Praefect, as his father
had been before him ; and we still possess the Letter in which he
informs himself of his own elevation to that high office (ix 24).
At the end of 537 he published, under the title of Variae^ the
vast collection of his official Letters. In 540, when Belisarius,
the victorious general of the ungrateful Justinian, entered Ravenna,
Cassiodorus had apparently already withdrawn from the world
and had returned to spend the evening of his days on his an-
cestral estate among the Bruttii. He there wrote an account of
his ancestors and a treatise On the Soul, He also founded two
Monasteries, and, for the instruction of 'his monks', wrote an
exceedingly lengthy Commentary on the Psalms ; a comparatively
short Commentary on the Epistles ; an ecclesiastical history (from
306 to 439) called the Historia Tripartita^ combining in a single
narrative the translations of the Greek historians Socrates, Sozomen
and Theodoret, executed at his request by Epiphanius; and an
educational treatise entitled the Institutiones Divinarum et Hu-
manarum Lectionum (begun about 543). In the 93rd year of his
age his monks surprised him by asking for a treatise on spelling :
he accordingly produced a compilation De Orthographia^ borrowed
from the works of twelve grammarians, beginning with Donatus
and ending with Priscian. He survived the final fall of the
Ostrogothic kingdom in 553, and even the invasion of Italy by
Alboin, king of the Lombards, in 568 ; and died between 575 and
585, in the 96th year of his age*.
^ Trithemius, De Scriptoribus Etdesiasticis^ ^494* f* 35* claniit temporibus
lustini senioris [518 — 517] et usque ad imperii lustini iunioris paene finem
[565 — 578], annos habens aetatis plus quam xcv anno domini dlxxv.
246 THE ROMAN AGE. [CHAP.
The Chronicon} of Cassiodorus, which closes its abstract of
the history of the world with 519 a.d., is mainly an inaccurate
copy of Eusebius and Prosper, while towards its close it is unduly
partial to the Goths. The charge of partiality has also been
brought against his Gothic History^ in which he had aimed at
giving an air of legitimacy to the dominion of the Goths in Italy.
It only survives in the abridgement by lordanes^ The Coph-
mentary on the Psalms and the Historia Tripartita were widely
known in the Middle Ages. His other works have points of
contact with our present subject. His official Letters, arranged
in twelve books, to which he gave the name of Variae^ are
undoubtedly addressed to a vast variety of persons, from the
emperor Justinian down to the chief of the shorthand writers;
but, so far from being marked by the corresponding variety of
style which their writer claims for them", they are apt to strike a
modem reader as almost uniformly inflated, florid, tawdry and
unduly grandiloquent ^ A certain degree of elevation of manner
may fairly be expected of a minister who proudly recalls his
protracted conversations with his king, — those gloriosa colloquia*^
in which, besides discoursing on aflairs of State, the monarch
would inquire concerning the sayings of wise men of old *; but it
must be confessed that, in the Letters in general, the thought is
'often a piece of tinsel wrapped up in endless folds of tissue-
paper'^ He is specially fond of beginning and ending his letters
with 'wise saws', and interspersing them with 'modern instances'.
There is often a 'lack of humour '^ in the incongruous way in
which documents otherwise not deficient in dignity are studded
with stories about birds, such as thrushes, doves and partridges,
storks, cranes and gulls, hawks, eagles and vultures; or beasts,
like the chameleon, the salamander and the elephant ; or flshes,
^ Migne, Ixix 1314 — 48; first edited by Cochlaeus, who dedicated it (in
1518) to Sir Thomas More, while he dedicated to Henry VIII the first ed. of
some of the Varioi (1519).
' Ed. Mommsen, 1881 (Afon, Gtrm, Hist.),
• Praef, | 15.
^ Cp. R. W. Church, Miscellafttoui Essays ^ p. 169 f, 191-^, ed. 1888;
Bury, Later Kantan Empire^ ii 187.
• Fraef, | 8. • ix 14, 8.
' Hodgkin's Cassi$darus^ p. 17.
XIII.] CASSIODORUS. 247
for example, the sucking-fish and torpedo, the pike and the
dolphin, the murex with its purple dye, and the echinus^ 'that
dainty of the deep*. 'The wandering birds love their own nests;
the beasts haste to their own lodgings in the brake ; the vo-
luptuous fish, roaming the fields of ocean, returns to its own
well-known cavern : how much more should Rome be loved by
her children 1'* This last is actually from a letter on the em-
bellishment of Rome. Elsewhere we read of the repair of its
walls, its temples and its aqueducts', and of the structure, as well
as the factions, of the Circus Aiaximus*, In the diploma for the
appointment of a public architect in Rome, some of the future
characteristics of Gothic architecture, the 'slender shafts of
shapely stone*, compared by Sir Walter Scott to 'bundles of
lances which garlands had bound ', seem almost to be anticipated
in the graceful phrases of the secretary of the Ostrogothic
dynasty : — quid dicamus columnarum iunceam proceritatem t moles
Was sublimissimas fabricarum quasi quibusdam ereciis hastilibus
contineriV Marbles and mosaics are ordered for Ravenna*; in a
letter of 537 we have the first historic notice of Venice*; we also
come across delightful descriptions of Como, of the baths of
Bormio, Abano and Baiae', and of the milk-cure for consumption
among the mountain-pastures south of the Bay of Naples*. We
read of a present of amber from the dwellers on the Baltic*, and
of the arrival at Rome of a water-finder from Africa". An order
for the supply of writing-material for the public offices transports
us to the Nile, and prompts a discourse on the invention of paper,
'which has made eloquence possible***. To the historian the
great interest of the letters of ' this last of Roman statesmen**' lies
in the way in which they illustrate in detail the working out of
the broad principles of law and administration embodied in the
Edict of Theodoric ", and the promotion of peaceful, orderly and
> i II (p. 156 Hodgkin). ' i 15, 18; ii 34; iii 31.
* iii 51 etc. ^ vii 15, 3, and Scott's Lay^ it 9 and 11.
* i 6; iii 9. ' xii 14. ' xi 14; x 19; ii 39; ix 6.
* xi 10. • V a. >• Hi 53. '* xi 38.
'' Ugo Balzani's Early ChronicUs of Italy ^ p. 11.
" R. W. Church, Miscellaneous Essays, p. 158, ed. 1888; Hodgkin*s //a/r
and her Invaders^ iit 180.
248 THE ROMAN AGE. [CHAP.
civilised relations between his Gothic and his Roman subjects*.
They justify the ascription to the king of the high merits of
wisdom' and toleration", and the noble resolve implied in the
phrase: — nos quibus cordi est in melius cuncta mutare. They
describe the Burgundians^ and Pannonians' as barbarians in
comparison with the Goths. In a document drawn up for the
successor of Theodoric, which is interesting to scholars as well as
to historians, a broad distinction is drawn between the barbarian
kings and the legitimate Gothic lords of Italy. The subject is
the increase of the salaries of grammarians.
'Grammar is the noble foundation of all literature, the glorious mother of
eloquence The grammatical art is not used by barbarous kings: it abides
peculiarly with legitimate sovereigns. Other nations have arms : the lords of
the Romans alone have eloquence... The Grammarian is a man to whom every
hour unemployed is misery, and it is a shame that such a man should have
to wait the caprice of a public functionary before he gets his pay '...Such men
'are the moulders of the style and character of our youth. Let them..., with
their mind at ease about their subsistence, devote themselves with all their
vigour to the teaching of liberal arts'*.
Cassiodorus recommends Felix, a native of Gaul, for the
consulship of 5 1 1 on literary as well as other grounds, because he
is a verborum nai^ellus sator^. He cannot refer to Rhegium without
reminding the recipients of a State-document that the place is 'so
called from the Greek piiy^vfu*\ He oddly supposes that Cir-
senses stands for ciratm and enses^. Writing to one of his
subordinates in the law-court, the holder of the then very humble
ofRce of CanallariuSf he makes the following interesting reference
to the origin of the name : —
Remember your title, Cancellarius, Ensconced behind the lattice-work
{coMcM) of your compartment, keeping guard behind those windowed doors,
however studiously you may conceal yourself, it is inevitable that you should
be the observed of all observers '^
It is only once (in his Preface) that he alludes to Horace
' On citdliias (defined in Mommsen's Index as status reipublicat iustus) see
Hodgkin's Cassiodorus^ p. 30 and index.
' xi I, 19 sapientia (r./. patientia).
' ii 17, nemo cogitur ut credat invitus.
^ i 45 f* ' iii ^Sf* * ix ai, p. 406 Hodgkin.
'^ II 3. • Xll 14. ■ 111 51.
'* xi 6, pp. Ill, 463 Hodgkin.
XIII.] CASSIODORUS. 249
{nonumque prematur in annum) ; but he has several reminiscences
or adaptations of Virgil, including the phrase often cited since in
speeches of eulogy :—:^rr;n^ avulso non deficit alter aureus^. He
quotes Cicero's rhetorical works alone', and Tacitus solely to
inform the dwellers on the B^tic of the supposed origin of
amber*. Throughout the Letters he exhibits (though in an
infinitely lower degree) * the encyclopaedic culture of a Cicero or
the elder Pliny'*.
In the last book of the Variae^ he paints a pleasant picture of
the first city of the Bruttii, Scyllacium, the place of his birth. He
describes it as 'hanging like a cluster of grapes upon the hills,
basking in the brightness of the sun all the day long, yet cooled
by the breezes from the sea, and looking at her leisure on the
labours of the husbandmen in the cornfields, the vineyards, and
the olive-groves around her'*. Such was the region to which he
withdrew, after spending thirty years in the service of the Ostro-
gothic dynasty, there to devote himself for the rest of his long life
to a work destined to have a lasting influence on the learning of
the Middle Ages. He had already been corresponding with
Agapetus, the Pope of 535-6, on a scheme for founding by
subscription at Rome a theological school on the model of those
of Alexandria and Nisibis*. Agapetus selected a house on the
Caelian hill, afterwards connected with the Church of San Gregorio
Magno, and there built a library: — a line from an inscription, seen
in the ninth century by a pilgrim from Einsiedlen, says of this
Pope : — codicibus pukhrum candidit arte locum''. The wider
scheme for a theological school at Rome had been rendered
impossible by the conflicts which arose on the invasion of Italy
by Belisarius ; but Cassiodorus was now able to carry out his plan
on a suitable site in the region of his birth. While he was still
Praetorian Praefect, he had formed a series of vivaria, or preserves
for fishes, at the foot of the Moscian mount overlooking the bay
^ Vdr. V 4; cp. ii 4O1 7; v 11, 41 | 11, and xii 14 (itUuba is not amara
among the Bruttii).
• De Or, i 30 ; Brutus 46. • Germ, 45 ( Var, v 1).
^ R. W. Church, /.r., p. 160. ' xii 15, p. 8 Hodgkin.
' Inst. Praef, Migne Ixx 1 105 f ; q>. Hodgkin p. 56.
^ Einsiedlen MS (De Rossi, quoted in J. W. Clark*8 Car$ of Books^ p. 44).
2SO THE ROMAN AGE. [CHAP.
of Squillace*; and here he founded one of his two monasteries,
which (like the modern College of Fishponds near Bristol) obtained
from these vivaria the name of the monasterium Vivariense^.
We read of its well-watered gardens, and its baths for the sick by
the banks of the neighbouring stream of Pellena', while } at the
foot of the hills and above the sand of the sea' there was a
'fountain of Arethusa', fringed with a crown of rustling reeds,
making a green and pleasant place all round it\ For those who
preferred a more unbroken solitude, there was another monastery,
or rather hermitage, in the 'charming seclusion of the Castle Hill ',
a lonely spot surrounded by ancient walls, possibly of some
deserted fort*. Such are the descriptive touches preserved mainly
in his Institutiones^ a partly theological and partly encyclopaedic
work which he composed for the benefit of ' his monks ' between
543 and 555*. In the first part of this work, bearing the separate
title De Institutione Divinarum Liiterarum, he describes the
contents of the nine codices which made up the Old and New
Testaments ; warns his monks against impairing the purity of the
sacred text by merely plausible emendations ; only those who have
attained the highest learning in sacred and secular literature can
be allowed to correct the sacred texts. Revisers of other texts
must study the works of the ancients, libros priscorum (1130 b),
and correct those texts with the aid of those who are masters in
secular literature. He notices the Christian historians, and some
of the principal Fathers, incidentally mentioning as a colleague in
his literary labours the monk Dionysius (Exiguus), who settled
the date of the Christian era, the earliest use of which occurs in
^ Var, xii 15, 14.
' Mr A. J. Evans places the Roman Scyllacium at Roccella, 6 miles N.E.
of the mcxlern Squillace, and the monastery between Squillacc and the shore,
Virgil's navifragum Scylaceum (Hodgkin, pp. 9, 68 — 73). Roccella is described
as *a little world of scenic splendour' and is the subject of a fine illustration in
Lear's CtJabria^ p. 104.
' Insi, i 39.
^ Var, viii 39 (p. 380 Hodgkin).
' Inst, i 99, montis Castelli secreta suavia...muris pristinis ambientibuf
inclusa.
* Mommsen's Pref. to Variat^ p. xi. A later revision is implied in the
reference in c 17 to the end of Justinian's reign (565).
XIII J CASSIODORUS. 2$ I
the year 562 a.d.* He urges his monks to cultivate learning,
not however as an end in itself, but as a means towards the
better knowledge of the Scriptures'. Afler dealing with secular
literature and recommending the study of the Classics, he exhorts
those of his readers, who have no call towards literary work, to
spend their efforts on agriculture and gardening; and in this
connexion to read the ancient authors on these subjects : —
Gargilius Martialis, Columella and Aemilianus Macer, manuscripts
of which he had left for their perusal*. It has been surmised
that, but for Cassiodorus, the treatise of Cato De Re RusHca
would have perished*; but it may be remarked that he does not
actually mention that work. He spent large sums on the purchase
of MSS from northern Africa and other parts of the world*, and
encouraged his monks to copy them with care. He mentions a
certain division of the books of the Bible found in codice grandiore
litiera grandiore (ciariore ?) conscripto containing Jerome's version.
This MS he had presumably brought from Ravenna, and it has
been conjectured that part of it survives in the first and oldest
quaternion of the codex Amiatinus of the Vulgate, now in the
Laurentian Library in Florence. The frontispiece of the latter
represents Ezra writing the Law, and the press with open doors
in the background has a general resemblance to that containing
the four Gospels among the mosaics of the mausoleum of Galla
Placidia at Ravenna (440)*. The books in the monastic library
of Cassiodorus were preserved in presses {armaria)^ nine of which
contained the Scriptures, and works bearing on their study, the
few Greek mss being in the eighth armarium. The arrangement
in general was not by authors but by subjects. The biographical
works of St Jerome and Gennadius were combined in a single
codex^ and similarly with certain rhetorical works of Cicero,
Quintilian and Fortunatianus^
^ Computus Ptisckalis in Migne, Ixiz 1149, first ascribed to Cassiodorus
by Pithoeus.
• Inst, \ 28, p. 1 141 A — B. • ib* p. 1 1 41 — 3.
• Norden's Kunstprosa^ p. 664. • Inst* i c. 8.
• H. J. White, in Studia Bibtua, 1890, ii 373—308; J. W. Clark's Car$ of
Books y frontispiece, and pp. 39 — 41.
' i 8» 1 7 ; ii 1. Franz, Cass. pp. 80—91, gives a list of books either certainly
or probably included in the Library.
252 THE ROMAN AGE. [CHAP.
He is specially interested in those of his monks who are
careful copyists. In describing the scriptorium he dwells on the
special privileges of the antiquarius^ who, ' by copying the divine
precepts, spreads them far and wide, enjoying the glorious
privilege of silently preaching salvation to mortals by means of
the hand alone, and thus foiling with pen and ink the temptations
of the devil ; every word of the Lord written by the copyist is a
wound inflicted on Satan". The art of the copyist had been
practised by the younger monks alone in the monastery of
St Martin's at Tours*; and, in the rules laid down by Ferreolus in
Gaul, c, 550 A.D., reading and copying were considered suitable
occupations for monks who were too weak for severer work*.
But these arts receive a far stronger sanction from Cassiodorus.
He himself set the example of making a careful copy of the
Psalms, the Prophets and the £pistles\
Some precepts of spelling are included in the Institutiones^
from which it appears that Cassiodorus approved of in in compo-
sition being assimilated to the following consonant for the sake of
euphony*. For the same reason he prefers quicquam to quidquam.
To avoid mistakes the copyist must read the works of ancient
authors on orthography, Velius Longus, Curtius Valerianus,
Papyrianus, 'Adamantius Martyrius' on V and B, Eutyches on
the rough breathing, and Phocas on genders. These works he
had himself collected to the best of his ability. He adds that
biblical mss should be bound in covers worthy of their contents,
and that he had supplied a pattern volume, including specimens
of different kinds of binding. For use by night he had provided
lamps so skilfully contrived that they never ran short of oil and
never needed trimming, while he had also constructed a sundial
for bright days and a water-clock for the night and for days that
were overcast*.
In the ninth century, the first part of the Institutiones was
^ Inst, \ 30. ' Sulp. Severus, Vita S, Martini^ c. 7.
' c. 38, pagitiam fingat digito^ qui terrain non praescribit aratro (Franz,
Cass, p. 56).
* Fraif, p. 1109B.
* > 15 (P* 1 1^9 A, Migne), multa etiam respectu euphoniae propter subse*
quentes litteras probabiliter immutamus, ut illumination irrisiot immuta^ilis,
imfiust improbus, * i 3a
XIII.] CASSIODORUS. 253
imitated by Rabanus Maunis in his treatise De Instituiione
Clericorutn^ and was used as a text-book at the monastery of
Reichenau'. In the second part, which is a brief manual De
Artibus ac Disciplinis Liheralium Litterarum\ Cassiodorus gives
a succinct account of the seven liberal arts, half the work being
devoted to Dialectic alone, and the rest about equally divided
between the six other arts, with a somewhat fuller treatment of
Rhetoric in particular. The allegory of Martianus Capella on the
liberal arts is not mentioned by Cassiodorus, but it can hardly be
doubted that, by emphasizing the sanctity of the number ' seven ',
by giving a new meaning to the saying that 'Wisdom hath
builded her house, she hath hewn out her seven pillars ', and by
connecting the seven arts with the education of his monks, he
unconsciously increased the popularity of that pagan work'. The
short chapter on Music mentions a work by Albinus, which the
author remembers reading in Rome, but it had possibly been lost,
gentili incursione sublatus. The long chapter on Dialectic includes
an abstract of a large part of the Organon of Aristotle, in the
course of which the reader is referred to Porphyry's Introduction^
and to the six books of the commentary on the De Interpretatione
by Boethius {viro magniJuo\ a MS of which is left to the monks.
The quaint saying that Aristotle, in writing the De Interpretatione^
calatnum in mente tingebat^ is here quoted. A chapter on logical
fallacies is added, besides some matter more closely connected
with Rhetoric than Dialectic. At the close of this part of the
work, Plato and Aristotle are oddly described as opinabiles
magistri saecuiarium litterarum^ a phrase which, considering the
author's powers of rhetorical expression, is faint praise indeed
It may be noticed, however, that the highly artificial style of the
Variae is somewhat simplified in the Institutiones^ where (in the
author's own language) plus utilitatis invenies quatn decoris
(p. 1240 c). Erasmus, while fully appreciating the high character
and the piety of Cassiodorus, does not approve of his attempting
' Franz, Cass, p. 134. ' Migne, Ixx 11 50 — 1315.
' H. Parker, in Historical Review^ ▼ 456. 'The old pagan learning was
never destroyed, notwithstanding the complete victory of Christianity'; and
Cassiodorus was one of those who, ' by Christianising it to a certain extent, made
it more popular to later generations' (Ugo Balxani, p. 5).
254 1*HE ROMAN AGE. [CHAP.
in the Institutiorus to cover the whole field of sacred and secular
learning ^ But the work was doubtless useful to the unlearned
monks for whom it was mainly intended. The chapter on
Rhetoric was imitated by Isidore of Seville, and by Alcuin, who
also owes much to that on Dialectic*.
The treatise De Orthographia gives rules of spelling to enable
the copyist to avoid certain common mistakes. The four chapters
extracted from the treatise of ' Adamantius Martyrius ' on V and
B, show that those letters must have been constantly confounded
in the pronunciation of imperfectly educated persons, who drew
little (if any) distinction between vivere and bibere*. Among the
lost works of Cassiodorus were some compilations from Donatus
and Sacerdos (p. 1123 d). By his careful attention to the
training of copyists he did much towards preventing the earlier
Latin literature from perishing. He knew Greek, but preferred
to read Greek authors in Latin translations ^ He caused a Latin
rendering to be made of the Jewish Antiquities of Josephus\
St Jerome in his cell at Bethlehem had set the first great example
of isolated literary labour. Cassiodorus appears to have been the
first to have applied this principle fti a wider and more systematic
manner to the organisation of the convent As has been well
observed by Dr Hodgkin, 'the great merit of Cassiodorus, that
which shows his deep insight into the needs of his age and
entitles him to the eternal gratitude of Europe, was his determina-
tion to utilise the vast leisure of the convent for the preservation
of Divine and human learning, and for its transmission to later
ages '. Similarly it has been remarked by Prof. W. Ramsay that
'the benefit derived from his precepts and example was by no
means confined to the establishment over which he presided, nor
to the epoch when he flourished. The same system was gradually
introduced into similar institutions, the transcription of ancient
works became one of the regular and stated occupations of the
^ £p, 1038. ' Franz, Cass. p. 135.
* p. 1 361 Ctbibo...di vita per v, a potu per b scribendum est. Mistakes, such
as vibamus for bibamust and fobetu for foveast actually occur in Mss of the
Vulgate (Franz, Cass, p. 61).
^ Froif. 1 108 A, dulcius enim ab unoquoque suscipitur, quod patrio sermone
narratur. * Inst, i 17.
XIII.] CASSIODORUS. 255
monastic life, and thus, in all probability, we are indirectly
indebted to Cassiodonis for the preservation of a large proportion
of the most precious relics of ancient genius'*. In fact it is
generally agreed that the civilisation of subsequent centuries, and,
in particular, the institution of monastic libraries and monastic
schools, where the light of learning continued to shine in the
' Dark Ages ', owed much to the prescience of Cassiodorus*.
Boethius and Cassiodorus have been happily described as the
'great twin-brethren', and have been compared to a 'double-
headed Janus *\ While the gaze of Boethius looks back on the
declining day of the old classical world, that of Cassiodorus looks
forward to the dawn of the Christian Middle Ages; but both
alike, in their different ways, prevented the tradition of a great
past from being overwhelmed by the storms of barbarism.
Cassiodorus, who had devoted the first half of his life to Politics,
and the second to Religion, stands in more than one sense on the
confines of two worlds, the Roman and the Teutonic, the Ancient
and the Modern. It has even, been observed that the very word
modemus is first used with any frequency by Cassiodorus \
Apart from the Instituiiones \ie does not appear to have drawn
up any written Rule for the guidance of his monks, and we know
nothing of the fortunes of his monastery after the death of the
founder. He recommends his monks to read the Institutes of
Cassian, the founder of Western Monasticism; while he warns
them against that writer's views on free will*. Of Benedict and
the Benedictine Rule we have no mention in his extant writings.
His precepts are indeed consistent with that Rule, but there is
nothing to show that they were suggested by it. He is first
claimed as a Benedictine by Trithemius (d. 1516)*, but the
' W. Ramsay in Smith's Diet, Bicgr, s.v,
• Cp. Ebcrt, i 500', and Nordcn's JCunstprosa^ p. 663 — 5.
' Ebcrt, i 486', einen Januskoff bUdet diesa Dioskurenpaar,
• Hodgkin, pp. i — 3. Cp. Var. iv 45 (Symmachus) antiquonim diligentis-
simus imitator, modernonim nobilissimus institutor; iii 5, 3, modemis saeculis
moribus ornabatur antiquis; 8, i ; 3it 4; viii 14, 3; 151 i ; xi i, 19. The word
is found in Cassiodonis's slightly older contemporary, Ennodius, Ixiii 54 A,
931 B, and in a diploma of 499 (WolfHin, Rhtin, Mus, xxxvii 91).
• Imt, i 19.
• De viris iUtisiribus ord, Ben, i c. 6 and iii c 7.
256 THE ROMAN AGE. [CHAP.
silence of Cassiodorus is considered by Baronius' to be a sufficient
reason for rejecting this claim, and Baronius is not really refuted
by Caret in his lengthy dissertation on this subject (1679)'. ^^^
Benedictine monastery on Monte Cassino was founded in 529,
more than ten years before that of Cassiodorus on the bay of
Squillace ; but it was the latter which set the first example of that
devotion to literary labour which afterwards became one of the
highest distinctions of the Benedictine order*.
Benedict, who belonged to the same Anician geris as Boethius,
„ ^. was bom at Nursia, north of the old Sabine region,
in 480, the year (either actually or approximately)
of the birth of Boethius and Cassiodorus. Among those whom
he gathered round him, when, despectis litterarum studiis*^ he had
fled from the delights and the dangers of Rome to the solitudes
near Subiaco, was the young Roman noble, Maurus, afterwards
known as St Maur. After a time he went some 50 miles south-
ward to Monte Cassino, where a temple of Apollo was still
standing with a sacred grove which was a centre of superstition
among the surrounding peasants. The people were persuaded to
destroy the altar and burn the grove*; and higher up the hill
the last stronghold of paganism was superseded in 529 by a
monastery, which, notwithstanding many changes, still looks
down from a height of more than 1700 feet on a wild mountain
district to the north, on the rocky summits of the Abruzzi to the
east, and to the west and south on the long reaches of the silent
stream that winds through the broad valley of the Carigliano, —
the rura^ quae Liris quieta mordet aqua tacitumus amnis. Near
the foot of the hill were the ruins of a Roman amphitheatre, and
hard by was the site of the villa of 'that pagan Benedictine'*,
^ Annaiat ad ann. 494 (no. 77). * Migne, Ixix 483—496.
' Cassiodori O^a in Migne, Ixix, Ixx; Variae^ ed. Mommsen (in Afon,
Hist, Germ,) 1894; Hodgkin's Italy and her Invaders^ 1885, iii 374 — 7, 310 —
338, and Letters of Cassiodorus^ 1886, with the literature there quoted, esp.
A. Franz, M, Aur. Cassiodorus Senator^ pp. 137, 1873, and R. W. Church, in
Ch, Quarterly^ 1800 (Misc, Essays^ 1888, pp. 155 — 304); also Bury*s Gibbon,
iv l8of, 533.
* Gregorii Dialogic ii init*
* ti^. ii 8; cp. Dante, Paradiso^ 33, 37 — 45.
* Montalembert, Monks of the IVest, i 434, ed. 1896.
XIII.] BENEDICT. 257
Varro. The three virtues inculcated in the Benedictine discipline
were silence in solitude ^d seclusion, and humility and obedience ;
the three occupations of life which were enjoined, the worship of
God, reading, and manual labour. Chapter 48 of the ' Rule of
St Benedict' after declaring that 'idleness is the enemy of the
soul', prescribes manual labour, combined with the setting apart
of certain hours (nearly two hours before noon in summer, and
until 8 or 9 a.m. in other parts of the year) for sacred reading,
lectio divina. During Lent each of the monks is to receive a
book from the library and to read it straight through. One of
the monks is also chosen in each week to read aloud to the
rest during their meals (c. 38). None are to presume to have
either a book or tablets, or even a pen {graffium) of their own
(c- 33)*- Thus the learned labours of the Benedictines were no
part of the original requirements laid down by the founder of
their order. Before the death of the founder {c. 542), his faithful
disciple, Maurus, had crossed the Alps; had been welcomed at
Orleans; and at Glanfeuil on the Loire, near Angers, had founded
the first Benedictine monastery in France, on the site afterwards
known as St Maur-sur-Loire^ The name of St Maur still
survives in the English surname of Seymour ; and it is associated
for ever vAiYi the learned labours of the French Benedictines of
the 'Congregation of St Maur', whose headquarters from 1630 to
the French Revolution were the Abbey of Saint Germain-des-Pr&
in the south of Paris*.
It is said that, late in life, Benedict foresaw that the lofty
buildings of Monte Cassino would fall in ruins before the ravages
of the spoiler \ a foreboding fulfilled by the Lombards in 583, and
the Saracens in 857. Towards the end of 542 he was visited by
Totila, king of the Goths, who came not to destroy the fabric but
to consult its founder, and to depart impressed with the lessons of
humanity which he had learnt from Benedict*. It is also said
^ Benedicti Regula Monathorum, ed. Wolfflin, 1895. Cp. HalUm*! Lit* of
Europe^ i 4; Harnack*s Afonchtum^ 43^; Norden, p. 6651 note.
' Mabi11on*s Acta Sanctorum OrditUs S. Benedicti^ i 390.
' Plans showing site of library in J. W. Clark's Care of Books ^ pp. 115 f.
* Gregorii Diahgi, ii 17 (with Preface of Mabillon, /.r.).
* ib, ii 15; Mrs Jameson's Monastic Orders, i 7 — 15, and Milman's Lot,
Chrisiianity^ ii 80—96. Cp. Hodgkin*s Italy and her Invaders^ iv 469 — 498.
s. 17
258 THE ROMAN AGE. [CHAP.
that the closing years of the founder's life were brightened with a
vision of the splendid future which awaited his Order. Such at
least was the interpretation which tradition assigned to the story
of his once seeing the darkness of the dawn suddenly dispelled
by a light more dazzling than that of day ^ The fulfilment of his
hopes, so far as it is connected with our immediate subject, will
attract our attention at later points in this work.
The last of the grammarians from whom Cassiodorus compiled
his treatise De Orthographia was Priscian, qui
nostra tempore Constantinopoli doctor fuit (c. xa).
Almost all that \& known of his date is that he composed (about
512) a poetic panegyric on Anastasius, emperor of the East from
491 to 518*; and that a transcript of his great work on grammar
was completed at Constantinople by one of his pupils, the
calligrapher Theodorus, in 526-7'. Three of his minor works,
(i) on numerals, weights, and measures, (2) on the metres of
Terence, and (3) some rhetorical exercises, are almost entirely
derived from Greek originals. They were dedicated to Sym-
machus (possibly the consul of 485), who was known to the
author by his high repute before he met him (probably on some
occasion, otherwise unknown, when Symmachus visited Constan-
tinople). Priscian was a native of Caesarea in Mauretania, and
there is no proof that he ever lived in Rome. His Grammar is
divided into xviii books; i — xvi on Accidence; xvii and xviii
on Syntax. In the dedication he states that he proposes to
translate from the Greek of Apollonius (Dyscolus) and Herodian ;
but that his work would be of small extent compared with the
spatiosa volumina of the former and the pelagus of the latter. He
follows Apollonius very closely, as may be seen from those
portions of his work in which the corresponding books of
Apollonius are almost completely preserved, viz. the parts on the
Pronoun, Adverb, and Conjunction, and on Syntax. Most of
Priscian's Latin learning comes from Flavius Caper ; much is also
' Gregorii Dialogic ii 34; Montalembert, /.r., i 435 f.
> BUhrens, Poet. LaL Min, v 364.
' ...scripsi artem Prisciani eloquentissimi grammatici doctoris mei manu
mea in urbe Roma (W. Komana) Constantinopoli... Oly brio v. c. consule, i.e.
Mavoitio Olybrio, cons. 516-7 (Jahn, Sdchs, Barkhte^ '851, p. 354).
XIII.] PRISCIAN. 259
due to Charisius, Diomedes, Donatus (with Servius on Donatus),
and Probus ; and to an earlier list of grammatical examples from
Cicero. The work is remarkably rich in quotations from Cicero
and Sallust; also from Plautus, Terence, Virgil, Horace, Ovid,
Lucan, Persius, Statius and Juvenal. There are fewer from Cato,
and from Accius, Ennius and Lucretius ; very few from Catullus
and Propertius, Caesar, and the elder Pliny; and none from
Tibullus and Tacitus. The Greek examples are mainly from
Homer, Plato, Isocrates and Demosthenes. His own style is
very prolix, and he seems to have little consciousness of the
importance of the order of words in Latin prose. His fame in
after times was great. His pupil, Eutyches, calls him ' Romanae
lumen facundiae' and ' communis... hominumpraeceptor'. A MS
of Priscian had reached England in the life of Aldhelm (d. 709).
He is quoted by Bede, and is described as ' Latinae eloquentiae
decus* by Alcuin, who mentions his name in the list of the
library at York. He is copied in a grammatical treatise by
Alcuin's pupil, Hrabanus Maurus, and minutely studied by the
latter's pupil, Servatus Lupus (d. 862). His grammar was one of
the great text-books of the Middle Ages and is accordingly still
represented by more than 1000 mss. Early in the Renaissance,
in a poem on the reported death of Petrarch, Priscian appears as
the foremost representative of Grammar (1343)*; and, after the
middle of the fourteenth century, it was either Priscian or Donatus
whose portrait was placed beneath the personification of Grammar
among the Seven Earthly Sciences in the chapter-house (after-'
wards called the Spanish chapel) of Santa Maria Novella at
Florence, while among the representatives of the Seven Heavenly
Sciences, the central figure has sometimes been identified as
Boethius (c. 1355).
It was only two years after Boethius was consul in Rome
(510) that Priscian eulogised an emperor of the East in Con-
stantinople (512). Between these dates is the death of Clovis
(51 1 ), for whom Boethius had some seven or eight years previously
' Antonio Beccaria, Gramntatita era prima in questo pianto \ E con lei
Prisciano (Priscian, I xxxi Hertz). — Best cd. of Priscian, that of Hertz (with
minor works by Keil), 1855—9. Cp. Teuffel, § 481; and Jeep's Retietheilty
89—97.
17 — 2
26o THE ROMAN AGE. [CHAP. XIII.
selected a skilled harper at the request of Theodoric's minister,
Cassiodorus. Two years after the death of Boethius (524) falls
the death of Theodoric (526), and within a year of that event the
copy of Priscian's Grammar, from which all our extant mss are
ultimately descended, was being transcribed in Constantinople.
The close of the Roman age is marked by the death of Boethius ;
and the fact that the great work of Priscian was copied by his
pupil, not in Rome, but in Constantinople, foreshadows the
beginning of the Byzantine age of scholarship. Two years after
the archetype of Priscian had been transcribed, the Schools of
Athens were closed in the early part of the reign of Justinian,
probably at the very time when in the West the monastery of
Monte Cassino was rising above the ruins of the altar of Apollo.
As we pass in fancy from the ruins of Apollo's altar to the
Castle Hill that looks down on the Vivarian monastery and the
bay of Squillace, and think of Cassiodorus spending the last
thirty-three years of his life among his monks, training them to
become careful copyists, and closing the latest work of his long
life by making extracts for their benefit from the pages of Priscian,
we feel that we have left the Roman age behind us, and that we
are already standing within the confines of the Middle Ages.
at:c|acie:prMrr>cinr>
Cll
nooivcu aci rrfernperviM
From the Biblical Commentary of Montr Cassino
written before 569 B.C.
(E. M. Thompson's PaUieography^ p. 102.)
BOOK IV
GREEK SCHOLARSHIP IN THE ROMAN AGE
Vos exemplaria Graeca
Noctuma versaie manu^ versaie diurna,
Horace, Ars Poitica^ 268.
6 Koff i;/ia9 xpovof...airc&tf«cc rj /uicv ap\auiL #cai cwftpovi (niTopiK^
rrjv hucalav rifiifv, rjv koX irporcpov cT;(c, xaXcSs diroXafitTv , , .alria 8*
otfiai KoX apxV ''^ ro<ravTi79 /Acraj3oXi79 ly^cro 1; ir(£yrQ>v fcparovoxi
DiONYSius Halicarnassensis, Z?^ Oraioribus Antiquis^ c. 2 — 3.
iJ/Acis ov ?rpo9 ra SirifiapTrift,iya a^opco/ACK, oXAA irp^ r^ 8o#ccfiiJ-
rara rtav apxaimv.
Phrynichus, Eclogoi Dedicatio.
Conspectus of Greek Literature, ftc, i — 300 A.D.
y^TTum
Hiitoriaiii,
Oraton,
SohoUn,
OtliMrWkiWn
Bmperon
Poeta
Biographers,
Ctoographen
Rhetorldani
Oritioi, *o.
of ProM
A.D.
Theodorus of
Theon
14 Tiberiui
c, a4 d. Strabo
Gadara
Seleucus
37 Caligula
Philippus of
Apion
Ueliodorus
4oPhUoJuda«os
41 Claudiuf
Theualonica
(b.aoB.c.) visits
Rome
^ Pampbilua
Pampbila
$4N«ffO
Ludllius
63 Josephus
37-<. 98
Erocianiu
68Galba
69 0tho
69 Vitelliiu
75 Nicetes of
Smyrna
DioChrysoatom
Epaphroditua
roTitui
81 Domitiao
Plutarch
c. 46— C. 12$
Dioscorides
96Nerva
98 Trajao
c. 40— r. 114
f Anonvmus
ircpt v^ou«
117 Hadriao
Dionysiui
Herenn. Philon
Favorinua
110 Aspasiua
Periegetes
c. 64— c, 141
Alexander
AeL Dionysius
Mesomedea
Phlegon
Aelian,7W/ibw
Aelius llieon
Nicanor
ApoUonius
Dyscolus
138 Ancoobus
Arrian
Pius
Jt. 130-171
143 Herodes
Aiticus 103 —
151 Albinus
Uician
160 Appiao
c. ia5-<. §98
179
Herodian
Alciphron
161 M. Aimliut
Pausanias,
Galen
(161-0 L. Verus)
180 Commodus
Halteutica
161-9 Pdyae-
nua, Foliorct'
Demetrius
AtticUta
Hephaestioii
131 — aoi
175 Aiticus
Numenius
193 Peitinax
tica
176 Aristides
Harpocraiion
180 Fhrynichus
180 Pollux
193 lultanus
193 deptimius
Ptolemaeus
iz^-c. 189
180 Maximus
Tyrius
Sextus Kmpiri-
Babrius
173 PauMnias
cus
Severus
Clemens Alex-
Hermogenes
Alexander
andrinus
■MA
Aphrodisiensis
C. 160— C. 815
ail Caracalla
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Dositheus
Xenophon Bph.
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canus
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335 Apsuies
185-854
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c. 100—350
335 Philosira*
aaa Aelian
c. 170—830
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CM and earlier
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353 Aemilianus
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353 Valerian &
Gallienus
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833 -f. 301-5
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375 Tadiua
373 Menander
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Haliodorus
al4 DIodatiaa
(aw Maximian)
•
CHAPTER XIV.
ROMAN STUDY OF GREEK BETWEEN 164 B.C AND I4 A.a
Our survey of Latin Scholarship in the Roman age began
with some account of Greek influence in Roman Literature
before the eventful visit of Crates of Mallos (168 b.c), and also
touched upon the Greek sources of Roman drama shortly after,
as well as before, that date (p. 167). At the outset of a similar
survey of Greek Scholarship in the same age, we propose to
resume that account by dealing briefly with the Roman study of
Greek between 164 b.c. and the death of Augustus in 14 a.d.
The Roman study of Greek is strikingly exemplified by the
fact that, about 164 ac, Tiberius Sempronius Roman
Gracchus' addressed the Rhodians in a Greek study of oreck
speech that was still extant in the time of Cicero 1648.0. and
{Brutus^ 79). Greek influence was stoutly re- ^^'^'
sisted by the elder Cato (234-149), and it was probably at his
instance that the Greek philosophers and rhetoricians were
expelled from Rome in 161. The philosophers
returned in 155 in the persons of the Academic ^i J**° ****
Carneades, the Peripatetic Critolaus, and the Stoic
Diogenes, who aroused the interest of the young Romans, and
the indignation of the aged Cato, by the sophistry of the argu-
ments with which they defended the seizure of Oropus by Athens
(Plut. Caio, i 22). In his old age Cato warned his son against
Greek physicians and also against Greek literature, adding that
the latter was worthy of inspection but not of study (Plin. N. B,
xxix 14). He is said to have learnt Greek late in life (Cic. De
Sen. 26), and to have derived some advantage, as an orntor^ from
> The father of the Gracchi.
264 THE ROMAN AGE. [CHAP.
the reading of Thucydides and still more from that of Demo-
sthenes; but Plutarch, in recording this tradition, is careful to add
that, even as a writer^ Cato showed the influence of Greek
literature, and that many of his apophthegms were translated
from Greek {Cato i 2). Toward the end of his days, as he
looked forward to the conquest of Carthage by the younger Scipio,
he expressed his sense of the contrast between that leader and the
rest of the Roman generals by quoting a line from Homer : — otos
ircirwrat, rot 8c criciai dicro'ovo'i {ib. 27). Among the Greek friends
of the younger Scipio were the Stoic Panaetius and the future
historian Polybius, who, while Carthage was in flames, saw his
former pupil musing on the fate of Empires, and heard him
murmuring the lines of the Iliad: — lo-o-crai ^/Aop Zrav wor oKiakfj
*I\iOS Iprj Kol IlpiafjLOi koi ,\ao9 ivfifJLtXxia Upidfioio, The fall of
Corinth, in the same year as that of Carthage (146), made Rome
the master of the Hellenic world ; but Greece, though conquered
in arms, continued victorious in the field of letters : Graecia capta
ferum victorem ceperat, is more true than cepit (Horace, Ep. 11 i
156). A native of Carthage, who became a pupil of Carneades
and took the name of Clitomachus, was on intimate terms with
the Roman historian, A. Postumius Albinus, and with the friend
of Scipio and Laelius, the great satirist Lucilius.
Lucilius ^ °
Lucilius himself, while he banters the Roman
Epicurean, Titus Albucius, on his fancy for being saluted in
Greek, is (like the rest of the Scipionic circle) himself familiar
with the masterpieces of Greek literature. Gaius
of*R*in'^** Acilius, who had interpreted to the Senate the
written by specches of the Greek envoys of 155, produced in
Greek"* " 1 42 a Greek history of Rome; and (}reek was the
language of another lost history, written by the son
of the elder Africanus. P. Licinius Crassus Dives Mucianus,
consul in 131, was so familiar with Greek, that as governor of
Asia he delivered his decisions either in ordinary Greek or, if the
case required, in any of the four dialects of that language (Quint.
xi 2, 50). The great work of Varro on the Latin
language, finished before Cicero's death in 43 B.C.,
owed much to the grammatical writings of the Stoics and the
Alexandrian critics, and even derived its definition of grammar
XIV.] ROMAN STUDY OF GREEK. 265
from that of Dionysius Thrax'. From the Greek Cynic, Menippus
of Gadara (r. 250 B.C.), Varro adopted a new type of satirical
composition in which verse was blended with prose, and the
700 portraits of famous men collected in his Imagines were
equally divided between Romans and Greeks.
Cicero began his study of Greek philosophy under the Epicu-
rean Phaedrus, but was soon attracted more strongly cicero
to the Stoic Diodotus (who ended his days as an in-
mate of Cicero's house) and to the Academic Philo, the pupil of
Clitomachus. In resuming and completing his education in Greece
(79-77 B.C.), he studied at Athens the Stoicised Academic philo-
sophy of Antiochus of Ascalon; and rhetoric, partly at Athens, but
mainly at Rhodes, where he formed a close friendship with the Stoic
Poseidonius. So deeply imbued was he with Greek learning that,
on his return to Rome, he was even reproached as ' a Greek and
a pedant ' (Plut Cic. 5). His vague and distant interest in Greek
art is indicated in the Fourth Verrine (69 B.C.); his closer interest
in Greek literature, in the Pro Archia (62 B.C.); and his familiarity
with the Paradoxes of the Stoics, in the work of that name, and in
the pro Murena, About 60 B.C. we find him enthusiastically
studying Dicaearchus {ad Att, ii 2) and Theophrastus (ii 7, 4 ; i
16, 3), and writing historical memoirs in the manner of Theo-
pompus (ii 6, 2). Poseidonius has apparently suggested the
opening {xissage in the earliest of his rhetorical treatises, the De
Inventiont*^ while other portions are borrowed from Hermagoras.
A far higher degree of originality is shown in his maturer works,
the De Oratore (55 B.C.) and the Brutus (46), but the former of
these gives proof of his familiarity with Greek philosophy, while
the Orator (46), in which he attacks the narrow Atticists of the
day, is inspired in part by Plato, • Isocrates, Demosthenes, Aris-
totle and Theophrastus*. The De Optimo Genere Oraiorum is a
' Varro, frag. 91, grammatica est scientia eorum quae a poetis historicis
oratoribusque dicuntur ex parte maiore ; p. 8 supra, Varro supplies us with
the earliest example of the use of lyricus in Latin, if Wilmanns, De Varronis
JJbris Grammaticii^ p. 187, is right in assigning to Varro the passage in Senr.
de accentibus^ 17, ' Dionysius... Aristarchi discipulus, cognomento Thrax, domo
Alexandrinus, qui Rhodi docuit, lyricorum poetarum longe studiosissimus...'
' Philippson in Neue Jeihrb. 15.^, p. 417.
' Cp. the present writer's ed., pp. Ixvii — Ixxi.
266 THE ROMAN AGE. [CHAP.
short preface to Cicero's lost translation of the speeches of
Aeschines and Demosthenes 'On the Crown'. He also translated
the Oeconomicus of Xenophon, and the Protagoras and Timaeus
of Plato, part of this last being still extant. His Topica^ written
on board ship without books (in July, 44), is not really a transla-
tion of the corresponding work of Aristotle. In connexion with
his philosophical dialogues, he was specially studying Aristotle in
54 B.C.* The titles of his earliest philosophic writings, the De
Republica (54) and the De Legibus (52), are suggested to him by
Plato, and the Dream of Scipio^ related in the last book of the
former, is the counterpart of the Vision of Er at the close of the
Republic. In 51 b.c. he revisited Athens (staying with Aristus,
the brother of Antiochus), and succeeded in preventing the
destruction of the house of Epicurus by the patron of the great
Epicurean poet Lucretius. At Mitylene he met the Peripatetic
Cratippus ; and, on his return from Cilicia, he once more stayed
with Aristus at Athens (49). During the Civil War we find him
appropriately studying Demetrius Magnes, On Concord, In the
fourth and fifth books of the De Finibus^ and in the Acaiiemica
(45), his main authority is Antiochus. In the Tusculan Disputa-
tions (44) he follows either Philo or Poseidonius, Panaetius and
Antiochus. A letter to Atticus (xiii 32, 2) implies that, in con-
nexion with this work, he studied certain treatises of Dicaearchus.
In the first book of the De Natura Deorum (44), he probably
follows the Epicurean Zeno; certainly Poseidonius (i § 123) and
possibly Philodemus; in the second, Poseidonius (amongst
others); and in the third, certainly Clitomachus. The last two
are among the sources of the De Divinatione (44), while §§87—89
of the second book are, according to Cicero himself, taken from
Panaetius. In the De Seneciute (44) he is perhaps inspired by
the Peripatetic Aristo of Ceos; in the De Amicitia (44) his main
authority is Theophrastus. The first two books of the De Officiis
(44) are confessedly founded on Panaetius, with additions from
Poseidonius, and possibly from Athenodorus Calvus, who certainly
supplied Cicero with the general scheme of the third book (ad
Att, xvi II, 4 and 14, 4). Even in his lost Consolatio in memory
^ ad Quint, iii 5 and 6.
XIV.] ROMAN STUDY OF GREEK. 26/
of Tullia, he closely followed Grantor ircpl ircv^ovc, while his lost
Hortensius was modelled on the Protrepticus of Aristotle and of
Poseidonius\ Writing to Atticus (xii 52, 3) in 45 B.C., the year
in which he composed the De Finibus and the Acadetnicay he
frankly disclaims originality, calling the works on which he was
then engaged merely 'copies': — Aircfypa^ sunt: minore latere
fiunt ; verba tantum afferOy guibus abundo. Early in life he had
translated into Latin verse the astronomical poem of Aratus, and
in 60 B.C. had lavished all the resources of Greek rhetoric on a
memoir of his consulship, which excited the admiration and the
despair of Poseidonius, who had been requested to write on the
same subject (ad Ait, i 19, 10 ; ii i, i). In his Letters^ especially
in those addressed to a Greek scholar like Atticus, he readily
resorts to Greek. However inadequate and inaccurate may have
been his transcripts from Greek philosophical texts, he deserves
the credit of having enlarged the vocabulary of Latin and of the
modem languages derived therefrom, by his admirably adequate
renderings of Greek philosophical terms*. cTSo^, irocon;^ and
iro<ror>79 have attained 'a much longer life and a far more
extended application* in Cicero's species, qualitas and quantitas,
and their modem derivatives. His renderings of the later Greek
writers like Epicurus, Chrysippus and Philodemus are in point of
style better than the originals. In his opinion as to the com-
parative merits of Greek and Latin he is not always consistent.
At one time *he gives to Greek the preference over I^tin [7\isc,
ii 35], at another to Latin over Greek [De Fin, i 10] ; in reading
Sophocles or Plato he would acknowledge their unrivalled ex-
cellence ; in translating Panaetius or Philodemus he would feel
his own immeasurable superiority".
^ For further details on the Greek authorities followed by Cicero in his
philosophical works, cp. Hirzel's Uniersuchungen^ 1877 — 83 ; Thiaucourt*s
Essai^ 1885; Schanz, ^ 158 — 179; and the current editions of the sereral
works, esp. Dr Reid*s Academica, pp. 1 — 9, and Prof. J. B. Mayor's Dt Nat.
Deorum^ i p. xlii f.
' Cp. Bernhardt, D€ Cicerone Graecae philcsophiae interpreter Berlin, 1865;
and Clavel, De Cicerone Graecorum interprtte^ Paris, 1868 (in part a reproduc-
tion of H. Estienne*s Ciceronianum Lexicon Graeco-latinum^ I5.S7)*
■ Munro's Lucretius^ Introd. p. 306 — 7*. '
268 THE ROMAK age. [CHAP.
Cicero's early translation of Aratus is repeatedly imitated by
an incomparably greater poet, Lucretius (97-
53 B.C.). In massive and majestic verse that poet
unfolds in fairly lucid form his exposition of the physical system
of Epicurus, the writer of * a harsh jargon that does not deserve
to be called a style''. The Roman poet has carefully studied
Democritus, Anaxagoras and Heraclitus. Incidentally he borrows
from Empedocles, and perhaps from Poseidonius (v) ; also from
Thucydides, whom he repeatedly misrepresents, and once abandons
for Hippocrates (vi 1180-95). He translates Homer (ii 24, 324;
iii 21, 1000, 1025; V 905 f.; vi 971); and imitates Hesiod (v
1289), ^"^ Euripides (i loi; ii 991 — 1006; v 805). In one
passage only he gives a close rendering of Antipater of Sidon (iv
181 f), an epigrammatist of the second half of the second century,
whose versification is in strict accord with the best Alexandrian
models. In this isolated and tacit rendering of a minor Alex-
andrian poet, and in his openly avowed admiration for Ennius (i
117), Lucretius stands in strong contrast with the poets of the
new school, the poetae novi (Cic Orator^ 161) or
Buphorion^^ vc<i)T€f)oi (ad AtL vii 2, i), the cantores Euphorionis^
who regarded the grand old poet with contempt
(Tusc, iii 45). Discarding the drama and the ampler forms of
epic poetry, this new school aimed at reproducing the legendary
lore and the artificial versification of the 'Alexandrian' poets with
their minor epics, and their amatory, satirical or mythological
elegies and epigrams. Its leaders were Valerius Cato and Calvus
(82-47), Ai^d i^s greatest poet was Catullus (84-54),
whose Alexandrian affinities are especially marked
in his Coma Berenices^ a close translation of Callimachus, in his
Peleus and Thetis^ and in the elegiacs addressed to M'. Allius,
with their many examples of the art of mythological digression.
His study of earlier Greek models is shown in his rendering of an
ode of Sappho, and in his adoption of her most characteristic
metre. Among his companions in Bithynia (57-
6 B.C.) was C. Helvius Cinna, who there obtained
a copy of Aratus* ; it was apparently Parthenius of Nicaea whom
^ Munro, u, x., p. 306.
• Isidore, vi la (Merry's Ftagmtntt of R^man Poetry , p. 454).
XIV.] ROMAN STUDY OF GREEK. 269
he imitated in two elaborate poems which were so obscure as to
need a scholiast. Varro Atacinus (bom in 82 b.c.),
who began his career with an epic on Caesar's Auclnut
conquest of the Sequani, and with satires lightly
esteemed by Horace (Sat i 10, 46), at the age of 35 threw
himself with great enthusiasm into the study of Greek literature,
producing a geographical poem apparently in imitation of Alex-
ander of Ephesus, Prognostics after the model of Aratus, and
a Latin version of the Argonautics of Apollonius Rhodius. His
skill as a translator is proved by his rendering of the following
lines (iii 749): —
^X^'f ^^y^ ^ lUkaiwoiihriP Ixcv 0p0viyr.
' Desierant latrare canes urbesque silebant ;
Omnia noctis erant placida composta quiete*.
These two lines are preserved by the elder Seneca (p. 313 K),
who records the fact that Ovid wanted to strike out the last
three words; he also refers to the still finer treatment of the
same theme in Virgil (Am, viii 26 f).
Turning from the poets to the historians of the last few
decades of the Republic, we note that Caesar
(100-44), like Cicero, studied Rhetoric at Rhodes; Nepo«.
and that, in his account of the early state of Gaul,
he is probably following the Rhodian Poseidonius. Cornelius
Nepos may have modelled on Apollodorus the great chronological
work mentioned in the dedication of the poems of Catullus
(52 B.C.); he also wrote lives of 'grammarians', which have un-
happily perished. Sallust (86 — 35-4), in the lengthy introductions
to his 'Catiline' and ' Jugurtha', and in the Speeches and almost
all the Letters interspersed in those works, is an imitator of
Thucydides, whom he further resembles in the brevity and con-
ciseness of his style.
Among the poets of the Augustan age Virgil (70 — 19 b.c.)
was early directed by Asinius Pollio to the study
of Theocritus, whom he imitates in at least 17
passages of his Eclogues^. The lines in Eclogue viii 37 — 41,
^ For details see Kennedy's notes, Conington's IntroductioH^ Sellar't
Virgil c. IV i, or Schanz, § 934.
2/0 THE ROMAN AGE. [CHAP.
regarded by Voltaire as the most beautiful passage in Virgil, and
by Macaulay as 'the finest lines in the Latin language', are simply
translated, and in one particular mistranslated, from Theocritus
(xi 25 f; ii 82)', whose meaning is also missed when vdrra
S* cvaXXa ycFOiro is rendered omnia vel medium fiant mare
(Eel. viii 58). In general, however, his imitations and adapta-
tions are admirably true to his original. In the Georges he
borrows from Homer and Hesiod, and from 'Alexandrian ' poets
such as Aratus, Apollonius Rhodius, Callimachus, Theocritus,
Bion, Nicander', and Parthenius'. The passage on the zones
(i 233) came from the Hermes of Eratosthenes^; but there is
no warrant for the statement of Servius (on i 43) that Virgil
borrowed largely from the closing passage on agriculture in the
Oeconomicus of Xenophon. The first half of the Aeneid is mainly
founded on the Odyssey^ and the second on the Iliad. The
account of the Fall of Troy is partly inspired by the cyclic poet,
Pisander'; the passion of Dido by that of Medea in Apollonius
Rhodius*; the description of Camilla possibly by that of Pen-
thesilea in the lost Aethiopis of Arctinus. Homer and Apollonius
are the source of not a few of the similes ; the happy comparison
suggested by the play of light reflected on the ceiling from a
brazen bowl of' water being derived from the latter of these
poets (Aen. viii 22, and Ap. R. iii 755). Lastly, there are
some fine reminiscences of the great tragic poets of Greece
(e.g. iv 469— 473)'-
Horace (65-8 b.c.) imitates Archilochus in his early Epodes
{Epist, i 19, 23), and not Archilochus alone but
also Alcaeus and Sappho in the metres of his
maturer Odes^ which (in Book iv 2) supply proof of the poet*s
familiarity with works of Pindar that have since perished. In
his Ars Poetica he is said to have included the most notable
* Sellar*s Virgil^ p. 150.
* Quint. X I, 56.
* Gellius, ix 9, 3 ; Macrobius, v a, 4 ; Morsch, Dc Graecis in CeorgUis
a Vergilio expressis (1878), p. 39; and Conington's Introduction^ and on G, i
437-
* Probus on Virg. Gtorg. p. 4a K.
' Macrobius, v a, 4. ' ib. v 17, 4.
' Cp. Nettleship, i lai— 5, and Schanz, | 933 — 4.
XIV.] ROMAN STUDY OF GREEK. 2/1
of the precepts of the Alexandrian critic, Neoptolemus of Parium
(supray p. 178), and he there insists on the constant study of the
great Greek models of style (268-9). Poets of the Alexandrian
age were studied by Virgil's contemporary, Cor-
nelius Callus (70 — 27 B.C.), who probably imitated
Parthenius in his Lycoris^ and certainly produced translations
and imitations of Euphorion*. The learned Alexandrian type
of Elegy was abandoned by Tibullus (d. 19 B.C.), while it was
closely followed by Propertius (d. 15 B.C.), who
openly avows his veneration for Philetas and
Callimachus (iv i, i ; v 6, 3). The Ama of the latter is the
precursor not only of the last book of Propertius, but also of
the Fasti of Ovid (43 B.C. — 18 a.d.), which, in its
, . • , Ovid
antiquarian details and in all points connected
with the Calendar, follows the Fasti of Verrius Flaccus, which
we possess in an abridged form in the Fasti Praenestini^, The
poet was prevented by his banishment in 8 a.d. from finishing
the Fasti, The same disaster led to his flinging his Metamorphoses
into the fire; and the text was only recovered by means of
copies already made by the poet's friends. A Greek poem on
the same subject had been composed by Parthenius under the
same title, and by Nicander under that of ^rcpocovftcvo. In one
of his stories of transformation he gives two divergent accounts
in different parts of his poem. The legend of the halcyon existed
in two forms, one preferred by Nicander, another by Theodorus':
Ovid follows the former in xi 270, the latter in vii 401. He
imitates Homer, the Greek tragedians and Euphorion. He must
have known the Greek Argument to the Medea of Euripides, as
he makes the same mistake that is there made of connecting
the revival of the nurses of Bacchus with the revival of Aeson
(vii 294)*. It may here be suggested that he probably had his
attention drawn to this Argument while preparing his own early
play on Medea. It need hardly be added that his Metamorphoses
and his Heroides display a wide familiarity with the legendary
* Probus on Virg. Eel, x 50, and Servius on Eel, vi 7a and x i.
* Winther, De fastis VtrHi Flaeei ab Ovidio adhibUis (1885).
' Probus on Virg. Georg, p. 44 K.
^ Robert, Bildund Lied^ p. 33i> 5.
272 THE ROMAN AGE. [CHAP. XIV.
lore of Greece. One of his obscurer works, the I&is^ is an
imitation of the vituperative poem of that name in 'which Calli-
machus attacked Apollonius Rhodius (Ibis^ 5^ 0*
The first Universal History written in Latin, a work completed
by Pompeius Trogus in 9 a.d., was probably founded
Trogui***"* ^^ ^^^ o^ ^^^ Alexandrian Timagenes. It has
only survived in the abridgement (probably of the
third century) drawn up by Justin, from which it may be inferred
that the original authorities were Dinon, Ephorus, Theopompus,
Timaeus, Phylarchus, Polybius and possibly Poseidonius^ The
way in which Livy (59 B.C. — 17 a.d.), the foremost
historian of the Augustan age, deals with his
authorities, may be best studied in his fourth and fifth decades.
While he there follows the Roman annalists, CI. Quadrigarius
and Valerius Antias, in his narrative of exclusively Roman events,
his authority for the relations between Rome and the Hellenic
States is Polybius. He does not however copy his Greek original
too closely, but apparently aims at giving his version a Roman
tone and a rhetorical colouring*. In the narrative of the opera-
tions closing with the battle of Cynoscephalae (xxx 5 — 10) we
can minutely compare the copy with the original (xviii 18 — 27);
and can feel (with Munro) 'how satisfying to the ear are the
periods of Livy when he is putting into I^tin the heavy and
uncouth clauses of Polybius'*.
» Schanz, §§ 338—330.
' Nissen's Untersuchungat^ 1863; Schanz, § 335.
' Lucretius, IntrodL p. 306'.
CHAPTER XV.
GREEK LITERARY CRITICISM IN THE FIRST CENTURY
OF THE EMPIRE.
In the Augustan age Rome was in a preeminent degree a
centre of attraction to the leading representatives of Greek
literature. It was visited by Strabo about 20 b.c., forty years
before the completion of his great work on Geography with its
frequent citations from the older Greek literature, beginning with
Homer, and from Alexandrian geographers and astronomers, such
as Eratosthenes and Hipparchus. Ten years earlier is the ap-
proximate date of the publication of the History of Diodorus,
partly founded on researches in the libraries of Rome. It is also
the date of the arrival in Rome of Dionysius of
Halicamassus, who lived in Rome for at least HSiciJraiiMiii'
22 years, from 30 to 8 b.c. He had learnt Latin,
and had become familiar with Latin literature, before producing
in the latter year his extant work on Early Roman History. We
are here, however, concerned with his rhetorical writings alone.
It was in the time of Dionysius that the struggle between
Atticism and Asianism, which had continued from the days of
Demosthenes to those of Cicero, was to all appearance decided
in favour of the former: and Dionysius ascribes the victory of
Atticism to the commanding influence of the mistress of the
world, and to the critical as well as practical instincts of her
statesmen \ The writings of Dionysius contributed much towards
the revival and the maintenance of a true standard of Attic prose.
The exact date of their production is unknown ; but the author's
* Dt OraUtrihm Antiquis^ « — 3.
s. 18
274 THE ROMAN AGE. [CHAP.
own references to certain of his works as already published
occasionally supply data for an approximate chronological order,
which will here be followed in a brief notice of each : —
(i) Tht First Letter to Ammaeus. The aim of this short treatise is to
refute the opinion of an unknown Peripatetic, that Demosthenes owed his
success as an orator to the precepts laid down in the Rhetoric of Aristotle.
Dionysius shows that twelve important speeches of Demosthenes were delivered
before the end of the Olynthian war (348 B.C.) mentioned in the Third Book of
the Rhetoric \ and twelve others between the Olynthian war and 339 B.C., i.e.
before the completion of the Rhetoric^ which he would! even assign to a later
date than the De Corona (330 B.C.). In connexion with the Olynthian war he
quotes several important passages from Philochorus. He also supplies us with
a partial chronology of the life of Aristotle, and of the speeches of Demosthenes;
but he includes among the latter the Speech on Halontuius^ the Fourth Philippict
and the Speech in repty to the Letter of Philip \ and his order of the Olynthiacs
(II, III, I) is open to very grave dispute. He justly observes that Greek
rhetoric is indebted not to the Peripatetic school alone, but also to orators such
as Antiphon, Isocrates, Isaeus, Demosthenes, Aeschines, Lycurgus and Hyper-
eides; to Thrasymachus and Theodorus; to Alcidamas (the pupil of Gorgias);
to Theodectes and other disciples of Isocrates ; and to Anaximenes, the
contemporary of Philip and Alexander'. This is the only extant work of
Dionysius which deals solely with a question of literary history as contrasted
wiih literary criticism,
(a) The treatise On the Arrangetnent of Words {^tpX ffvtfBioaat d^o/idnaif,
De Compositione Verltarum)^ dedicated to the writer's pupil, Kufus Melitius, is
a more extensive and a maturer work. It begins by distinguishing between
thoughts and words, between *the sphere of subject-matter' (0 •wparnAXkrKeht
r6Tot) and *the sphere of expression' (6 Xff«crur6t r6Tot). This last includes
choict of words, and arrangement of words, but the latter alone is here treated.
Then follows a brief review of the history of the * parts of speech '. Nouns,
verbs and connecting-particles (o'l^df^/ioc) were recognised by * Theodectes and
Aristotle'. The article {(kpOpop) was added by the Stoics. Later writers
successively separated the adjective (rb wfittanfyopmbv) and the pronoun (orrw-
wida) from the noun; the adverb (Mp^iio) from the verb; the preposition
(wpbOtOLt) from the connecting-particle; the participle {j^^roxh) from the
adjective, smd so on. The proper combination of these parts of speech makes
a kQ\o¥^ and the proper combination of «wXa makes a 'period' (c. a). The
art of arrangement in verse and prose is next illustrated (c. 3) from Homer {Od.
xvi I — 16) and Herodotus (i 8 — 10), and shorter passages in both are re-
written to show the superiority of their original form. Among those who had
neglected the art, were Polybius, Ilegesias and Chrysippus (c. 4). At a later
point, the due arrangement of words and clauses and figures of thought are
discussed (c. 6 — 9). Beauty (or 'nobility') of style (rd xoXdr) is exemplified by
' Ad Ammaeum, i t (W. Ktiyt Roberts, p. 41).
XV.] DIONYSIUS OF HALICARNASSUS. 27$
Thucydides and Antiphon ; charm of style {ii ^9oiHj) by Ctesias and Xenophon ;
and both by Herodotus (c. 10), for whom his countryman, the Halicamassian
critic, has an unbounded admiration. These results are mainly attained by
means of melody, rhythm, variety, and propriety {rb wphrow). In connexion
with melody we have an examination of a few lines of the OresUs (c. 11). But,
in the use of all these means, much must depend on tact (iccu^t), and no manual
of tact had been hitherto mapped out by any rhetorician or philosopher (c. n)^.
Euphony (as an element of 'melody') is next illustrated by the sounds of the
letters of the alphabet, here divided into vowels {^uvtferraf ^w^al) and con-
sonants (^^6^) ; and the latter into semivowels (V'^o»ra) and mutes (d^o»ra).
Long vowels are more euphonious than short vowels. The descending order
of euphony is for the vowels, a, 1;, w, v, c, 0, e ; and for the semivowels, X
and p, next m and r, and lastly t, which is denounced as a disagreeable letter.
The nine mutes are next classified firstly as }pi\d {(eftues) «, v, r ; Baaia {aspiraiae)
X* ^, ^; and ixiaa (mediae) 7, /9, d; and secondly as gutturals («, x» 7)1 labials
(ir, 0, p) and dentals (r, ^, 6) ; and in the former classification the aspirates are
regarded as superior to the mtdiae^ and the mediat to the tentus (c. 14). The
•
effect produced by apt combination of letters and syllables is happily illustrated
(c. 15) by Homer's ^6rct poU»fftv (//. xvii 965) and X'P^^ ^Xa^^c^^ {Od, ix
416). Further, the sense of the word must be suggested by the scund, as in
Homer's descriptions of the scream of the eagle, the rush of arrows, and the
breaking of waves on the shore. In this connexion it is noticed that aptitude
for imitation, and for invention of names, is a natural instinct; and Plato is
mentioned as having been the first to discuss etymology, in the Cratylus and
elsewhere. * That diction * (he continues) ' must necessarily be beautiful in
which there are beautiful words; and beautiful words are caused by beautiful
syllables and letters''. Then follow further illustrations from Homer, the *poet
of the many voices' (6 woKv^vbrrarot i,wdwTWf rOv vocip-iDr), whether he is
describing the grace of Penelope, the growth of the palm-tree, the beauty
of Chloris, the ugliness of Gorgo, the meeting of the mountain-torrents, the
conflict between Achilles and the Scamander, or ^he fate of the comrades of
Odysseus in the den of Polyphemus. Beauty of language had been defined by
Theophrastus as depending on the beauty of individual words ; but much may
be attained by skilful combinations of sound. In the Catalogue of the ships
(//. ii 494 — 501) even the uncouth names of Boeotian towns had been invested
with beauty by the skill of Homer (c. 16). The various metrical feet are next
enumerated and distinguished (c 17); and metrical effects illustrated from
masters of style, such as Homer, Thucydides, Plato and Demosthenes, as con-
trasted with the Asiatic orator, Hegesias (c. 18). In the sequel, the charm of
variety is exemplified by the metres of Stesichorus and Pindar, and by the
periods of Herodotus, Plato and Demosthenes (c 19); apt propriety by Homer's
effective description of the stone of Sbyphus, where the sound is an echo to the
sense {Od, xi 593 — 8). The three ipfiopUu, or modes of composition, are next
distinguished as (1) the 'austere' {admipiL kpi»jwla or vivBwit)^ represented by
^ Rhys Roberts, p. 46 n. * Cp. Saintsbury, i 130.
18—2
276 THE ROMAN AGE. [CHAP.
Antimachus and Empedocles in epic poetry, Pindar in lyric, Aeschylus in
tragic; Thucydides in history, and Antiphon in oratory (c. ai); (2) the 'smooth
or florid* {yXa^vpd, di^Biipd), by Hesiod, Sappho, Anacreon, Simonides, Euripides,
Ephorus, Theopompus and Isocrates (c. 93); and (8) the 'intermediate' {Koafi),
by Homer, Stesichorus, Alcaeus, Sophocles, Herodotus, Democritus, Plato,
Aristotle and Demosthenes (c. 24). In connexion with the question how far a
composition in prose may resemble a beautiful poem, the brief rule in Aristotle's
Hhetoric (iii 8, 5), that prose must have rhythm without metre, is expanded
into the precept that prose should be metrical, rhythmical and melodious
without actually becoming metre, rhythm or poem. This precept is illustrated
by passages from Demosthenes ; and, in reply to the objection that it is
incredible that so great an orator could have spent such pains on these minor
matters, the critic urges that there is no cause for wonder, if one who surpassed
all his predecessors in oratorical fiime, should, in fashioning works for all future
ages, and in submitting himself to the inexorable test of Envy and of Time,
use no thought or word at random, but should pay no small regard to the order
of his thoughts, and the grace of his language. If Isocrates spent at least ten
years on his Panegyric, and the first eight words of Plato's Ripttblir were found
on the author's tablet arranged in several different ways, we cannot wonder if
Demosthenes also took pains to attain euphony and harmony, and to avoid
employing a single word, or a single thought, which he had not carefully
weighed ^ The work concludes with the inquiry how far poetry can resemble
fine prose. This is less possible in heroic and iambic than in lyric verse, where
the measures are more free, as is shown in Simonides' famous Ode on Danai,
which (like Pindar's dithyramb in c. aa, and Sappho's 0<U to Aphrodite in c. 93)
is here fortunately transcribed and thus transmitted to posterity.
(3) On the Ancient Orators (irepi rOif dpx^w> /np-dfiu^ {two/unitiaTifffJMl).
This treatise was originally in two parts, comprising (1) three earlier oraton,
Lysias, Isocrates, Isaeus, (2) three later orators, Demosthenes, Hypereides,
Aeschines, the first three being distinguished as having invented eloquence, and
the second three as having brought it to perfection. (1) alone is extant ; the
account of Demosthenes in (2) may possibly survive in an expanded form in the
special treatise on that orator (No. 4). Here the critic aims at establishing a
standard for Greek prose, not in oratory alone, but in every variety of compo-
sition. Hence he treats the orators less as individual writers than as types.
In the Essays on Lysias, Isocrates and Isaeus, he gives a life of each followed
by a critique on his style, and a series of illustrative extracts from his works.
The style of Lysias is praised for purity of diction, moderation in the use of
metaphor, clearness, conciseness, terseness, vividness, truth to character,
perfect appropriateness, winning jwrsuasiveness and inimitable charm (c. 13);
Isocrates is commended for his patriotic spirit, as well as for a smoothness and
amplitude of style, which is marred however by a certain tameness and pro-
lixity; Isaeus, who is less natural and more obtrusively clever than Lysias, is
^ This celebrated passage, and its context, is translated in Jebb's Attic
Orators, i Ixxvi f.
XV.] DIONYSIUS OF HALICARNASSUS. 277
extolled as the source of the oratorical power of Demosthenes. The three
orators are contrasted in several happy phrases : e.g. ' Isocrates strives to attain
the charm which, with Lysias, is a gift of nature ' (Isocr. 3). Lysias is so
natural that 'even if he states what ]» falser you believe him'; Isaeus so clever
that 'even if he is telling the iruth^ you suspect him* (Is. 3). Lysias 'does not
arouse his audience, as Isocrates or Demosthenes' (Lys. 98). — Dionysius deals
with Demosthenes and Deinarchus in later works (Nos. 4 and 6), but on a
different scale and with a different aim.
(4) On the Eloquence 0/ Demosthenes, The original title and the beginning
are lost; the current titles, ircpt t% Xcxrcir^t AtifiovBipovt dctr^rifTOt and De
admiranda rn dicendi in Dettiosthene^ come from Sylbutg*s ed., 1586. At the
end the author promises a treatise vcpt r^t «'/>a7/iartir^t ol^o^ 8€iv6niTot,
which is not extant. The present work, even in its mutilated form, is justly
regarded as a masterpiece of criticism^. Demosthenes b here described as
having formed his style on a happy combination of all that was best in the
three typical varieties of diction, (1) the elevated and elaborate (X^|ct, 6fiyXi(,
irepcm^, tf^XXa7/Uvi|), represented by Thucydides; (9) the smooth and plain
(Xcr^ Koi d^X^), by Lysias: (3) the mixed and composite {jukt^ kqI o^9m%),
by Isocrates (c. i — 3, 33, 34, 36). The distinction between these three types
is probably due to Theophrastus (c. 3). In the latter part of the treatise the
three modes of composition (as contrasted with the three varieties 0/ diction above
mentioned) are (as in De Comp,ii — 34) carefully discriminated, (i) the austere^
represented by Aeschylus, Pindar and Thucydides ; (i) the smooth^ by Hesiod,
Sappho, Anacreon and Isocrates ; and (3) the mixed^ by Homer, Herodotus,
Plato and Demosthenes (c. 36 — 43)'. Demosthenes, in all his multiform
variety, is compared to the fabled Proteus (c. 8). His speeches are remarkable
for their effect on the emotions, which may still be felt even by the reader.
' When I am reading any of the speeches of Isocrates, I become sober and
calm..., but, when I take up one of those of Demosthenes, I am roused to
enthusiasm, and driven hither and thither..., and I share in all the emotions
that sway the mind of man* (c. ii).
(5) The Letter to Gnaeus Pompeius (possibly a Greek freedman of Pompey)
is in reply to a correspondent who is dissatisfied with the writer's criticisms on
Plato. Dionysius protests that he has really fallen under the spell of Plato's
marvellous powers of expression, and adds that, although he happens to prefer
Demosthenes to Plato and Isocrates, he does no wrong to either of the latter
(c. i). He quotes from his Ancient Orators a passage on Plato describing him
as combining the elevated style with the plain^ and as being less successful in
the former, whereas the plain style in Plato is 'mellowed by the tinge of
antiquity ', it 'remains radiant in beauty*, and u 'like a balmy breete blowing
from meadows of surpassing fragrance '. He cites examples of both of these
styles from the Phaedrus^ adding that, whereas, in Plato, 'elevation of style
sometimes lapses into emptiness and dreariness *, this is never, or hardly ever,
the case in Demosthenes (c. 9). He has also been asked for his views on
' Blass, Gr, Bereds,^ p. 180. * Cp. supra^ p. 375 f.
278 THE ROMAN AGE. [CHAP.
Herodotus and Xenopbon. In reply he quotes, from the Second Book of bis
lost treatise On ImitUian (wMpi lut*^**^), a long passage on these historians, and
also on Thucydides, Philistus and Theopompus. This is almost all that sur-
vives of the treatise in question. The First Book (Dionysius tells us) was on
the general nature of Imitation (not as a principle underlying all the fine arts,
but as a process of copying existing models of style) ; the Second, on the authors
who ought to be imitated ; the Third (not then finished), on the proper mode
of imitation. Fragments of an epitome of the Second Book are extant under
the title of rwr 6,fXoJUaif xplffu, De Veterum CepssuraK It is these fragments that
enable us to compare the criticisms of Dionysius with those of Quintilian
(X i).
(6) On Deinarchus. Dionysius here deals with the life and style of
Deinarchus, but his main object is to draw up a critical list of that orator's
speeches. He distinguishes 60 as genuine and more than ay as spurious.
Some of them are rejected on grounds of either style or chronology, as in the
case where he triumphantly shows that, at the date of the delivery of a certain
speech, its supposed author, Deinarchus, * had not yet attained the age of ten '
(c. 13)'
(7) On Thucydides^ addressed to Q. Aelius Tubero, probably the jurist
and historian of that name. This is a critique (a) on the historian's treatment
of his subject-matter, and (b) on his style. Under (a) Dionysius discusses the
historian's choice of his theme, and his mode of handling it, objecting to his
annalistic method (c 9), his unsatisfactory statement of the causes of the war
(10), and his abrupt conclusion (11). He ought (says Dionysius) to have
begun with the tnu cause, the growth of the Athenian power ; and the most
eflective ending (as he sajrs elsewhere) would have been the return of the
exiles from Phyle and the restoration of the constitution (ad P^mp, 3).
Dionysius also finds fault with the insignificance of the occasion selected for the
delivery of the famous Funeral Oration (18), and with the want of proportion
in various parts of the work (13 — 15). Under {b) he quotes the account of the
last battle in the great harbour of Syracuse (vii 69 — 7a) and the reflexions on
the factions of Greece (iii 81 — 9) for praise and blame res|>ectivcly (c. 36 —33).
In the second passage he is specially severe on the sentence, ^v S* ol voXXoi
KOKoDpyoi Srrtt df^ioi «^«Xiprat ^ i^uiBth dyoBol, xal rif ftiv o^crx^orrai, iwl M
r^ dTdXXorrot (iii 83, 7) and his remarks (c. 3a) compel one to conclude that
he could not construe the passage. He also finds fault with the Melian
Dialogue (37 — 41), but in the next chapter (49) adds a list of those of the
speeches that he deems worthy of imitation. On the whole, however, he has
an unfavourable, opinion of the speeches, while he regards the narrative portions
of the history as (with few exceptions) admirable. Here and elsewhere (c. 95
and ad Pomp, c. 3, de Deinarckc c. 33) Dionysius clearly contemplates the
case of his contemporaries actually trying to write like Thucydides. The case
was not imaginary, as we may infer from earlier evidence in Cicero's Orator
(30» 3>)* It is in this connexion that Dionysius insists in conclusion that
^ Usener, Dion. HaL de Imiiatiane (supra, p. 194, n. 4).
XV.] DIONYSIUS OF HALICARNASSUS. 279
Thacydides had been imitated by no ancient writer except Demosthenes, who
bad assimilated his merits, while he had avoided his faults (c. 53).
(8) The Secofui Letter to Ammaeus deals more minutely with the style of
Thacydides. It begins with a summary of the characteristics of that style,
quoted from De Thucydide^ c. 94. It exemplifies each of those characteristics
in turn, viz. his use of obscure, archaic and poetic words (c. 3), of periphrasis
and brachylogy (4), of noun for verb (5) and verb for noun (6), of active for
passive (7) and passive for active (8), of singular for plural and plural for
singular (9 and 13) ; of persons for things and things for persons (14) ; also his
confusion of genders (10), his peculiar uses of cases (1 r) and tenses (19), his use
of parenthesis (15), his involved expressions (16), and his affected figures of
speech (17). In the criticism of historians in general Dionysius is unsatisfactory ;
like other ancient writers, he regards history as a branch of rhetoric, and he
is far less conscious of the intellectual greatness than of the stylistic obscurity
of Thucydides. He tells us that 'there are very few who can understand
everything in Thucydides, and there are some things which even they cannot
understand without a commentary* (51). Even apart from the textual evidence
supplied by his extensive quotations from the historian, such a statement
incidentally confirms the belief that in the dajrs of Dion3r8ius the historian's
text was not very different from that which we now possess. If all the clauses
recently rejected as 'ascripts*, on \he ground of their interfering with perfect
lucidity of expression, had been really absent from the text of that time, we
should not have found in Dionysius so many complaints as to the difficulty of
Thucydides.
Thus far for the genuine works of Dionysius. The Art o/Rhet&rie^ ascribed
to Dionysius, is unworthy of his name, and is (in part at least) demonstrably
later than his time. It falls into three sections : (1) on the various types of
epideictic speeches (c. i — 7), in which mention is made of an orator Nicostratus,
who lived under Marcus Aurelius (d. 180 A.D.) ; (2) on oratorical figures of
thought (irepi r&w irx,'nitJ0Lrtffiihu9 X^cm^), treated in c. 8 and more fully in c. 9,
p)ossibly a very early work of Dionysius and including in both chapters one of
his favourite quotations, odic iyAt h /MB0oti (8) on the faults to be avoided in
oratorical exercises (c. 10), and on the criticism of speeches (c. 11). These
two chapters have many points of similarity, and probably a common author-
ship. The author's promise of a treatise On Imitation at the end of c 10
must have led to the whole work being assigned to Dionysius, though it is
unlike him either in matter or manner^
In the undoubtedly genuine works of Dionysius we may regret
a certain want of appreciation of the real merits of Thucydides
and of Plato ; but we must recognise the fact that, in the minute
and technical criticism of the art and craft of Greek literature,
these works stand alone in all the centuries that elapsed between
^ Cp. Christ, § 464', p. 642 note.
28o THE ROMAN AGE. [CHAP.
the Rhetoric of Aristotle and the treatise On the Sublime. Their
author is called by an anonymous writer the ' canon of rhetorical
criticism '\ and is described by Doxopater (cent, xi) as 'the great
Dionysius, the excellent exponent and indeed the father of our
art". Among modem writers, he is recognised by Gr&fenhan
(iii 344) as, ' in point of learning and insight, one of the best
critics of his time'. M. Egger (p. 395) less generously observes
that ' apart from industry in the accumulation of materials and a
certain acumen in grammatical analysis, he is destitute of all that
marks a true critic*. Mr Saintsbury, necessarily placing him
below Aristotle in authority, method and traditional importance,
and below 'Longinus' in critical inspiration (p. 127), accepts him
'as a critic who saw far, and for the most part truly, into the
proper province of literary criticism — that is to say, the reasonable
enjoyment of literary work and the reasonable distribution of that
work into good, not so good, and bad' (p. 137). Lastly, Professor
Rhys Roberts, in an admirable edition of the 'Three Literary
Letters', has noticed that 'his critical writings form a golden
treasury of extracts from the best writers of Greece'; that he
repeatedly 'reminds us of the often-forgotten truth that the
excellence of the ancient authors was the result of ingenious and
elaborate art'. 'A studied simplicity is the ideal he upholds'.
'His own style of writing... is at least eminently lucid and un-
affected '. 'He was at once a scholar and a critic ', and ' he
furnishes us with one of the earliest and best examples of the
systematic exercise of the art of literary criticism '. He dwells,
'at perhaps disproportionate length, on matters of style and purely
verbal criticism; but for the modem world' this has 'not been
altogether a disadvantage; he has helped where help was most
needed' (pp. 46—9). In that modern world he has inspired
Boileau (1674) and Pope (17 11)' with some of their precepts on
the art of poetry, and (in 1834) Tennyson was quoting from the
extant epitome of a lost work of Dionysius when he said in a
letter to Spedding : ' I have written several things since I saw you,
some emulative of the i/Sv koX Ppaxy koI ftcyaXoirpcTrcs of Alcaeus,
» Spcngel, A*i*//. Gr, i 460. • Walt, liAet. Gr. vi ry.
' Cp. Essay on Criticism, 175 — 8 {De Comp. c. 13), and 665, * See Dionysius
Homer's thoughts refine, And call new beauties forth from ev*ry line '.
XV.] CAECILIUS OF CALACTE. 28 1
Others of the ^icXoy^ rwv oyofMrnnr iceu rij% auvOiirtia^ aKpip^ta of
Simonides'^
With the name of Dionysius of Halicamassus we naturally
associate that of his friend Caecilius of Calacte on
the northern coast of Sicily. Dionysius describes caimcte *****
his friend as agreeing with him in the view that it
was 'the enthymemes of Thucydides' which 'had been specially
imitated and emulated by Demosthenes' (ad Pomp. 3); and the
two critics are often linked together by Quintilian (iii i, ix 3) and
the unknown writer of the Lives of the Ten Orators. Caecilius
was the author of a work on the characteristics of the Ten
Orators', but the only important fragment of this work which has
reached us is a criticism on Antiphon, noticing that he seldom, if
ever, uses the 'figures of thought". The title is, however, of
interest as the earliest trace of that canon of the Ten, which is
recognised by Quintilian, but not by Dionysius, and which cannot
with any certainty be ascribed to Didymus. As Caecilius was a
pupil of the Pergamene scholar Apollodorus, it has been proposed
to trace this canon to* the school of Pergamon*, but it is quite as
likely to have had an Alexandrian origin (p. 129). In either case
it is important to notice that the very form of the title shows that
the canon was already recognised and was not invented by
Caecilius. His rhetorical writings included a comparison between
Demosthenes and Aeschines, and between Demosthenes and
Cicero ; also a lexicon, an art of rhetoric and a work on figures
of speech*. His lost treatise ircpl v^ovs (*on elevation of style')
is described by the author of the extant treatise bearing the same
title, as falling short of the dignity of the subject, as giving
* Memoir^ i 140. — On the rhetorical works of Dionysius, cp. Biass, Dt
Dion. Hal, Scriptis Rhetoricis^ 1863, Gr, Bereds, (1865) c. vi; Christ, § 464';
Croisct, V 356 — 370; also Egger, 396 — 406; Saintsbury, 117 — 137; and csp.
W. Rhys Roberts* ed. of the 'Three Literary Letters,* ad Atnmaeum i, ii and
ad Pompeium (Cambridge Univ. Press), 1901, and the literature there quoted.
Max. Egger*s Denys d* ffalicamnsset pp. 306, has appeared since (1909).
* irtfA xapaffT^pot ru^r UKa ^ffrSptatf, * Photius, p. 485^ 15.
« Brzoska (1883), refuted by R. Weise, Quaesti^a Catciiianae (1888).
' On Caecilius, cp. Blass, Gr. Ber. 191 — 931; Christ, § 465'; Croiset ▼
374 — 8; also Rhys Roberts in Am, Joum, Phil, xviii 301 — n, and in hit ed.
of 'Longinus* On the SubUmi (Camb. Unir. Press), 1899, pp. 7, 990~«.
282 THE ROMAN AGE. [CHAP.
innumerable examples to illustrate the nature of ' the sublime ',
but stating nothing as to the means whereby it may be attained.
It is also criticised for omitting ' passion ' as one of the sources of
' the sublime ' (c 8), and for preferring Lysias to Plato (c. 32 § 8).
The extant treatise irtpl v^ovs was regarded as the work of
'Dionysius Longinus' by all editors from 1554
vfoT M^* to 1808, when Amati pointed out that in a Vatican
MS it was ascribed to 'Dionysius or Longinus'.
The same alternative is offered in the index to two Paris mss;
but, in the superscription of this treatise in both, the two names
are set side by side, with a considerable space between them.
I^Astly, a Florence ms of the treatise bears the inscription
dKctfvv/uiov irept v^ov9. In this last description we must for the
present acquiesce, as there are very grave difficulties in ascribing
the treatise either to Dionysius of Halicamassus or to Cassius
Longinus (d. 273), or to any other known author, such as
Plutarch or Theon of Alexandria. The latest writers quoted in
the treatise itself are Amphicrates (Jl. 90 B.C.), Cicero, Caecilius
and Theodorus {fl, 30 ac), and it may* very well be assigned
to the first century of our era\ In any case it is convenient to
notice it here in close connexion with Dionysius and his friend
Caecilius, whose own work on the same subject appears to have
prompted its publication. Its general aim is to point out the
essential elements of an impressive style, which, avoiding all
tumidity, puerility, affectation and bad taste, finds its inspiration
in grandeur of thought and intensity of feeling, and its expression
in nobility of diction and in skilfully ordered composition. It
deals not merely with Hhe Sublime'; it is a survey of literary
criticism in general, with special reference to the elements which
invest style with a certain elevation or distinction. (In the
following abstract the few lacunae in the text are indicated by
asterisks.)
After noticing the defects of the treatise of Caecilius on the same subject
(supra, p. 181), the author defines 'the Sublime' as consisting in *a certain
distinction and excellence of language ' (c. i ) ; and, in answer to the inquiry
whether there is such a thing as * an or/ of the Sublime/ he replies that a lofty
type of style may be the gift of Nature, but it is controlled by Art (c. !)•»««
^ See esp. the Introduction to the ed. by W. Rhys Roberts, pp. 1 — 17.
XV.] THE TREATISE ON THE SUBLIME. 283
The faults of style which are inconsistent with the Sublime, are (t) tumidity,
(1) puerilityi (3) misplaced emotion, and (4) bad taste (r6 ^vxp6r). lliese
faults are described : tumidity is exemplified from Aeschylus, and bad taste
from Timaeus (c. 3 — 4). They are all caused by the fashionable craze for
novelty of expression (c. 5).
To avoid these fiults we must acquire a clear knowledge of the true
Sublime. This is difficult owing to the fact that a just judgement on styU is the
Jinai fruit of much experience (^ rCanf Xhytaif Kpiffit ToKKijit ion Ttlpat rcXevraror
iiriy4ptniifia). The true Sublime is that which pleases all and always (c. 6 — 7).
It has five sources: (i) grandeur of conception, (3) intensity of emotion,
(3) Appropriate employment of figures of thought and speech, (4) nobility of
verbal expression, and (5) dignity and elevation of composition (c 8).
The first of these holds the foremost place, and can only be attained by (ao
far as possible) 'nourishing a soul sublime' (rdf ^vx^* ivarpi^w Tp6f rd
luyiOii), ^ Sublimity^ (as I have said elsewhere) is the echo of greatness of soul
(0^ot iuya\o^pov^i(t dn^i}/M). This is illustrated from Homer, in contrast
with Hesiod ; also from 'the legislator of the Jews*..., who wrote in the begin-
ning of his Laws, ' God said. Let there be light, and there was light ; let there
be land, and there was land.* As compared with the ///a/, the Odyssey^ which
was clearly the author's later work, shows a decline in several respects, in its
love of the marvellous and in its subordination of aciion to narrative and to
delineation of character. The Homer of the Odyssey \% like the sinking sun, which
is still a glorious orb, but is less intense in its brightness ; it is also like the
ebbing-tide of greatness, drawing us into a region of shallows strewn with m3rth
and legend. 'If I am here speaking of old age, it is still the old age of
Horner^ (c. 9).
Grandeur of conception is also shown in choosing the most striking points,
and in grouping them into a consistent whole. This is best exemplified in
Sappho's Ode {to Anactoria)^ where the most varied sensations are combined in
one perfect picture (c. 10).
It is also shown by Amplification (c. 11) as is seen in Demosthenes, as
compared with Plato and with Cicero. Plato has less of * the glow of a fiery
spirit' than Demosthenes. Demosthenes again is like a sudden tempest, or a
thunderbolt, while Cicero resembles a widespread conflagration, fed by a vast
and inexhaustible store of flame (c. 1 1) ^
It is further attained by imitating great writers of prose or poetry, even as
Homer was imitated by Archilochus, Stesichorus, Herodotus and Plato. In
composing anything that calls for loftiness of thought or language, it is well
to ask ourselves how the same thought would have been expressed by Homer
or Thucydides or Plato or Demosthenes; or how our own sajrings would be
1 Cp. Tacitus, Dial, 36, 'magna eloquentia, sicut flamma, materia alitur et
motibus excilatur et urendo clarescit', and Pitt's famous rendering: 'It is with
eloquence as with a flame; it requires fuel to feed it, motion to excite it, and
it brightens as it bums' (Samuel Rogers' Recollections^ and Stanhope's Life of
Pitt, iii 413).
284 THE ROMAN AGE. [CHAP.
likely to strike Homer or Demottheoes in the past, or each succeeding age in
the future (c. 14).
It is also produced by vivid imagery which stirs the emotions, as in Euri-
pides, who spends the utmost pains on giving a tragic effect to the emotions
of love and madness, besides invading all the other regions of the imagination.
Images of a fine type are found in Aeschylus and Sophocles, and in Demo-
sthenes and Hypereides (c. 15).
'Intensity of emotion' is here left untouched, as it is reserved for another
treatise. The true Sublime also finds expression in Figures of speech, such as
Adjuraiion^ which is well illustrated by the famous oath in Demosthenes, by
those who fell at Marathon, Salamis, Artemisium and Plataea (De Cor, 308),
where the orator, conscious of the defeat at Chaeroneia, does not allow the
passion of the moment to betray him into calling any of the earlier engage-
ments victories, but forestalls all possible rejoinder by promptly adding: — *a//
of whom had the honour of a public funeral, and not the victorious only'
(c. 16). 'Hie use of a Figure is most effective, when the fact that it is a Figure
is unot)served, as in the oath by the men of Marathon, where the 'Figure' is
concealed by the splendour of the context (c. 17). Figures include rhetorical
quesiion, exemplified in the orator's questions about Philip in the First Philippic
(H 10, 44); also asyndeton^ illustrated from Homer's Odyssey (x 351-3), the
Meidias of Demosthenes (§ 71) and the HeUettica of Xenophon (iv 3, 19, iioBoihrro
ifidxooTo dwiicTtiPOP dT40p'fiOKw)t as contrasted with the accumulation of con-
necting particles, characteristic of the school of Isocrates (r. 19—31); also
hyperbatOH (or inversion of order). It is by the use of this last Figure in the best
writers that imitation approaches the effects of nature ; for Art is then perfect,
when it seems to be Nature, and Nature again is most effective when she is
pervaded by the unseen presence of Art. Many illustrations of this Figure may
be found in Herodotus, Tliucydides and Demosthenes (c. 32). Figures in
which several cases are combined, as well as accumulations, variations and
gradations of expression, are very effective, as also interchanges of cases, tenses,
persons, numbers and genders. The interchange of singular and plural, and
the use of the present for the past, are next illustrated ; and it is added that a
vivid effect is produced by addressing the reader, and also by suddenly changing
from the third person to the first (c. 37). The last Figure mentioned is/wn-
phrasis, which must be handled with great discrimination (c. 38 — 39).
The fourth source of the Sublime is a careful choice of striking words used
in their normal sense (c. 30), on the effect of which it is needless to dilate, y^
btautiftd words are in very truth the poculiar iij^ht of thought (0*^ 7^ r^ ion
tdiop ToO roO rd iraXd 4r6/iara). ^ ^ ^ As to the number of Metaphors which may
properly be used in a single passage, the true standard is Demosthenes (e.g.
De Cor. 396). Excessive boldness of metaphor may be subdued by the apologetic
devices suggested by Aristotle and Theophrastus. An accumulation of meta-
phors may be allowed in passionate passages. It may also be exemplified from
Plato's Timaeus (65 c— 85 E) and elsewhere, though Plato is often criticised for
this, and Lysias is preferred by Caedlius (c. 33).
XV.] THE TREATISE ON THE SUBLIME. 285
Here follows an interesting digression (c 33 — 36) on the question whether
we should prefer grandeur of style with some attendant faults to a perfectly
faultless mediocrity, and a greater number of merits to merits that are higher
in kind. The critic decides that Homer is to be preferred to the comparatively
faultless Theocritus and Apollontus Rhodius; Archilochus to Eratosthenes;
Pindar to Bacchylides ; Sophocles to Ion (c. 33) ; Demosthenes to H3rpereides
(c. 34)*; Plato to Lysias (c. 35).
Closely related to Metaphors are Comparisons and Similes (c. 37), but the
discussion of these is lost. « « « Then follow illustrations of Hyperbole from
Herodotus and Isocrates (c. 38).
Dignity or elevation of composition consists in the careful arrangement of
words, as in the sentence of Demosthenes (De Cor, 188) closing with C^ittp
w4^; and in the proper collocation of phrases, as in Euripides, whose poetic
quality is due to his power of composition rather than his invention.
Among faults destructive of the Sublime are excess of rhythm, broken and
jerky clauses (c. 41), undue conciseness and undue prolixity (c. 42), and lastly
triviality of expression (c. 43).
A philosopher has inquired, why the present age does not produce great
authors, and whether this is due to a despotic government. The author suggests
that it is due rather to human passions, such as the love of money, and the
love of pleasure ; and asks how we can imagine, in such an age, the survival of
an unbiassed critic of great works that are destined to descend to posterity.
He concludes by promising a separate treatise on the Passions in connexion
with discourse in general and the Sublime in particular (c. 44).
Strange to say, this remarkable work is never mentioned by
any extant classical writer. In modem times, beginning with
1554, it has been frequently edited and still more frequently
translated, notably by Boileau (1674), whose preface prompted
the tribute paid to the supposed author of the treatise in the
closing couplet of the following passage in Pope's Essay on
Criticism : —
'Thee, bold Longinusl all the Nine inspire*
And bless their critic with a poet*s (ire.
An ardent judge, who zealous in his trust,
With warmth gives sentence, yet is always just:
Whose own example strengthens all his laws;
And is himself that great sublime he draws'.
Fenelon preferred it to Aristotle's Rhetoric^ commending it for
the way in which it kindles the imagination while it forms the
^ In c. 34, I the text runs : tl d* dpiO/t/f fi^ rf dXiy^fc Kplvoiro rd jrarop^t^
ftara. I may here suggest tl d* dpa ijAi rt} /uy40ti dXXd r^ rX^^ei. In 33, i
we have rXe(ovf contrasted with ful^vt ; and in 35, i fuy40€i with T\ff$tt,
286 THE ROMAN AGE. [CHAP. XV.
tasted Gibbon, who used Boileau's translation and notes, found
the Greek, 'from the figurative style and bold metaphors, ex-
tremely difficult' (i 2 Sept 1 762). Macaulay inadequately describes
its author as 'rather a fancier than a critic". In recent dmes
it has been characterised by Egger (p. 426) as 'the most origirud
Greek essay in its kind since the Rhetoric and Poetic of Aristotle'.
Of its unknown author it has been well said by Mr Andrew
Lang: — 'he traces dignity and fire of style to dignity and fire
of soul';... 'he proclaims the essential merits of conviction and
of selection'; 'he sets before us the noblest examples of the
past'; ' he admonishes and he inspires". The work was eulogised
by Casaubon* and Ruhnken* as a 'golden book'; and similarly
Mr Saintsbury, while describing 'almost all the book' as deserving
'to be written in letters of gold', would write 'in precious
stones' the author's 'admirable descant' on 'beautiful words':
for beautiful words are in deed and in fact the very light of the
spirit (p. 167). The latest English editor* aptly closes his
Introduction by characterising the author as one whose 'deep
humanity and broad sympathies have helped him to interpret
the spirit of antiquity to the modern mind, and have given him
a permanent place in the history of literature as the last great
critic of ancient Greece and (in some sense) the first international
critic of a wider world".
^ Premier Dialogue sur t^loqumce^ quoted by Egger, p. 437.
• Works ^ vii 661.
* Introduction to Mr H. L. Havell's translation (1890), p. xxx f.
^ Quoted in Boileau's Prtface,
* Dissert, p. 34 (Opusc, p. 515).
• W. Rhys Roberts, p. 37.
' On the treatise in general, cp. Christ, § 551'; Croiset, v 378 — 383; Egger,
415 — 439; Saintsbury, i 153 — 174; also the editions of Weiske (1809), Egger
(1837), Jahn (1867), Vahlen (1887*), and esp. Rhys Roberts (1899), with the
literature there quoted.
CHAPTER XVI.
VERBAL SCHOLARSHIP IN THE FIRST CENTURY
OF THE EMPIRE.
Turning from literary criticism to lexicography, we have to
record, among early lexicographers and compilers
of collectanea, the royal name of Juba II, king
of Mauretania (ft, 25 B.C.). The son of Juba I, who (like Cato)
put an end to his life after his defeat at Thapsus (46 ac.), he
was taken to Rome, where he received a careful education. As
a reward for fighting on the side of Octavian against Antony and
Cleopatra, he was permitted to marry the daughter of the latter,
and was restored to his kingdom (29 b.c.). Four years later
he was allowed to extend his dominion from Numidia on the
East, to the Pillars of Hercules on the West, placing his capital
at lol, to which he gave the name of Caesarea (the modem
Cherchet), After a tranquil reign he died under Tiberius about
20 A.D. He is praised for his historical research by Plutarch,
who calls him the most accomplished of kings \ while his varied
learning is similarly lauded by Pliny' and Athenaeus*. He wrote
on the history of Rome, and on Assyria, Arabia, and Libya,
besides a work in at least eight books on the Art of Painting,
with biographies of eminent artists, and another in at least seven-
teen on the History of the Theatre. The latter dealt with the
instruments of music used in the Drama, with choral songs and
dances, and the distribution of the several parts among the actors.
' Sertor, 9, 6 wdpnop I^ropcjrwrarof pofftkituff and Anton. 87 h xo^^rarot
^ N. If. V It studionim daiitate memorabilior quam regno.
' 83 B, dp^p vo\v/ia$4ffTaTot,
288 THE ROMAN AGE. [CUAP.
It is quoted by Athenaeus (175 d) and Photius (161), and large
parts of it have probably passed without the author's name into
our scholia on the dramatists and especially into the Onomasticon
of Pollux \ A manual on metre ascribed to Juba was really
founded on the work of a later writer, Heliodorus*.
Pamphilus of Alexandria (fl, 50 a.d.) was the compiler of
a vast work in 95 books on rare or difficult words
(irepi yAcixro-biv i/roi Acccoiy), which was superseded by
abridgements and ultimately lost. An abridgement of Pamphilus
was regarded by C. F. Ranke, M. Schmidt, Ritschl and Naber
as the source of the lexicon of Hesychius, and this abridgement
was identified by Ranke and Schmidt with the IlepicpyoircnTrcc
(the 'poor students' lexicon') of Diogenianus, mentioned by
Hesychius himself in his preface. But it has since been con-
tended by Weber that the work of Diogenianus was an abridgement
not of Pamphilus alone but of a large number of other lexicons'.
The original work of Pamphilus was known to Athenaeus, who
quotes it under various titles and often by the author's name
alone.
Among the contemporaries of Pamphilus was his namesake
Pamphila, who lived for 23 years at Epidaurus
collecting materials for a miscellaneous work in
33 books on facts and anecdotes connected with the history of
literature. It is often quoted by Aulus Gellius\ Homer, Euri-
pides and Menander were studied in her home, but it is uncertain
whether the works on those authors, noticed by Sui'das and others,
were written by her father Soteridas or her husband Socratidas.
A far less quiet life was led by the 'grammarian' Apion,
an Alexandrian Greek of Egyptian origin, who
succeeded Theon (xt//m, p. 142) as head of the
» Rohde, De PoHucis fontibus (1870) ; Bapp, Leip%, Siitd, viii 1 10 f.— Christi
§ 553'; Croisct, V 40«.
* Schanz, Lai. Lit. § 606.
» Hugo Weber, Phihi. Suppl. iii (1878), 454 f; cp. Bursian*s /a>ir«^. xvii
H5 (1881). Cp. Christ, §§ 556*, 631*.
* e.g. XV 17 and 13. Cp. Croiset, v 407. It is Pamphila who has pre-
served the tradition that, at the beginning of the Peloponnesian war, the age
of Hellanicus was 65, of Herodotus 53, and of Thucydides 40 (he was more
probably 14).
xvl] juba. pamphilus. apion. 289
Alexandrian school, and taught at Rome in the times of Tiberius
and Claudius. His unwearied industry caused him to be re-
garded as one of the sons of toil under the nickname of Mox^c,
while his unbounded vanity and his noisy self-assertion prompted
Tiberius to call him 'the cymbal of the world', and Pliny^ to
improve on this phrase by describing him as ' the drum of his
own fame ', or (as we should say) * the blower of his own trumpet*.
With the aid of the writings of Aristarchus, he compiled a
Homeric glossary which is frequently quoted by Hesychius and
Eustathius*. He pretended that he had summoned from the
grave the shade of Homer, with a view to inquiring as to the
names of the poet's parents, and the place of his birth ; but he
refused to impart to others the information which he had re-
ceived'. His historic work on Egypt supplied Gellius with the
story of Androclus and the Lion (supra^ p. 200). It also included
certain charges against the Jews of Alexandria, which were
brought to the notice of Caligula, and answered by Josephus
(37 — €, 100 A.D.) in a work still extant. The cause of the Jews
also found an able advocate under Caligula and Claudius in
the person of the aged Philo Judaeus (from 20 B.C. till after
40 A.D.), who thus emerged for a while from a life of study mainly
spent on Plato and on the allegorical interpretation of the Book
of Genesis and the exposition of the Law of Moses.
Among the minor grammarians of this (and the immediately
preceding) age, may be mentioned Ptolemy of
Ascalon, who appears to have taught in Rome in jtHlmnariani
the time of Caesar, and was the author of works
on the correct pronunciation of Greek, on Homeric accentuation
and on the Aristarchic recension of Homer; Apollonius, son
of Archibius, who produced under Augustus a Homeric lexicon,
an abridgement of which is still in existence ; Seleucus of Alex-
andria, a commentator on Homer, who was invited to the table
of Tiberius with a view to discussing points which had arisen
in the emperor's daily reading, and who, to prepare himself for
such discussions, took the imprudent precaution of asking the
» N. H, Pref. 15.
' Griifenhan, iii 58, 116, 154; Christ, \ 557^; Croiset, ▼ 405.
' Josephus, contra Apiotum^ ii s.
s. 19
290 THE ROMAN AGE. [CHAP. XVI.
attendants what the emperor had been reading, with the result
that he was first disgraced and then compelled to put himself
to death ^; Philoxenus of Alexandria, who similarly devoted his
attention to Homer, and to accentuation, and is often quoted
in the scholia-, Erotianus, who composed under Nero a leicicon
to Hippocrates, which is still extant; and Epaphroditus of
Chaeroneia (probably the patron of Josephus), who (according
to Sui'das) lived at Rome under Nero, Vespasian, Titus and
Domitian, and applied the resources of his large library of 30,000
books to the exposition of Homer, Hesiod, Pindar, Cratinus and
Callimachus*. It may here be added that the only extant Greek
work of L. Annaeus Comutus, the friend and preceptor of Persius,
is a survey of the popular mythology as expounded in the ety-
mological and symbolical interpretations of the Stoics*. His
Latin works on 'figures of thought', on 'pronunciation and
orthography', and his 'commentaries on Virgil', have not sur-
vived; while the commentaries on Persius and Juvenal, which
bear his name, belong to the Middle Ages\
» Suet. Tib, 56.
* Grafenhan, iii 65 f; Croiset, v 353 f.
* Comuti Tkeologiai Graecae compendium^ ed. C. Lang, 1881.
* Croiseti v 418.
CHAPTER XVII.
THE LITERARY REVIVAL AT THE END OF THE FIRST
CENTURY A.D.
In the revival of Greek literature towards the close of the
first century, our attention is claimed by two authors of special
interest, who supply us with incidental evidence on the state of
learning in their time.
The first of these is Dion Chrysostom {c, 40 — c, 114A.0.),
who was bom at Prusa in Bithynia, and was exiled
from Bithynia and from Italy during the fifteen chrwttom
years of the reign of Domitian (81—96). In all
the three periods of his life, before and during and after his
exile, he was a great traveller; and, in the many places which
he visited, he gave ample proof of the eloquence which gained
him the name of Chrysostom. We still possess, in different
degrees of completeness, some eighty of his discourses, which,
however, resemble essays rather than orations. In one of these
(11) he professes to prove to the citizens of New Ilium 'that
Troy was not captured '. For his proof he relies on an Egyptian
priest whom he does not name, and on inscriptions which had
disappeared ; also on points of improbability, or impropriety, in
the Homeric narrative. The composition as a whole is conceived
in a vein of irony, and is simply a rhetorical exercise which is not
intended to be taken seriously ^ Far more interesting than the
prolixities of his argument in the above discourse is the incidental
fact that in his day the inhabitants of New Ilium learnt the I/iad
by heart from their earliest years. In another (52) we have an
instructive comparison between the Philactetes of Sophocles
^ Von Arniin*s Dio von Prusa^ p. 166 f.
19—2
292 THE ROMAN AGE. [CHAP.
(409 B.c) and the plays of Aeschylus and Euripides (431 ac)
on the same subject. The preliminaries to the perusal of the
three plays are not without their interest. The writer tells us
that he rose about the first hour of the day in the cool and
almost autumnal air of a midsummer morning; he made his
toilette and said his prayers, took a quiet drive followed by a
walk and a short rest; after this, when he had bathed and anointed
himself, he had a slight breakfast, and then set to work on the
plays. He states that he was in delicate health at the time, and
it has been suggested that he was recruiting at the country-house
of a friend and wrote his essay for the entertainment of a house-
party of persons interested in classical literature*.
He describes his delight in com|)aring the diflerent ways in which the three
great tragic poets had dealt with the same theme. The work of Aeschylus was
marked by his customary grandeur, his antique simplicity, his audacity of thought
and expression'; that of Euripides by precision, acumen, and rhetorical skill';
while that of Sophocles was in the happy mean between the two, with its noble
and elevated composition*, at once tragic and harmonious, charming and sublime.
Incidentally we learn that, in the play of Euripides, Odysseus foreshadowed the
approach of envoys from Troy ; that, in Aeschylus and Euripides alike, the
person of Odysseus was artfully disguised by Athena, and the chorus was-
composed of natives of Lemnos and not (as in Sophocles) uf the Greek com-^
panions of Odysseus. The choruses of Sophocles were full of charm and dignity,
and did not contain so many moral sentiments as those of Euripides. But Dion
would prefer to abolish the chorus altogether*.
In a third piece (59) we have a short summary of the opening
of the Philoctetes of Euripides ; in another (55), an essay on the
indebtedness of Socrates to Homer. In his Rhodian oration
(31), in which he rebukes the Rhodians for dishonouring their
benefactors by placing new names on the pedestals of their
statues, he is clearly imitating the Leptines of Demosthenes. All
the above belong to the literary group of his discourses. The
political group (on the affairs of Bithynia) does not here concern
us; while the moral discourses of the third period of his life,
^ Von Arnim, p. 161.
and r6 aC^adct Ktd aw\ov¥,
' r6 oKpifiit Kol ipifib Kol woXiTijroV.
^ 9tiiM^ Tipa Kol /uydKoTptw^ toIi^ip,
* Cp. Jebb*s PAi/ocUtet, pp. xv — xxi.
XVII.] DION CHRYSOSTOM. 293
which are mainly inspired by the teaching of the Stoics, include
grave denunciations of the vices and follies of the inhabitants
of the Phrygian town of Celaenae, and of Tarsus and Alexandria.
But, fortunately, they also include an idyllic picture of the happy
and contented life of the poor herdsmen and huntsmen of
Euboea, which is almost unique in ancient literature (7)^; and
a discourse on the blessings of an intelligent monarchy, purporting
to have been addressed to the semi-civilised inhabitants of Olbia,
near the mouth of the Borysthenes, most of whom knew Homer
by heart, while some of them had even studied Plato (36). Above
all, they include the Olympic oration (12), in which Pheidias is
described as expounding to the Greeks assembled at Olympia
the principles which had guided him in the composition of his
colossal image of the Olympian 2^us. The discourse appears
to have been prompted by the tradition that Pheidias had derived
his inspiration from the three famous lines in which the nod of
Zeus is described in Homer (//. i 528 — 530). There is a striking
passage pointing out some of the contrasts between poetry and
sculpture.
The art of the poets (says Pheidias) is free and unfettered. Homer in
particular has not confined himself to a single dialect, but he has blended the
Doric and even the Attic with the Ionic, combining all these varieties with as
much care as the colours in dyeing, and not even limiting himself to the dialects
of his own day but going back to the past and giving fresh currency to some
archaic word, like an antique coin recovered from a long-lost hoard ; not dis-
daining even the language of barbarians, or neglecting any word endued with
sweetness or strength. Homer*s metaphors and his modifications of ordinary
words are also eulogised. He has proved himself a creative poet in his diction,
in his metre, and in his varied imitations of all manner of sounds, whether
of rivers and forests, of wind and fire and sea, of stone or bronze, of beasts or
birds, of flutes or shepherds* pipes. Hence he is never at a loss for words
expressing every shade of thought, and, by the fertility of hb fancy, he can
inspire the mind with any emotion he pleases. But we, poor artists {wg%
Pheidias), are far from enjoying any such freedom. We must use a material
that is solid and durable, a material hard to find and hard to work ; and to
1 Abridged translation in MahafTy's GrtA World under Roman Sway, pp.
176— '290. Incidentally we learn from this discourse that, at Thebes, all but
the Cadmea was now in ruins, while a votive Hermes, dedicated of old for some
victory in flute-playing, had been set up anew amid the ruins of the ancient
agora.
294 THE ROMAN AGE. [CHAP.
each image of a god we can only impart a single form which has to expren all
the fulness of the nature and power of the Deity. Poets, on the other hand,
can easily comprise in their verse many varied forms of beauty ; they can at will
represent these forms either at rest or in motion ; they can represent acts and
words, and the effect of illusion, and the lapse of time. With the poet* a
single inspiration, a single impulse of the soul, suffices to cause an infinite
number of words to flow forth from their source, before the image and the
thought, which he has seized, escape him. Our art, on the contrary, is painful
and difficult ; it spends its effort on hard and obdurate stone, and its progress
must needs be slow. But the greatest obstacle is that the artist must keep the
same image in his mind, it may be for years, until he has completed his work.
It is said, perhaps truly, that the eyes are more trustworthy than the ears; but
they are more difficult to convince and they insist on clearer and more vivid
evidence. The eyes remain fixed on the objects which they are contemplating,
while the ears may easily be excited and led astray, when they are thrilled with
words endued with all the witchery of metres and sounds, (i 234-6 Dindorf.)
This passage has sometimes been regarded as the germ of
Lessing's Laocoon\ but it is very doubtful whether it was even
known to Lessing, who, as his readers will remember, takes as
the starting-point of his famous Essay the criticism of the dictum
ascribed by Plutarch* to Simonides, to the effect that Painting
is silent Poetry, and Poetry is Painting endued with language.
The Olympic discourse also contains some interesting remarks
on Plato and on myths. As a philosopher, Dion clearly took
for his model the Socrates whom he knew in the pages of
Plato and Xenophon. In the introduction to that discourse
he ironically assumes a Socratic ignorance as a means towards
stimulating reflexion in others. Addressing the Alexandrians in
Or. 32, he describes himself (like Socrates in Plato's Apology)
as sent to them to forget himself and solely to attend to their
moral good (i pp. 404, 407 Dind.). As a writer, Dion is
characterised by a certain smooth and fluent charm combined
with complete absence of emphasis'. His turns of phrase not
unfrequently remind us of Plato or Demosthenes, both of whom
were among his favourite authors. When he went into exile
(as we are assured by Philostratus') the only two books which
he took with him were the Phaedo of Plato, and the speech of
Demosthenes, De Falsa Legations In drawing up a course of
' De Gloria Ath^ 3. * Croiset, v 483.
» VU.Soph,\i,
XVII.] PLUTARCH. 295
Study for a distinguished friend, who had asked his advice, he
names Menander and Euripides and (above all) Homer, among
the poets (leaving melic, elegiac, iambic and dithyrambic poets
to men of leisure) ; among prose authors, Herodotus and Thucy-
dides and, in the second rank of historians, Theopompus rather
than Ephorus; and among orators, Hypereides, Aeschines and
Lycurgus, as easier to understand and to imitate than the great
masters, Demosthenes and Lysias. Beside the ancient Attic
orators, notwithstanding the opinion of the rigid Atticists of the
day {rtav irdvv dicpi/SJi^), even recent rhetoricians might be studied
with advantage. Lastly, among the 'Socratics', he specially
recommends Xenophon, adding that Xenophon's harangues in
the Anabasis sometimes moved him to tears (Or, 18)*.
From Dion Chrysostom we turn to one of the most versatile
and prolific of his literary contemporaries. Plutarch,
who was born at Chaeroneia between 45 and 50 a.d.,
was already familiar with the poetry of Greece, when, after attain-
ing the age of 19, he left his Boeotian home to spend several
years in Athens. He there studied rhetoric, mathematics and,
above all, philosophy, especially that of Plato, under the guidance
of Ammonius. He afterwards visited Egypt, and (under Ves-
pasian) spent a considerable time in Rome, where his lectures
on philosophy were attended by leading Romans, such as Arulenus
Rusticus. He also explored various parts of Italy, including the
battle-field of Bedriacum in the North*. After his travels he
returned to his home and there passed the remainder of his long
life, only leaving it occasionally for Athens or Delphi, or for the
warm baths of Thermopylae or of Aedepsus in Euboea. He
died, probably under Hadrian, about 125 a.d.
As a strong adherent of the Platonic philosophy, he discusses
' On Dion in general, cp. von Arnim*s critical ed. (1893-6), and his Leien
und Werke (Us Dio von Prusa (1898); also E. Weber 10 Uipi. Sttui, (1887);
Christ, § fio'; Croisct, v 466—483 ; Egger, 440—455 ; and Saintsbury, i 109 —
' OMc, 14. His guide on this occasion was an archaeologist of consular
rank, Mestrius Flonis, — the same who, at the table of Vespasian, urged the
emperor to say phustra instead of plostra^ and on the following day was
accordingly greeted by the emperor as Flaurus (^XaOpof) instead of Fkrus
(Suet. Vesp, 21).
296 THE ROMAN AGE. [CHAP.
(p. IOI2 f) the origin of the soul as described in. the TYtmuus,
and deals with minor points connected with Plato, in the ten
chapters of his * Platonic Questions'. The vision of Er at the
close of the Republic has its counterpart at the close of the
De Sera Numinis Vindicta. The fact that 'no infant smiles in
the waking moments of its first few weeks, but only when it
falls asleep', is explained in one of the fragments of his De Anima
(p. 736) 'by the Platonic doctrine that the transplanted soul is
disturbed and terrified by the aspect of this world, which it regards
with displeasure, while in sleep it recalls its happier state with
God and smiles at the glorious vision '\ He often attacks the
views of the Stoics and Epicureans, though he not unfrequently
borrows from the Stoics and disagrees with Plato. Of the strictly
philosophical works of Aristotle he seems to have read little;
but, in the collection and classification of facts and in the encyclo-
paedic pursuit of knowledge, he shows the influence of the Peri-
patetic school; he certainly quotes many details from Aristotle,
Theophrastus and Straton. His religion finds its natural
centre in Delphi ; he discusses the mysterious letter E inscribed
above the portal of the Delphian temple, concluding with the
explanation given by his own master, Ammonius, that the symbol
of the letter stands for its name (et) and thus means ' 'i'hou art ', —
the worshipper's tribute to the Being of the God whose temple
he approaches. In the 'Pythian Oracles' he inquires into the
reason why Apollo, who of old was wont to respond in verse,
now uttered his oracles in prose alone. The dialogue on the
' Cessation of Oracles ' includes much on the subject of demons,
as beings intermediate between gods and men, and is lit up with
a strange light by the simple yet mysterious legends of the old
prophet of the Erythrean Sea, of the genii of the British Isles,
and of the death of Pan, a theme which has since been made
memorable by the Muse of Milton and also by a later Muse.
The Miscellanies of Plutarch, commonly called the Moralia^
include several works not unconnected with literary criticism;
but, even in literary criticism, Plutarch is apt to aim mainly at
moral edification. His comments on Homer ('OfirfpiKal /mcXerai)
survive in fragments only ; those on the Boeotian Hesiod's Works
^ Mahafly's Greek IVbrld under Roman Sway^ p. 191 f.
XVII.] PLUTARCH. 297
and Days^ as may be inferred from the passages preserved by
Proclus and Tzetzes, must have been a medley of minute observa-
tion and moral disquisition. Some of his notes on the didactic
poems of Aratus and Nicander may be seen in the scholia on
those authors, but they are solely on matters of natural science.
Of the works which have reached us in a more complete form,
the tract *0n the Education of Children*, which was probably
not written by Plutarch, is very interesting, but is only slightly
connected with literature. 'How a young man should study
poetry ' is a title full of promise, which only ends in disappoint-
ment. The author is oppressed by the consciousness that, in
matters of morality, the old Greek poets are not entirely safe
guides for young persons; but, instead of pointing out that the
Homeric poems represent a primitive and undeveloped stage of
moral and religious thought, he struggles to find in the old poets
salutary examples of conduct and precepts of action, and only
succeeds in this effort by means of fanciful interpretations'.
*You cannot prevent clever boys from reading poetry, so you
must make the best of it. It is like the head of an octopus, very
nice to eat, nourishing enough, but apt to give restless and
fantastic dreams (p. 15 b). So you must be careful to administer
paedagogic correctives, and to put the right meaning on dangerous
things'*. Plutarch has in fact no pretensions to literary criticism;
he is simply a moralist bent on compelling all literature to minister
to edification. He is, however, entitled to our gratitude for
preserving here and elsewhere many passages from the poets,
which would otherwise have been lost to posterity. As a native
of Boeotia, Plutarch takes a special interest in citations from the
Theban poet, Pindar. But even the merit of preserving for us
the relics of early Greek poetry is absent from the treatise *0n
Study' (^cpl rov (Lcovciv), which merely inculcates a calm and
dispassionate attentiveness, and even warns the student against
taking any special pleasure in style. 'A man who will not attend
to a useful statement, because its style is not Attic, is like a man
' Cp. J. Oakesmith's Religion 0/ Piuiarch^ pp. 69, 176 (Longmans, 1901).
Plutarch is here borrowing from the Stoics and Peripatetics (A. Schlemm, De
fontibus Plutarchi De Audiem/is PoeliSt 1893).
' Satntsbury, i 140.
298 THE ROMAN AGE. [CHAP.
who refuses a wholesome medicine because it is not offered him
in a jar of Attic manufacture '\ Literature is to Plutarch a whole-
some medicine, and not a source of enthusiasm, a fountain of
refreshment, a well-spring of delight.
It is uncertain whether the treatise On the Malignity of
Herodotus was written by Plutarch. It begins and ends with
commendations of Herodotus as a ready writer, and the possessor
of a charming and graceful style. It also praises him as a good
judge of character, but it repeatedly sets him below Thucydides
as a historian, and cites a large number of passages to prove what
the writer regards as his bad temper, spite and uncharitableness.
In the centuries that had passed since the Persian wars, orators
and rhetoricians had diffused a kind of glamour over the memories
of the glorious days of Greece, and the historian whose picture of
the past included shade as well as light, was unpopular with those
who had deceived themselves into the belief that an undimmed
and unbroken splendour rested on the victorious conflict between
the Greeks and the Barbarians. Even in Plutarch's own days
the victory of Plataea, in which the Thebans had no part, was
still commemorated on the spot where it had been won (Aristides^
19, 21).
In a treatise, which has reached us In an imperfect form
(p. 853), Plutarch shows a high appreciation of the merits of
Menander, while he is shocked at the occasional coarseness of
Aristophanes, whom he refuses to regard as a moral teacher. He
considers Aristophanes as vulgar (<^opriicd9, Pavavaoi) and theatrical
(^v/AcXiK09) ; Menander as graceful, sententious and sensible.
The latter is compared to a breezy and shady meadow, brightened
with flowers, on which the eye can rest with a sense of repose.
Plutarch is quite unconscious of the genius of Aristophanes, and
can find no cause for the poet's great reputation for ' cleverness '
(Sector r;9). If passages from the old Attic Comedy are recited
at a banquet, every guest must be attended by a grammarian to
explain the personal allusions (Quaest, Conv, vii 8, 3 § 5).
In the nine books of his Convivial Questions the literary
element is but slightly apparent. In arranging your guests at
table, he would have you place 'the eager learner beside the
' c. 9; Saintsbury, i 141.
XVII.] PLUTARCH. 299
distinguished scholar' (i 2, 6). He inquires why A is the first
letter of the alphabet (ix 2). He discusses the number of the
Muses (ix 14) and the three kinds of Dances (ix 15), the custom
of wearing garlands at dinner, the material of the victor's crown
in the Isthmian games (v 3), the question whether prizes for
poetry were of ancient date (v 2), and why it was that the
dramatic and artistic representation of things painful was pleasant
(v i). In discoursing on the art of conversation, he draws many of
his illustrations from Homer (ii i). In connexion with Homer,
he inquires why it was that, in the order of the games, boxing
came before wrestling and running (ii 5); and what was the
exact meaning of (oiporcpov (v 4) and dyXaoNopiros ; and of
v7rcp<^Xo(a, as an epithet of apple-trees in Empedocles (v 8).
In the letter of consolation addressed to his wife, he finds fault
with critics who 'collect and gather together all the lame and
defective verses of Homer, which are but few in number, and
in the meantime pass over an infinite sort of others, which were
by him most excellently made' (p. 611)'. In the introduction
to the dialogue De Defectu Oraculorum points of grammar, such
as the question whether )9aXX(i> loses a X in the future, and what
is the positive of x^^^i^ and /ScXriov, are described as causing the
disputants to contract their brows and contort their features;
while other topics can be discussed with a calm and unruffled
mien (p. 412 f).
Plutarch is mainly a moralist, not only in his so-called
Moralia^ but also in his lAves^ with their vivid moral portraiture,
which made Montaigne call them his 'breviary', and Madame
Roland 'the pasture of great souls". Several of his Lives^ e.g.
his Pericles and his Caesar^ his Demosthenes and his Cicero^ have
a literary as well as a historical interest; but it is disappointing
to find that, at the moment when we expect some literary criticism
in the comparison between the two greatest orators of Greece
and Rome, Plutarch (notwithstanding the interest in Latin rites
and customs shown in his Roman Questions) shirks the task on
the ground of his imperfect knowledge of Latin (JDem. 2); he
actually rebukes Caecilius for instituting such a comparison
{id. 3); and, even in the case of the Greek orator, offers no
^ Trench, Plutarch, P* )7« ' ^* P* 34 f*
300 THE ROMAN AGE. [CHAP.
criticism on his style. His Life of Cicero (24, 40) implies some
acquaintance (either direct or indirect) with Cicero's philosophical
works. His knowledge of I^tin has been discussed by Weissen-
berger\ who defends him from some of the attacks of Volkmann.
His Lives of Galba and Otho were founded either on Tacitus
or on some authority common to both'. In his Life of Luadlus
(c. 39) we find his only direct quotation from Latin literature
(Horace, Ep, i 6, 45), but his description . of Rome as tcSk
iivOpiairCvuiv ipymv to KoWurrov {De Fortuna Rom, 316 e) is
possibly a reminiscence of Virgil's rerutn pulcherrima Roma
(Georg, ii 534)*. His Roman Questions^ in which Ovid's Fasti
are never quoted, are partly founded on Varro and Juba; and
his Greek Questions on Aristotle.
On the whole, Plutarch cannot be seriously regarded as a
literary critic, but he fully deserves the credit of being a lover
of literature. Literature is fully recognised in his fragmentary
discourse on the question whether the Athenians were more
glorious in war or in wisdom ; and, in attacking the Epicureans,
he warmly defends the cause of letters. His treatise on the
profit which a young man may obtain from the writings of the
poets supplied Basil with many hints for his treatise on the gain
to be derived from the study of heathen authors. Montaigne
'can hardly do without Plutarch'. In Southey's Doctor the
translation of the Moralia by Philemon Holland is one of the
few books for which Daniel Dove finds room on his shelves.
He is the theme of more than 250 allusions or direct references
on the part of Jeremy Taylor; his Moralia occupied 24 years
of the life of Daniel Wyttenbach, and had an important influence
on the career of Neander*. 'Plutarch*, says Emerson*, *will be
perpetually rediscovered from time to time as long as books last'^
* Die Sprache Piutarchs^ '895.
' Cp. Schanz, Rom, Litt, § 438.
> Oakesmith's Religion of Plutarch^ p. 8411.
^ Trench, pp. 74, 108 f, iii.
' Elssay prefixed to translation of Plutarch's Morals^ revised by Prof.
W. W. Goodwin (1870); see also Essay on Books in Society and Solitude,
p. 451 oi Prose Works, ed. 1889.
* On Plutarch, cp. the monographs by Greard (1866) and Volkmann (1869),
R. C. Trench's Four Lectures (1875) and J. Oakesmith's Religion of Piutarck\
XVII.] FAVORINUS. 30I
Plutarch and Dion Chrysostom have points of contact with
Favorinus of Aries (bom c. 75 A.D.), who was a
pupil of Dion and a friend of Fronto and Plutarch.
He visited Ephesus, but lived mainly in Rome, where his lectures
were attended by Herodes Atticus. He is much admired by
Gellius. He was one of the most learned men of the age of
Hadrian, whose favour he enjoyed for a time; and he appears
to have died under Antoninus Pius. He vied with Plutarch in
the number and variety of his writings, which included philosophy,
history, philology and rhetoric ; but he was more of a rhetorician
than a philosopher. In philosophy he was a Sceptic Besides
several semi-philosophical works, he wrote at least five books of
Memoirs^ and twenty-four of Miscellanies, The latter is described
by Photius as a store-house of erudition, and both are among the
authorities followed by Diogenes Laertius^ He survives in frag-
ments only ; but he may here serve to mark the transition from
Dion and Plutarch to the Sophists and the Atticists of the age
of the Antonines, who will be briefly noticed in the next chapter.
also Christ, §§ 470—485'; Croisct, v 484 — 538; Egger, 409 — 435; and Saints-
bury, i 137—146.
* Christ, § 510*; Croisct, v 539 f.
CHAPTER XVIII.
GREEK SCHOLARSHIP IN THE SECOND CENTURY.
For nearly two-thirds of the second century the Roman
The second Empire was under the beneficent rule of Hadrian
century. (117 — 138) and the Antonines (138 — 180). Hadrian,
the patron of Greek literature in general and of
rhetoric in particular, was specially devoted to Athens, where he
had distinguished himself as archon under the rule of Trajan.
After he had ascended the throne, he completed the magnificent
temple of the Olympieum, which had been begun by Peisistratus
650 years before. In the region north of the Acropolis, he built
the ' Stoa ' which bore his name, with its walls and colonnades of
Phrygian marble, its roof glittering with gold and alabaster, and
its chambers stored with books, and beautified with paintings and
statues \ The bust of Sophocles, and the marble personifications
of *the Iliad' and *the Odyssey,' found in the neighbourhood,
may once have adorned the Library in these buildings. M. Aure-
lius established at Athens a school of Philosophy, with a pro-
fessorial chair for each of the four sects, the Academics, Peripatetics,
Stoics and Epicureans ; and a school of Rhetoric with two chairs,
the * political ' and the * sophistical ', the holder of the latter being
appointed by the emperor and set over the whole of the University.
The selection of the four professors of Philosophy was assigned
to Herodes Atticus (103 — 179), who, like Hadrian, was one of
the greatest benefactors of Athens. His lavish
Atuciw*** liberality caused the Panathenaic Stadium on the
Ilissus to gleam with marble from the quarries of
Pentelicus, and (about the time when Pausanias was writing his
' Pausanias, i 18, 9.
CHAP. XVIIL] HADRIAN. HERODES. M. AURELI. 303
Description of Greece) raised a new Odeum with a roof of cedar
to the south of the ascent to the Acropolis. He was the most
brilliant of the Sophists of the age ; he could refute the pretended
Stoic by means of appropriate passages from Epictetus ; and, in
giving alms to a Cynic impostor, who had only 'the beard and
the staff ' of his profession, he could quote an effective precedent
from Musonius^ His house at Athens and his villa, amid the
olive-groves and water-courses of Cephisia, were frequented by
statesmen, philosophers and rhetoricians'; and among these last
was the eminent rhetorician Aristides. In the age of the Antonines
a remarkable proof of proficiency in Greek was given by M.
Aurelius, the * Stoic on the throne*, in the famous .. ^
M. Aurelius
Meditations (rot ci? iavroi'), which (as it happens)
include a single chapter on the moral effect of Attic tragedy and
comedy (xi 6), while they represent in general the highest standard
of morality attained prior to Neo-Platonism and apart from
Christianity. The author of the Meditations gave early encourage-
ment to the precocious genius of the rhetorician Hermogenes ;
among the preceptors of the adoptive brother of M. Aurelius,
L. Verus, were Hephaestion and Harpocration ; while the tutor
of Commodus was the grammarian Pollux, whom his former pupil
appointed professor of Rhetoric at Athens. During this century
there was no lack of patronage for Scholarship at Athens and
Rome ; but, meanwhile, the greatest grammarian of the age,
ApoUonius Dyscolus, was living in poverty in Alexandria. His
son, Herodian, lived in Rome, and dedicated to M. Aurelius his
great work on accentuation.
In the second century an interest in the ancient epics of
Greece is attested by a composition in prose pur-
porting to give an account of a poetic competition torianV * eu!.*'
between Homer and Hesiod*. Verse is represented
by the didactic poems of Dionysius Periegetes and Oppian, by
the hymn to Nemesis by Mesomedes and the fables of Babrius ;
history, by Appian {fl, 160) and by Arrian (yf. 130), the modem
Xenophon, who, with his 'chameleon-like'* style, imitates Herodotus
* Gelltus, i 1, 3—13; ix 1. ■ 1^. i «, j.
' dTftfT, printed in Goettling's Hesiod^ pp. 341 — 354, and in Riach's.
^ Kaibel in hermes^ xx (1875) 5o8.
304 THE ROMAN AGE. [CHAP.
and Thucydides as well as Xenophon and Ctesias; military
history, by Polyaenus (/f. 161-9); geography and astronomy, by
Claudius Ptolemaeus of Alexandria; while topography and bio-
graphy were combined in the 'cities and their celebrities' of
Philon of Byblus (c. 64 — 141), and the chronology of the Olympic
Games was studied by^Phlegon of Tralles. In the age of Trajan
and Hadrian (if not at an earlier date) Ptolemaeus Chennus of
Alexandria, besides writing a historical drama called the Sphinx^
and an epic poem in twenty-four books entitled Anthomerus^
compiled a vast collection of miscellaneous anecdotes which was
known to Photius\ He has acquired a new importance from
the fact that he is now regarded as the author of a lost treatise on
the U/e and Works of Aristotle^ dedicated to one Callus, and
ascribed to ' Ptolemaeus ' in an Arabic list of the Works^ which
is derived from a Syriac rendering of the Greek original.
In the time of the Antonines Archaeology and Topography
were the theme of Pausanias, who was still engaged on
his Description of Greece in 173 a.d. (v i, 2), having
written his account of Attica before, and that of Achaia after,
the building of the Odeum of Herodes Atticus. From his home
in Asia Minor, near the river Hermus and mount Sipylus, he
travelled over Greece, Italy and Sardinia, and even visited Syria,
and the oracle of Ammon in the Libyan desert. His work is
invaluable for its varied information on the mythology, topography,
sculpture and architecture of ancient Greece ; and its utility has
been recognised in the archaeological exploration of Athens and
Argolis, of Delphi and Olympia. It is neither a manual of
archaeology, nor a guide-book, but a volume of reminiscences
of travel. It cannot reasonably be doubted that it is founded
largely on the author's own experience ; but there has been much
discussion as to the degree of his indebtedness to authorities such
as Polemon of Ilium in archaeology (supra p. 152), Artemidorus
of Ephesus (fl, 100 B.C.) in topography, and Istrus of Paphos
(a pupil of Callimachus) in history. He cites Euripides far less
often than the ancient epic poets ; and almost all that we know
^ Cod. 190, jccuy^ XoTQfka^
' Christ, I 559', and esp. A. Baomstark, AristoieUs bet den Syrem^ 1900.
The list is given in Arist. Frt^, pp. 18 — 11 Rose.
XVIII.] PAUSANIAS. ARISTIDES. 30$
(or think we know) of the Messenian wars is due to his having
preserved for us the substance of the lost epic of the Alexandrian
poet, Rhianus'.
Of the Sophists who lived under the Antonines, one of the
most celebrated was Aelius Aristides (129 — 189),
who studied oratory at Pergamon and Athens, be- Ari»«d«l***"*'
sides visiting Rhodes and travelling in Egypt The
storms, which he encountered on his voyage to Italy in 155,
shattered his health and compelled him to live as a valetudinarian
for many years at Pergamon and Smyrna. When Smyrna was
ruined by an earthquake (178), he obtained the aid of M. Aurelius
for its restoration. At Athens he delivered his Panathenaic dis-
course, with its rhetorical review of Athenian history. History
he regards as holding a position intermediate between poetry and
rhetoric (ii 513); rhetoric he defends from Plato's attacks in the
Phaedrus and Gorgias^ while he shields Miltiades, Themistocles,
Cimon and Pericles from the contempt with which they had been
treated in the latter of those dialogues. He is also the author of
several fictitious discourses on events in Greek history, and of a
prose paraphrase of the speech of Achilles in the ninth Iliad.
Lastly, he has left us a pleasant picture of a learned and accom-
plished lecturer on the ancient Classics in the person of a teacher
of M. Aurelius named Alexander of Cotyaeum, whose countrymen
are assured that he will be gratefully welcomed by the authors of
old in the world below, where he will be assigned an enduring
throne as the best of their interpreters [Or, 12). Unhappily, the
only work of Alexander mentioned by Aristides is vaguely stated
to be on the subject of Homer, and he is now represented solely
by a fragment on a point of textual criticism in Herodotus'. In
editions of Aristides we find two compositions inspired by the
Leptims and proving an intimate acquaintance with the text of
Demosthenes ; but their authorship is not quite certain '. In
^ Christ, § 501'; Croisct, v 679—683; Kalkmann, P, dtr Ptrug§t (1886);
Gurlitt and Bencker (1890); Heberdey, di$ Rgistn dts P. (1894); Fruer's
Pausanias (1898); ed. Hitzig et BlUmner, 1896- .
' Quoted by Porphyry, p. 188, Schrader.
' They are not found in the MSS of Aristides, and are only attributed to him
on the ground of a passage in his Speech against Capito, p* 315 (H. £. Fots,
1841).
s. 20
306 . THE ROMAN AGE. [CHAP.
Style Aristides is one of the strictest Atticists of his time, hb
favourite models being Thucydides, Plato, Xenophon, Isocrates
and Demosthenes. To rival Demosthenes was his main ambition,
and he had the satisfaction of seeing in a dream the apparition of
a philosopher who assured him that he had even surpassed that
orator (i 325). As a successful imitator of the Attic writers he is
highly praised by Phrynichus^; his copiousness and force are
lauded by Longinus'; by later rhetoricians, such as Libanius and
Himerius, he is regarded as a classic ; his fame descended to the
Byzantine age, in which Thomas Magister classes him alone with
Homer, Thucydides, Demosthenes and Plato; and the study of
his speeches in the schools is still attested by the extant scholia
and proUgonufia. His love of literature on its rhetorical side
is frank and outspoken ; ' speeches * (he tells us) * are his sole
delight'; 'the whole gain and sum of life is oratorical occupation".
In his apology for the blunder of commending himself in the
course of an address to a deity i^Or, 49), he justifies himself by
many quotations from orators and poets, and from Solon in
particular ; but he shows no taste for literary criticism. In a
history of Scholarship his main claim to notice rests on his suc-
cessful study of the ancient models of Attic prose, and also on
the fact that he has preserved for us (in Or, 49) the longest
passage from the iambic poems of Solon which was known to us
until the recovery of Aristotle's Constitution of Athens*,
Inferior to Aristides is the * Platonic philosopher', Maximus
of Tyre {fl, 180), who lectured in many lands (in-
Tyrhw"*"* cluding Phrygia and Arabia), and paid several visits
to Rome. All his forty-one discourses are written
in the affected and over-symmetrical style of Gorgias, with an *
inordinate fancy for the accumulation of synonyms. As a Platonist
of eclectic tastes, while he opposes the Epicureans, he borrows at
will from the Peripatetics, Stoics and Neo-Pythagoreans ; and, like
Plutarch, he may be regarded as a precursor of the Neo-Platonists.
' ap. Photium, p. 101 A 18.
' Dindorfs Aristides^ iii 74 1.
. ' Canter in Dindorfs Aristides, Hi 779, quoted by Saintsbury, i ii4f.
^ Oil Aristides^ tee the editions of Dindorf (1819) and Keil (1899) > ^'^^ ^P*
Christ, I 511' f; Croiset, v 571—581 ; and Saintsbury, i 113— 6.
XVIII.] MAXIMUS TYRIUS. 307
But, while Plutarch is a genuine philosopher and a wise counsellor
on the conduct of life, Maximus is merely a rhetorician, who
happens to write by preference on philosophic subjects. The
subjects themselves are not uninteresting : e.g. ' Does Homer re-
present any special philosophic school?* (32); *0n Plato's God'
(17); *0n the Daimonion of Socrates' (14, 15); *0n Socratic
Love' (24 — 27); *Was Plato justified in banishing Homer from
his Republic?' (23); 'Have poets or philosophers discoursed
better concerning the Gods?' (10); 'Are the liberal arts con-
ducive to virtue?* (37). He discusses the influence of music and
geometry ; he is fond of quoting from Homer and Sappho (e.g. 24,
9), and has contributed to the restitution of the fair fame of the
Lesbian poetess ' ; he eulogises Homer for his breadth of view and
his varied knowledge, but describes Aratus as no less famous (30) ;
he sees little difference between poetry and philosophy; he favours
the allegorical interpretation of poetry ; has a high admiration for
Plato (17, I ; 27, 4); and, in discussing Plato's attitude towards
Homer, insists that an admiration for Plato is quite compatible
with an admiration for Homer. On the whole, we are bound
to admit that, so far as regards literary criticism, the high
expectations raised by the titles of his lectures only end in dis-
appointment".
The brilliant and versatile satirist, Lucian of Samosata
(c, 125 — c, 192), who includes rhetoricians and
sophists among the many themes of his satire, is
himself a product of the sophistical and rhetorical education of
his time. Born in northern Syria, and educated in Ionia, he
travelled and lectured in Asia Minor, Greece and Macedonia,
and even in Italy and Gaul; resided for some twenty years
{f. 165 — 185) at Athens; and, towards the end of his life, held
a Government appointment in Egypt
A history of Scholarship is only concerned with a few of the
four-score writings that bear his name. His Judgement of the
Vowels {hUri ^n/cKTcjv), which throws some light on the Attic
Greek of his day, describes a lawsuit brought before the court
of the vowels by the letter Sigma against the letter Tau, com-
1 Welcker*s kl, Schri/Un, ii 97.
• Christ, 8 511'; Croiset, t 581 — «; Saintsbory, i 117 — 8.
308 THE ROMAN AGE. [CHAP.
plaining of violent ejectment from various words such as tnifitpov,
OdXaxraa and 0c(ro-aA.ia, which the Atticists of the time pronounced
TTffitpov, OdXarra and 0crraXia. His satire On the proper manner
of writing History (ira>9 Set Xxrtoplnv inrfyp6j^tw\ which was once
much admired, is an attack on the incompetent historians, who
were preparing to describe the Parthian War (which ended in 165)
in the style of Herodotus and Thucydides. This attack on con-
temporary historians is veiled under the disguise of advice to the
historians of the future. The two great requirements of the true
historian (says Lucian) are intelligence (crvi^co-cs) and power of
expression (^/miTvcia). His Parasite is a parody of the discussions
held by rhetoricians and philosophers, from Plato downwards, on
the subject of rhetoric. In his Lexiphanes we have a playful
satire on the Atticists of the day, and on their fancy for inter-
spersing their compositions with obsolete phrases borrowed from
the old Attic authors. A specimen of this kind of patch-work is
produced by Lexiphanes himself, who is severely criticised, and
is solemnly admonished to reject the miserable inventions of
modem rhetoricians, to emulate the great classical writers such
as Thucydides and Plato, and the ancient masters of tragedy and
comedy, and, above all, to sacrifice to the Graces and to perspicuity.
Lexiphanes has been supposed^ to be a satirical representation of
Pollux, the lexicographer ; but the latter was not appointed pro-
fessor of rhetoric at Athens until the reign of Commodus, whereas
the Lexiphanes was apparently one of Lucian's earlier works
(§ 26)'. His Pseudologistes (or Solecist) is directed against gram-
marians who lapsed into solecisms, in spite of a pedantic attention
to correctness of style. Elsewhere, he writes an amusing satire
{Adversus Indoctum) on a collector of books in handsome bind-
ings, including copies of Archilochus and Hipponax, Eupolis and
Aristophanes, Plato, Antisthenes and Aeschines, which he could
neither read nor understand. In the Teacher of Orators (jnfTopiav
hihdxTKokosi) Lucian attacks the prevailing type of instruction in
the person of one of its most conspicuous representatives, some-
times identified (as in the Lexiphanes) with the lexicographer
Pollux. In the same spirit as in that dialogue, Lucian distinguishes
^ By the ScholiasU and C. F. Ranke, Pollux u, Lucian (1851).
* Christ, § 539*.
XVIII.] LUCIAN. 309
between the two paths which lead to the attainment of rhetorical
skill, (i) the long and laborious imitation of the great authors
of old, such as Plato and Demosthenes; (2) the collection of
fashionable phrases for ordinary use and affected archaisms for
occasional adornment'. Rhetoric is also represented in his Bis
Accusatus^ where Lucian is accused by 'Rhetoric' of having
deserted her, and by 'Dialogue' of having disgraced her. In
his Conversation with Hesiod^ he ridicules the ancient poets for
pretending to be inspired interpreters of the will of heaven.
Lastly, in his dialogue On Dancings he states that, as an inter-
preter of the poets, an accomplished dancer of pantomime ought
to know Homer and Hesiod, and (above all) the tragic poets,
by heart.
Lucian singles out, in the literature of his age, the defects
which were due to an affected imitation of ancient models ; he
ridicules the frivolity of the rhetoricians, and the pretentiousness
of the historians of his day ; and rallies the Atticists for their
superstitious cult of an obsolete phraseology. He is himself an
Atticist of a higher though far from perfect type, and Cobet has
abundantly shown, quanto opere a Graecitatis antiquae dicendi
sinceritaie desciverii*. His verbal familiarity with Greek literature
is attested by his constant quotations from Homer, Hesiod and
Pindar', and his frequent reminiscences of Thucydides, Xenophon,
Plato and Demosthenes \ The encomium on that orator found
among his writings, shows a just appreciation of the patriotism of
Demosthenes, but is wanting in wit, and is probably spurious.
The legend of the Olympic recitation of the history of Herodotus
is found in the writing which bears that historian's name. Traces
of Horace* and Juvenal have been detected in Lucian, and a
passage in the Germania of Tacitus ($ 3) finds its parallel in the
Method of writing History ($ 60). His skill as a critic of art
^ Saintsbury, {151.
* Var, Lect. 300 f ; cp. 75 f.
' Ziegeler, De Luciano poilarum iuiiice et imiiatort (1871).
^ Brambs, Citate und Reminiscenun M Lucian (1888). On Ludan's
Atticism, cp. Du Mesnil (1867), W. Schmid, Aitiktsmus^ i 111 — 5, and
Chabert (1897).
* A. Heinrich, Lukian u, Horcu (1885).
310 THE ROMAN AGE. [CHAP.
is proved by his Portraits (EIkoi^cc) and his Zeuxis, In his
management of dialogue he exhibits the influence of Plato, while
his genius has much in common with that of Aristophanes, to
whom he repeatedly refers. He owes something also to the
comedies of Cratinus, and to the satires of Menippus'. In his
Prometheus es he admits that he has 'attempted to adjust the
philosophical dialogue to something like the tone of the comic
poets', and to avoid the faults and combine the excellences of
both*. In the Byzantine age * he was often imitated ; he was
also a favourite author during the Renaissance^; and the travellers'
tales of his True History have been told anew in various forms by
Rabelais, Cyrano de Bergerac, and Swift His interest in the
great writers of Attic prose is clearly marked ; but he has not
sufficient seriousness of purpose or stability of principle to be
a really great critic of classical literature*.
With Lucian we may associate a slightly later writer, Alciphron,
represented in the fictitious letters of Aristaenetus
(i 5 and 22) as one of the correspondents of Lucian,
whom he undoubtedly imitates*. His own imaginary Letters are
inspired by the Attic Comedy of Philemon, Diphilus and
Menander.
The Greek of Lucian was imitated in Latin by Apuleius of
Madaura in Africa, who wrote in the times of
pu e us Antoninus Pius and M. Aurelius. It was Lucian's
Ass that inspired the satiric novel known as the Metamorphoses of
Apuleius, which includes the celebrated myth of Cupid and
Psyche. The author's title to the name of philosophus Platonicus
rests on his minor works : — (i) De Deo Socratis^ a prolix exposi-
tion of the Platonic doctrine on the subject of God and the
daemons ; {2) De Platone et eius dogmate^ a treatise on the natural
* Rabast^, Quid comicis debtierii Lucianus (1867).
' Satntsbury, i 149.
' Krumbacher, dsch. d. By%, Lit. 9§ '94* ip^* 11 ii p* 756', and Hase,
Notices et Extraiis^ ix 1, 1 19.
^ Forster, Lucian in dtr Renaissance (1886).
* Cp. Saintsbury, i 146—151; alto Egger, 464—9; Christ, §| 533 — 54a';
and esp. M. Croiset, v 583 — 616, and his Essai (1881).
* Cp. iii 55 with Lucian's Symposium,
XVIII.] RHETORICIANS. 3 1 1
and moral philosophy of Plato, followed by a spurious book on
the logic of Aristotle. He also wrote De Mundo^ a free trans-
lation of the ircpi Kocfiov, bearing the name of Aristotle, and
possibly written by Nicolaus of Damascus'.
Greek rhetoric includes the criticism of literature and the
study of models of style, and in these respects has
points of contact with the general history of rhetoriciMt
Scholarship. All that was essential in the pre-
vious teaching of rhetoric was summed up in the time of Hadrian
by Alexander', son of Numenius. His treatise on Figures' was
the authority mainly followed by later writers, such
as Tiberius^ on the figures of Demosthenes; Phoeb-
ammon' on ' rhetorical figures ' (which he classifies and reduces
in number); and Herodian', who introduces examples from the
poets. The age of Hadrian may perhaps also claim Aelius Theon
of Alexandria, who wrote commentaries on Xeno-
phon, Isocrates and Demosthenes, and whose
Progymnasmata or 'preliminary exercises' are still extant^
Theon's work deals with the art of writing under twelve divisions:
— maxims, fables, narration, confirmation and refutation, common-
places, description, encomium, comparison, prosopopoeia (or
character-drawing), thesis (or abstract question), and proposal
of a law ; and it includes many illustrations from ancient litera-
ture. It was superseded by a similar work composed towards
the end of the fourth century by Aphthonius, the pupil of
Libanius; but, in the mean time, it continued to hold its own
beside the work of Hermogenes. Hermogenes of Tarsus, who
lived under M. Aurelius and was already dis- ..
tinguished at the age of fifteen, failed to fulfil the
high promise of his early years. His Progymnasmaia^ are less
1 All these Opuuula de Phihsophia have been edited by Goldbacher (1876).
• Fragments in Spengel, Rhet, Gr, iii I — 6.
• Sp. iii 9 — 40. * Sp. iii 59—81.
• Sp. iii 43—56.
• Sp. iii 60 — 104.
^ Sp. ii iS9- Cp. Sftintsbury, i 93 f, who rightly inclines to place him before
Aphthonius. The name of Aeliut given him by Suldas suggests the age of
Hadrian.
• Sp. ii 3— 18; cp. Saintsbury, I 90— s.
312 THE ROMAN AGE. [CHAP.
interesting than those of Theon; his works on l^al issues \ on
rhetorical invention (with examples from the Attic orators)*, and
on eloquence*, are more remote from the history of Scholar-
ship than his treatise defining the different varieties of style
and suggesting methods for imitating them, with critical remarks
on some of the best prose writers \ The treatise of Demetrius
on Verbal Expression*, wrongly attributed to
Demetrius of Phaleron, certamly belongs to the
Roman age*, and probably to the time of the Antonines'. The
author frequently quotes from the Rfutork of Aristotle, and has
many interesting remarks on oratorical style and rhythm. Thus
he happily compares the ' disjointed ' style to a number of stones
lying near one another, loose, scattered and uncombined, and the
'periodic' style to the same stones when bound compactly in
the self-supporting cohesion of a vaulted dome (§ 13). He con-
trasts the clauses (xoiXa) of Prose with the metres of Verse, illus-
trates these clauses from Hecataeus and from the Anabasis of
Xenophon, and expresses a general preference for short clauses.
He also discusses periods, and parallel clauses (including homaeo-
teleuta). His main subject is well described by Mr Saintsbury
(i 104) as the *Art of Prose Composition*.
In this century rhetoric, as the art of literary expression, was
in close alliance with grammar and lexicography.
To the age of Hadrian we may assign the eminent
grammarian ApoUonius Dyscolus, who lived and died in poverty
in what was once the royal quarter of Alexandria. He appears to
have spent a short time in Rome, under Antoninus
DyiE'oiur*"* Pius. His name of Dyscolus (* crabbed ') is said to
have been due to a sourness of temper, caused by
eme poverty*; but it is far more probable that it was suggested
•w€fA ffTdffiwift Sp. ii 133 — 174.
v€pl €itp4ff€utt sp. ii 177 — 262,
T€fl /Atffddov dii^drrfrott Sp. ii 426 — 56.
wtpl /dcwr ii 265—415, csp. 410 — 25. Cp. Croiset, v 629 — 634.
w€pl ip/Aiiinlat, Sp. iii 259 — 328; ed. Radermacher, and Rhys Roberts,
I
I 108 refen to the patrician laticlave, ' Croiset, v 87 n.
Anonymous life (ap. Flach, Hesychius Milts,, p. 243). Cp. Grmfenhan,
of.
ext
190
111
XVIII.] APOLLONIUS DYSCOLUS. 313
by the difficulty of his style. ApoUonius and his son, Herodian,
are the most important grammarians of the imperial age. He was
the founder of scientific grammar, and the creator of Greek Syntax.
Of his numerous writings a large portion was lost at an early date.
The fact that Priscian founded his great grammatical work on
that of ApoUonius, has suggested the view that the writings of
ApoUonius (most of which are now known by their titles alone)
formed part of a complete 'art of grammar', treated under thirteen
heads. This view (which is that of Dronke* and Uhlig) is not, how-
ever, generally accepted. The existence of a complete art of grammar
cannot be inferred either from Priscian, or from the scholium on
Dionysius Thrax', which is quoted for this purpose. ApoUonius
must therefore be regarded as the author, not of a systematic
treatise, but of a series of special studies on important points'.
The subjects of his principal works were, the parts of speech in
general, also nouns and verbs in particular, and syntax. The
parts of speech, in his view, were eight in number, arranged in
the following order: — noun, verb, participle, article, pronoun,
preposition, adverb and conjunction. His works on nouns and
verbs were extensively quoted, not only by Priscian, but also by
Georgius Choeroboscus (r. 600) and the scholiasts on Dionysius
Thrax. But only four of his writings have survived — those on
the pronoun, adverbs \ conjunctions and syntax*. This last is in
four books, the first of which determines the number and order of
the parts of speech (assigning precedence to the noun and verb),
and next discusses the syntax of the article; the second deals
with the syntax of the pronoun; the third begins with the
rules of ' concord ' (ncaraXXiyXori;?) and their exceptions, followed
by the general syntax of the verb ; the fourth includes the syntax
of prepositions, adverbs and conjunctions, but only a small portion
of this is still extant*.
» Rhtin, Mus, xi 549 f. • Prellcr, Aufsatu, p. 89.
* Cp. Matthias, in Ftecktis. Jahrb,^ Suppi, xv, quoted in Jeep's RtdethiiU^
p. 94.
* First printed in Bekker*s Anted, Gr, ii 630—646. • ib. ii 479— S^S*
* cd. R. Schneider and Uhlig (iSygf). Cp. L. Unge, Das System der
Syntax des ApoUonios DysMos (1853). and Eg^er, Ap. Dyse^U (1854); also
Steinlhal, ii 110—347; Christ, | 564'; Cohn in Fauly-Wisstima^ II i 136—9;
and Croiset, v 635 f.
314 THE ROMAN AGE. [CHAP.
While Dionysius Thrax was, as we have seen, the first to make
a special study of grammar (p. 137), it was Apollonius who placed
that study on a scientific basis. He analysed the true nature of
language and of its component parts ; set aside certain fantastic
theories current in his day, and introduced scientific explanations
in their place. Thus he refutes those who supposed that 'the
article served to distinguish the genders', and insists that each
part of speech has its origin in a conception characteristic of
itself \ The characteristic of the article is Hhe retrospective
reference to a person already mentioned'; such a retrospect
takes place, when we speak either of a known person, or of a
definitely recognised class*. He was the only ancient grammarian
who wrote a complete and independent work on Syntax, and his
opinions continued to be recognised as authoritative throughout
the Middle Ages, and down to the time of Theodorus Gaza and
Constantinus Lascaris inclusive. His definitions of the parts of
speech show a marked advance on those of his predecessors, and
are adopted by Priscian and by subsequent grammarians'. Priscian
(xi i) calls him 'maximus auctor artis grammaticae ', and refers to
him and his son as 'maximis auctoribus' (vi i)\ The vast extent
of their works is implied in Priscian's mention of the 'spacious
volumes' of Apollonius, and the pelagus of the writings of
Herodian (Prooem, § 4).
Aelius Herodianus, the son of Apollonius Dyscolus, lived at
Rome under M. Aurelius. His principal work,
entitled KaBokucrj npoa-ifSia^ was in 21 books, the
first 19 treating of accentuation in general, book 20 on quantities
(xpoyoi) and breathings (irFcvftara), and book 21 on enclitics,
diastole and synaloephe. It was mainly founded on Aristarchus
and Tryphon, and the nature of its subject left little (if any) room
for originality. It is now represented only by excerpts preserved
by Theodosius and '.Arcadius*. Herodian also wrote on ortho-
graphy; on barbarisms and monosyllabic words; on nouns and
verbs; on inflexions, declensions and conjugations. Our know-
ledge of these works depends entirely on extracts in later
' Syntax t i p. 13 Bekker, ixoffrop ik oArCiv i^ Idiat ivvolat dyi7€ra4.
' ib. p. 36 (Croiset, l.c,)*
* Cp. Grafenhan, Hi 109—131. * Cp. xiv 1, xvii 1.
XVIII.] HERODIAN. NICANOR. 315
grammarians, e.g. in the Homeric scholia^ and in Stephanus of
Byzantium. His only extant work is a treatise 'on peculiar
diction' (ircpl fiotnjpov^ Xc^coif), consisting of a series of articles
on exceptional or anomalous words. The close of the preface
skilfully leads up to the first article in the list, that on Zeus*.
We have also an abstract of his teaching on syllables ' common '
in quantity (Trcpl Sixpoumv), and numerous excerpts from his work
on the accentuation of the //rW and the Odyssey, These excerpts
are mainly preserved in the Homeric scholia*, Herodian generally
agrees with Aristarchus, while he often discusses the views of
Tryphon and others less known to fame*. By grammarians of
later ages he is generally called 6 rcxvucds ^.
Another of the sources of the above scholia was the work of
Nicanor (Trcpl crrtyfiiTs), written by an Alexandrian
grammarian rather earlier than Herodian, probably
in the reign of Hadrian. Nicanor distinguished eight varieties of
punctuation*, viz. three forms of the full stop*; two of the colon';
and three of the comma*. His interest in punctuation led to his
being known as *the punctuator' (6 cmy/xaTto?)*.
In the second century lexicography received a new impulse
from the prevailing fancy for imitating the great
Attic models of the past. The study of those ^^l^
models had been begun in the days of Dionysius
of Halicamassus, while their imitation was the characteristic of
the new Sophists, who came into existence towards the close of
the first century, and flourished during the age of the Antonines'*.
i^ Kcd 6 SoXri^t (Aratus) dpx^MC'M ^ip ^<c Ai^ iipxtl^iuffBa,
' Lchrs, Herodiani scripta tria (1848).
* Lehrs, De Aristanki Siudiis Homencis, p. 30* ; cp. Ludwich, Aristanhs
Horn, Textkr, i 75 — 80.
^ Cp. in general Lentz, Hti-odiani tecknici reliqui«u [\^i)\ Grifenhan, lit
71, 99; Christ, § 565*; Croiset, v 637.
' Bachmann, Anted. \\ 316.
* uirepreXeJo, reXc/a, ^voreXe/a. ' Avm wpAriif tfvM itvrdpa,
' dpvwSicfHTotf 4imw6Kpiro9, and ^oertyfi^, Thiii last if a 'stop put after a
protasis,' nn apodotic comma.
* Friedlander, Nicatwris.,, reliquiae (1850); cp. Grafenhan, iii 67, 94 ; Christ,
i 563'; Croiset, v 637 f.
" Cp. Bemhardy, Cr, Litt, i 630 — 64s*.
3l6 THE ROMAN AGE, [CHAP.
This new type of imitative literature stimulated the production of
lexicographical works prepared by compilers claiming the name of
'Atticists'. Their aim was partly to collect words and phrases
sanctioned by Attic usage, partly to explain unfamiliar terms
found in Attic authors. Lists of such words had already been
drawn up, in the Alexandrian age, by Aristophanes and Crates ;
and, early in the imperial age, by Demetrius Ixion and Caecilius
of Calacte ; also, in the first century a.d., by minor grammarians
such as Dorotheus and Epitherses, Nicander and Irenaeus^ But
it was in the time of Hadrian, at the beginning of a new age of
Greek Scholarship', that lexicography made its first important
advance.
In that age the chief representative of lexicography is the
' Atticist ', Aelius Dionysius, described by Suidas as
DionyihiB * descendant of Dionysius of Halicarnassus. He
compiled a lexicon of Attic words in five books
with a supplement in five more, both parts including many
examples of each word. Photius (cod, 152) describes it as
equally useful to imitators of Attic style and students of Attic
writers. His own copy included a similar lexicon, of equal bulk,
but containing fewer examples, compiled by another
the^AttrcSt' 'Atticist', Pausanias, who lived under Antoninus
Pius and possibly also under M. Aurelius. Photius
{cod, 153) suggests the desirability of recasting and combining the
lexicons of both of these ' Atticists ' in a single work with all the
items in a single alphabetical order*. For most of our knowledge
of both, we are indebted to Eustathius. The sources of their
learning are Aristophanes of Byzantium and Didymus, Pamphilus
and Diogenianus, Tryphon and Herodian^ In the
VcstinuB ,
age of Hadrian, Julius Vestinus of Alexandria com-
piled collections of words from Thucydides, and from Isaeus,
Isocrates, Demosthenes and other orators*; while his fellow-
* Croiset, v 639.
* WiUinowitz, Eur. Her, i 173.
* Cod, 15a — 3. Cp. Rindfleisch, De Pausaniae et Aelii Dionysii Ux, rhii,
(1866).
* K. Schwabe, Aelii Dionysii et Pausaniae Frag* (1890), combined in
alphabetical order.
* Suidas, Oi^ifOTti'ot.
XVIII.] THE ATTICISTS. 317
townsman, Valerius Pollio, made a selection of Attic phrases,
mainly from the poets. Pollio's son, Diodonis, confined himself
to explaining difficult terms in the Attic orators '.
Of the 'Atticists' the most interesting to ourselves are
Phrynichus and Moeris, some of whose works are ^ . ^
Still extant. Phrynichus (fl, 180) appears to have
taught Rhetoric in Bithynia under M. Aurelius and Commodus.
He was a passionate purist, and, in spite of feeble health,
composed a vast lexicon of Attic terms in 37 books, under the
title of (To^io-Tun) irporrapao'Ktwjy *the rhetorical magazine'. All
that we know of this great work is the selection published in
Bekker's Anecdota*^ and the summary in Photius {cad, 158), who
describes the work as at least five times too long, and the author
as failing to illustrate by example that beauty of style which he
commends by precept It was partly founded on the work of
Aelius Dionysius. As authorities Phrynichus recognised, in prose,
Plato and the ten Attic orators, with Thucydides, Xenophon,
Aeschines Socraticus, Critias and Antisthenes (with a special
preference for Plato, Demosthenes and Aeschines Socraticus);
and, in verse, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes*.
He composed (probably in his youth) a far shorter work which
has come down to us, known to Suldas as the ^KrriKtMm^Sy with an
alternative title ^xXoy^ ^rj/uirtav koI 6vofjLdTwv 'AmjccSv. It consists
of a long list of rules and prohibitions, telling the student what
expressions to avoid, and what to use instead ^ Throughout the
^ Phot. i49r. Cp., in general, Christ, I 571*; Croiset, ▼ 640 f.
9 i pp. I — 74. * Photius, cod, 158, p. 101^.
* You must say not ixoprifift but ^cXorri^; not iwiBw, but trtffBtp; not
Utala, but Urrtla; not ifw6i«iy/ia, but wapiittyfia; not iiwdfuw, but Jr^ip;
not fUxpit and Axfuh but nixt^ and &XP*^ ; not dvii^ai, but drt4iftu ; not thUrm,
but tlalna ; not e^a/H^reiir (which has survived in modem Greek), but x^fi^
€l6i¥WL. AffTi must not be constructed with the Future ; ri/uLxot must be used
only of fish. You must not say drorda^o/uu, but dffwdt>»/uu ; not np/iarac, but
aflfiij¥eu ; not ^Xty/id^ait but ^Xryfinimi ; not wtpUe^tvet, but 4w€pia€tv0t ; not
wioOfAoi, but wlofiai; not ^Xccrroc, but dXi^Xccrrcu; not wftoKt, but 6fui/iL0ict; not
drcXei/o-o/icu, but Awtifu ; not wiufdp and dc^, but wn^ and iif^ ; not Jccuro>
iai fioP€t9, but KOKodaifumop. 'To answer* is not dvoxpctf^aA, but dvoicpbfa^ai ;
iwlSo(ot must not be used in the sense of iwUii/wt; you must not use itmi^dfufif,
but iwpidfiifif ; not ^M^f hut i(r, and so on, through more than 400 items. Ed.
Lobeck (1810); Rutherford (1881).
3l8 THE ROMAN AGE. [CHAP.
work the author keeps his attention fixed on the general usage of
the best Attic writers, without regard to exceptional or mistaken
divergencies from the strict Attic rule*. Those whom Phrynichus
specially singles out for animadversion, among recent writers who
had departed from the Attic standard, are two of the age of
Hadrian: — Lollianus, who was himself a Greek and taught at
Athens ; and Favorinus, a native of Gaul, who was not unknown
in Rome (supra^ p. 30 ij.
The views of Phrynichus on points of Attic usage were
controverted by Orus, a grammarian of uncertain
date, who is sometimes placed shortly after Phry-
nichus'. Orus is possibly one of the authorities followed in the
short anonymous lexicon called the Anti-Atticist ('AKriarrucumfc)'.
The latter gives ancient authorities for words condemned by
Phrynichus and others. Thus Phrynichus (100) condemns the
use of olk^x^v for en, though he knew that it is once found in
Xenophon. The Anti-Atticist records this use, and justifies it by
adding a reference to Hypereides. Of the life of
Aelius Moeris we know nothing; but we possess
his collection of Attic terms (Xcf cic 'AmKai;, which, like one of the
works of Phrynichus, is sometimes called the *K-mKi(rTri^^,
The date of Valerius Harpocration, the author of an important
lexicon to the Attic orators (Xcfcic r(av Scxa j^roptiiv),
arpocra n .^ uncertain. He is described by Su'idas as a
rhetorician of Alexandria. According to various modem views,
he was a contemporary of either Tiberius*, or Hadrian ^ or
Libanius^ It is perhaps best to place him in the second
^ Cp. Dedication to Cornelianus, quoted on p. 361.
* E. Hiller, Die Znt dts Gram, Oros, Jahrb. f. d. Phil., 1869. p. 438 f,
agrees with Ritschl, Opusc. i 583, in placing him shortly after Phrynichus.
But Reitzenstein, Etymohgika, pp. 287 f and 348, makes him a contemporary
of Orion {c. 435 A.D.).
* fiekker. Anted, i 75 — ri6.
^ ed. Bekker, 1833; cp. Christ, | 571*; Croiset, v 641.
* £. Meier, de aetate Harp, in Opusc, Acad, ii.
' Bemhardy, Qtuuitionum de Harp, aetaie specimen,
' Valesius, ed. 1683; Libanius (£/. 371) reproaches Themistius for attract-
ing ' the Egyptian Harpocration ' to the inclement climate of Constantinople
U- 353)-
XVIII.] HARPOCRATION. 319
century \ and to identify him with the Harpocration mentioned
by Julius Capitolinus' among the grammatici Graeci charged with
the education of L. Verus ; he would thus belong to the age of
the Antonines. He cites no grammarian or lexicographer later
than the time of Augustus, and it is this fact that has led to his
being placed as early as Tiberius ; but it is also consistent with a
later date, as it is doubtful whether the first two centuries saw
the publication of any work on the Attic orators which it was
possible for him to cite. His lexicon has come down to us in
two forms, the complete work and an abridgement ; but the mss
of the former are far inferior to those of the latter. One of the
MSS of the complete work (P) is in the Library of Trinity College,
Cambridge : another (Q) in that of the University (Dd 4, 63). In
the margin of the second is a series of articles (including a passage
from Philochorus oh the subject of ostracism), first published by
Dobree (1822) under the name of Lexicati rhetoricum Canta-
brigiense. The work of Harpocration himself is of special value
in connexion with the language of the Attic orators and the
institutions of Athens. Besides quotations from the tragic and
comic poets, it preserves for us a number of passages from the
Atthidographers Hellanicus, Androtion, Phanodemus, Philochorus,
and Istrus, from the Constitutions of Aristotle, from the Laws of
Theophrastus, from historians such as Hecataeus, Ephorus and
Theopompus, Anaximenes and Marsyas, also from Craterus, the
collector of Attic decrees, from travellers such as Polemon and
Diodorus (On Demes\ and from scholars such as Callimachus,
Eratosthenes and Didymus of Alexandria, Dionysius of Hali-
carnassus and his namesake, the son of Tryphon. These two
last are apparently his latest authorities. In five passages he
mentions certain mss of Demosthenes known as 'ArTuciavo,
which are also mentioned in two of our Demosthenic mss (the
Munich and Venice mss, B and F respectively) at the end of the
Speech on Philip's Letter*^ and are probably connected with the
* So Dindorf.
• Jul. Capitol., Verus^ c. 2.
s iidpBunat in 8^ 'Arrucai^. Cp. Galen, frt^^m, comm. in Hm, Phi,
p. 1 1 Daremberg, jcard tV rOm 'ArrucQif drrc7pd^«ir iicioctw, and Bernhardy
Gr. Litt, \ 634*.
320 THE ROMAN AGE. [CHAP.
person of that name noticed by Lucian {adv, Indoctutn^ 2, 24),
who is sometimes identified with Atticus, the friend of Cicero \
Harpocration seldom goes so far astray as in the article on the
phrase h Karoi^cv ko/aos (Dem. 23 § 28), where he actually records
three erudite but erroneous explanations proposed by Didymus,
instead of stating that it simply means ' the law next below \ ' the
following law ".
Another lexicographer, Julius Pollux (noXv8cvfn;c) of Naucratis
(ft. 180 A.D.), is the author of an Onomasticon* of
Attic words and phrases in ten Books, dedicated to
his imperial pupil, Commodus, who appointed him to a professor-
ship at Athens, which he held until his death at the age of 58.
The arrangement is according to subjects. Among the most
valuable portions are Book iv, on music, dancing and the Greek
theatre, probably partially borrowed from Juba {supra^ p. 287)^;
Book viii, on the Athenian tribunals and officers of State,
founded partly on Aristotle's Constitution of Athens^ \ and Book
IX (§ 51 f), on coins. His primary authorities are the lexicons
of Didymus, Tryphon and Pamphilus ; in Book 11 he partly relies
on a medical writer named Rufus ; and, from Book ix onwards
(as he himself tells us), he has made use of the Onomasticon of
Gorgias the younger. His biographer, Philostratus, informs us
that, while in matters of criticism he was fairly competent, his
declamations were marked by more spirit than skill'; and, as
already observed (p. 308), the scholiast on the Lexiphanes and
Rhetorum Praeceptor of Lucian informs us that both of those
works, with their ridicule of those who affected an ultra- Attic
phraseology, were intended as a satire on Pollux. But, on
the whole, there seems to be good reason for agreeing with
^ Cp. Dziatzko in Pauly-Wissowa, j.v. 'Arrcjctai'a.
* h fAirii roOroif fdfAot (Bekker*f Anecd, 469). Cp. CoI>et, De auctoritate ti
usu Crammaiicorum veterum (1853); Blass in I. Miiller's Handbuch, Ib 4,
p* 155'* — On Harpocration, cp. Christ, | 573*; Croiset, v 646 f.
» ed. Dindorf (1814); Bckkcr {1846); Bethc (1900- ). Cp. Christ, § 573*;
Croiset, v 645 f.
^ Rohde, De Pollucis in apparaiu scaenico tnarranJo fotUibui (1870).
* See Introduction p. xxv, and Testimonial in present writer's ed.
' Vit, Soph, ii 13, rd iUp KpiriKii UapQt i^jreiro ktK
XVIII.] POLLUX. HEPHAESTION. 321
Hemsterhuis^ the editor of both, that Pollux is not attacked by
Lucian, though Lucian, who is himself an Atticist, remorselessly
attacks the a/Tected Atticism of his day.
In this age the leading authority on metre was Hephaestion of
Alexandria, probably identical with the grammarian
of that name who, together with Telephus of Per-
gamon, and Harpocration, was charged with the education of
L. Verus*; if so, he belongs to the middle of the second century.
His work on metre (originally in no less than 48 books) has only
survived in the epitomised form of his own Encheiridion. Of the
three best mss one is in Paris and two in Cambridge, while the
scholia (including extracts from an earlier authority, Heliodorus,
and from the unabridged work of Hephaestion) are preserved in
two MSS in Oxford*. It long remained the standard work on the
subject. We also possess part of his treatise on poetry, the most
important portion of which is the passage on the parahnsU in
Attic Comedy.
Early in the second century the study of Aristophanes was
facilitated by Symmachus {c, 100), whose extant
scholia prove that he commented on the plays in
the following order : — Plutiis^ NubeSy Ranae^ EquiteSy Achamians^
VespaCy Pax^ AveSy Thcsmophoriazusoiy Ecclesicuusae and Lysis-
traia. He apparently produced the first edition of select plays
of Aristophanes^ The metres of that poet had already been
studied by Heliodorus, who preceded Hephaestion, and is some-
times placed in the first half of the first century a.d.
Among commentators on Plato, in the age of the Antonines,
we may mention Albinus, who was one of the instruc-
tors of Galen in 151, and wrote a considerable work tors on puto;
on the dogmas of Plato, the two surviving fragments aJScIm!!'
of which include a discussion on the order of the dia- X***®"* .
Nmiitaitw
logues, and a summary of Plato's teaching (under the
slightly altered name of Alcinous)'. A commentary on Plato was
^ Lucian, Proleg, p. 31 f, and v 175 ed. Bipont.
• Jul. Capitol., yerust c. 1.
• ed. Gaisford <i855*), and Westphal (1866). Cp. Christ, | 567*; Croiset,
V 649 f. ^ Wilamowitz, Eur, Her. i lypf; Romer, Siudien (190a).
• Printctl in K. F. Hermann's text of Plato, vol. vi (Croiset, ▼ 691).
S. 21
322 THE ROMAN AGE. [CHAP.
also written by one Atticus (fl. 1 75), and extracts from his exposition
of the Timaeus are preserved by Proclus. The mathematical
passages in Plato were expounded in a Neo-pythagorean spirit
by Theon of Smyrna, and part of this exposition has survived*.
Lastly, the Neo-pythagorean Numenius, who wrote on the di-
vergencies between the teaching of Plato and that of the later
Academy, is among the precursors of Neo-platonism.
A varied training in the principles of the Platonists, Peripa-
tetics, Stoics and Epicureans, fell to the lot of Galen
(131 — 201), who was born at Pergamon in the reign
of Hadrian, and studied medicine in Pergamon, Smyrna and
Alexandria before settling for a while in Rome. On the death of
M. Aurelius (180), he returned to Pergamon and there ended his
days. Besides being a prolific writer on medical and philosophical
subjects (including ethics and logic), he wrote on matters connected
with grammar and literary criticism. Of ten such works that he
names in the list of his own writings (c 17), five were on Ancient
Comedy. Some of the rest dealt with questions of Atticism,
including a lexicon in 48 books comprising words used by the
early Attic writers. In the treatise On the order of his own worhs
(c. 5) he shows that he had no sympathy with the Atticism of the
day ; he even ridicules those who criticised errors of pronunciation.
The aim of his lexicon was simply to determine the exact sense of
the words used by ancient writers, which, as he found, were often
misunderstood by his contemporaries. He is practically repeating
a precept of Aristotle's Rhetoric (iii 2, i), when he says that the
greatest merit of style is perspicuity', and the excellence of his
own style is due to his using ordinary language free from the
affectations of Atticism and archaism'. He wrote commentaries
on Plato's Timaeus and Fhilebus^ on Aristotle's Categories and
Analytics^ and on Theophrastus and Chrysippus; but, with the
exception of fragments of the first, they have not survived. His
118 genuine extant works include one on sophistical expressions,
and another on the dogmas of Hippocrates and Plato.
1 ed. Hiller, 1878.
' De Facultaiibus Nai.^ c. it ^(t y* tuylaniv \l^€iin dper^ ffa^^ipttop th^ai
* Croiset, v 731, 735; cp. Christ, § 645'.
XVIII.] GALEN. SEXTUS EMPIRICUS. 323
Towards the close of the second century the empiric school
of medicine was represented by Sextus Empiricus,
whose writings are our principal authority on the EraplScut
Greek Sceptics. The shorter of his two extant
works, the Pyrrhonean Sketches, is an outline of the views of the
founder of the Sceptics, in the form of a refutation of the logical,
physical and moral doctrines of the dogmatists; the longer, the
Sceptical Commentaries, consists of eleven Books, 1 — v being
directed against the dogmatists, and the remaining six against
teachers of the sciences (irph^ fiaOrnAartKovs), viz. the grammarians
(vi), rhetoricians (vii), geometricians (viii), arithmeticians (ixX
astrologers (x), and musicians (xi)\ He endeavours to demolish
all the liberal arts' in turn, with a view to proving that nothing
whatever can really be taught : much of his work, though marked
by considerable acumen, is puerile and pedantic ; but his poetic
quotations are of some interest; and, happily, in attacking the
arts, he preserves some important facts about them. Thus his
attack on the grammarians is of special value for certain items of
evidence connected with the history of Scholarship'. It may be
added that he approves the division of Grammar into three parts,
(i) techniccU, including the study of diction; (2) historical, including
the explanation of mythological and antiquarian allusions; (3) eoce^
gesis, criticism and emendation (i 4). He is here probably following
Apollonius^
The close of the century is marked by a name of note
among Christian scholars. Clement of Alexandria
{c. 160 — c, 215), probably an Athenian by birth, AieMndlu*'
sought in the philosophic schools of Greece and
Italy, of Syria and of Palestine, the teaching which he found at
last at Alexandria (r. 180) in the lectures of the Stoic Pantaenus,
who had become a convert to Christianity. Clement himself
taught at Alexandria {c, 190 — 203), first as the colleague and next
as the successor of Pantaenus, counting Origen among his pupils.
> In the Mss the second group of Books is wrongly placed first, and the
whole work is often quoted by the title of that group, Adv, MatAimaHcat,
' iyK6K\ia lUkBiiiuira, p. 600, I. 43.
• e.g, p. 10 n. 4 su^ra.
* Christ, I 5i«*; Croiset, v 701—3.
21 — 2
324 THE ROMAN AGE. [CHAP.
About 203 he left Alexandria for ever, passing the rest of his life
at various places in Asia Minor, and also at Antioch. The three
principal works, in which his teaching is successively unfolded,
are (i) his ExhortcUion (Xoyo« vporptwrmo^ npoq ^EXXi^kuc), a
learned and systematic attack on paganism, dealing almost entirely
with Greek mythology and Greek speculation ; (2) his Paedagogus^
a course of instruction resting on reason as well as revelation, and
partly borrowed from the Greek philosophers, and from the Stoic
Musonius Rufus'; (3) his Miscellanies^^ in which he aims at giving
precision of form to precepts of moral perfection, and reconciling
faith with reason. Christian truth with pagan philosophy. That
philosophy he regards as originally derived from the Hebrew
Scriptures and as leading up to Christianity by promoting habits
of serious thought and purifying the mind from unreasoning
prejudice*. In the spirit of an eclectic*, he borrows freely from
the Greek philosophers, and above all from Plato, sometimes
expressly acknowledging his obligations, sometimes tacitly leaving
them to be detected by readers familiar with the original. He
regards Greek philosophy as given by God for the training of the
nations, while it supplies the Christian philosopher with a recreation
only, as compared with the serious objects of his study*. He
has been well described as ' a born orator and friend of the Muses,
delighting in apt anecdotes and fine sayings, loving everything
in the shape of literature '^ There is no doubt as to the vast
variety of his learning, however imperfectly it may be assimilated.
It is from the Pythagorean Numenius^ that he borrows his famous
simile comparing Truth to the body of Pentheus, torn asunder
by fanatics, each seizing a limb and fancying he has the whole '.
He describes the mount of God as the true Cithaeron, and applies
to the mysteries of the Christian Church phrases borrowed from
1 Wendland, Quaest, Mason, (1886).
' jcard rV dXiy^ ^\o<ro^ar fnacriKutp OwofumifiiTuif ffrpiafiartit (parti-
coloured bundles) ; such fanciful titles were fashionable in this age ; cp. Pref.
to Gellius. Cp. Hort and Mayor's ed. of Book vii (1902), pp. xi f.
• Croiset, v 746 — 53. * Strom. \ p. 114.
• Strom, vi 149 — 168.
' Bigg*s Neoplaionisms p. 161.
' ap. Euseb. Praep. Ev. xiv 5, 7. • Strom, i 13, 57.
XVIII.] CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA. 325
the Bacchae of Euripides*. The Gospel is to him 'the New Song
more powerful than that of Orpheus or Orion "« His style is
deeply tinged with phrases from Homer, whom he sometimes
interprets allegorically ; he also shows a marked familiarity with
Attic usage*. For modem scholars the Miscellanies are by far
the most important of his works. The varied learning there
displayed has some resemblance to that accumulated in the nearly
contemporaneous work of Athenaeus. The author himself com-
pares its variety to that of a flowery meadow or a wooded
mountain diversified with every kind of growth ^ But, in all
this diversity, there is the leading thought that all the objects
of knowledge are brought into unity in the perfect Christian
philosopher. To Clement, all the philosophy, and indeed all
the learning, of the Greeks was more recent than that of other
nations, and most of it borrowed from the Jews. In the same
spirit, Numenius had already asked: 'What is Plato but Moses
expressing himself in Attic Greek?'*. Such opinions may be
traced to the learned Jews of Alexandria, to Philo Judaeus
(20 R.C. — 40 A.D.), and to Aristobulus (176 b.c), who says as
much in commenting on the Timaeus of Plato'; and one of the
links between Aristobulus and Clement may perhaps be found
in Alexander Polyhistor, who was interested in the Jews^ In
connexion with Greek Scholarship the most important passages
in the Miscellanies are i 21 (a comparison between Hebrew and
Greek chronology) ; v 14 (on the debt of Greek to Hebrew
literature) ; and vi 2 (on plagiarisms of Greek authors from one
another)*. The second of these passages is partly compiled from
Tatian.
Clement of Alexandria is the earliest of the Greek Fathers
who were specially conspicuous for learning. He has preserved
• 11. 470 — 7 ; Strom, iv 25.
' Exhort, c. I.
' Bigg*s Christian Platonists, p. 45 n; cp. (on hit allegories) Hatch's ffiUert
Lecturest p. 70.
^ Stroffi, vi i; vii III. * Strom, i ss, 150.
• Cp. Strom. V 14, 97.
^ Suprat p. 159. Cp. Cobet, *B/>/a^, i 170.
• Christ, I 68i«.
326 THE ROMAN AGE. [CHAP. XVIII.
a large number of details respecting the Orphic and Eleusinian
mysteries; and, from the knowledge of the mysteries displayed
in his Exhortation (2 and 12), it might even be inferred that he
had himself been initiated. Readers of Lobeck's Aglaophamus
may remember that, in these matters, he is there cited as a most
important witness (p. 140).
•"1^1^ i lua|i •« «•• i^^f •^ o ^ f « f ,*«^ p^ •••^***^ f •^
» /'i.^-^iiiriv.^^y •^•^"^MH*^ f *y*^* •^ •^^^
From Codex Parisinus (914 a.d.) of Clsmens Alexandrinus
{Proirept, § 48), copied by Baanes for Arethas, abp of Caesarea (p. 395 infra),
(E. M. Thompson's Palaeography, p. 164.)
<wafiaffTJi9a> iU¥W i$¥Ci¥* iTa¥t\$6¥Ta tit ktyvwrw irayay<4ff$<u rtX'
W>rat Ua^ovt' rbp oSr 'Ocrcpir, rhv wpordropa <r6i'ai^oG>, iedoK&tjfKU ixi'
XcMTcr a^rdf woXvrtX&r k < aro^Kcud > ^ec 8i airr6¥ Bp6a^t 6 9i^/uoupy^' oAx
6 'A^<aior dXXot> di rit 6/ub¥v/Mt Utlptoi rQt Bpvd^iir tt 0Xif<c>
CHAPTER XIX.
GREEK SCHOLARSHIP IN THE THIRD CENTURY.
In turning from the second to the third century, which
approximately begins with the accession of Sep-
timius Severus in 193 and ends with the abdication century**"*
of Diocletian in 305, we feel conscious of a sense
of decline. We leave the age of Aristides and Lucian for that of
the Philostrati, and Aelian and Athenaeus. In science we have
no longer any names to compare with those of Ptolemy of
Alexandria and Galen of Pergamon. In history, however, we
note a decided advance in authors such as Dion Cassius and
Herodian, both of whom made Thucydides their model. In
philosophy, the high level reached in the previous century by
M. Aurelius is fully maintained by the earliest of the Neo-
platonists. The decline of poetry, represented in the early part
of the century by the Cynegetics of Pseudo-Oppian, is compensated
by the rise of romance in the writings of Xenophon of Ephesus,
and of Heliodorus.
The Sophists of this century include Philostratus 'the Athenian'
(b. c. \io\fl. 215—245) who, before the year 217,
dedicated his Ufe of ApoUonius of Tyana to the .Si^ASJSTiI'
empress Julia Domna, the wife of Severus, the
mother of Caracalla, 'the patroness of every art, and the friend
of every man of genius'*. Perhaps the most memorable passage
is that in which ApoUonius, in connexion with the art of Sculpture,
identifies f^vratr(a with 'the creative imagination'*, thus giving
the term a new meaning unknown to Aristotle. A few years
1 Gibbon, c. 6 p 147 Bury). Philostr. VU. ApolL i 3; VU. S^. ii 30;
^A 73-
' vi 19 (quoted on p. 74); cp. wtfH fh/wttt xv 1, and Egger, p. 484.
328 THE ROMAN AGE. [CHAP.
later {c, 230-7) Philostratus wrote the Lives of the Sophists^
Book I including the ancient Sophists, such as Gorgias ; Book 11,
the modem, among whom Herodes Atticus is prominent These
Lives are neither real biographies nor. critical studies, but are
rhetorical portraits drawn in an exaggerated style. Incidentally
we here learn that, during the life of Herodes Atticus, a purer
Greek was spoken in Attica than in Athens itself*; and that,
even after the death of Aristides, the study of rhetoric flourished
at Smyrna*. His Gymnasticus^ written after 319, is not without
interest in connexion with the history of the Olympic games and
the various kinds of athletic contests. His Letters are mainly
inspired by the New Comedy of Athens and by the elegiac poets
of Alexandria*. They also supply an interesting link between
Greek and English poetry ; for it is here that we find the source
of Ben Jonson's well-known Song to Celia : —
'Drink to me only with thine eyes.
And I will pledge with mine;
Qr leave a kiss but in the cup
And I'll not look for wine....
I sent thee late a rosy wreath,
Not so much honouring thee,
As giving it a hope that there
It could not wither'd be.
But thou thereon didst only breathe
And sent'st it back to me;
Since when it grows, and smells, I swear,
Not of itself but thee!'«
Bentley's grandson, Cumberland, found fault with Jonson for
thus borrowing a ' parcel of unnatural, far-fetched conceits ' from
a despicable sophist's' 'obscure collection of love-letters'; and
Cumberland's criticism was in turn denounced by Giffard*.
^ ii I, 13. ' ii 16, f.
• Croiset, v 764 — 770.
^ <£/• 35» ^Mo' ^ M^oct rp6ru'€ roct 6fi/iaauf..,ii6»fov 9* if/^XoOira Odarot Ktd
Toct xc^^c'i wpoa^fiovffa rXijpov ^Xrifidrunf r6 9KVWfia (cp. Arbtaenetus, i 45,
and Agathias in An/A, Pa/, y 261), 1, wivofi^ aoi cri^opw ^wf, od vk TifiQw,
Kol TQvro fUif ydp, dXX' adroit rt x^t^'^o* ^<^> ^6dott, tra fi-^ fAOftapBj, 46, v/f.,
rd Xtl^eu^a (rdr ^wy) drWrcfi^f'or fifixiri rWorra ^69unf n6i^o^ dXXd Kol aoQ,
* Ben Jonson, viii (1875) 359 note. Cp. Saintsbury, i 119.
XIX.] PHILOSTRATUS. AELIAN. 329
Philostratus, 'the Athenian', is surpassed in poetic imagination,
and in a certain affectation of literary simplicity, by phiio-
his nephew, ' Philostratus of Lemnos ' (bom c. 190). ttntut 11,
The Heroicus of the latter comprises a series of
portraits of the heroes of the Trojan war, purporting to be derived
from the manifestations vouchsafed by the spirit of Palamedes to
a vine-dresser of scholarly tastes on the shore of the Hellespont
Homer's description of those heroes is here corrected, and made
more ethical and more dramatic. The work has some little
interest in a history of Scholarship, in so far as it mentions certain
Greek tragedies that are no longer extant, viz. the Oeneus (i 5)
and the Palanudes (xii 2) of Euripides, while it also attests a
continued interest in the study of Homer. In his Eikones he
professes to give a description of sixty-four pictures in a gallery
at Naples. The question whether actual works of art are here
described has been much discussed, the opinion that the descrip-
tions are derived from passages in the ancient poets being main-
tained by K. Friederichs (i860), and opposed by Brunn (1861,
187 1 ), while an intermediate view is suggested by F. Matz
(1867).
One of the imitators of the Eikones of Philostratus II was
his grandson, Philostratus III. Seventeen of his
descriptions are still extant. They are preceded rtmui in
by a brief discourse on the relations between
painting and poetry. The Eikones are also imitated by Calli-
stratus in his fourteen descriptions of statues, in-
eluding three by Praxiteles and one by Lysippus*.
Among writers of miscellanies we may mention Aelian
{c. 170 — 230), who was a priest at his native
place, Praeneste. A Roman in spirit, he spoke
Greek Mike an Athenian', his preceptor being Pausanias, the
'Atticist". He is the author of seventeen books On Animals^
mainly borrowed from Alexander of Myndos (first century a.d.),
and of fourteen books of Historical Miscellanies (irourtXi; urrop^).
In both of these works he exhibits wide and varied learning, and
* Christ, |§ 5«4-6'; CroUet, v 761—773. Schmid, AUkiimus^ Iv 7,
however, assigns the tbove works of Philostrttus II to Philottntus I.
< Philostr. Vii, Soph, ii 31.
330 THE ROMAN AGE. [CHAP.
a certain industry in collecting facts tending towards moral and
religious edification. The Rustic Letters^ which bear his name»
are probably of Athenian origin ; they are idyllic in tone, and are
inspired by the Middle and New Attic Comedy*.
A vast variety of erudition has been preserved by Athenaeus
of Naucratis, who lived at Rome under Commodus
Athenaeus
and his successors. His comprehensive work, en-
titled AciiTKoo-o^urrai or ' Doctors at dinner ', originally consisted
of thirty books. It was abridged into fifteen ; and it is this
abridgement that has come down to us in an incomplete form.
The scene is laid at the house of the Roman pontiff Larentius ;
and all kinds of accomplishments, — grammar, poetry, rhetoric,
music, philosophy and medicine, — ^are represented among the
many interlocutors, some of whom bear famous names, such as
Plutarch, Arrian, Galen and Ulpian. The reference (286 e) to
the death of Ulpian (228 a.d.) shows that the work was produced
after that date. It is an encyclopaedia under the disguise of
a dialogue. Food and drink, cups and cookery, stories of famous
banquets, scandalous anecdotes, specimens of ancient riddles and
drinking songs, and disquisitions on instruments of music, are
only part of the miscellaneous fare which is here provided. To
the quotations in Athenaeus we are indebted for our knowledge
of passages from about 700 ancient writers who would otherwise
be unknown to us, and, in particular, for the preservation of the
greater part of the extant remains of the Middle and New Attic
Comedy. We also owe to him the preservation of the celebrated
scolion of Callistratus on Harmodius and Aristogeiton (p. 695)'.
Rhetoric is represented in this age by Apsines of Gadara
(c, 190 — 250), who taught at Athens c, 235-8, and
Amines ^*^ ^ friend of Philostratus * the Athenian ', and a
rival (r. 244-9) of Fronto of Emesa. His speeches
have perished, but part of his teaching survives in his Rhdoric\
which contains nothing essentially new. Its aim is purely
practical; it gives few rules, but it happily illustrates them by
many examples. The author appears also to have written a
> Christ, I 519*; Croiset, v 774-7.
' ed. KAibel, 1887-90; cp. Christ, | 533*; Croiset, v 778^780.
' Spengel's Rk€t, Gr, i 331 — 414.
XIX.] ATHENAEUS. CASSIUS LONGINUS. 33 1
commentary on Demosthenes ^ The Rhetoric of Minucianus*
was regarded as a classic and was expounded by
Porphyry. It was also expounded by Menander
of Laodicea, probably the Menander mentioned in the scholia to
Demosthenes and Aristides. The name of Menander is also
borne by two treatises still extant", the first ^^ m^ ^
which is ascribed by Bursian* to Menander and
the second to Genethlius, while these ascriptions are reversed by
Nitsche*. In the first the various types of epideictic discourse
are distinguished ; and the sources from which they derive their
material, classified. Hymns to the gods are divided into nine
classes, and poets named as examples of each. The ' Praises of
Cities ', ' Harbours ' and ' Bays ', and the proper method of com-
posing an encomium on an Acropolis, are among the many
matters treated in this work. The second treatise deals with
forms of compliment, condolence etc*
The most eminent rhetorician of the third century was Cassius
Longinus (r. 220 — 273), the nephew and heir of
Pronto of Emesa, the pupil of Origen, the admirer
of Plotinus, the preceptor of Porphyry, and the minister of Queen
Zenobia. He studied at Alexandria, taught for thirty years at
Athens, and ended his days at Palmyra as the counsellor of
Zenobia, whom he nobly supported in her resistance to Aurelian,
who put him to death in 273. Of his treatise On the Chief End
(ircpi ri\o\tsi) only an extensive fragment remains \ He also wrote
a Neo-Platonic treatise (ircpl ^x^*")* ^^^ Plotinus, after reading it,
remarked that Longinus was a scholar (^cAoXoyos), but not a
philosopher^ As a rhetorician, he composed several works ; and
we still possess part of his treatise on Rhetoric imbedded in that
of Apsines, and first identified by Ruhnken as the work of
> Schol, on Dem. Lept, p. 458, 9; and on Hermogenes, v 517 Wmls. Cp.
Pauly-Wissowa, s.v, and Croitet, v 781 f.
« Spcngel, i 415—434.
' ib. iii 339—446.
^ Bayer, Akad, 1884, Abt, 3.
• Berlin (1883); Bureian*t/aJlr£r^. xlvi 98 f.
* Croiset, v 783 f ; Saintibury, i 104 f.
' Porphyry, Vit, PloHni^ | 30.
s ib, I 14.
332 THE ROMAN AGE. [CHAP.
Longinus\ It is little more than a collection of practical
observations on ' invention \ arrangement, style, delivery, and
the art of memory*. It owed its reputation to the fact that it
was found simple, short and easy to remember, as compared with
the earlier Rhetoric of Hermogenes'. The studies of Longinus
ranged over philosophy, rhetoric and criticism; in the opinion
of Porphyry, he was the first of critics \ while Eunapius describes
him as a 'living library and a walking museum". He produced
two editions of a treatise on Attic phrases, and several works on
Homer'; and his Homeric problems had their influence on a
similar work by his pupil, Porphyry. It was his high renown
as a critic that led to the conjecture of the copyists that be
was the author of the treatise On the Sublime (p. 382) ; and there
are some points of coincidence with that treatise in the fragments
of his Philosophical Discourses '.
Materials for a history of Philosophy existed at an early date
in the form of documents preserved by certain
LaKrtfui** schools. These had been utilised in the lives
written by writers such as Aristoxenus, Speusippus,
Hermippus and Antigonus of Carystus ; in the lists of the suc-
cessive heads of each school drawn up by Sotion and Heracleides
Lembus; and in the summaries of the opinions held in one or
other school, as stated by Theophrastus, Areius Didymus, and
Aetius*. But the history of Philosophy had still to be written,
and it is only an uncritical compilation that is supplied by
Diogenes Laertius (of Laerte in Cilicia), who may be placed early
in the third century. He ends his account of the Sceptics with
the immediate successor of Sextus Empiricus (ix 116), and he
says nothing of Neo-Platonism. His work is dedicated to a lady
* Opusc. 183-5; Wyttenbach*s Zi^ of Ruhnken, p. 169, quoted in Wtlz,
Hhei, Gr, ix p. xxiii f.
* Spengel, i 399 — 310. • ib, p. 34 1.
^ yu, Plotini ao, tii^riKfaTi,rw koX ^XXoyi/Mn'drov, tad 11, ^r jr^«-et rpwrot.
» Vita Porphyrii.
' Suldas meniions dro^/Aara and itphfUKynkfira. *Ofifipucdt tl ^iX6^o0ot *Ofti|pof
etc
' ^XiXoyoi 6tu\Uu, WaU, I^A^i. Gr, vi 335 (on Sophocles); vii 963 (rcpt
X^^ffwt rrofi^tMovt, cp. rtpl Ofovt iii r, xxxii 7).
* DieU, D^xographi,
XIX.] DIOGENES LAERTIUS. 333
of high rank, interested in philosophy (iii 47, ix ao). It aims
at enumerating the chief representatives of each school, with
brief biographical sketches of an anecdotic character, a list of
their works and a popular statement of their views. The first
two books include the * Seven Wise Men of Greece ', the earliest
philosophers down to Anaxagoras and Archelaus, and Socrates
and his pupils with the exception of Plato, who is reserved for
book iiL Book iv is on the Academics, v on Aristotle and the
Peripatetics, vi on the Cynics, and vii on the Stoics from Zeno to
Chrysippus. In viii we return to the earlier age, to the school
of Pythagoras, with Empedocles and Eudoxus ; in ix we have
a confused jumble including Heracleitus, the Eleatics, the
Atomists and the Sceptics, while x is entirely on the School of
Epicurus, to which the compiler himself appears occasionally to
incline. Even in the case of Epicurus, the author has been
convicted of gross carelessness in the use of his authorities ^
while, in his list of the works of Aristotle, he follows the old
Alexandrian catalogue, ignoring the fact that they had subse-
quently been edited in a fuller form by Andronicus of Rhodes,
in the time of Cicero. The work appears to have been partly
founded on the works of Diocles of Magnesia (IwiBpofiti ^iXoai^^itti^,
first century B.C.), and Favorinus of Aries (iravroSair^ toTopm),
with literary items from the forgeries' of Lobon of Argos (irtpl
voiYfTtav) '.
I^te in the second and early in the third century is the age
of the most important of the ancient commen-
tators on Aristotle, Alexander of the Carian town <,f AphredtiUt
of Aphrodisias. He flourished under Septimius
Severus, having been called to Athens c. 198, and having dedicated
to Severus and Caracalla (not later than 211) his work On Faie^
which is an inquiry into Aristotle's opinions on Fate and Free-
will. His works, which are of special value in connexion with
the text of Aristotle and the history of Greek philosophy, are
' Uscncr, Epicurean xxi f.
' Hiller in Rhein, Mus, xxxiii 518 f.
* F. Nietzsche, in Hhein, Mus, xxiii — xxv, and Wilamowits, Phil, Uni, iv
330-49. Favorinus alone is regarded as his original by Maass, Pkii, Unt,,
Heft 3 and Rudolph, Leipt, Stud, vii 116 (Christ | 514*; Croitet, v 818—810).
334 THE ROMAN AGE. [CHAP.
largely quoted by later writers, such as the Neo-Platonists Syrianus
and Simplicius. Holding aloof from the mystical tendencies of
the Academics of his time, he mainly confined himself to the
interpretation of Aristotle. His extant commentaries deal with
the First Book of the Analytics \ the Topica ', the De Sensu ' and
the Metaphysics^, He is also the author of several independent
treatises ^ About half of his voluminous writings were edited
and translated into Latin at the revival of learning; and his
genuine works have been recently published, mainly by the Berlin
Academy*.
The only original product of Greek genius in the third century
was Neo-Platonism, which necessarily involved a
PUtonitin renewed study of the teaching of Plato, though it
attempted to combine that teaching with the tenets
of other schools of Greek philosophy. The doctrines of those
earlier schools had already been partially merged with one another,
and had also been blended with old and new varieties of belief.
This tendency had shown itself in Philo Judaeus, in Plutarch and
Numenius and (early in this century) in Alexander of Aphrodisias,
the commentator on Aristotle. In the same century the verbal
study of Plato's text was exemplified in the Platonic lexicon of
the sophist Timaeus', which is later than Porphyry unless the
extract from that Neo-Platonist (x. v. ovx riKixTra) is an inter-
polation.
Neo-Platonism is generally regarded as having been founded
by Ammonius Saccas, who taught at Alexandria during the first
half of the third century, but did not reduce his teaching to a
written form. Among his many pupils {c. 205 — 211) was the
Christian philosopher Origen (185 — 254), who in 203 succeeded
Clement as head of the Christian School of Alex-
andria. He was the first great scholar among the
Greek Fathers. With his own hand he supplied himself with
transcripts of the Greek Classics, but sold them all for a small
1 ed. Wallies (1883). * id, (1891).
* ed. Thurot (1875). * Latest ed. Hayduck (1891).
' Scripta Minora^ ed. Brans in SuppL Ar, ii.
* Gerke in Pauly-Wissowa, i 1453 f.
' ed. Ruhnken, 1785^
XIX.] NEOPLATONISTS. PLOTINUS. 33$
sum in order to be enabled to teach others without receiving any
remuneration. The work of Origen most closely connected with
Scholarship was his Hexapla^ an edition of the Old Testament
exhibiting in six parallel columns the Hebrew text and the same
in Greek characters, with the four translations by Aquila, Sym-
machus, the * Seventy ' and Theodotion. Seven shorthand writers
and as many copyists took part in it, and the work filled fifty
large rolls of parchment ; but it is now represented by fragments
alone. He also devoted much time and labour to the text of
the New Testament. As a commentator he holds that Scripture
has in general three senses, the literal, the moral, and the spiritual;
and, with a view to eliciting the last of these, he specially favours
the allegorical method of interpretation. These three senses
he regards as corresponding to the body, soul and spirit, which
he fancifully describes as figured in the water-pots of Cana
'containing two or three firkins a-piece'^ This weakness for
allegorising was combined with a wide variety of learning. Ac-
cording to a discourse delivered in his presence in 239 by his
pupil, Gregory Thaumaturgus, the range of his teaching at
Caesarea included dialectics, physics, geometry, astronomy, ethics,
metaphysics and theology ; while he is described by Jerome
{Ep, 70) as finding in Plato and Aristotle, in Numenius and
Cornutus, support for the doctrines of Christianity*.
The principles of Neo-Platonism were reduced to writing by
Plotinus (204 — 270), who studied under Ammonius ^. .
Saccas at Alexandna from 232 to 243, and spent
the remaining twenty-six years of his life at Rome. He may
justly be regarded as the true founder of Neo-Platonism, in so
far as he perpetuated its principles in a written form. In his
class-room 'the later Platonic and Aristotelian commentators
were read'; but everywhere an original turn was given to the
discussions, into which Plotinus carried the spirit of Ammonius ' \
' Origen*s Philotaiia^ c. la, p. I9t J* A. Robinson.
* Croiset, v 845-55 ; q>. Christ, | 683*, Bigg*s CAristum PUiimUsts^ tnd
WestcoU in Diet, Chr, Biogr,
» Porph. r. Ploi, 3.
« T. Whittaker, Tkt Nw-Platonists, p. 33 ; q>. Btgg*s Netpiaicmsm,
p. 187.
33^ THE ROMAN AGE. [CHAP,
The teaching of Plodnus has been preserved with the aid of his
pupil, Porphyry (233 — c, 301-5), in six groups of nine books
called the i?if/f^a^/x\ Porphyry had, in his youth,
known Origen at Alexandria ; and had been a pupil
of Cassius Longinus at Athens. It was from Longinus that he
received the name of ' Porphyrius ', as a rendering of his Tyrian
name of Malchus, or 'King'. In 263 he became the pupil
of Plotinus in Rome. He was a scholar and a mathematician,
as well as a philosopher and a historian. From Porphyry to
Julian one of the principal aims of Neo-Platonism was the philo-
sophic defence and maintenance of paganism. Porphyry's attacks
on Christianity, which were mainly concerned with historical
criticism, and had an important influence on Julian 'the Apostate',
were answered by Eusebius and others. His History of Philosophy
was mainly confined to Plato, but it included a Life of Pythagoras^
which is extant. He was among the last of the writers on
philosophy who had a first-hand knowledge of the writings of
his predecessors ; and he quotes Longinus ' as saying that, with
the exception of Plotinus and Amelius (a pupil of Plotinus),
philosophers had ceased to do anything more than collect and
expound and expand the opinions of their predecessors. In
extreme old age he wrote the Life of Plotinus \ and his own
expositions of his master's teaching are still represented in his
Sententiae*, He also compiled a work on Chronology, which
is among the authorities followed by Eusebius \ In the domain
of Scholarship he produced a treatise on 'philological research'
(^iA<$Xoyo9 urropia), and On ' grammatical questions ' (ypa/x/Aarcicai
diropcai), as well as an ' introduction ' to Thucydides, and to the
Categories of Aristotle. His Eisagoge^ or introduction to the
latter, as translated by Boethius (p. 240), had an important
influence on the thought of the Middle Ages; his commentary
on the Categories exists in fragments only^ He also wrote on
> cd. Creuzer (Oxford, 1835), (Paris, 1850).
* I'rafT. 5, 5.
* T. Whiltaker, pp. 113-4.
* Frag. Hist. Gr. iii 688 f.
' Porphyrii hagoge et in Aristoteiis Caiegorias commentarium^ ed. Biisse
in Comm. Arist. iv, with Boethius' translation of the Isagoge (1887). The
XIX.] ARISTIDES QUINTILIANUS. 337
' the philosophy of Homer \ and on the profit which kings might
derive from his poems. This department of his literary activity
is now represented only by some fragments of his HomerU
Questions (Ofitipuck (ip^/iara)', which have several points of
contact with Aristotle's Hotntrk Problems *, and by his work On
the Cave of the Nymphs^, In the latter, the Cave in Ithaca,
which is the theme of the beautiful description in Od. xiii loa — 112,
is treated as an allegory of the universe ; the cave itself and the
nymphsy the two entrances into the cave, the vessels of stone
and the bees, are all of them allegorically interpreted in a highly
imaginative composition marked with superabundant learning
and (happily) enriched with numerous citations. Many moral
sentences borrowed from Sextus and Epicurus are imbedded in
his Letter to Marcella^ \ while his treatise De Abstinentia (ircpl
^iroyrj^ lyL^yiav\ in which vegetarianism is recommended to those
alone who lead a philosophic life*, has preserved for us the sub-
stance of the treatise of Theophrastus On Piety*y besides many
quotations from the poets, e.g. the important fragment of the
Cretes of Euripides. The work on Homer's Life and Poems^
preserved in Plutarch's Moraiia^ is sometimes ascribed to Por-
phyry. The pleasing effect there recognised in the figure homoeo-
teietiton^ has led to its being credited with an early recognition of
the charm of rhyme ^
The theory of Music was treated by Aristides Quintilianus,
who is certainly later than Cicero', and probably
later than Porphyry. His description of the descent Q^nSni^,
of the Soul from the region of the Ether, and of
Isagoge was also translated into Sjrriac, and the work of a Hellenised Sjrrian
was thus the means of introducing his countrymen to the study of Aristotle
(A. Baumstark, AristoieUs bei den Syrem).
> ed. H. Schrader (iSSo). Cp. GrUfenhan, ill 198 f.
* Kx. frag. 141, 164, 1 78, Rose.
* Nauck, ed. 3 (1886), with VUa Pytkag,, De Abstinenim and Ad
Marcellam.
* Usener's Epicurea^ p. Iviii f ; cp. A. Zimmemi Perpkyry to Marcella
(1896).
* T. Whillaker, pp. 114-144. • Bemays, Tkeopkrattos (1866).
' Trench, Sacred Latin Poetry^ p. 30^ (SainUbury, i 68 f ).— On Porphyry
in general, see Croiset, v 831-841, and cp. Christ. | 641*.
* vfpl ftcvfuciitf ii 6.
S. 22
338 THE ROMAN AGE. [CHAP. XIX.
its passing through that of the Moon *, is distinctly Neo-Platonic,
and can be closely paralleled by a passage in Porphyry*. The
value of his work depends mainly on its indebtedness to Aris-
toxenus of Tarentum, and to still earlier authorities, such as
Damon of Athens, the friend of Plato*.
^ Ttpi ftouo-urfff ii 17.
' StnUmHae, 34.
' von Jan in Pauly-Wissowa, ii 894.
K^PCi
From Codbx Pakisinus of a student's copy of a Commentary on
Porphyry's Introduction to Aristotle's Categories (1333 a.d.).
(E. M. Thompson's PiUtuography^ p. 173.)
ro&rttiff iK€i tUrlp, Kal al inr6\oiroi' 6rov di ftla < ^irXf /rcroi > , circi Ktd
Ttiffai iKkelrown, tlfnfKdrtt rdf kowu^I <.at Xf^M^^^A^'' '^^^ ^'^ ^^* dia^opdt,
dtvripa di dca^opd aCr&tf < inripxirai, > 6 rp^ot rQt KarYfOplat' al /A^r yiip iw
rCk rl krruf KaTiiyo<.poOpTtt>' Cxnrtp rb yipw kqX rh tUot* al Ik iw rCk 6woibif
< r< erriM > waTep if dia^opii, xal rd fdcor xal r6 0'u/i/9ff/3i|4r6f .
David the Armenian.
22 — 2
Conspectus of Greek Literature, &€•, 300 — 600 A.D.
HijfPf^n
Po«ta
Qironolofferi
Oratoxiand
Boliolanaiid
OtlMrWHtm
Emparon
ft HiBtorlaiu
Bhotorlolani
OrltiM
of ProM
3MCoasUnUusI
3o6CoosuniineI
3x3 Etttebius
lamblichut
afiS— 340
c. a8o— c. ^
335Philostiatus
III Later
Ulpian
3a6 Athaiutfius
335 DexippuB
«95— 373
33I(
EikoMtt
-40 Cbnsun-
? Callistratus
^ tine II
340 Proaeresius
36sTheon
367 Epiphaniut
-61 Constan-
876—368
3«S— 403
UusII
Olympiodorus I
Gregory
-50 vCoosuns I
Libaaius
3«4-f.393
Themistiua
Naaiaoaen
361 Julian
xio-^^-c. 394
Himenus
Gregory 01
363 lovian
364 Valens
36a ApoUinaris
of Laodicea,
c. 315—386
NysJ
381 Chryaoatom
d. c. 383-99
Quintus Smyr*
naeus
378Theodo«iusI
«^. /Ammonius
^'iHelUdius
394 Theodora of
395 Arcadius
Aphtbouius
Theudosius
Mopaucatia
^.350—403
100
406 Synesiua
408 Theodo-
Palladas
403 Eunapius,
Liveto/Pkih-
Troilus
Stephanus
.f\3yo-f'4i3
sius 11
Bysantinus
Isidore of
pkuts
Pdusium
c, 410 Nonnus
4a5 0rus
435 Orion
41a Lyril of
Eudoda
439 Theodoret
386^. 458
439 Socrates
Syrianus
4i5d.o(Hvpatia
43id.ofPluiar-
chua
415-SoHieroclca
443 Sotomen
450 Marcian
Anatolius, bp of
450 Zosimus
Hesychius
431-38 Syrianus
438-85 Produs
457 Leo I
Constantinople
Alexandrinus
449-5«
410— ^8s
c. 450 SyrUc
474 Leo II
0H AritUtU
474Zeno
Tryphiodorus
Stobaeus
485 Marinus
480— sao 'Dio-
Colluthus
Procopius of
H enneias
nysius Arco-
(;axa
Timotheus of
pagita'
Musaeus
John of Antioch
Marcellinus
Gaia
Ariscaenetus
fUMI
Christodonu
Romanus
518 Justin I
5i8Zachariahof
Sopater
Ammonius son
Isidorua
527 Justinian I
Mitylene
532-6 Procopius
of Uermeias
Henas
yi, 527—568
Petnis Patncius
Choricius
Simplidus
Agapetus
Joannes Philo-
Paulus Silen-
tiariuft
A 534— 56a
533 Nonnokus
punus
0/ AtJUtu
Agathias
Agaihias
cU$td
c. 536—582
C' 536—588
5<i lohn Lydus
563 John Malalas
r. 5^ Hesychius
of Miletus
Joannes Charax
56< Justin II
578 Tiberius II
58a Mauricius
581 Theophanes
564 Olvmpiodo-
rus II
of Antioch
d. 590
56a Menander
^ww
Protector
t David the Ar-
59^ John of
i!.piphania
menian
YChocroboscus 1
593 Lvagrius
1
CHAPTER XX.
GREEK SCHOLARSHIP IN THE FOURTH CENTURY.
The fourth century begins a few years before the abdication
of Diocletian (305). By the end of its first quarter
(3*4)> Christianity was recognised as the religion centtwy**"^
of the State, and Byzantium chosen as the site
of the new capital, which was henceforth to become a new centre
of Greek learning. Before two-thirds of the century had passed,
a pagan reaction had intervened during the brief reign of Julian
(361-3). A historian of the eleventh century, who assigns to
his reign the last of the pagan oracles, informs us, that the
emperor sent envoys to restore the temple of Apollo at Delphi,
but the work was no sooner begun, than the envojrs were bidden
to return with the following response : —
etrare r*} /9a^iX^, X^A^u viat MfoXof affki,
06 Ta7dr XaXffoO<rar* dWtf'/^cro Kul XdXov OS^pK
Tell ye the king: to the ground hath fallen the gloriooi dwelling;
Now no longer hath Phoebas a cell, or a laurel prophetic;
Hushed is the voiceful spring, and quenched the oracular fountain.
By the end of the fourth century, the Serapeum of Alexandria
had been destroyed (391), the Senate of Rome had (nominally
at least) become Christian (394), the Olympian festival had been
abolished, the overthrow of paganism completed under Theo-
dosius I, and the rule of the Roman Empire divided on his
death between his two sons, Arcadius, who ruled in the East,
and Honorius in the West (395).
In this time of transition from paganism to Christianity, the
principal Greek authors on the Christian side were Eusebius,
' Cedrenus, ffisi, C^mp. i 304, p. 534 Bonn.
342 THE ROMAN AGE. [CHAP.
Athanasius, Epiphanius, Basil, Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of
Nyssa, Chrysostom, and Theodore of Mopsuestia. Of these,
Eusebius (265 — 340), the devoted pupil of Pam-
philus, in whose library he laid the foundation of
his vast erudition and whose name he gratefully assumed by
calling himself Eusebius Pamphili, was bishop of Caesarea in
Palestine (313 — 340). He is best known as a historian and
chronologer. In the previous century a sketch of the comparative
chronology of the history of the Jews and Gentiles had been
drawn up by Julius Africanus, ending with 221 a.d. This was
one of the principal works incorporated by Eusebius in his
Chronicle, The latter was in two parts, (i) an epitome of uni-
versal history, and (2) chronological tables, the whole constituting
the greatest chronological work produced by the ancient world
It is the foundation of most of our knowledge of the dates of
Greek and Roman history, down to 325 a.d. In part (i), the
first authority quoted for Greek history is Castor of Rhodes
(60 B.c), who supplies the lists of the kings of Sicyon, Argos
and Athens. Next comes a list of Olympian victors, doubtless
taken from Julius Africanus, ending with the Olympic victor of
220 A.D. ; the kings of Corinth and Sparta from Diodorus; of
Macedonia, Thessaly and Syria from Porphyry, who had previously
been followed in the list of the Ptolemies. The epitome of
Roman history begins with excerpts fro(n Dionysius of Hali-
camassus, Diodorus and Castor, and mentions Cassius Longinus,
Phlegon of Tralles and Porphyry among the authorities followed.
The author's object was to show that the Books of Moses were
earlier than any Greek writings, but scholars may be grateful
to him for having carried his work far beyond the narrow limits
necessary to prove that point. The Greek of Eusebius survives
in excerpts only ; for our knowledge of the rest we have to rely
on the Latin version by Jerome, and the Armenian translation,
first published in i8i8^ The Ecclesiasticai History of Eusebius
(ending with 324 a.d.) was the first of its kind; while his Prae-
gratia Evangelical includes a survey of the various forms of
^ Eusebi Chronicorum libri duc^ ed. Schoene 1866-75; ^^ Chronkorum
Librit ed. Fotheringham. Cp. Salmon in Diet, Chr, Biogr, ii 348-55.
> ed. E. H. Gifford.
XX.] EUSEBIUS. BASIL. 343
religious belief, with numerous citations from the philosophers
of Greece, as many as twenty-three of the dialogues of Plato
being quoted, and more than fifty passages from the Laws alone *.
Athanasius of Alexandria (395 — 373), the champion of ortho-
doxy, with all his subtlety of dialectic, is more interesting as a
man of action than as an orator and an author. Epiphanius
(315 — 403), the head of a school of learning near Jerusalem from
335 to 367, and, for the rest of his life, bishop of Constantia
(the ancient Salamis in Cyprus), gives in his Refutation 0/ Heresies
a brief account of the various forms of Greek philosophy*. Basil
(331 — 379), bishop of Caesarea in Cappadocia,
and Gregory of Nazianzus in the same region
(^. 330 — c 390), were pupils at Athens of the Christian teacher
Proaeresius and of the pagan Himerius. Both alike protest
against the prejudice with which the ancient Greek literature was
regarded by many Christians, the former devoting a special dis-
course to proving by numerous citations that that literature is
full of precepts and examples calculated to elevate the mind and
to prepare it for Christian teaching*. Basil describes his retreat
on the river Iris in Pontus, where he spent five years in founding
the earliest monasteries of the East and in making selections fi'om
the works of Origen, as more beautiful than the island of Calypso
(Ep, 14 ; 358 A.D.). When the envoy sent by Basil to Pope
Damasus for aid in contending against the semi-Arians of the
East returned without result, Basil expressed in a quotation from
Homer (//. ix 698 f ) his regret that he had ever approached so
proud a personage (Ep. 339). In his Hexaimeron he imitates
Philo Judaeus, and in his turn is imitated by Ambrose. The
Funeral Sermon on Basil, a masterpiece of sacred eloquence, was
preached by his friend Gregory of Nazianzus. The latter is best
known as an eloquent preacher; but he is also a skilful writer
* Lightfoot DUt, Ckr. Bw^. ii 331 A.
* Printed separmtely by Dielt in hii D&X4impki^ pp. 587— 593* *"<! leverely
criticiied on pp. 175-7.
* wpl6% To^ wiovt Swm if 4^ ^XXifrarAr i^^Xoirro X^tmt, ed. Sommer (1894),
Bach (1901). Cp. Di Sttuii0 S, S, ad Gr^, Ep. ii, and GrcRor. Nax. Funermi
Sermon on Batii^ p. 39.) c Morell, on profane education, 1)^ al voXXal X^riardr
acarnJou^cr, in MfiouXw vol ^^tLktpip vol 8ffoO w6ppt0 ^XXav#«»f KtutAt dUrn
(Croiset, v 937).
344 I^HE ROMAN AGE. [CHAP.
of hexameter, elegiac, iambic and ionic verse of the ordinary
classical type, varied twice by metres of a new kind depending
not on quantity but on accent. In his verses he occasionally
borrows from Empedocles. The cento from the Bacchoi and
other plays of Euripides, once ascribed to him, is now recognised
as a production of the Middle Ages\ Basil's brother, Gregory
of Nyssa {f, 343 — c. 396), while he incidentally shows us that
Christian youth still continued to be instructed in pagan poetry',
is mainly a theologian animated in exegesis by Origen's partiality
for the spiritual, figurative and allegorical form of interpretation,
which was strongly opposed by Theodore of Mopsuestia (r. 350 —
403) and by Chrysostom. Chrysostom (344-7 — 404), who exhibits
the art of a Demosthenes and an Isocrates super-
ChryaMtom . ., /.
added to a great natural genius, was a pupil of
Libanius at Antioch, where for sixteen years (381 — 397) he
wielded by his extraordinarily eloquent discourses a far wider
influence than he ever attained during his brief and troubled
tenure of the patriarchate of Constantinople (398 — 403). Theo-
dore of Mopsuestia (r. 350 — 428) is highly esteemed as a biblical
expositor and a theological controversialist. His
MopauettiV Opposition to the allegorical method of interpreta-
tion is noticed by Photius (Cod, 3). He prefers
the grammatical and historical method which he had inherited
from Chrysostom's master and his own, Diodorus of Antioch;
and in the exegesis of the New Testament, he shows the instincts
of a scholar in noticing minor words which are often overlooked,
in attending to niceties of grammar and punctuation, and in
keenly discussing doubtful readings'.
The mystic and Neo-Platonist, lamblichus, died about 330 a.d.
This enables us to infer the approximate date of the Neo-Platonist
Dexippus, who refers to lamblichus in the introduction to his
extant Commentary on the Categories of Aristotle \
Dexippus is also the author of a dialogue on the
criticisms of Plotinus on the Categories^, Apart from Neo-
Platonists, the principal writers of prose, on the pagan side, were
^ ed. Brambi (1885). ' ii p. 179.
' H. B. Swete in Diet, Chr, Biogr, iv 947 a.
* ed. Busse, 1888. ■ ed. Spengel, 1859.
XX.] CHRYSOSTOM. THEODORE. HIMERIUS. 34S
Himerius, Themistius, Libanius and Julian. Himerius, bom at
Prusa {c. 315), was for nearly forty years a teacher
at Athens. Of his seventy-one Declafnahons only
thirty-four have survived. Some of these are rhetorical exercises
on themes such as the defence of Demosthenes by H3rpereideSy
or the plea of Demosthenes for the recall of Aeschines. Others
are of the nature of inaugural orations at the beginning of an
Academic course. One of the latter is as solemn a discourse
as that of a hierophant at Eleusis : — ' Before the ceremony opens
which is to give you access to the sanctuary, let me distinctly
warn you what you should do, and what you should avoid ' ^ In
another he tells his 'freshmen' that, to lead his flock, he has
no occasion to resort to the rod, but is content to rely on melody
alone : ' what blended sound of flute and pipes can touch your
souls like the simple accents of this Chair?'* In an earlier age
he might have been an elegant poet instead of a semi-poetical
rhetorician. He is far from being a profound student of Thucy-
dides and Demosthenes ; he shows a much deeper interest in
poetry. He borrows largely from the ancient lyric poets, supplying
us with prose paraphrases of some of the lost odes of Alcaeus ',
Sappho* and Anacreon', and also showing his familiarity with
Stesichorus, Ibycus, Simonides and Pindar*.
Themistius (bom c, 310-30) declined important appointments
in Rome and Antioch, and spent most of his life ^^ . ^
at Constantmople, where he had a high reputation
as an eloquent teacher. He enjoyed the favour of the emperors
Constantius II, Julian, Jovian, Valens and Theodosius, and was
entrusted with the education of Arcadius, but probably did not
live to see his pupil ascend the throne of the East (395). We
possess part of his early work, his Paraphrases of Aristotle^ the
portion still extant being a somewhat prolix exposition of the
^ xxii 7 ; XV 3 (Cmpes, (/mvirsiiy Life in Amiini Athens^ p. 80 f) ; q>.
Bemhardy, Gr, Litt, i 66o«; Juleville't VJ^oU dTAtkhut', and Henberg,
Geschichte Griechtnlands^ iii 311-57.
• XV 1; Capes, p. ii4f. • xlv 10.
* Frag. 133, 147 Bergk.
• Frag. 1^4-6 Bergk.
* xxii 5 ; xiii 7; Teaber, Qua€st, HitHtrmmae (1884); ed. DUbner (1849) ;
cp. Christ, I 609', and Crotset, v 869 f.
34^ THE ROMAN AQE. [CHAP.
Later Analytics^ the Physics^ the De Anima^ and some minor
treatises *. His . paraphrase of the Metaphysics^ Book A, was
translated into Arabic (in century ix), and thence into Hebrew
(1255), ^^^ Latin (1576)*. In his teaching he appears to have
assigned a prominent place to the Categories, When he is
charged with making his pupils presumptuous and conceited, he
inquires: 'have you ever heard of any of my friends speaking
proudly or behaving haughtily on the strength of synonyms or
homonyms or paronyms?" His original work consists mainly
of official harangues. Under several successive emperors he was
practically the public orator of Constantinople, and the noblest
use which he made of that position was to plead repeatedly for
toleration in matters of religious belief and worship. He was
highly esteemed by Christians and pagans alike \ His Christian
correspondent Gregory Nazianzen calls him 'the king of elo-
quence' (Ep, 140). He names, as the five Classics studied in
Constantinople, Thucydides, Isocrates, Demosthenes, Plato and
Aristotle*; as a sixth, he mentions Aristophanes*. He shows
us his general relation to the ancient Classics in a composition
addressed to his father (Or, 20), where we find him vaguely
referring to the 'golden Menander, and Euripides, and Sophocles,
and fair Sappho and noble Pindar ', while he quotes and actually
discusses various authors in his Basanistes (Or. 21); but he
supplies us with nothing of the nature of definite literary criticism.
'To Themistius...the great writers of old are persons worthy of
infinite respect, to be quoted freely, but to be quoted... for the
substance only". In another of his discourses (Or, 23) he
complains of the length of time spent by teachers on the exposition
of a single author, ' wasting as much time on one poor book as
the Greeks spent in the siege of Troy '. He holds himself aloof
from the Sophists of the day: 'the Sophists might dwell con-
tentedly in the unrealities of dreamland, but eternal verities alone
engaged the attention of his class".
> ed. Spengel, 4 volt. (1866) ; also Anai. Pr, i, ed. Wallicf (1884).
' Steinschneider, Jfedr, C/tderfi/MtingeM, | 89.
> Or, xxiii p. 351 (Grote*s Ar, i 81).
* Christ, I 601'; Croiset, v 871-6; ed. Dindorf, 1831. ■ O. iv p. 71.
* Or, xxiii p. 350. ' Saintsbury, i 115. * Capet, p. 9a
XX.] THEMISTIUS. LIBANIUS. 347
Another leading teacher of the day was Libanius (314 — €. 393).
He was born at Antioch. At the age of fifteen he l«,||„iu,
showed his first eagerness for literary learning, sold
all his favourite pigeons, and turned with enthusiasm to the
ancient Classics. The authors then most read were Homer and
Hesiod, Herodotus and Thucydides, Lysias and Demosthenes;
but others, such as the dramatists, and Pindar ahd Aristophanes,
Plato and Aristotle, were not neglected, as is proved by quotations
in Libanius and his contemporaries. At the age of twenty he
read the Acharnians during a terrific storm of thunder and
lightning, which almost blinded him and made him deaf, and
even left him liable to headaches for the rest of his life^ At
the age of twenty-two, though his kinsmen wished to keep him
at home, and his friends offered him rich heiresses in marriage,
he insisted on completing his education at Athens: 'he would
have declined the hand even of a goddess, if he could only see
the smoke of Athens". At Athens he at once became the victim
of a party of students who insisted on his attending the lectures
of their favourite professor alone, whom he soon deserted for
the private study of the ancient Attic authors'. He was a student
for about four years, during which he visited Corinth, Argos
(where he was initiated in the local mysteries) and Sparta (where
he attended the primitive ceremony of scourging at the altar
of Artemis Orthia). But his time at Athens passed swiftly
by : 'he saw it only as in a dream, and then went on his way '1
Soon afterwards, however, he became a public teacher at Athens,
Constantinople, Nicaea and Nicomedeia, where he spent five
years (344 — 349), which long remained in his memory as the
very 'flower' and 'spring-time of his life". It was there also
that he was visited by a friend who brought with him the welcome
gift of a whole waggon-load of books*. From Nicomedeia he
returned to Constantinople and Athens, and finally, at the age
of forty, after sixteen years' absence, reached his old home at
Antioch, where he remained as a public teacher for the rest
of his life. Among the Greek rhetoricians of the Roman age
M 9 r ; Ep. 639. * i 1 1 (Cipet, p. 66).
» i 13 (f*. 99 f). * Capes, p. 67.
• i 38. • i 39-
348 THE ROMAN AGE. [CHAP.
he mentions Favorinus, Adrianus and Longinus\ and he takes
special pains to obtain a bust of Aristides'. Like Themistius
at Constantinople, he was a devoted adherent of the pagan cause
at Antioch, but his most famous pupil was Chrysostom. We are
told that, on his death-bed, he would have named Chrysostom
as his successor, 'if he had not been carried off by the Christians'*.
The genuineness of the correspondence between Libanius and
Basil is doubtful, and there is no certain proof that the Christian
bishop ever became the pupil of the pagan rhetorician.
Libanius was a prolific writer. Among his purely scholastic
works* are his Declamations (ficXcrai), and his Rheiorical Exercises
{trpoyvfiyaafJidTtay irapayycX/iara), the latter including speeches
composed in the characters of Achilles and Medea, and a ^me-
what dull and formal comparison between Demosthenes and
Aeschines. He is also the author of certain critical works on
Demosthenes, including a Zt/e of that orator and Arguments
to his speeches. These are preserved in the mss, and printed
in most of the editions, of Demosthenes ; he rightly declines to
accept the Speech on Halonnesus as the work of Demosthenes,
and is inclined to ascribe to Hypereides the Speech on the treaty
with Alexander. Among his rhetorical works are an Apology
for Socrates and a Speech against Aeschines, both in the artificial
manner of Aristides. When he bitterly reproaches the gods in
his Monodies on the destruction of Nicomedeia and on the death
of Julian, his composition is in strict accord with the precepts
of the rhetorician Menander*. Many of his other speeches are
much more interesting owing to the light which they throw on
the academic life and on the general culture of the time. We
learn that he had assistants to copy all his speeches, and a slave
in charge of the complete collection*. In one of his discourses
he describes two of the pictures (scenes of country life) that
adorned the Senate-House of Antioch'; in another, he defends
the pantomime of his day against the attacks of Aristides*. As
a widely popular teacher, he is proud of the number of his pupils;
» ^/A 1313, 546, 998. » £p, 1551.
' Sozom. viii a. * ed. Reiske, 4 vols. (1784-97).
' iii 435 Sp. * £^. 656.
' iv 1048 and 1057. * iii 345.
XX.] LIBANIUS. 349
he is ' too modest to aver that he has filled the three continents
and all islands, as far as the pillars of Hercules, with rhetoricians',
but he avows that he has 'spiritual children' in Thrace and
Bithynia, in Ionia and Caria, in Galatia and Armenia, in Cilicia
and Syria ^ He represents a student complaining to himself:
'what shall I gain from all this ceaseless work, from reading
through so many poets, so many rhetoricians, and writers of
every style of composition?" He complains of the inattentive-
ness of his class : ' some of them stand like statues, with their
arms folded ; others vacantly count the numbers of those who
come in late, or stare at the trees outside...; they forget all
about Demosthenes, the latest comments as completely as the
first ' '. He exhorts the idlers to ' pay less attention to the races
and more to their books ' 1 His life and times are also reflected
in his Letters^ of which more than 1600 have survived*. Here
we incidentally learn that he was ignorant of Latin*; he reproaches
a Roman friend for not writing to him in Greek, although his
correspondent had thoroughly studied Homer and Demosthenes^;
and he tells Demetrius* that, having been much bored by the
recitations of his pupils, he had, instead of lecturing in person,
read them parts of the 'artificial epistolary discourse' of his
correspondent. He is familiar with Attic comedy*, and no
writer of that age is more thoroughly imbued with the language
of Demosthenes and the other Attic orators. Four centuries
later he was regarded by Photius as, on the whole, maintaining
a true standard of Attic style ^*. In the most recent criticism
of Demosthenes, his reminiscences of the orator's language supply
part of the materials for determining the original text; and a
permanent value attaches to his Argununts to the orator's
' iii 444 (Capes, p. 79 f).
« iii 438 (ib, p. 81 0.
• i 100-3 (Bernhardy, Gr. Lift, i 663* ; Sieven, p. 39 ; Capes, p. 1 1 1 f).
^ Or, xxxiii (ii 194 f); Saintsbury, i 133.
• ed. J. C. Wolf (1738).
• Epp, 933, 1341. ^ Ep, 956.
« Ep. 138 (Saintsbury, U.).
• Fbrster, Rhein, Mus, 33, 86 f.
^^ Cod, 90, Kaim^.. ,Kal ^rdBfiif \6yov 'Arrc«oO. He is often called LtunofBiw^t
h fUKp6t,
350 THE ROMAN AGE. [CHAP.
speeches ^ Probably his only contact with modem literature
is to be found in the fact that his sixth Declamation* has been
imitated in the character of Morose in Ben Jonson's Silent
Woman*,
Sk)me of the extant scholia on Demosthenes bear the name
oi Ulpian. They are of little value *, and probably
belong in part alone to this eminent Sophist, the
author of a number of lost rhetorical treatises and declamations,
who taught rhetoric at Emesa and Antioch, under Constantine,
counting among his pupils the Christian Proaeresius, and possibly
the pagan Libanius*.
Three of the discourses of Libanius, not to mention many
. . incidental remarks in the rest of his writings, are
Julian 1 !•*. 1 1 *• 1 .
on the life and character of the emperor Julian,
with whom he had much in common. Blinded by the beauty
and the power of the ancient Classics, both alike ' loved to dwell
in a world of gods, goddesses, and heroes'*. When Libanius
heard of Julian's death, we are assured that nothing but the
principles of Plato, and the duty of writing an encomium on
the emperor, prevented the rhetorician from falling on his sword ^
Julian, the son of the half-brother of Constantine, had owed his
Greek training to a Hellenized Scythian, Mardonius, an admirer
of Plato, Aristotle, Theophrastus, and (above all) of Homer.
When the lad was longing for races and dances and other delights,
his tutor gravely referred him to Homer's admirable descriptions
of the races in memory of Patroclus, to the dances of the Phae-
acians, the lays of Phemius and Demodocus, the palm-tree of
^ Cp. Index to present writer's First Phil, and Olytithiacs of Demosthenes.
— On Libanius in general, cp. Sievers, Das Leben eUs Libanius (i868); Jule-
ville, Sur la Vie tt la Corrapandance de Libanius; Christ, § 599'; Croiset, v
876-85; Egger, 509-9; Saintsbury, i iai-4.
' di^tfcoXot T^fuif X^Xor 7tvcuca iavrbif wpoaayyiXKn (separately edited by
F. Morell, Paris, 1593-7).
* Works, iii (1875) 341 note; Hallam's Lit, iii 97I
^ Doeckh, Siaatshauskaltung, ed. Frankel, p. 535 *der unwissende Ulpian*,
^* 399* 41^* 549* ^'^* ^4' • ^('c' appreciated on p. 614.
' MtiUer and Donaldson, Gk Lit, iii 190 f.
* J. R. Motley in Ditt, Chr, Biogr, iii 710^.
' i 9ifi 591*
XX.] ULPIAN. JULIAN. 351
Delos, the isle of Calypso, the cave of Circe and the garden
of Alcinoiis*. After spending six years in the seclusion of Cappa-
docia, he attended lectures at Constantinople and Nicomedeia.
At the latter place, at the age of fourteen, he was not allowed
to hear Libanius, but he privately obtained reports of his lectures'.
He spent a short time as a student at Athens (355), counting
among his companions the future bishops Basil and Gregory
of Nazianzus. Writing afterwards to two of his fellow-students,
he urged them not to despise light literature or to neglect rhetoric
and poetry, but to pay more attention to mathematics, and to
Plato and Aristotle (Ep. 55). His own studies, however, were
soon interrupted by affairs of state. Summoned by his cousin
Constantius to take the command in Gaul, he left Athens with
regret, stretching out his hands to the Acropolis and imploring
Athena, with tears in his eyes, to grant him the boon of death ' ;
and, reluctantly assuming the purple robe of a Caesar at Milan,
he expressed his foreboding of his future fate by murmuring to
himself the ill-omened line of Homer : lAAa)9c irop^vpcos Bavanx^
icai lAoipa Kparaitf (//. V 83)*. When the news of his victories
in Gaul arrived at Constantinople, the wits of the court derided
him as a ' dabbler in Greek ' ' ; but the Gallic soldiers soon hailed
him as emperor at Paris, while he mused on the Odyssey^ and
prayed Zeus 'to send him a token'. Constantius died on his
march against him, and Julian ascended the throne. The pagan
and the Neo-Platonist, the believer in magic and the worshipper
of the Sun-god, who had been a heathen at heart for the last
ten years, now flung off the mask and appeared in his true colours.
Thenceforth his great aim was the preservation of 'Hellenism',
or Hellenic civilisation, of which the ancient religion was an
expressive symboP. He proclaimed toleration for all religions;
wrote admonitory letters to pagan priests forbidding them to read
Archilochus or Hipponax, or the old Attic comedy, or amatory
novels, or infidel writings, such as those of Epicurus, 'most of
' MisopogoH^ 351 D. ' Libanius, i 547.
* Ep. p. 175 A. * Amm. Marc xv 8, 17.
' ib, xvii II, I, litterionem Graecuin.
• iii 173; Ep. p. 184 c.
' Whittaker, Nto-Phionitts^ p. 144.
352 THE ROMAN AGE. [CHAP.
which the gods' (he is glad to say) 'have permitted to perish '^
He also published a decree forbidding Christian teachers, who
did not believe in the gods of Homer and Hesiod, Herodotus
and Thucydides, Lysias, Isocrates and Demosthenes, to give
any instruction in pagan literature*. It was probably owing to
this edict that Apollinaris, formerly a grammarian at Alexandria
and now a priest of the church at Laodicea, prepared a series
of Christian poems, while his son, of the same name, composed
in the metre of Homer twenty-four books on biblical history down
to the time of Saul, imitated Pindar, Euripides and Menander in
sacred verse, and turned the Psalms into Greek hexameters*.
Julian attempted a religious revival at Antioch, where he became
exceedingly unpopular, avenging himself by writing, under the
title of MUopogon^ a severe satire on that city. From Antioch
he started on a punitive expedition against the Persians; at an
early stage of his march, he wrote to Libanius, whom he had
lately described as that ' citizen of Antioch, that excellent artificer
of speeches, who is dear to Hermes and to me'\ stating that
at fieroea all good omens were sent by Zeus, to whom he had
royally sacrificed a white bull * ; but the expedition ended in the
death of Julian, who was fatally wounded in a skirmish near
the Persian capital of Ctesiphon on the Tigris. His brief reign
was not forgotten : 1 24 years afterwards, the votaries of the
ancient gods still reckoned their years from his death*.
His writings teem with proofs of his familiarity with the old
Greek Classics. From a child he had been passionately fond
of possessing books '. When he visits Ilium as emperor, he finds
a bishop of pagan sympathies protecting from profanation the
temple of Athena, the shrine of Hector and the tomb of Achilles'.
The mere enumeration of the passages which he quotes from
Homer would fill three pages of print*. He also cites Hesiod
p. 386 c; T. R. Glover, p. 64.
Ep. 42, p. 4^3 A; Greg. Naz. Or, iii 51.
The last alone has survived, Migne xxxiii 1313.
Misopopm, 354 c. • Ep, 17, p. 399 a
Mar. viL Procli^ 36.
Ep. 9; Misopogon, p. 347 a. • Ep, 78.
Brambs, Studien i (1897), pp. 41-3.
XX.] QUINTUS SMYRNAEUS. 3S3
and Pindar, Euripides and Aristophanes, Theocritus and Babrius.
He was fond of reading Bacchylides^ His numerous quotations
from Euripides are mainly confined to the B<uchae^ Phoenissae
and Orestes^, He never cites Aeschylus; he lived in a time
when Sophocles was evidently read no longer; for he actually
quotes a proverbial line from Oed, jyr. 614 without knowing
its source. He had been taught by Mardonius to emulate Plato
and Socrates, Aristotle and Theophrastus ' ; he often mentions
Aristotle, but quotes more frequently from Plato; he urges his
former fellow-students to study both (Ep. 55). His favourite
speeches in Demosthenes are the First and Second Olynthiaes^
and the.j^^ Corona^ but he also knows the Leptints and the
De Chersoneso, In Isocrates, he quotes oftenest from the Eva-
goras and the Panegyricus^ and also from the ad Denumicum and
ad Nicociem, By far the largest amount of indebtedness to
Isocrates and Demosthenes is (not unnaturally) found in his
earliest extant oration, the encomium on Constantius, composed
at the age of twenty-four ^ During his stay in Cappadoda, he
borrowed ' many philosophical and rhetorical works ' from George,
afterwards bishop of Alexandria, who was slain by the mob of
that city, leaving behind him a valuable library, which Julian
caused to be sent to Antioch for his own use*. He founded
a public library in Constantinople and placed his own collection
in it*. This library was destroyed by fire u8 years after his
death \
It was probably in, or shortly after, the time of Julian, that
Quintus of Smyrna composed the epic poem which
serves to fill the gap between the story of the Iliad s^rnSua
and that of the Odyssey. The versification of his
hexameters suggests an earlier date than that of Nonnus, who
flourished r. 410. Quintus is an imitator of Homer, Hesiod and
^ Amm. Marc. xxv. 4, 3. ' Brambs, i 54.
• Afuopogon, 353 B. * Brmmbs, Sit/dim u (1899).
• Epp, 9, 36. • Zosimus, iii 11, 5.
' On Julian, cp. J. Wordsworth in Duf. Ckr, Biogr, and the literature there
quoted, including G. H. Rendall's Huhean Essay (1879); also A. Gardner
(1895), and T. R. Glover'i Fmirtk Century^ pp. 47—76; with Christ, S603';
and Croiset, v 893-'-903.
s. 23
354 THE ROMAN AGE. [CHAP.
ApoUonius Rhodius. He is true to the Homeric tone, and he
adopts Homer's vocabulary without borrowing his conventional
phrases. Just as Hesiod, early in the Thcogpny^ tells of the
Muses ' who on a day taught him a beautiful song, while he was
feeding his lambs under divine Helicon', so Quintus avers that
the Muses had inspired him when, as a boy, he was 'tending
his fine flocks on a lowly hill in the plain of Smyrna, thrice
as fiEur from the Hermus, as a shout would carry' (xii 308 — 313).
He is familiar with the legendary scenes near Smyrna, with Niobe
turned to stone on the cliff of Sipylus (i 294 — 306), with the
Phrygian haunt of Endymion (x 126—137), <^d ^^^ ^^^ storied
islands and headlands and tombs of the Troad (vii 400 — 416).
He is probably independent of the Cyclic poets, and the attempt
to prove his indebtedness to Virgil has not succeeded ^ Modern
critics have praised the way in which he -relates the stories of
Penthesilea and Deidameia; and the tale of Oenone, which
Quintus 'somewhat lazily handled of old', has been retold in
a fresh form by Tennyson. His work, as a whole, is character-
istic of an age which ' could admire but not create '. Even the
tale of Oenone is believed to be of Alexandrian origin'; and
throughout the work there are many proofs of special indebted-
ness to the Alexandrian poet, ApoUonius Rhodius*.
The grammarian Theodosius of Alexandria may possibly be
identified with the 'wonderful grammarian Theo-
Thcodosius
dosius ', to whom Synesius sends his greetings near
the close of his fourth Letter. If so, he may be placed about
the end of the fourth century. His name is wrongly assigned
to a collection of commentaries* on the Grammar of Dionysius
Thrax, consisting of two parts, the first including extracts from
the Greek version of Priscian by the Byzantine monk Planudes
{end of cent, xiii), with scholia by Melampus and Stephanus, and
the second being the work of Theodorus Prodromus (cent xii)*.
^ Refuted by Koechly in his ed., p. xiii f.
' Rohde's Gr, Roman^ p. 1 10 (quoted by Glover).
* Kemptzow, 1891. — On Quintus in general, cp. T. R. Glover's Fourth
Century ^ 77—101; Christ, | 584*; Croiset, v 903-5.
« Tkiodasii Alex, /irammatica, ed. GottUng (iSaa).
' Uhlig, Dion. T^rax, p. xxxvii; Hilgard in Gram. Gr, iv p. cxxvii f.
XX.] THEODOSIUS. AMMONIUS. H£LLADIUS. 355
Theodosius is probably the author of the epitome of Herodian's
work on accentuation (icavovcs rfj^ KaOoXiicrj^ Trpoat^as) attributed
to Arcadius, a celebrated grammarian of Antioch (before 600 a.d.)\
He is undoubtedly the author of certain ' introductory rules on the
inflexions of nouns and verbs ' '. This work was often appended
to that of Dionysius Thrax and was formerly ascribed to the
latter. But there is a marked difference between them. Thus,
while Dionysius Thrax confines himself to quoting only those
tenses of rwrno which were in actual use, Theodosius sets forth
all the imaginary aorists and futures of that verb, regardless of
ancient usage. He is the earliest grammarian who does so ; and
his work transmitted this misleading teaching to later ages, in
which it was expounded by Joannes Charax and Georgius Choero-
boscus (cent, vi), through whom it descended to the grammars
of the Renaissance, and even to those of modern Europe. These
monstrous and portentous forms have shown a wonderful vitality,
notwithstanding the fact that they have been virtually slain by
Cobet, who vigorously denounces them as 'monstra et portenta
formarum, . . . quae in magistellorum cerebris nata sunt, in Grae-
corum libris nusquam leguntur".
Near the close of the century (391), among those of the
pagan party who resisted the destruction of the
Serapeum at Alexandria, were the grammarians and'wieiiaditts
Ammonius and Helladius\ The work on synonyms
bearing the name of the former is only a Byzantine edition of
the work of Herennius Philon', while the lexicon of Helladius
was known to Photius {cod. 145) and was one of the authorities
followed by SuVdas. Ammonius and Helladius fled from Alex-
andria to Constantinople, where they became the instructors of
the ecclesiastical historian, Socrates*.
^ ed. M. Schmidt, i860.
' €l<rayuryiKol KapSftt wtpl K\lff€tn ^oiiirta^ koX ^ft&nmff Bekker Amid. Gr,
974—1061 ; ed. Hiigard with the Scholia of Choeroboscus in Gram, Gr,,
iv 1889-94.
' Variae Lecthnes^ p. 330. On Theodosius in general, q>. Christ, | 6s8*,
and Cohn in Pauly-Wissowa. Cp. su^a, p. 138.
* Rufinus, Hist. Eccl. ii it ; Socr. v 16-17.
' Cohn in Pauly-Wissowa, ii 1866.
* Photius, cod, a8.
23—2
CHAPTER XXI.
GREEK SCHOLARSHIP FROM 4OO TO 53O A.D.
In this chapter, which closes our survey of the Roman age,
The fifth '^® '^°*^ ^^ ^ traversed begins in the brief and
century, ineffective reign of Arcadius, and ends in the first
few years of the long and fruitful reign of Justinian.
Under the successor of Arcadius, the skilled calligrapher Theo-
dosius II, a University was founded at Constantinople, as a
counterpoise to the School of Athens ; and the literary interests
of the day are further illustrated by the fact that his consort,
Eudocia, a native of Athens, won the applause of Antioch for
a Greek speech closing with the Homeric line : vfitripfq^ (for
ravrq^ roc) ycvc^s re «cat alfiaroi w^ofiai cTyat^. Early in the
fifth century we find evidence of a revival of interest in Greek
poetry in northern Egypt. It is the age of Nonnus, who was
born at Panopolis in the Thebaid, and probably
Nonnus ^^^^ ^^ Alexandria. His vast and diffuse epic in
forty-four books on the adventures of Dionysus is
an immense repertory of mythological lore. After his conversion
to Christianity he wrote a free and flowing paraphrase of the
Gospel according to St John. The versification of both is marked
by the predominance of dactyls, the strict avoidance of consecu-
tive spondees, an almost invariable preference for the trochaic
caesura in the third foot, and the constant use of the acute
accent on one of the last two syllables, — generally the last but
one. These innovations, which are better suited to the idyll
than to the epic, are unknown to Quintus Smyrnaeus ; and the
last of them forms a prelude to the accentual versification of
' //. vi an XX 14 1 ; Evagrius, i 20; Bury's Lattr Roman Empire t {131.
CHAP. XXI.] NONNUS AND HIS SCHOOL. 357
the Byzantine age*. The school of Nonnus includes the Egyptian
grammarian and poet, Tryphiodonis, the author of an elegant
but uninteresting poem on the FaU of IVoy ; Col-
Kkthus, of Lycopolis in the Thebaid (^. 491 — 518X CeUAtinM.
the writer of a short epic on Helen \ and (the only ^h'SItodonM
true poet of the three) Musaeus, whose Hero and
Leander^ with its echoes of the Alexandrian age of Callimachus,
is the most charming product of Greek literature at the close
of the Roman age '. During the transition from the fifth to the
sixth centuries Christodorus of Coptus distinguished himself by
his rhetorically poetical description of the seventy-three statues
of the poets, philosophers, historians and heroes of Greece, which
adorned the gymnasium of Zeuxippus at Constantinople until its
destruction by fire in 532 '.
In the fifth century general history is best represented by
Zosimus, an imitator of Polybius, and ecclesiastical u,_^
history by Socrates, who continues Eusebius from
306 to 439, and Sozomen and Theodoret, who cover part of the
same period. All four of these historians belong to the middle
of the fifth century.
In the same century the philosophers devoted their attention
mainly to the Titnaeus of Plato, and to certain
pseudo-orphic poems and a collection of oracles,
which had already been expounded by Porphyry. The light
of Neo-Platonism grows dim after the death of Proclus (485),
and it slowly disappears in the course of the sixth century. The
Syrian school of lamblichus (r. 280— <. 330), which had been
so brilliant in the first half of the fourth century, fell into obscurity
after the death of Julian. Early in the fifth century a new centre
of Neo-Platonism was formed at Alexandria, and in that school
the most interesting personality was that of Hypatia. Her father
was the philosopher and mathematician, Theon, ^ .
the commentator on Aratus, Euclid and Ptolemy,
the compiler of a list of consuls from 138 to 373, and the last
known member of the Alexandrian Museum (365). She studied
' Christ, S 585'; Croiset, y 994—1000; q). Bury, i 317— 3«o.
* Christ, S 586*; Croiset, ▼ 1003.
* Antk. Pal, it.
358 THE ROMAN AGE. [CHAP.
the Platonic philosophy at Athens, and lectured at Alexandria
on mathematics, as well as on Plato and Aristotle; in* her
philosophic teaching she followed the tradition of Plotinus*. As
recorded in the ecclesiastical history of the time, her brilliant
career was cut short by the fanaticism of the Alexandrian mob
in the spring of 415'.
The most distinguished of her pupils was Synesius, who
in his Letters shows a very high regard for his
teacher, even after he had become bishop of Ptole-
mais, the metropolitan see of the Cyrenaic Pentapolis. He was
bom at Cyrene (c. 370), being descended from the Dorian
founders of his native city, which, as he proudly recalls, was
also the birthplace of Cameades and Aristippus. In his boyhood
he led a healthy life in the open air, thus acquiring that love
of the chase which never left him. His youthful education under
Hypatia at Alexandria included mathematics and philosophy
{c, 390-5). He describes himself as united to one of his friends,
Hesychius, by the sacred bond of their common study of geo-
metry'; he presents to another, Paeonius (an important personage
at Constantinople), an astrolabe of his own invention*; and, in
one of his Letters^ he tells a third that he fancies the very stars
look down with kindly influence on himself, as the only man
in Libya who could look up to them with the eyes of knowledge *.
His father, a senator of Cyrene, left him his library; Synesius
himself had many more books to bequeath than he had thus
inherited; and, during his whole life, his sympathies were
thoroughly Greek. From about 400 to 402 (during the patri-
archate of John Chrysostom) he stayed at Constantinople as the
special envoy of Cyrene at the court of Arcadius, before whom
he delivered on his country's behalf a courageous* plea for a
remission of taxation. The speech owes much to reminiscences
of Dion Chrysostom, whose style, however, is more simple than
^ W. A. Meyer, quoted by Bury, i 308.
* There are monographs on Hypatia by Hoche (Philott^uit xv 435 f), and
W. A. Meyer (1886).
* Ep. 93. * Migne, Ixvi 1577.
* Ep, 100, p. 1470 D.
* 1 5 10 A, tC» rwvorf *BXXiirwy $appa\iiiT€(tw.
XXL] SYNESIUS, 359
that of Synesius*; and, besides including passages from the
Gargicu and Republic^ it is interspersed with some sixteen quota-
tions from the poets. In one of the phrases which he borrows
from Homer, he even describes the emperors as having, by their
robes of purple and gold and their barbaric gems, brought on
themselves 'that Homeric curse — the coat of stone". In the
same discourse he oddly speaks of the stone of Tantalus (instead
of the sword of Damocles) as hanging over the state, suspended
by a single thread. At Constantinople or elsewhere, he had
apparently been bored by people who gave themselves airs on
the strength of having seen the groves of Academe, the Lyceum
of Aristotle and the porch of Zeno'. He accordingly paid a
visit to Athens, writing to his brother from Anagyrus to tell him
that he had been to Sphettus and Thria, to Cephisia and Phaleron,
and that he had seen the Academy and the Lycaeum, and all
that remained of the * Painted Porch ', which a Roman proconsul
had robbed of the masterpieces of Polygnotus. The splendour
of Athens (he adds) only survived in places bearing famous names;
Hypatia of Alexandria far surpassed the 'brace of Plutarchean
Sophists ' (either Plutarchus and Syrianus, or a son and son-in-law
of the former), who attracted their pupils to their lecture-rooms,
not by the fame of their discourses but by the bribe of jars of
honey from Hymettus ; for Athens, once the home of the wise,
derived the last remnant of her glory from her bee-keepers
alone *.
He left Constantinople during an earthquake, and reached
the Cyrenaic coast during a terrific storm. After his return,
he spent two years at Alexandria (403-4), married a Christian
wife and in 404 settled down at his old home as a country
gentleman delighting in his horses and dogs, dividing his time
between 'books and the chase", and suppressing local bands
of brigands, when to his surprise and embarrassment he found
himself called by the voice of the people to be bishop of Ptole-
mais (406). After seven months of uncertainty, he allowed
1 Theodonis Metochita, in Dindorft DUn^ ii 367. Cp. Bjm> Ziitsthr. 1900,
85—151.
' //. iii 57- • ^A 54. * ^A 13^
• 1307 D, 1388c; cp. 1484 A, 1488a
36o THE ROMAN AGE. [CHAP.
himself to be consecrated by the Alexandrian patriarch, Theo-
philus, early in 407. He was soon very active in the discharge
of his duties, but his tenure of office must have been brief, for
we find no trace of him beyond 413. It therefore seems probable
that he died one or two years before the tragic end of Hypatia.
Seven of his Letters are addressed to her ; he regards her as ' his
mother and sister, and his preceptor ' ; and, when he has lost all
his three sons and is trembling for the fate of Cyrene, he confides
to her his woes, and (quoting Homer) assures her that, 'if men
forget the dead that dwell in Hades, yet even there' he will
remember Hypatia ^ His Dian^ an Apologia pro vita sua, written
c. 405, is a treatise on education and moral discipline, composed
for the benefit of a son who was yet unborn, and suggested by
the teaching of Dion Chrysostom, whose later writings he regards
as models of simple and natural elegance. He tells Hypatia
how he had come to write it {Ep. 153). Certain philosophers
had accused him of pretending to opinions about Homer, and
of caring for beauty and rhythm of language. He accordingly
holds up Dion as an example of a rhetorician who had become
a philosopher without losing the charm of a classic style. In
the treatise itself he insists that the true philosopher must be
a thorough Greek ; must be initiated into the mysteries of the
Graces, and familiar with everything that is important in literature;
all this he will know as a scholar (^iXoXoyos) and will jui^ as
a philosopher'. 'These rigid critics, who profess a contempt
for rhetoric and poetry, do so not of their own choice, but owing
to poverty of nature ". ' Beauty of language is not an idle thing ;
it is a pure pleasure, which looks away from matter to real
existence '^ 'A man may be well-equipped in speech, and, at
the same time, a master of philosophy.' Synesius aims at being
both, notwithstanding the criticisms of philosophers who are
illiterate, and of grammarians who criticise philosophical works,
syllable by syllable, without producing anything of their own*.
' £fi. 134; also 10, 15, 16, 33, So, 153; cp. £p. 4, 1343 b (to his brother
at Alexandria), dawaaai t^p ^nfiafftuurinip jcai Bto^XtmiTJiif ^X^o'o^or, koI
rdv t^ioLiko^a x^P^" ^^ dvoXa^orra rijt Btavtalas aOHiftt and E/p. 13a, 135 f.
• 1 135 A, c. * 11350.
* II39B. * 1153 A.
XXI.] SYNESIUS. 361
He also answers those of his critics who had reproached him
with using incorrect and faulty texts; 'what does it matter' (he
replies) *if one syllable is put for another?' 'The very necessity
for making emendations is itself an excellent training.' 'The
whole end of books is to call out ability into active exercise;
to make us think, and think clearly '\ In conclusion he refers
with charming candour to his own skill in improvising the sequel
of any passage which he happened to be reading, and to his own
imitations of ancient tragedies and comedies, possibly dating from
his Alexandrian days; — adding that, in these compositions, the
reader would have taken him for a contemporary, now of Cratinus
and Crates, now of Diphilus and Philemon. The influence of
Porphyry is apparent in the Dion\ and that of Plotinus in his
treatise On Dreams (which he regards as a means of divine
revelation). In this hastily written work he incidentally remarks
that thoughts revealed to him in the visions of the night had
helped him not merely in the pursuits of the chase, but even
in the cultivation of his style*.
His Letters^ 159 in number, ranging in time from r. 399 to
413, are full of the news of the day, full too of grace and point
and literary interest. They are praised by Evagrius, Photius and
Sui'das '. We here find, now the traveller, now the man of action,
absorbed in his country's good ; now the meditative student, and
now the active administrator. Throughout them all, the writer's
literary proclivities are most strongly marked. He tells us that
he has been asked for some of his poems, but that he ' has not
had time even to take them out of their boxes '^ In the same
Letter he quotes from the Odyssey (ix 51) and from Archilochus.
In a few lines full of idyllic charm, written to his brother at the
seaside, he describes the birds and trees and flowers that surround
him at Gyrene, adding that the cave of the Nymphs calls for
a Theocritus to sing its praises*. In a violent storm between
Alexandria and the Cyrenaic coast he recalls the Ajax of
Sophocles and the tempests in the Odyssey^, He assures one
of his friends, half in fun, that the rustics south of Cyrene regard
' 1160C-D; 1556 a; cp. Nicol, p. 109; Crawford, p. 163 f.
' c. 9. ' Volkmann't Syttesius, p. 113.
^ Ep, 199. ' Ep* 114. * Ep. 4.
362 THE ROMAN AGE. [CHAP.
Odysseus and the Cyclops as still in the land of the living, and
suppose that the emperor, whom they have never seen, is the
same as a certain Agamemnon who once sailed to Troy\ To
Synesius himself, Menelaus is the type of the true philosopher
who can extort the truth even from the evasive Proteus'.
Throughout the whole of his writings his references to Greek
literature are very numerous. He refers most frequently to Plato
{c, 133 times). Homer {c. 84) and Plutarch (r. 36); less often
to Aristotle (20) and Herodotus (16), and to Hesiod, Pindar,
Euripides, Aristophanes, Xenophon and Plotinus {c, xo each);
while the smallest number of quotations comes from Archilochus,
Empedocles, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Thucydides and Demosthenes'.
A far greater familiarity with Demosthenes is shown by his
correspondent, the monk and scholar Isidore of Pelusium
{c. 370 — c. 450), whose reminiscences of Demosthenes, scattered
up and down his 2000 Letters, are sometimes of value for
purposes of textual criticism ^ Once, when Dion quotes a
passage, which is really to be found in //. xxii 401, Synesius
actually ventures to assert that Dion must have invented it*.
His writings happily illustrate the extent and the character of
the study of Greek literature which prevailed in his age', while
they also embody the opinions of a man of singular versatility,
a student as well as a sportsman, a man of genuine cultivation
but not entirely free from pedantry, one who stood on the border-
land between Neo-Platonism and Christianity, and filled at one
time the position of a pagan orator and philosopher, and at
another that of an active patriot and a Christian bishop. His
Hymns have won high praise from Mrs Browning, who translated
two of them, while the tenth and last and simplest of them all
has found its way into Hymns^ Ancient and Modem'', Even
in an abstruser poem of portentous length, a passage where he
bids all the sounds of inanimate Nature be silent while he sings
» Ep. 147. ' iiiSd.
* Crawford, pp. 531-79.
* Cp. index to present writer's ed. of First Philippic and Olynthiacs.
* 1 300 A.
* Cp. Volkmann's ir^M/JiW, p. 135.
' No. 185, 'Lord Jesus, think on me* (trans, by A. W. Chatfield, 1876).
XXI.] SYNESIUS. PALLADAS. 363
the Father and the Son, supplies us with a strain of not ungraceful
simplicity : —
Let heaven and earth awed silence keep,
Let air and sea be still,
Let rushing winds and waters sleep,
Hushed be the river, hushed the rilP.
Touches of poetry are not wanting even in his prose. In
contrasting the freedom of his life at Cyrene with the slavery
endured by the orators in the law-courts of Alexandria, he says
in his Dion : — * I sing to these cypresses ; and this water here
runs, rushing along its course, not measured off, or dealt out by
the water-clock... And, even when I have ceased, the stream
flows on, and will flow on, by night and by day, and till next year,
and for ever ' ".
In contrast with the Neo-Platonic and Christian hymns of
Synesius we may briefly glance at the 150 epigrams
of one of the latest of the pagan poets, Palladas.
We there see him sighing over the gods of the ancient world,
whose days are gone for ever'; studying the old poets, but
finding himself so poor that he is compelled to sell his Pindar
and his Callimachus * ; writing witty verses on the scholastic uses
of the Iliad^\ discovering that, in the Odyssey as well as the
//iW, Homer is a misogynist*; and revealing himself as in
general a gloomy pessimist, whose only enthusiasm is for
Hypatia : —
Thee when I view, thyself and thy discourse
I worship, for I see thy virgin-home
Is in the stars, thy converse is in heaven.
Adorable Hypatia, Grace of speech.
Unsullied Star of true philosophy ^
* iii 72 — 81.
' Dion^ c II, 1 149 a; Crawford, p. 195. — On Synesius in general, see
Opera in Migne, Ixvi 1021 — 1616; Tillemont, Mimoira^ xii; Clausen (1831);
Druon*s ^/ii/^v(i859); Volkmann (1869); Lapatz(i87o); A. Gardner (1886);
J. C. Nicol (1887) ; Halcomb in Dut. Chr, Bufgr- \ Nieri in Hhnsta diJUoUgim
xxi (1892) 210 f; Seeck in Phihlogus Iii (1893) 458-83 (where the chronology
of the Letters is revised) ; W. S. Crawford (1901); and T. R. Glover's FmHh
Century t pp. 310—356; also Christ, | 654', Croiset, v 1043-9; and e. 11 of
Kingslcy's Hypatia,
* Anth, Pal, ix 441. * ix 175, • ix 173-4.
* ix 166. ' ix 40a Cp. T. R. Glover, pp. 303-19.
364 THE ROMAN AGE. [CHAP.
The murder of Hypatia, as we are assured by Socrates
(vii 15), brought no small discredit on the patriarch Cyril and
the Church of Alexandria. Cyril (380 — ^444) had
Theodoret Succeeded Theophilus as patriarch in 41a. Apart
from homilies and commentaries, the extant works
of Cyril include a defence of Christianity against Julian, and
against the Arians and Nestorians. He was opposed by the
friend of Nestorius, Theodoret (386 — €, 458), bishop of Cyrrhus
in northern Syria (428). Theodoret, in his examination of
Christian truth in the light of Greek philosophy, written soon
after his appointment as bishop, institutes a comparison between
the various schools of philosophy. His statement of the opinions
of the Greek philosophers is of value in so far as it has been
proved to be founded on Aetius, who lived in the first century b.c^
The study of Greek in this age is illustrated by the fact that,
at the synod held in 415 at Diospolis (the ancient
Lydda), Pelagius, who was born of a Roman fomily
in Britain (r. 370 — c, 440), made a great impression owing to his
perfect familiarity with Greek, which was an unknown tongue to
the historian Orosius, the emissary of St Augustine at preceding
conferences in Palestine*. On the side of St Augustine in the
Pelagian controversy was a good Greek scholar, Marius Mercator
(/?. 418 — 449), who wrote in Greek against the Nestorians. The
decline of Greek scholarship at Rome at this time is indicated
by the fact that, when Nestorius sent a Greek letter and other
documents to Pope Celestine (430), the latter was compelled to
invite Cassianus to come from Marseilles to translate them*.
Athens was the scene of the latest phase of Neo-Platonism.
The mystic teaching of the Syrian pupil of Por-
piatonitta. phyry, lamblichus (d. c, 330), author of a life of
Pythagoras and an exhortation to the study of
philosophy, including excerpts from Plato and Aristotle, was
introduced into Athens by one Nestorius. At the end of the
fourth century a new school was engrafted on the old by the son
of this Nestorius, Plutarchus (d. 431), who restored the authority
' ^ wtfH rCanf dpco'jcArrwv Ivi^ayiirTi), Diels, Doxographi^ pp. 45 f.
' C. Gidel, NoitvilUs Etudes sur la Hit. Gn modeme (1878), p. 61 f.
» ib. 64-5.
XXI.] NEO-PLATONISTS. PLUTARCHUS. SYRIANUS. 365
of dialectic, besides devoting himself to mystic speculation, and
to the Neo-Platonic exposition of Aristotle as well as Plato. He
wrote an important commentary on Aristotle's treatise De Anima;
little, however, of his work has survived except the passages
quoted by Olympiodorus (the younger) and other commentators
on Aristotle. His successors as heads of the School of Athens
were Syrianus (431-8), Proclus (438-85), Marinus, Isidorus,
Hegias, and lastly Damascius (529).
A pupil of Plutarchus, Hierocles of Alexandria, who succeeded
Hypatia, and flourished between 415 and 450,
produced a commentary on the 'golden verses' of s^amuf**'
'Pythagoras', which is still extant'. A pupil of
Hierocles, the Christian Neo-Platonist Aeneas, is the author of a
dialogue called Theophrnstus^ on the immortality of the soul and
the resurrection of the body, which is praised for its brilliant
style and its successful imitation of Plato. Of the successor of
Plutarchus, Syrianus of Alexandria, we are told that he was in
the habit of introducing his pupils to the Messer mysteries' of
Aristotle before initiating them in Plato. He is said to have written
commentaries on the Phaedo^ Republic and Laws, His commen-
tary on three books of the Metaphysics has been published'; his
comments on the rhetorician Hermogenes have also survived'.
About the end of the fifth century a commentary on Aristotle's
Organon was produced by David the Armenian, a pupil of
Syrianus ^ All our knowledge of the Neo-Platonism of Syrianus
is due to his distinguished pupil, Proclus, who declares that he
owes everything to that inspired teacher. Proclus ^^
(410 — 485), who was bom in Constantinople, and
studied grammar under Orion, and Aristotle under Olympiodorus
the elder at Alexandria, went to Athens shortly before 430. The
first place, at which he sat down or drank water, was close to a
temple dedicated to Socrates. At Athens he read with Syrianus the
whole of Aristotle, and afterwards Plato ; and there he remained,
> ed. Gaisford in Stoban Echgae^ ii (1850) ; MuUach, Frag. Phil. \ 408.
* ed. Usener, in Berlin Aristotle, ▼ (1870). ' ed. Rabe, i89«-s*
* So Neumann (1829); Rose, however, De Ar, lihr. ^rdine (1854) 944 f,
makes him a pupil of Ofymficdarus II and placet him in the sixth century;
and Busse, Prarf, in Porphyrium^ xli-iv, agrees.
366 THE ROMAN AGE. [CHAP.
living a laborious life in the practice of severe abstinence, and
continuing to preside over the School for forty-seven years. We
are assured that he was a deep thinker, a fluent lecturer and a
man of great personal charm. His pupils deemed him divinely
inspired, and on one occasion a casual attendant at his lectures
declared that his head was illumined with a celestial splendour '.
In accordance with his principle that ' all things sympathise with
air', he held that the philosopher should observe the religious
rites of all nations and be ' the hierophant of the whole world ' ;
he also practised the cult of the dead, visiting in the first instance
the tombs of the ancient Attic heroes*. He reduced Neo-
Platonism to a precise and systematic form, but was incapable
of restoring life to theories which had long lost touch with reality.
He wrote rapidly, and wrote much, mainly in the form of
comments on Plato. To the teaching of Plato he adhered more
closely than Plotinus ; and Plato is the source of his system of
triads. Among his extant works are commentaries on the Re-
public^ Timaeus and Parmenides^ also his 'Theological Elements'
and a treatise on Plato's ' theology '^ In the course of his
commentary on the Republic he defends Homer against the
attacks of Plato. Seven of his Hymns to the Gods have survived.
They are inspired with the breath of an ' immortal longing ', like
that of Plato or Plotinus; and the poet is ever pressing toward
the 'path sublime', while he prays to the Sun and Athene and
the Muses for the pure and ' kindly light that leads upwards (^«5f
aVayciiyiov), the means of attaining thereto being the study of
books that awaken the soul'*. His pupil, Marinus, describes
him as having sounded all the depths of the theology and
mythology of the Greeks and barbarians, and as having reduced
them to perfect harmony*. Proclus (says Zeller) is really a
'scholastic': all his genius is devoted to the interpretation of
texts, which he accepts unreservedly without caring to criticise
them^ It is stated that he often said that 'if it were in his
power, he would withdraw from the knowledge of men, for the
^ Marinus, Proclus ^ c. 33. * EUnuntt of Tkiolcgy^ no. 14a
' Wbittaker, p. 160. * V. Cousin, ed. 3, 1864.
* Bur/t Laitr Roman Emfirt^ i 516. * Marinus, c 99.
' See, however, Whittaker, p. i6a.
XXL] PROCLUS. HERMEIAS. AMMONIUS. 367
present, all ancient books except the TUnuieus and the Sacred
Oracles '\ He was not thinking of the Scriptures, but his
aspiration as to Plato was not long afterwards fulfilled in the
Western world, by the fact that 'along with the few compendia
of logic and the liberal arts, which furnished almost the sole
elements of European culture for centuries, there was preserved '
a Latin translation of a large portion of the Tsmaeus'.
After Proclus, Neo-Platonism lived on for about a century.
Among its representatives were Hermeias (end of
cent v), who taught at Alexandria, and whose Ammoniuir'
diffuse scholia on the Phaedrus are still extant*;
many extracts from them are quoted in the edition of Dr Thomp-
son, who observes that, 'amidst a heap of Neoplatonic rubbish,
they contain occasional learned and even sensible remarks '\
He agrees with Synesius ' in supposing that beauty of every kind
is the theme of this dialogue. He was succeeded at Alexandria
(early in cent, vi) by his son Ammonius, who is still represented
by his commentaries on the logical treatises of Aristotle ^ and
is the earliest of the extant expounders of the Eisagpge of Por-
phyry ^ Among the pupils of Ammonius were Simplicius,
Asclepius', Olympiodorus the younger, and Joannes Philoponus.
The last of these wrote (among other works) a commentary on
Aristotle's Physics*.
After languishing under the successors of Proclus (Marinus,
Isidorus and Hegias) the School of Athens revived for the last
time under Damascius, who studied at Alexandria and was a
pupil of Marinus at Athens. He was not metely a n* od
mystic, like lamblichus ; he was also a dialectician,
like Proclus, His 'Life of Isidorus* (disfigured by many puerilities)
1 Marinus, c 58. * By Chalcidius; Whtttaker, p. i6a
• Published in Asl'i ed., 1810, and by Couvreur, 190a.
* Thompson's PhatdmSt pp. ix, 91, 136.
* Volkmann's Synesius, p. 1 48.
• ed. Bussc, Caieg, 1895, De Intetfr, 1897.
7 Busse*s ed. (1891), and Berlin program (1899), cp. Bunian't /a4f«i^.
Ixxix 88.
* Comm. on Ar, Metaphysics A-Z, ed. Hayduck (1888), largely founded on
Alexander of Aphrodisias.
• ed. Vitelli (1887-8).
368 THE ROMAN AGE. [CHAP.
and his 'Problems and Solutions on First Principles' have sur-
vived * : his commentaries on Aristotle have perished. He was
the head of the School in 529, when the 'golden chain' of the
Platonic succession was broken by the edict of Justinian, which
put an end to the teaching of Neo-Platonism at
of Athena Athens. The public payments to the professors
jLVunUn ^^ ^^"6 ceased; even their private endowments
were now suppressed, and the closing of the School
was the natural consequence*. Its teachers lingered for a short
time in their Athenian home, and, in 532, seven of them, namely
Diogenes and Hermeias, Eulalius and Priscianus, Damascius,
Isidorus and Simplicius, left for the court of Chosroes, the en-
lightened monarch who had recently ascended the Persian throne
and who proved his interest in Greek philosophy by promoting
the translation of certain Platonic and Aristotelian writings.
Their high expectations were bitterly disappointed and they soon
entreated permission to return. In 533 Chosroes concluded a
treaty with Justinian, which ensured the protection of the philo-
sophers from persecution for their opinions '. They returned to
the dominions of the empire, to settle, not at Athens, but at
Alexandria. Among those who had left Athens for Persia was
a pupil of Damascius and Hermeias, Simplicius of Cilicia, whose
commentaries on the Categories'^ *Fhysia^ De Caelo
S ImpI IC11UI
and De Anima^ of Aristotle are still extant; and
whose 'moral interpretation of Epictetus is preserved in the
library of nations, as a classic book'*. This last is popular in
style ; while the main value of the rest lies not in their exegesis
but in their citations from early Greek philosophers. After 564
we find at Alexandria the younger Olympiodorus, who has left
us a life of Plato and commentaries on the First
thlTouiJ^er™ Alcibiades, Gorgias, Phaedo, Philebus, and Aristotle's
Meteorologica, They unfortunately exhibit no
originality, either literary or philosophic. The Neo-Platonic
1 drop/cu jcai Xi/acit, ed. Ruelle (1889).
' Bury's Gibbon, iv a66n; cp. Finlay's History of Gruct^ i 377-87 Tozcr;
Henberg's GeschichU Griechetilands^ iii 488 — 545; and Gregorovius, Siadi
Athtn im MitUlalter^ i 54-7.
* Agathias (fl. 570) ii 30 (Ritter and Preller, ulL). « Basel, 1551.
ed. Diels, Heiberg, Hayduck (1882-95). • Gibbon, c.xl(iv 367 Bury).
XXL] SIMPLICIUS. 'DIONYSIUS'. 369
Schoolf and, with it, the study of Greek philosophy, practically
ceased towards the end of the sixth century \
Shortly after the close of the School of Athens, we find (in
533) the first mention of the writings of ' Dionysius
the Areopagite*. Their many coincidences with theAnSpaJte*
the teaching of Proclus and Damascius have led
to their author being identified as a Christian Neo-Platonist, and
to their date being assigned to r. 480 — 520. The works on the
heavenly and on the ecclesiastical hierarchy (with the triple triads
in each), and those on the divine names and on mystical theology,
had their influence on the ' angelology ', the mysticism, and (in
the case of Erigena) the pantheism of the Middle Ages'. Theit
author has been called the father of Scholasticism. He was specially
studied by John of Damascus in the Eastern, and by Aquinas
in the Western Church ; while the effect of his teaching may be
traced not only in Savonarola, Ficino and Pico della Mirandola,
but also in Dante', in the 'trinall triplicities ' of Spenser \ and
in the magnificent line in which Milton enumerates more than
half the orders of the heavenly hierarchy : —
'Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms, Virtues, Powers'*.
While Plato and Aristotle were being expounded at Athens
and Alexandria, grammar and lexicography were
not neglected. With the grammarians the main
source of inspiration was Herodian. It was from Herodian that
Timotheus of Gaza {c. 500) derived the substance of his treatise
on combinations of vocal sounds' ; on the same model, Joannes
Philoponus (early in cent, vi), already mentioned as a pupil of
Ammonius, wrote a work on dialects and accentuation, including
» On Neo-Platonism in general, cp. Zeller, PAi/, d. Gr. ^ ^ (and the
literature there quoted); also T. Whittakcr's Nio-platttisU (1901); and Bigg's
Neoplatonism (1895).
» Milman, LaL Chr, ix 57 f ; Westcott, Religums Thctigki in tki Wm/,
pp. 149-93; T. WhitUker, p. 188; H. Koch, PstudcDiof^sim (1^00).
* Par, X 1 1 5-7; xxTiii 97-134.
* Hymne of Heavenly Love, 64; q). Hymne of Heavenly Betmiu^ 85—98.
* P, L.y 601. The ultimate source of these terms is the Vulgate trans, of
Rom, viii 38; CoL i 16. Cp. Lupton in DuL Chr. Bwgr, i 847--8.
* iray6ret ira^oXwal rcpi 9vrrifykn^ Cramer, AnndU Par. iv S39.
s. 24
370 THE ROMAN AGE. [CHAP.
an alphabetical list of words differing according to their accent S
which was widely used in the Middle Ages; and, similarly,
Joannes Charax (in the first half of cent vi) compiled an abstract
of Herodian's work on Orthography, part of which (a fragment on
enclitics) is still extant*.
In lexicography the labours of the Atticists of the second
_ century were continued in a series of mechanical
fraphen. Compilations. A treatise on Synonyms ^ attributed
ramon ua .^ ^^^ ^^ ^^ * Ammonius *, who left Alexandria for
Constantinople in 391 ^ appears to be only a revised edition of
that of Herennius Philon on the same subject (p. 355). A more
important work is that of Orion, who was born at the Egyptian
Thebes, and was one of the teachers of Proclus
Orion
at Alexandria {c, 430), and of Eudocia, the consort
of Theodosius II, at Constantinople. This was an Etymological
Lexicon, the extant portions of which prove that it was founded on
the researches of Heracleides Ponticus, Apollodorus, Philoxenus,
Apollonius Dyscolus, Herodian, and Orus of Miletus, who has
often been confounded with Orion*. The work of Orion in its
original form was one of the sources of the etymological compila-
tions of the Byzantine age.
Hesychius of Alexandria, who probably belongs to the fifth
century, is the compiler of the most extensive of
of^leMndria ^ur ancient Greek lexicons. It is not so much
a 'lexicon' as a glossary. In the preface it is
described as a new edition of the work of Diogenianus (p. 288),
with additions from the Homeric lexicons of Apion and Apollonius
(the son of Archibius). Whether the lexicon of Diogenianus was
an independent work, or only an abstract of that of Pamphilus
1 ed. Egenolff (1880).
' Bekker*s Amcd. 1149-56. Krumbacher, By*, Litt, § 242' f.
* irtfl 6/ialuf¥ Kal hia^fnaw Xi^ttaw^ ed. C. K. Ammon (1787). Christ, | 699*.
Cohn in Pauly-Wissowa, Ammonias (no. 17), ascribes the work to the Byzantine
age.
* Socr. //ist, Eccl. v 16.
* Rilschl, De Oro et Oriont, Opusc, \ 582—673; Christ, § 630». Orus and
Orion were probably contemporaries ; both of them taught Brst at Alexandria,
and afterwards at Constantinople (cp. Reitzenstein's Etyuiohgika^ pp. 987 f,
and 348).
XXL] HESYCHIUS. 37 1
(p. 288), is still a matter of controversy. Hesychius is of special
value in connexion with the emendation of classical authors.
His work has often enabled Ruhnken and later critics to restore
the original word in ancient texts where its place has been taken
by an explanatory synonym. The existing lexicon, large as it is,
is an abridgement only; in its original form, it apparently included
the names of the authorities for each statement *.
In the next century another scholar of the same name,
Hesychius of Miletus, who lived under Justinian,
was the author of a lexicon of special importance of'iiiittul'**
in connexion with the history of Greek literature'.
He owed much to Aelius Dionysius and Herennius Philon. Our
knowledge of his lexicon is solely due to the citations of Suidas,
who describes his own work as an epitome of that of Hesychius
of Miletus.
The reign of Justinian saw an abridgement of the great geo-
graphical lexicon of Stephanus of Byzantium. The
original work was produced after 400 A.D.: and its sysantimn*^
extent may be inferred from the fact that the
articles before S filled as many as fifty books. The only part
of the original which has been preserved is the article on *iPfip(a,
and those from Av/iiy to ^iiriov. It must have included many
extracts from ancient authors, with notices of historical events
and famous personages. In grammar Stephanus follows Herodian;
and, in geography, Hecataeus, Ephorus, Eratosthenes, Artemidorus
(Ji. 100 B.C.), Strabo, Pausanias, and especially Herennius Philon".
Among the earliest of compilers of chrestomathies was Proclus,
who is regarded by Gregory of Nazianzus * and by chre«to-
Suidas as identical with Proclus the Neo-Platonist ra«thie«.
(p. 365 ), and this opinion is accepted by Wilamowitz *,
though the character of the work is totally different from that of
• Ruhnken's Prtufaiio^ in Opitsc, pp. 19^ — 219.
matologi qttae iupersunt^ ed. Flach (1882). Cp. Knimbacher, Byt. £Mi.
§ '39'.
• Christ, § 597*; e<l. Dindorf (1815). Westermann (1839), Meineke (1849).
« Migne, xxxvi 914, Ilp^irXof 6 IlXarcmrdt h fun^ofUpXif wtpl xlkXov
• /%i/. £/«/. vii 330.
24—2
372 THE ROMAN AGE. [CHAP.
the extant writings of that philosopher. Earlier scholars* had
identified him with Eutychius Proculus of Sicca (instructor of
M. Aurelius), who, however, is a Latin* grammarian. He is
possibly the Proclus, whose 'enumeration of festivals' is mentioned
by Alexander of Aphrodisias'. For almost all our knowledge of
the 'grammatical (i.e. literary) chrestomathy ' of Proclus we are
indebted to Photius {cod. 239), who states that, in the first two
books, the author, after distinguishing between poetry and prose,
dealt with epic, elegiac, iambic and melic poetry, naming the
leading representatives of each ; and that he described the epic
cycle in particular as a consecutive series of poems by various
authors. This account is confirmed by the fragments of Proclus
preserved in the codex Venetus of the Iliad and in some other
Mss. They include a short life of Homer, and a list of the
authors of the Trojan part of the cycle, viz. the Cypria^ the Hiad^
the Aethiopis (Arctinus), the Little Iliad (Lesches), the Iliupersis
(Arctinus), the Nosti (Agias), the Odyssey^ and the Telcgonia
(Eugammon), with an abstract of the contents of all except the
Iliad and the Odyssey. Our knowledge of the contents of the
lost epics of Greece comes almost entirely from this source \
The two other books probably dealt with dramatic poetry, and
prose.
The Readings in History by Sopater of Apamea, and the
sources from which they were derived, are known to us solely
through the account in Photius (cod. 161). The only Chresto-
mathy which has come down to us in an approximately complete
form is that of Joannes Stobaeus (of Stobi in
Stobaeut
Macedonia), who is probably not much later than
Hierocles {c. 450), the latest author whom he cites. In its
original form it was in four books, (i) on philosophy, theology
and physics, (2) on dialectic, rhetoric, poetry and ethics, (3) on
virtues and vices, (4) on politics and domestic economy. The
' Valesius, and Welcker, Ep. CycL i 3 f.
' Capitolinus, M. Aurelius^ c. 3.
* On Aristot. Soph. El. p. 4.
^ D. B. Monro's Appendix to Homer's OcL (1901), pp. 345 — 585. Christ,
§ 637'; Croiset, v 978. Text in Gaisford's Hephatstion, and Westphal's Scr.
Afetr. Gr.
XXL] PROCLUS. STOBAEUS. APHTHONIUS. 373
work is divided into 206 sections, each denoted by a short motto
under which all the extracts are grouped, first those in verse,
and then those in prose. The number of writers thus represented
is no less than 500 \ In the Middle Ages the four books were
treated by copyists as belonging to two separate works, (i) and
(2) being entitled 'Extracts on Physics and Ethics' (iieXoyoi),
and (3) and (4) the 'Anthology', a name that really belongs to
the whole work*.
The study of rhetoric still survived as part of a general
education and as a necessary preparation for public ^. . .
hfe. We may here briefly notice Aphthonius, who,
as a pupil of Libanius, belongs to the end of the fourth and the
beginning of the fifth centuries. He is celebrated
for his small manual of preliminary exercises (irpo-
yvfivaxTfjuara), a work remarkable for its simplicity and clearness,
and for the variety of its examples'. It follows the tradition
of Hermogenes, but the number of the exercises is here extended
from twelve to fourteen by the separation of 'refutation' from
' confirmation ', and the introduction of a new section on ' blame '.
It was the theme of several commentaries, and continued to be
used as a text-book not only in the Byzantine age^ but even
as late as the seventeenth century. It. is happily described by
Mr Saintsbury (i 92) as 'one of the most craflsmanlike cram-
books that ever deserved the encomium of the epithet and the
discredit of the noun '. After Aphthonius, the writers on rhetoric
are only commentators on their predecessors. Thus Troilus
(c, 400), Syrianus (430), Marcellinus {c. 500) and Sopater (early
in cent vi) all wrote commentaries on Hermogenes. Marcellinus
was also the author of an extant life of Thucydides, probably
founded on the labours of Didymus*.
* Pholius, r«/. 167; Mcinckc*s ^fw^. xxxvii.
* ed. Gatsford (1811); Meincke (1857); Wachsmuth and Hey8e( 1884-95);
cp. Christ, § 639' ; Croiset, v 979.
* Spengel, ii. Cp. Christ, § 546'; Croiset, ▼ 981 f.
* Commentaries by Joannes Geometres (first half of cent, x) and Joannes
Doxopatres (first half of cent, xi) are mentioned by Knimbacher, Bj^ Liit, 45s,
461 and esp. 735*.
■ Susemihl, Gr, Litt, AUx. ii S03 n.
374 THE ROMAN AGE. [CHAP.
Early in the sixth century the principal schools of ancient
learning in the East were those of Athens, Alex-
of^ilrninff andria and Constantinople*. Of these, Athens
was the last stronghold of paganism ; Alexandria,
'the centre of the widest culture', the home (especially in the
fourth and fifth centuries) of pagan poetry and philosophy, as
well as of Christian theology; and Constantinople, the seat of
a university since the time of Theodosius II', and, to a large
extent, a school of Christian learning '. The secular library there
founded by Julian (with its marvellous ms of Homer, forty yards
long) had been destroyed by fire in 491, but there was a library
of ecclesiastical literature in the patriarchal palace^. The best
days of Nicomedeia and Antioch were in the fourth century,
in the times of Libanius. The Greek and Syriac school of
Edessa in Western Mesopotamia had been finally closed in 489.
Apart from these, the eastern shores of the Mediterranean could
boast of Berytus, which, from the third century till its destruction
by an earthquake in 551, was a great school of Roman law,
besides being (as described by Eusebius) a school of Greek
secular learning*. Further to the south was the school of
Caesarea, which had counted Origen among its teachers, and
the historians Eusebius and Procopius (fl, 527 — 562) among its
students. There was even a home of culture in the former land
of the Philistines. Towards the close of the fifth century, Gaza*
produced a grammarian in Timotheus, and rhetoricians such as
Procopius of Gaza (yf. 491 — 527), whose paraphrases of Homer
were admired by Photius^ and his pupil and successor, Choricius',
who held the office of orator under Justin and Justinian. The
speeches of Choricius were among the models studied in the
' Himerius, vii 13; Themistius, xxiii p. 355.
' Bury, i iiS. ' Bury, i 212, 317.
^ Bernhardy, Gr, LiU, \ 664^; Bury, i 353.
* Di Mart, Palaest. iv 3; cp. Liban. Ep, 1033; and Bemhardy, Gr, Liii.
i 664 ^ Nonnus, Dion, xli 396, calls it * the nurse of tranquil life \ and Agathias,
ii 15, *the pride (tyKoKKtStwiffiAa) of Phoenicia*.
* Seitz, DU Schule von Gasa (1892) ; Roussos, rpccf Fa^oi (1893).
' p. 1030. His Letters are published in the Epistolographi Gratci (ed.
Didot). Cp. Eisenhofer (1897).
* ed. Boissonade, 1846; Forster in Philol, liv 93 — 123 &c.
XXI.] SCHOOLS OF LEARNING. 375
Byzantine age, and they are even now of value in the textual
criticism of Demosthenes*.
All the rhetoricians, lexicographers and grammarians, whom
we have now passed in review, belong to the age that ended
with 529 A.D., the eventful year in which the School of Athens
was closed in the East, and the Monastery of Monte Cassino
founded in the West Three years later (532) the rebuilding
of the Church dedicated to the Eternal Wisdom by the founder
of Constantinople was begun by Justinian, who adorned that
Christian Church with columns from the pagan temples of
Ephesus and Heliopolis, and left behind him, in the many-tinted
marbles, the deeply-carved capitals, the lofty dome and the
spacious splendour of Santa Sophia, the last of the great religious
buildings of the ancient world. Between 529, the date of the
publication of Justinian's Code^ and 533, that of the completion
of the Digest and the Institutes^ the legal learning of the past
was summed up and reduced to a systematic form, while the
old Roman Law of the Twelve Tables was finally superseded.
In the following year, the emperor who had suppressed the
School of Athens, put an end to the consulship of Rome, thus
virtually closing the Roman age in the West, as he had already
closed it in the East*.
* See index to present writer's First Phili^k and Olynthiaa of
Demosthenes.
* If, in the transitional reign of Justinian, any further event should be sought
to mark the end of the old order and the beginning of the new, it may be
found perhaps (with Prof. Bury) in the plague of 54s, which raged for four
months in Constantinople and for four years in the Roman Empire. 'When the
plague has ceased, we feel in 550 that we are moving in a completely other
world than that of 540' (Bury's Laitr Roman Empire^ \ 400).
lo^
BOOK V.
THE BYZANTINE AGE.
iar€fnjOrjfi€y koi PipXifov^ Kcnybv rouro koi iropoSojov, koI via
Kaff T^fjuav ivivtvorifilinff rtfitoptn,
Photius, €uL Imptratarem Basilium^ Ep. 218, ed. Valettas.
...Set yap Tov^ watSa^ ayawatr^i Sea tov9 waripa^,
PsELLUS, Ep. 20, ed. Sathas.
ri 817 irorc, & dypdfLfiartf n^v fUwaarripiaKtiv Pifi\u)$TJicifv rg frjl
iropc^urcuTCCf ^xS » '^^^ ^^^ M*^ ^^ icar^ccf ypafifiara^ ^iciccvoif ical
aur^i^ Ttav ypofifuiro^pcov cticcmSi'; a^f avrri¥ ariytw r3t rtfua.
Acvarrac rts /Acr3t <r^ ^ ypofiftara fioBtivf ^ aXXa ^lAoypofifuiTot.
EusTATHius, De emendanda vita momistica^ c. 1 28, ed. Tafel.
Conspectus of Greek Literature, &c., 600 — 1000 A.D.
Bmporon
MO
60a Pbocas
610 HencUus
641 Heredius,
Coostanttnus,
and Heradeo-
nas
649 CoosUkosII
668 CoiMtaniine
IV
685 Justinian II
605 Leontius
697 Tiberius I II
700
PoeU
6a6 Sergius
629 Sopnrontus
610-41 Georgius
Pisides
705 Justinian II
(restored)
711 Philippicus
713 Anastasius
II
7 IS Theodosius
III
Houtt 0/ Leo
717 Leo III
741 Constantine
V
775 Leo IV
78oCoasuntine
VI
797 Irene of
Athens
Andreasof Crete
c» 650—730
Hlstoriani,
Obroniolen
610-31 John of
Antioch
610-40 Theophy-
lact Siniocattes
630 CkramcoH
Patchalt
800
SoaNicephorxisI
8(1 Stauracius
811 Michael 1
813 Leo V
SaoMidiaelll
899 Theophtlus
84aMidiaelIII
MactdoHtaH
Dynasty
867 Basil I
886 Leo VI
736 John of
Damascus
c. 6cfir-c. 753
743 Cosoias of
Jerusalem
Stephen of St
Sabas
7«5— 794
Theodorus
Studites
759—826
830 Josephus
Studites d. 883
900-
912-59 Constan-
tine VII
990-44 Roma-
nus I
959 Romanus 1 1
963 Nicephorus
II
969 John I,
Zimisces
976 Basil II
llOOO*
Bhetorldani
Pkilopairis
c, 6o9— 6(o
Georgius
Syncdlus
Jl. 784— tf. 810
Nicephorus
Patriarches
d. 899
813 Theophanes
Confessor d. 817
Tktppkants
amiinuatHt
813—961
867 Georgius
Monachus
9i7Constantinus
Cephalas, edi-
tor of Antfuh
logia PtUatma
061 Theodosius,
tJm9\% Kpi(n|«
John Gcometres
^.963—986
Ntcolaus.
BpittolM
859—995
Constantine
Porphyrogeni'
tus 905—959
963 S)rmeon
Magister
999 LeoDiaconus
r. 950-999
Boholan
610 Stephanas of
Alexandria
Jacob of Edessa
ft. 651—719
BodtotUurtloAl
ItAUn
Theognostus
ft. 813-90
Michael
Syncellus
Jl. 899-^9
830-76 ^yrinc
and Arttbic
translations
^Aristotle
857 Photius
c. 890— c. 891
863 Cometas
870 d. Alkendt
870 Ignatius
88a Stymologi'
cum parvum
^Oj Arethas
c. 860—939+
950 d. Alfarabi
950-76 SuTdas
63oMaxiauu
>30M(
Coofi
Barkusmmssd
Jose^ai
Anastasius
Sinaites
Jl, 640—700
7t6 Johnof
jDamascui
806 Nicephorus
Patriarcbea
d. 899
857 Phodtts
c. 890— c. 891
Syroeoo Meta-
phrastes,£cM»
^Sainh
CHAPTER XXII.
BYZANTINE SCHOLARSHIP FROM 529 TO lOOO A.D.
In the history of Greek Literature the Byzantine age, in the
broadest sense of the term, may be said to begin with the
founding of Constantinople in 330 and to end with its fall
in 1453- It may be divided into three parts : (i) the i^fy
Byzantine period, of about three centuries, from 330 to the death
of Heraclius in 641 ; (2) the intervening period of two centuries,
which, so far as secular learning at Constantinople is concerned,
may be described as a dark age extending from about 641 to
about 850 ; (3) the later Byzantine period of six centuries from
850 to 1453^ In the history of Scholarship this third period
extends over five centuries only, beginning in 850 with the great
revival of Byzantine learning heralded by the auspicious name
of Photius, and ending about 1350, when, a full century before
the fall of Constantinople, the interest in Scholarship passes
westward to the cities of Northern Italy which caught the first
rays of the new light that came to them from the East.
In our survey of the history of Scholarship, we have found
it convenient to treat the first two centuries (330^5^9) of the
first of the above periods as the last two centuries of the Roman
age, leaving a period of little more than a century p^Hod i,
(529 — 641) for the opening pages of the present 5«»-*««'
Book. In this century, history is represented by
the 'statesman and soldier' Procopius of Caesarea (yf. 527 — 562),
the secretary of Belisarius and the historian of his campaigns,
who resembles Herodotus in his love of the marvellous, Thucy-
dides in his diction, and Polybius in his subordination of the
^ Krumbacher, Gtschichte der Bynaniiniuhen LittirtUur^ ed. 9, 1897,
pp. II f.
38o THE BYZANTINE AGE. [CHAP.
course of events to the influence of Fortune^; by the 'poet and
rhetorician" and student of the ancient classics, Agathias
(536 — 582), who, in relating the end of the Gothic war, the
Perso-Colchian wars (541 — 556) and the invasion of the Huns
(558), recognises a divine Being (to Oilov) as the author of
retribution'; by Menander Protector (582), the imitator and
continuator of Agathias; and by the Egyptian Theophylactus
Simocattes, the euphuistic historian who describes the reign of
Maurice (582 — 602) in a style rich in metaphors borrowed from
the Hebrew Scriptures and the Greek Romances. Antiquarian
research is the province of Joannes Lydus (r. 490 — 570), who
studied Aristotle and Plato under a pupil of Proclus, and in his
work On Offices gave a full account of the Roman civil service
and the causes of its decline *. In poetry we have an imitator
of Callimachus and of Nonnus in the person of
Paulus Silentiarius «(the gentleman-usher who pre-
served silence in the palace of Justinian), the author of nearly
100 elegant epigrams in the Palatine Anthology*^ and also of
a celebrated Description of the Church of Santa Sophia^ ^ in which
he incidentally betrays his contempt for the Athenians, and at
the same time flatters the emperor who closed their philosophic
School, by stating that his verses will be judged, not by ' bean-
eating Athenians, but by men of piety and indulgence, in whom
God and the Emperor find pleasure '^ George of Pisidia (Georgius
Fisides\ besides celebrating the campaigns of Heraclius, wrote
a poem on the Creation, intended to refute Aristotle and Plato,
Porphyry and Proclus. Except in a single poem, in which he
imitates the hexameters of Nonnus, he uses the iambic measure
alone, and is generally strict in observing its rules ; but he departs
from the standard of the ancient poets in breaking the law of
the final Cretic, and in never allowing the accent to fall on the
^ Bury*s Later Roman Empire^ ii 178.
* Gibbon, c. 43 (iv 420 Bury).
' Bury, ii 354 f.
« 1^. ii 183 f.
* e.g. V ^^^ 370, 301.
* ed. Graefe (1833) ; Bekker (1837); German trans. Salzenberg (1854).
' Bury, ii 185 f.
XXII.] HISTORIANS AND POETS. 38 1
last syllable of the line*. Psellus, the foremost representative
of the Byzantine literature of the eleventh century, did him the
honour of devoting a long letter to answering the question
* whether Euripides or Pisides wrote better verses'". The historian
Agathias, who in his youth was addicted to heroic verse and
' loved the sweets of poetic refinement ', allows reminiscences of
the poets to colour his prose. He contributes about 100 epigrams
to the Palatine Anthology*^ with a preface^ written in the style
of the New Comedy and including a quotation from the Knights
of Aristophanes (I. 55 f). He assures us that 'poetry is really
a thing divine and holy', and that 'its votaries (as Plato would
say) are in a state of fine phrenzy'*. The sacred poets of this
age are Sergius, patriarch of Constantinople (636) and Sophronius,
patriarch of Jerusalem (629).
Late in the sixth century is the earliest date that can be
assigned to Georgius Choeroboscus, who played ^^
an important part in Byzantine education by his
lectures on Grammar at the university of Constantinople*. The
chronological order of his principal works was: (i) a treatise on
prosody, followed by lectures on (2) Dionysius Thrax, (3) Theo-
dosius, (4) orthography, (5) Hephaestion, and (6) Apollonius and
Herodian. His grammatical learning is derived from the above
authors, and from Orus, Sergius, Philoponus and Charax, the
last three of whom belong to the sixth century. He is himself
first quoted in the Etymologicum JRorentinum^ a MS of cent x,
representing a work prepared under the direction of Photius,
with the aid of authorities which followed Choeroboscus, who
accordingly cannot well be placed later than 750*. His prolix
lectures on the rules of Theodosius of Alexandria on nouns and
verbs have come down to us in a complete form, part of them
> ib. \\ iffi f.
* Leo Allatius, Dt Gtorgiis^ reprinted in Fabridtis, BibL Gr, x 7f ; BooTy,
Poites et Mllodes (1886), p. 169 ; Krambacher, p. 710*.
* c-g- V 137, 161 ; vi 76. * iv 3.
■ Bury, ii 185.
* Certain Mss of his scholia on Theodosius describe him as hinn^m and
6lKW)iu9iKhi dtddtfiraXot. He was also the University Libmrian, x>^^*^^*
Cp. Hilgard, in (PhiM. Gr, \v p. Ixi f.
^ Reitzenstein, EtymoUgika^ p. 194, n. 4«
382 THE BYZANTINE AGE. [CHAP.
having been taken down by dictation {dwo tfnav^^y. He appears
to have had comparatively little influence on the later Byzantine
grammarians, who preferred to study the great original writers
on grammar, but in the age of the Renaissance he is closely
followed in the text-books of Constantine Lascaris (1463-8; ed.
pr. Milan, 1476) and Urbanus of Belluno (Venice, 1497)'.
Early in the seventh century (610) Aristotle was being ex-
^ . pounded by Stephanus of Alexandria, the author of
commentaries on the Cate^nes*^ De Interpretatwne^
De Caehy de Anima^ Analytics^ Sophistici EUnchi^ and Rhetoric^,
The ecclesiastical writers of this age include Anastasius,
patriarch of Antioch (559, d. 599), a precursor of Scholasticism,
and an opponent of Justinian's opinion that the body of Christ
was incorruptible; and Maximus Confessor (580—662), the
private secretary of Heraclius and the opponent of his views
on monotheletism. The latter is among the persons conjectured
as possible authors of the anonymous Chronicon PaschaU^ an
epitome of the history of the world from the
PwJchSir**'* Creation to 630 a.d., containing lists of consuls
first published by Sigonius (1556), and many other
chronological details first communicated by Casaubon to Scaliger
and published by the latter in his edition of the Chronicon of
Eusebius (I6o6)^ Among the authorities on which it is founded
are Sextus Julius Africanus and Eusebius, the Consular Fasti
and the Chronicle of John Malalas. This last in its present form
ends with the year 563 ; its author was a native of
Antioch, who aimed at supplying the public of his
day with a handbook of chronology written in the language of
ordinary life. The only ms is in the Bodleian ; the name of the
author was identified by John Gregory (d. 1646), and the work
published by John Mill (1691), with an appendix consisting of
the famous * Jitter to Mill ', which revealed to Europe the critical
skill and the scholarship of Bentley. In this ' Letter' the passages
> ed. Hilgard, Gram, Gr, iv i (1889) 101 — 417 and iv 3 (1894) Proleg.
and I — 371.
* Krumbacher, % 144*. * ed. Hayduck (18S5).
^ ed. Kabe, Comm, Arist. xxi i,
* Salmon in Diet. Chr, Biogr, i 510.
XXII.] MALALAS. JOHN OF DAMASCUS. 383
quoted by Malalas from the Greek poets are emended and ex-
plained, the laws of the anapaestic metre laid down, and the
blunders in proper names corrected, the 'earliest dramatists'
Themis, Minos and Auleas being shown to be mistakes for
Thespis, Ion of Chios and Aeschylus \ To the first half of the
seventh century may be assigned the legend of the monk Barlaam
and the Indian prince Josaphat, the most famous
and most widely-known romance of the Middle j^phl**"*"*
Ages. The discovery of a Syriac version of the
lost Greek original of the Apology of Artstides in the monastery
of mount Sinai shows that sixteen printed pages of Barlaam and
Josaphat are borrowed directly from Aristides •.
Our second period of two centuries (641 — 850) includes the
hundred years of the iconoclastic emperors, Leo
the 'Isaurian' having issued in 737 the decree ^i^..^ *
against images, which was revoked by the empress
Eirene in 802, and Leo the Armenian having in 816 promulgated
a similar decree, which was finally set aside by the empress
Theodora in 843. The chief opponent of the iconoclasm of Leo
the ' Isaurian ' was the Syrian John of Damascus (r. 699 — 753)',
who held high office at the court of the Saracens,
and sent forth from Damascus three celebrated Dimiacttt
discourses in defence of the worship of images.
He had been educated by Cosmas, an Italian monk familiar
with Plato and Aristotle, who had been brought by Arab pirates,
probably from the shores of Calabria, to the slave-market of
Damascus. John is also celebrated as the author of the Fons
Scientiae {miYrj yvoScrcaif), an encyclopaedia of Christian theology
beginning with brief chapters on the Categories of Aristotle,
together with extracts from the Eisagoge of Porphyry, for his
knowledge of both of which he was indebted to Leontius of
Byzantium (485 — c, 542). Elsewhere, he describes certain of
his opponents as seeing in Aristotle *a thirteenth apostle**. In
1 Jebb's Bent ley t pp. la— 16; Prof. G. T. Stokes, in ZWrf. Ckr. Biogr,
s.v. ; Knimbflcher, 9 *4o'.
• J. Armitagc Robinson, Camhridgt Texts and SiwOts^ 1891 ; Knimb«cher,
9 39i« ; Bury, ii 531-4.
' Krumbacher, |9 16, 175*. ^ Canirajaiobitas^ c 10.
384 THE BYZANTINE AGE. [CHAP.
applying to Christian theology the logical system of Aristotle,
he became, through Peter Lombard and Thomas Aquinas, a
name familiar to the Schoolmen of the West He has been
assigned 'the double honour of being the last but one of the
Fathers of the Eastern Church, and the greatest of her poets'^
At the convent of St Sabas, which looks down on the Dead Sea
from a rocky ravine S.E. of Jerusalem, he composed those hymns,
three at least of which have, in their English render-
Greek hymns .1,1 , .
mgs, become widely known m modem times: —
'Those eternal bowers'; 'Come, ye faithful, raise the strain';
and the Golden Canon of the Greek Church, 'Tis the Day of
Resurrection ' '. His adoptive brother, Cosmas of Jerusalem, was
the most learned of the Greek Christian poets', while to his
nephew, Stephen of St Sabas (725 — 794), is assigned the original
of the hymn 'Art thou weary, art thou languid?'^ All of these
were preceded by Anatolius, bishop of Constantinople 449 — 458,
the author of the evening hymn of the Greek islanders, ' The day
is past and over'*; by Romanus, who is regarded as 'the greatest
poet of the Byzantine age' {c. 500)*, and by his imitator Andreas,
archbishop of Crete (c. 650 — 720), the author of the Great Canon
of 250 stanzas, and of the hymn beginning, ' Christian 1 dost
thou see them?" The monastery of Studion in Constantinople
was the retreat of Joseph of Sicily (Ji. 830), who inspired the
hymn, ' O happy band of pilgrims ' ', and of Theodore of Studion
(759 — ^2^)> ^^^ author of the Canon, which, for the four centuries
preceding the I?ifs /rae, remained the 'grandest Judgment-hymn
of the Church'*. Among other writers of hymns were the
historian Theophanes (d. c, 817), and Methodius, patriarch of
Constantinople (843-7)1 who called the Synod which in 843
restored the worship of images '^
In this second period, apart from sacred poetry, works in prose
^ J. M. Neale's Hymns of the Eastern Churchy p. 33 (ed. 1863).
■ ib. 38, 55. 57. • ib, 64—83.
« ib, 84-6. • ib, a— I a.
* Krumbacher, § aja', p. 663.
' Neale, pp. 17, 18.
• ib, 122—151. • ib, p. iia.
1* ib, pp. 89, 119. The Greek texts of some of the above hymns are
printed in Moorsom's Companion to Hymns Ancient and Modern^ pp. 79 — 91'.
XXII.] THEOGNOSTUS. CHRONICLERS ETC. 38$
^^"^■^^^-^^~^~~^"~"^^~^^^^~^^^~^"^""~^~^~^^"^"^^"^~^"^^^^^""— ^■■^^^"^^^^■"~"~^^^^""^~^"^"^^^^"^^^"^^^^^^^^~"
have been left not only by John of Damascus, who has been
already noticed, but also by Anastasius Sinaites (yf. 640 — 700),
who begins his principal work, the 'OSifyof or ' Guide to the true
way ', with a number of definitions clearly taken from Aristotle ;
and by Theodore of Studion (759 — 836X who is still represented
by his theological writings and by a large collection of letters
which throw light on the social life of the ninth century \ Under
Leo the Armenian (813 — 820) the grammarian Theognostus com-
piled a work on orthography comprising more than
a thousand rules, mainly founded on Herodian's
great work on accentuation. The vowels and the diphthongs which,
in Byzantine Greek, have the same pronunciation as those vowels,
are here grouped together, c with ai, and v with oc, the vowel
being called c ^cXov, or v ^iXov, to distinguish it from the diph-
thong '. In the first half of the ninth century Michael Syncellus
(Jl. 829-42) wrote a popular manual on Syntax. The other
prose-writers of the first half of that century include George
Syncellus (d. c, 810), who brought his Chronicle
of the world down to the reign of Diocletian; ^^^^q^^
Theophanes (d. c. 81 7X who carried it on to his 8ync«iiiM,
own day, to be succeeded by others who continued Niccphorus *
the work to 901; ,and the patriarch Nicephorus
(d. 829), who wrote a short history of the empire from 602 to 769,
and was, with Theodore of Studion, one of the main opponents
of the iconoclastic emperor Leo the Armenian. Among the em-
peror's supporters was John the Grammarian, patriarch from 832
to 842, who to great literary attainments added a wide knowledge
of science which led to his being accused by the ignorant of
studying magic*. But, on the whole, the iconoclastic age was
singularly barren in secular learning.
It was, however, during the two centuries described as the
dark age of secular literature at Constantinople
that the light of Greek learning spread eastwards amonf tb«
to Syria and Arabia. The philosophy of Aristotle JjjSSi/^
had already found acceptance, in the fifth century,
among the Syrians of Edessa, and, about the middle of that
> Migne, xcix. ' Knimbacher, 1 145*; q>. tupm p. 9a
• FinUy, W 117, 14I, J07 f.
s. 25
386 THE BYZANTINE AGE. [CHAP.
century, Syriac commentaries on the De Inierpretatione^ the
A^afytica Priora and the Sophistici EUnctU had been produced
by Probus. The School of Edessa, closed by Zeno in 489 owing
to its sympathy with Nestorianism, was succeeded by that at
Nisibis^ which attracted the notice of Cassiodorus, and that
at Gandisapora ' (between Susa and Ecbatana), which sent forth
Syrian students to instruct the Arabians in philosophy and
medicine respectively. In the sixth century works of Aristotle
had been translated into Syriac by Sergius of Resaina' ; and, in
the seventh, the De Inierpreiatiomy Categories and Analytics were
produced in the same language, together with a Life of Aristotle,
by Jacob, bishop of Edessa (fl. 651 — 719). Under the rule of
the AbbSsidae (which lasted from 750 to 1258, and whose capital
of Bagdad was founded in 762) the medical science of the Greeks
became known to the Arabs through the medium of the Syrians ;
and, in the reign of the son of Harun-al-Raschid, the calif Alma-
mun (813 — 833), whose request for the temporary use of the
services of Leo the mathematician was resolutely refused by
the emperor Theophilus {c, 830)*, philosophical works were trans-
lated by Syrian Christians from Greek into Syriac, and from
Syriac into Arabic. It was under Almamun that Aristotle was
first translated into Arabic under the direction of Ibn al Batrik
('Son of the Patriarch'). The Nestorian Honein Ibn Ishak,
or Johannitius (d. 876), who was familiar with Syriac, Arabic
and Greek, presided over a school of interpreters at Bagdad ;
and (besides versions of Plato, Hippocrates and Galen)* Greek
commentaries on Aristotle were, in his name, translated by his
sons and his disciples into Syriac and Arabic. In the tenth
century new translations of Aristotle, Theophrastus, Alexander
of Aphrodisias, Themistius, Syrianus, Ammonius etc were pro-
duced by the Nestorian Syrians. Of the Arabian philosophers
in the East the most important were Alkendi of Basra (d. c. 870),
^ KoX Xvpliis t45o¥ ilia xal dorca rdrra N<0't/3(r [r*]» | E^^/vdn/r 6tafidt,
Inscr. in Rainsa/s Ci/ies tU, of Phrygia, ii 733. Cp. Lightfoot's Ignatius^
i 497. See p. 349 supra,
' Gondi Sapor in Gibbon, c. \i (iv 361 Bury).
* A. BaumsUrk, Lucubr, Syro-Graecat^ 358 — 438.
* Cedrenus, p. 549 ; Gibbon, c. 5a (vi 34 Bury). • ib, vi 19 n.
XXII.] ARISTOTLE IN SYRIA AND ARABIA. 387
who commented on the logical writings of Aristotle ; Alfarabi of
Bagdad (d. 950), who in logic followed Aristotle unreservedly,
and accepted the Neo-Platonic doctrine of emanation ; Avicenna
(980 — 1037), who taught in Ispahan, combining instruction in
medicine with the exposition of Aristotle, analysing the Organon
and writing commentaries on the De Anima and De Caeio^ and
on the Physics and Metaphysics] and Algazel (1059 — 11 11), who
began his teaching at Bagdad and opposed (on religious grounds)
the doctrines of Aristotle ^ The Arabic translations of Aristotle
passed from the East to the Arabian dominions in the West,
Spain having been conquered by the Arabs early in the eighth
century. The study of Aristotle in Spain in the twelfth century,
and the influence of the Latin translations of the Arabic versions
of Aristotle, is reserved for our review of the Middle Ages in
the West (c. xxx).
At the beginning of the two centuries which are regarded as
the darkest portion of the Byzantine age, Leo the 'Isaurian',
who repelled the last great effort of the Saracens to destroy
Constantinople and ably reformed the military defences and the
civil administration of the empire, did no service whatsoever to
the cause of learning. He actually disendowed the imperial
academy in the quarter between the palace walls and Santa
Sophia, and ejected the Ecumenical Doctor at its head and the 12
learned men who assisted him in giving instruction in arts and
theology*. He is even stated by Zonaras, and by George the
Monk, to have burnt the academy with its library of 33,000
volumes of sacred and secular literature, — an act which (con-
sidering the position of the building) would have been so indiscreet
as to be absolutely incredible. It is probable, however, that the
schools of theology were alone suppressed, as we know that
^ Ueberweg*s Gntmiriss,td, 8, ii |a8 (pp. 401—417 fA History fPhilotopky^
E. trans.) with the literature quoted there, and in Httbner, } 35, and Kmnn-
bacher, p. 1098* f, esp. J. G. Wenrtch, Dt auttorum Gra§€9rum versi&mibm
et commentariis Syriacis Arabids AmunicU Persitisqtu (1849), J. Lippert's
StuJim (1894)1 and articles by M. Steinschndder ; also A. Baamstark,
AristoteUs bet den Syrem vam v — viii Jahrkundert (1900). Cp. Haar^a,
Histoire He la Philosophit Seeleuiipu^ ed. s, 11 i 15 — 99.
• Finlay, ii 44 ; Bury, ii 433 f.
25—2
388 THE BYZANTINE AGE. [CHAP.
learned divines -such as Theodore of Studion and the patriarch
Nicephorus ' received an excellent secular education in grammar,
language, science and philosophy' ^ Towards the end of this dark
period, Leo the Byzantine received permission from Theophilus
(829 — 43) to teach in public; under his successor, Caesar Bardas,
who ruled on behalf of Michael the Drunkard, iconoclasm was
abolished (through the influence of Michael's mother, Theodora),
and the university of Constantinople restored. In 857 the
patriarch Ignatius, a man of the highest integrity
SsJ^S^ "*• whose father (Michael I) and grandfather (Nice-
phorus I) had filled the imperial throne, was
banished ; and a man of equal integrity and greater learning,
Photius, whose brother had married the sister of the empress
Theodora, and whose grand-uncle Tarasius had been patriarch
in his day, was, like Tarasius, raised as a layman from the position
of chief Secretary of State to that of the head of the Eastern
Church*. The appointment of Photius led to a serious conflict
with the papacy ; and Ignatius was restored in 863. Basil I
(867 — 886), the founder of the Macedonian dynasty, appointed
Photius tutor to the emperor's son, afterwards known as Leo the
Wise ; and the two sets of moral exhortations, which have come
down to us under the name of Basil and are founded largely on
the work on the duties of princes dedicated by Agapetus to
Justinian, and also (like Photius' letter' to the king of the
Bulgarians) on the moral precepts of Isocrates, may possibly
have been really composed by Photius \ On the death of Ignatius
in 878, Photius was reinstated by Basil, to be exiled by his pupil,
Leo the Wise, in 886, and to die in exile in 891.
Photius, who was born c, 820-7, had scarcely completed his
own education when he was seized by his life-long
passion for instructing others. He displayed an
almost pedantic partiality for correcting the grammatical mistakes
of his friends, and this passion pursued him not only during his
tenure of the patriarchate, but even in the time of his exile*.
* Bury, ii 435, 519. « Finlay, ii 175 f.
* Ep. 6, pp. 234-48, ed. Valettas.
* Krumbacher, § 191'.
* e.g. Ep, 336 Valettas, ...o^c voXocxt^ovat... 0-1/1^171 c//ii r€l$tff$tu.
XXIL] PHOTIUS. 389
His house was the constant resort of eager youths to whom he
interpreted the Categories of Aristotle, and the controversies
respecting genera and species^ and 'mind' and 'matter'*. He
composed text-books of dialectic, and discussed with his pupils
points of theology and scholarship. Even when he had risen
to high office, his activity as a teacher did not cease. His house
continued to be frequented by the most inquisitive members of
the intellectual society of the capital*. Books were read aloud
in the master's presence and were criticised by the master himself,
who stated his opinion on their substance and their form. From
all who listened to his lectures he exacted the most implicit
submission, even demanding written promises of adhesion to his
views'. The wide range of his attainments was admitted even
by his opponents ; and, in his many-sided erudition, he not only
surpassed his contemporaries, but even rivalled the most learned
of the ancients. In his philosophical studies he showed a special
partiality for Aristotle ; while he had less capacity for appreciating
Plato, and was indeed strongly opposed to the Platonic doctrine
of Ideas \ In his dialectical treatises he generally followed
the methods adopted by Porphyry, Ammonius and John of
Damascus *.
The two works of Photius which are of special importance
in the history of Scholarship, are (i) his Bibliotheca and (2) his
Lexicon, In dedicating his Biblioiheca or Myriobiblon to his
brother Tarasius, he states that it was written in compliance with
his brother's request for information as to the books which had
been read aloud and discussed in the circle of Photius during
his brother's absence. Photius himself was at the time preparing
for his journey as envoy to the Assyrian court, Le. to the seat of
the calif at Bagdad. From the letter of dedication it has been
sometimes inferred that this vast work was compiled during the
* QuofsL AmphiL 77 c. i (Hergenrother, iii 341).
' Ep. 3, ad Papam Nicolaum (p. 149 Valettas), 6Um...fidwmm, xa^(^^«
tQv 4w€fHartimrw, rV Tpifiif^ rflr wpo^SimKryofidp^Mf rrX. Cp, Hergenrother, i
* Hergenrother, i 335, note 118.
* Hergenrother, iii 343. * Krambacber, | 916*.
390 THE BYZANTINE AGE. [CHAP.
embassy itself*; but, whatever ambiguity there may be in the
dedication, the most natural interpretation of the conclusion is
that it was completed before the author departed for Assyria*.
The work, which must have been finished before 857 ac, while
the author was still a layman, consists of 280 chapters, corre-
sponding to the number of separate volumes (codices) read and
reviewed, and it fills altogether 545 quarto pages in double
columns in Bekker's edition. Some of these reviews contain
lengthy extracts, with criticisms on the style or subject-matter.
Among the prose writings are the works of theologians, historians,
orators and rhetoricians, philosophers, grammarians and lexi-
cographers, physicists and physicians, and even romances, acts
of councils, and lives of saints and martyrs. Next to the theo-
logians, the historians fill the largest space; and, among the
historical writings here preserved for posterity, are important
notices of, or extracts from, Hecataeus, Ctesias, Theopompus,
Diodorus Siculus, Memnon of Heraclea, Arrian, Phlegon of Tralles,
and the chronologist Julius Africanus, besides later historians
such as Olympiodorus of Thebes, Nonndsus of Byzantium, and
Candidus the Isaurian. We are also supplied with excerpts from
the Chrestomathies of Proclus and Helladius, and brief reviews of
the lexicon of the latter, as well as similar works by Diogenianus,
and the Atticists Aelius Dionysius, Pausanias and Phrynichus.
The author is particularly happy in his literary criticisms. He
notes the charm of Herodotus, the monotonously balanced clauses
of Isocrates, the clear, simple and pleasant style of Ctesias.
Josephus in his view is rich in argument, and in sententiousness
and pathos; Appian, terse and plain; and Arrian, masterly in
his capacity for succinct narration. Lucian spends all his pains
on producing a prose comedy in a style that is brilliant and
classical. Phrynichus has collected excellent linguistic materials
^ e.g. Nicolai in Brockhaus, EncykL part 87 p. 359; Saintsbury, i 176.
Gibbon, c. 53 (vi 105 Bury) is rather vague.
' p. 545, ti yjkv TQATTnv t\\9 wpifffiilaM dioi'i^i'ra {Siopoowra MS) rA cou'^
col dtfOptifwiMoif caraXd^ riXtn, ix*^* ^^ tdrticip r^ iKwldot 06 dia/uaproO^or...
fl 3' iKtXBtv lifJL&s difaffia9dtit¥oif rA tfct6r re xal ^"KipBpwwoif ptOfM tit rV
dXXi^Xwr $iaif.,.dwoKaTarrifau (he will tend his brother a fresh series of
reviews).
XXII.] PHOTIUS. 391
for the use of others, without making any use of them himself.
Philostratus is lucid and graceful ; Synesius has dignity of phrase,
but is apt to become over-poetical, though his Letters are full
of charm ; Cyril of Alexandria writes in a poetical variety of
prose ; Libanius is a canon and standard of Attic style. Lastly,
in writing the earliest extant review of any novel, the critic
describes the Aethiopica of Heliodorus as abounding in pathetic
situations and hairbreadth escapes \ The work, as a whole, is
such as to prove, in the language of Gibbon, that 'no art or
science, except poetry, was foreign to this universal scholar, who
was deep in thought, indefatigable in reading and eloquent in
diction".
In his Lexicon (Xc^cwv <rvvayaryi7), which belongs to a later
date than the Bibliotheca^ he makes use of excerpts from the
vocabularies of Aelius Dionysius and Pausanias, both of them
partly founded on Diogenianus ; he also uses the abridged Harpo-
cration, with the Platonic lexicons of Timaeus and Boethus*.
For Homeric words he depends on Pseudo-Apion, Heliodorus
and Apollonius. This Lexicon has been preserved solely in the
codex GaUanus (c, 1 200), formerly in the possession of Dr Thomas
Gale (d. 1702), and now in the Library of Trinity College, Cam-
bridge. It was twice transcribed by Porson, and published from
his second transcript by Dobree (i822)\ The explanations of
certain words given by Photius in the learned Letters addressed
during his first exile (867-77) ^o Amphilochus, bishop of Cyzicus,
agree with those of the Lexicon *.
The above was not the only Lexicon executed under the
superintendance of Photius. In the Etymologicum Florentinum^^
preserved in a MS of cent x, and now called the Etymohgicum
genuinum^ Photius is cited in five passages, once in the form
wiria% iywy barrios h varpuipxn^^' But (curioUSly enough) he is
' Cp. Saintsbury, i 176 — 183.
' c. 53 (vi 104 Bury). ■ Naber'i Av^r/.
^ Previously edited (from another transcript) by Hermann (1808) ; and
since, by Naber (1864-5).
' Hergenrother, iii 10.
* Printed (with £(, parvum) In E. Miller's MHat^s (1868), pp. 11—340.
^ Reitzenstein's Etymologika (sammarised in BerL Phii. Wxh. 1898,
p. 901 f ), pp. 58 — 60 f.
392 THE BYZANTINE AGE. [CHAP,
not named in the numerous extracts derived from his earlier
Lexicon and described as taken Ik tov j^tiropucov. In his Am/JU-
lochian Questions (131), he quotes a passage on the magnet which
we find in the Etymologicum^ and which ultimately comes firom
the Chrestomathy of Helladius quoted by Photius in the Bibluh
theca (p. 529)^ At the end of one of the articles of the Ety-
molo^cum the poor scholar who originally transcribed the work
laments his poverty and describes himself as impelled by the
love of language (rip ra»v Ai^ywi^ ^on-c) to spend sleepless nights
over his task, in the hope of deriving great advantage from it
and leaving to posterity something worthy of remembrance*.
The authorities here quoted include Methodius, Orus and Orion,
Zenobius (the commentator on Apollonius), Herodian, Choero-
boscus, Theognostus {fl, 820), and many scholia on the ancient
poets. It would appear that the explanations of Homeric words
current early in the sixth century were supplemented from Choero-
boscus and reduced to a lexicographical form ; that interpolations
were then introduced, and that, in this last stage, the work was
taken up by Photius, who thus became the founder of the Greek
Etymological Lexicons. The Etymologicum genuinum was followed
by the Etymologicum parvum, which was also drawn up under the
orders of Photius, and, according to the statement at its close,
was completed on Sunday 13 May, the date of 'the opening of
the great church ' (of Santa Sophia) in a year identified as 882,
when the church was repaired and the western apse rebuilt by
the emperor Basil the Macedonian*. Even on the day of the
opening of his great cathedral church, the patriarch was doubtless
not uninterested in the completion of the least of his three
Lexicons.
His extant Letters (260 in number) are mainly on ix>ints
of dogmatic theology or exegesis, though many of them deal
with exhortation and admonition, condolence or reproof. In a
letter addressed, during his exile, to the emperor Basil I, he
bitterly complains that he has even been deprived of the use
of his books \ In another he expresses his surprise that the
bishop of Nicomedeia regards St Peter's use of iyKo/jiPwFaa$€
* jA 63-5. « 1^. 66. » jA 69.
^ p. 531 ed. Valettas, quoted on p. 377.
XXII.] PHOTius. 393
(i Pet V 5) as a barbarism, and justifies it from Epicharmus and
Apollodorus of Carystus^ In a third, he writes to the bishop
of Cyzicus, eulogising the epistles of Plato in preference to those
of Demosthenes and Aristotle, and recommending his corre-
spondent to study those 'ascribed to Phalaris, tyrant of Acragas',
and those of Brutus and of the royal philosopher (probably
M. Aurelius) and Libanius, together with those of Basil, Gregory
Nazianzen, and Isidore*. He tells the bishop of Laodicea to
cultivate a pure Attic style'; and, lastly, he corrects a composition
by the monk and philosopher, Nicephorus, and offers to make
a collection of rhetorical works on his behalf, as soon as he is
definitely informed as to the books which he requires*. The
second part of his long letter to Michael, king of the Bulgarians
{Ep, 6), is borrowed largely from the Nicocles of Isocrates. The
style of his Letters varies from the extreme of an excessive
redundancy to that of a most laconic terseness. One of the
most beautiful passages in his longer letters is that in the first
letter to Pope Nicholas (861), where he describes the loss of
a life of peaceful calm which befell him on his ceasing to be
a layman, and regretfully dwells on the happiness of his home
in the days when he was surrounded by eager inquirers after
learning by whom he was always welcomed on his return from
court ■.
Among the minor contemporaries of Photius were Cometas,
a professor of Grammar (863), who prepared a recension of
Homer which is the theme of two epigrams written by himself' ;
and Ignatius, the ' master of the grammarians ' (870 — 880), who
describes himself as the restorer of Grammar : —
ypatifULTiir/jiiff X^ift KtvBoiUvfpf irfXayct'.
* P- 54'-
' p. 545. It » possibly owing to the influence of Photius that the letters
of ' Phalaris ' and Brutus have been preserved in so many iiss (Hergenrdther,
iii 130).
* P- 547- * P- 66'.
'p. 149 Valettas, Hiwww tlfff^ixf^ i^% 4i4wwow yaXilnff yXvKdmt «rX.
On Photius, cp. Milman*s La/tH Christianity^ iii 156 — 170 ; HeigenrbCher's
Phctiusy 1867-9; Krumbacher, I «i6'.
* Anth, PtU, XV 37, 38. ' ib, 39. Kmmbacher, p. 710'.
394 THE BYZANTINE AGE. [CHAP.
But the waves of oblivion have rolled over the Grammar of
Ignatius, as well as the Homeric recension of Cometas.
The absence of all notice of the classical Greek Poets in
the Bibliothtca of Photius has often been observed. Possibly
its learned author was more partial to prose. His pupil, Leo the
philosopher, whom Caesar Bardas appointed Professor of Mathe-
matics at the University of Constantinople, describes himself as
bidding farewell to the Muses, as soon as he becomes a pupil
of Photius in the 'diviner lore' of rhetoric ^ The prose of Photius
is certainly better than his scanty contributions. to sacred verse;
and, apart from this, his omission of poetry in a work professing
to record only a portion of his reading in his maturer years is quite
consistent with his having studied the usual classical poets in
the days of his youth. In the ninth century the authors studied
at school, and familiar to the general public in
thc^aMsics. Constantinople, included Homer, Hesiod, Pindar;
certain select plays of Aeschylus {Prometheus^
Septetn^ Persae)^ Sophocles (Ajax^ Electra^ Oedipus Tyranmus),
and Euripides {Hecuba^ Orestes^ Phoenissae^ and, in the second
degree, Alcestis^ Andromache^ Hippolytus^ Medea^ Rhesus ^ Tro€uiesy\
also Aristophanes (beginning with the Plutus\ Theocritus, Lyco-
phron and Dionysius Periegetes. The prose authors principally
studied were Thucydides, parts of Plato and Demosthenes, also
Aristotle, Plutarch's Lives^ and especially Lucian, who is often
imitated in the Byzantine age'. Among rhetoricians, the favourite
authors were Dion Chrysostom, Aristides, Themistius and Libanius;
among novelists, Achilles Tatius and Heliodorus. The geographer
Strabo is hardly noticed before the Byzantine age. In sacred
literature, the books chiefly read were, apart from the Scriptures,
certain of the Greek Fathers, such as Basil, Gregory of Nazianzus
and of Nyssa, Chrysostom, Johannes Climax (525 — 600, author
of a devotional work on the SccUa Paradisi ending with the
Liber ad Pastorem\ and John of Damascus, together with lives
* Anth. Gr., Appendix iii 355.
' The KuXofUTpla of Eugenius {Jl. 500) was confined to 15 plays of the
three tragic poets. Cp. Bemhardy, Gr, £ML i 694^ ; and Wilamowits, Eur,
Her, i 195*.
* e.g. in the PhilopcUris (r. 6oa-io), Timarion (c, 1150) and ManarU
(c, 1416).
XXII.] STUDY OF THE CLASSICS. ARETHAS. 395
of saints and martyrs*. The predominance of sacred literature
is obvious in the catalogues of the great Greek libraries, such
as those on Mount Athos*. But the fact that so large a body
of secular literature has been preserved at all is mainly due to
the learning and enlightenment of eminent ecclesiastics such as
Photius and Arethas.
Arethas was one of the many distinguished pupils of Photius.
He was born at Patrae about 860-5, was Arch- ^^^
bishop of Caesarea in Cappadocia in or before 907,
and died in or after 933 (the date of a Moscow ms copied on his
behalf). Although his residence in Cappadocia kept him far
removed from the chief centres of learning, he devoted himself
with remarkable energy to the collection of classical as well as
ecclesiastical writings, and to commenting on the same. Certain
of his annotations on Plato', Dion Chrysostom, Lucian, Tatian,
Athenagoras, Clement of Alexandria, and Eusebius are still extant;
and he happens to be the author of three indifferent epigrams
in the Palatine Anthology (xv 32-4). His interest in classical
literature is attested by important mss copied under his orders
and at his own expense. Among these are mss of Euclid (888) ;
the Apologists, Clemens Alexandrinus^ Eusebius (914) ; Aristides
(917); possibly also of Dion Chrysostom, and certainly of Plato
(895)*. Arethas was one of the earliest commentators on the
Apocalypse, and his own copy of Plato found its way to the
monastery at Patmos. This famous ms was brought from Patmos
to Cambridge by the traveller, Dr Edward Daniel Clarke, after-
wards Professor of Mineralogy in that University. It is now in
the Bodleian at Oxford, and is known as the codex BodUianus
Clarkianus 39. At the end of the volume it bears an inscription
stating that it was ' written by John the calligraphist, for Arethas,
Deacon of Patrae, in the month of November 895 '. In October
1 80 1, when Clarke discovered the MS in the midst of a disordered
heap of volumes lying on the floor of the Library at Patmos,
* Knimbacher, § 315', p. 505.
' ed. Lambros (Camb. Univ. Prefts), « vols., 1895 f.
• M. Schanz in PkiloL 34 (1874) 374 f ; E. H. Gifibrd in Class. Rev.
1909, p. 16 ; J. Burnet, i>. p. 176.
^ Facsimile on p. 316. ' FatsimuU on p. 376.
396 THE BYZANTINE AGE. [CHAP.
' the cover was full of worms, and falling to pieces ' \ Its value
was fully appreciated by Porson at Cambridge (in 1802)' and
by Gaisford at Oxford (181 2). Its readings were published by
the latter in 1820, and it has since been reproduced in facsimile
(1898 f). The Oxford MS of Euclid (888), which, like that of
Plato, was acquired by Arethas while he was still a deacon at
Patrae, is almost the earliest dated example of the Greek minuscule
writing of the Middle Ages'.
The patriarch Photius had been finally deposed on the ac-
cession of his former pupil Leo the Wise (886). The next eighty
years were entirely taken up with the reigns of the son and the
grandson of Basil the Macedonian, Leo the Wise and Constantine
Porphyrogenitus, both of whom were chiefly dis-
Comiununcvii tinguished for their literary productions. Leo
(886 — 911) was the author of certain homilies and
epigrams, with a book of oracles which gained him the name
of 'the Wise'^. The treatise on Tactics bearing his name was
probably written by Leo the * Isaurian ' \ Constantine Porphyro-
genitus, so called because he was bom in the porphyry chamber
in the imperial palace, was kept in the background from the age
of seven to that of forty (912 — 945)1 and consoled himself mean-
while by writing books and painting pictures'. He produced
a biography of Basil I, treatises on the military subdivisions and
the administration of the empire ^ and a vast work on the cere-
monies of the court'. He also rendered considerable service
to Greek literature by organising the compilation of a series of
encyclopaedias of History, as well as Agriculture and Medicine.
The encyclopaedia of History was drawn up under 53 headings,
such as On Embassies', Virtues and Vices, Conspiracies, Strata-
gems and Military Harangues. It included numerous extracts
1 Clarke's Travels, vi 46 (e<l. 4, 1818).
' Luard*s Correspondence of Porson, p. 80.
* £. M. Thompson, Palaeoxrapky^ p. 163. On Arethas, cp. Krumbacher,
§217*, and E. Maass in Afilanges Graux, pp. 749-66.
< Krumbacher, pp. 168. 6^8, 71 1'. • ib. p. 636".
* Gibbon, c. 48 (v 308 f Bury) and c. 53 (vi 61-6),
^ Migne, cxiii 63 — 411. • id, cxii 74 — 1416.
* id. cxiii 605 — 65a.
XXII.] THE ANTHOLOGY OF CEPHALAS. 397
from earlier historians, beginning with Herodotus and ending with
Theophylact Simocattes. The most important of these extracts
are those from Polybius. They were published by Fulvius Ursinus
at Antwerp in 1582 under the title Seiecta de Legationidus^ and»
with additions by Hoeschel, in 1603. Further extracts from
Polybius and others were included in the Excerpta de Virtutibus ei
Vitiis published by Valesius (1634) from a ms found in Cyprus
and acquired by Peirescius (1580 — 1637), and hence known as
the Excerpta Peiresciana, A third series of extracts was included
in the Excerpta de Sententiis^ published by Mai in 1827 ^
To the early part of the tenth century we may ascribe the
Greek Anthology compiled by Constantine Cepha- ^^^ Antho-
las, who held office at the Byzantine court in 917. \o%y of
He included in his collection the earlier Anthologies ^^
of Meleager, Philippus and Agathias, whose prefatory poems he
preserves in his fourth book, and whose epigrams may be found
in books v — vii and ix — xi. The Anthology of Cephalas consists
in all of XV books, contained in a Codex Palatinus of century xi,
so called because it belonged to the Library of the Palatinate
at Heidelberg. In 1623, on the capture of Heidelberg by Tilly,
this MS was among the 3500 presented to the Pope and trans-
ported to the Vatican. It was divided into two parts, and after
the treaty of Tolentino in 1797 was taken to Paris (with 37 other
Palatine mss) as part of the Italian spoils of Napoleon Bonaparte.
After the Peace of Paris (18 15) the first part, consisting of
Books i — xii, was (with the 37 other mss) restored to Heidelberg,
which also possesses a photographic facsimile of the 48 leaves
still retained in Paris. The ms was first made known to scholars
by Salmasius, who transcribed the whole at Heidelberg in 1607.
Up to that time the Greek Anthology had .only been known in
the form of the Anthologia Planudea (cent xiv), which will be
noticed in the sequel (p. 418)*.
It is only the literary epigrams of the Anthoiagy that are
connected by their subject with the history of Scholarship. Some
of them contain the very essence of ancient literary criticism.
Among the poets here criticised we find Homer, Hesiod and
1 Krumbftcher, §S 107—144, esp. § iia*.
« Chrirt, § 357, p. 5"5'; Knimbacher, pp. 7«7-9*'
398 THE BYZANTINE AGE. [CHAP.
Antimachus ; Alcman, Archilochus, Stesichorus, Alcaeus, Sappho^
Ibycus, Hipponax, Anacreon and Pindar; Aeschylus, Sophocles
and Euripides ; Aristophanes and Menander ; Lycophron and
Callimachus ; Aratus and Nicander^ All the nine lyric poets
are skilfully discriminated in a single epigram (ix 184); all the
three bucolic poets described as gathered into one flock and one
fold (ix 205); and, in the dedicatory verses by Meleager and
Philippus, each of the poets whose verses are entwined in the
garland of the Anthology is distinguished by the name of an
appropriate flower. The writers of prose criticised by these poets
are comparatively few; but they include Herodotus and Thucy-
dides, Xenophon and Plato, and some other philosophers*. A
Byzantine epigrammatist, Thomas Scholasticus, who recognises
'three stars in rhetoric', admires Aristides and Thucydides no less
than Demosthenes '. Lastly, the verbal critics of Alexandria are
the theme of several satirical epigrams, the best known of which
are those of Herodicus (preserved by Athenaeus), and of Anti-
phanes (xi 322) and Philippus (xi 321)*.
In the latter half of the tenth century the expulsion of the
Arabs from Crete (061) is commemorated byTheo-
dosius Diaconus in a long iambic poem of some
historical interest ^ In the same age we have the prolific poet,
John the Geometer (y?. 963-86), whose best work is to be found
in his epigrams on the old poets, philosophers, rhetoricians and
historians'. Historical studies are . meanwhile represented (i) by
the Chronicle bearing the name of 'Symeon Ma-
gister' who is probably identical with the cele-
brated Hagiographer, Symeon Metaphrastes ' ; and (2) by the
history of the third quarter of the tenth century by Leo Diaconus,
whose style is influenced by Homer as well as Procopius'.
* vii 1—75; 405-9; 709; 745; ix «4— «6; 64; 184— 213; 506, 575 etc;
cp. J. A. Symonds, Greek Poets, 35^6 ; and Saintsbury, i 81-6.
* vii 93— 135; 676; ix 188, 197.
* xvi 315. This, however, is from the App. Planudea and is later than
Cephalas.
* Supra, p. 161 n. * Migne, cxiii 987 f.
* ib. cvi 901 f ; Krum1)acher, §§ 305-6'.
' Krumbacher, § 149'.
» I*. § ii7«.
XXII] SUlDAS. 399
To the third quarter of the tenth century (950-76)' we may
assign the great Lexicon of Sui'das (SovfSac), which
is a combination of a lexicon and an encyclopaedia,
the best articles being those on the history of literature. It is
founded (i) on earlier lexicons, such as the abridged Harpo-
cration, Aelius Dionysius, Pausanias and Helladius ; (2) on
scholia on Homer, Sophocles, Aristophanes and Thucydides, and
on commentaries on Aristotle; (3) on histories, especially those
included in the Excerpts of Constantine Porphyrogenitus ; (4) on
biographical materials collected by Hesychius of Miletus, and by
Athenaeus; and (5) on other writers especially popular at Con-
stantinople in the tenth century, such as Aelian, Philostratus
and Babrius. Its numerous coincidences with the lexicon of
Photius are best explained by regarding both as having borrowed
from the same originals. The earliest extant reference to the
lexicon is found in Eustathius (latter part of cent xii). The learned
Greeks of the Renaissance, e.g. Macarius, Michael Apostolius,
Constantine I^ascaris and 'Emmanuel' (probably Chrysoloras),
compiled many extracts from its pages'. A minor lexicon, the
Violarium (Icuvia) bearing the name of Eudocia (1059 — 1067),
the consort of Constantine Ducas, is partly composed of excerpts
from Sui'das, and is now ascribed to Constantine Palaeokappa
(c, 1543)** who was actually indebted to printed books for some
of the learning which he palmed off on the world under the
name of an empress of the eleventh century.
' The list of emperors, s.v, *Adcy&, ends with Joannes Tzimiskes (d. 976) ;
but this may be a later addition, and the lexicon as a whole may be of earlier
date.
^ On Suidas, cp. Christ, § 633*; Krumbacher, § 333'; Wentzel, \^«tM(|r
tur Geschichte der griechischin LexiMographen (S. Btr, Btrlin Akad, 1895,
477—487).
' Christ, p. 844' ; Krumbacher, § 140*.
Conspectus of Greek Literature, ftc, zooo — c. 1453 A.D.
Bmpwron
1000
976 Baul II
loas Contun-
line VIII
ioa8 Roraanus
III.
1034 Michael IV
104a Michael V
104a CoDstan*
tine IX
1054 Theodora
ios6MichaelVI
1057 Isaac I
ComnenuB
1059 Constan-
tine X Ducat
1067 Romanus
IV
1071 Michael
VII Ducat
io78Nicephorut
III
1081 Alexiut I
1100
1118 John II
Conuienut
1 143 Manuel I
Comnenut
1180 Alexiut II
Comnenut
1 183 Andronicut
i Comnenut
1185 Itaac II
Angelut
1 195 Alexiut III
1800
iao3 Isaac II &
Alexiut IV
iao4 Alexiut V
Ducat
NktuoH Em'
/rrvrr
iao4Theodore I
Lascarit
laaa John III
Ducat
1 354 Theodore
II Lascarik
1358 John IV
Latcarit
1359 Michael
VIII Pal-
aeologut
ia6i Recovery of
CoHttnntinofit
laSaAndronictu
II
1800-
1338 Andronicut
in
1341-76 lohn V
»34«-55j«*»nVI
Cantacutenut
1 376 Andronicut
IV
1379 John V
J restored)
anuel 1 1
143) John VI 11
1448 Conttan-
tine XI
1453 Fall 0/
tonstantino^
Poeti
Chrittophorus
of Mytilene
fl. ioa8-43
John Mauroput
ft. 1043-55
Ckrutus
PatUiu
Theodorut
Prodromus
d. c. 1159
1904 Louof
CoHstantinopU
LaitH Emperors
laoA Baldwin I
laoo Henry
I a 17 Peter
laio Robert
laai Baldwin II
-61
AntkoUgia
Planuata
Manuel Philes
c. 1375—1345
Iliad of
Hermoniacut
c. 1333-35
Hiatoztoiii,
Obroiilol«n
Z071 John
Xiphilinut
1080 John
Scylitzea
1080 Michael
Attaliatet
io8oNicephorut
Bryenniut
1069 —c. 1138
Cedrenut
Conttantine
Manatses
1145 Zonarai
1 148 Anna
Comnena
1083— 1148
1 176 John
Cinnamut
1143— <. 1186
Michael Glykai
<*. 1130— c. 1190,
i3o6 Nicetat
Acominatut
c. 1150— c. laii
ia6i Acropolitet
laiT — 138a
i3o8Pachymeret
134a— f. 1310
Xanthopulut
1395 — c. 1360
1365 John
Cantacuzenut
c. i3« — 1383
1359 Nicephonit
Grcgorat
146a Ducat
1463 Laonicut
1467 Critobulut
1477 Phranties
BhttorleUss,
John Doxopatres
'Sicelioies'
MichaelAndreo-
e«lut, trans-
tor of ' Syn
tipat*
Michael Italicus
ft. 1147-^
TimartPH
1 155 Nicephorut
Batilaket
1175 Michael
Acominatut
1140 — laao
Blemmydet
c. iis>7 — 1373
Georgiut (Gre-
goriutX^ypriut
1341— r. 1390
Nicephorut
Chumnut
c. 1961 — c. I3a8
Demetrius
Cydonet
c. x-Xil—c. 1396
1391 Manuel II
« 350— Mas
1416 Mazarit
14^ Matthaeut
Camariotet
BohtfUn
Avicenna
980—1037
Ptdlus
1018-78
1057-9 Isaac
Porphyrogeni'
tut
Algasel
1059-1111
{ohn Italus
f ichael of
Ephesut
EuttratittS of
Nicaea
c. 1050—1190
*Eiympl0gicum
GudiaMum '
Tzetzes
mo — ii8o4'
1175 Eustathius
a. c» 1 193-4
Grcgorius
Corinthius
' Etym^ieficMm
MogHum* be-
tween 1 100
and 1350
I8q6 Maximus
Planudes
ia6o — 1310
Moschopulus
1395 — 1316
homas
Magister
1383 — 1338
eodorus
Metochites
1383—1338
ridinius
John Pediasimut
A. 1338-41
Andrcat Lopa-
dioles,Z/j:M»»
ViMd^bemenst
1 397 Chry soleras
^' «35S— »4«5
M
■&.
M
1^;
BodMlmittoal
WHtm
Symeon
c. 1035— if. 1099
1078 Thaophjr-
Euthymiui
ZigabeQna
ft* 1081 — 1118
1143 NkhoUttS
01 Mccboiic
d. c. 1165
1975 JoaniMi
Beocus
d. c. 1993
1349 Gregoriut
ralamai
John Cyparia-
sio€es
1353 Philocheus
1360 Nilus
Cabasilas
Nicolaus
Cabasilas
{Mystie)^xyi\
1438 Bessarkm
CHAPTER XXIII.
BYZANTINE SCHOLARSHIP, IOCX>— I35O A.D. AND AFTER.
The consolidation of Byzantine legislation and despotism,
which had continued for a century (867 — 963) under the first
four emperors of the Basilian dynasty, was followed by a shorter
period of conquest and military glory (963 — 1025) under John
Tzimiskes and Basil 'the slayer of the Bulgarians', and ended
in a still shorter period of conservatism and stationary prosperity
(1025 — 1057) under Constantine VIII and the three successive
husbands of his daughter Zoe. Shortly before this last period
falls the birth of Psellus (1018 — 1078), the most notable personage
in the Byzantine literature of the eleventh century.
Born at Nicomedeia, he learnt law at Constanti-
nople from the future patriarch Xiphilinus, whom he imbued
with an interest in philosophy. According to his own account,
his study of inferior philosophers led him at last to Aristotle and
Plato, and thence to Plotinus, Porphyry, lamblichus and Proclus *.
He also tells us that in his time learning flourished no longer
at Athens or Nicomedeia, at Alexandria or in Phoenicia, or in
either Rome, the Old or the New*. Under the second of the
three husbands of Zoe, Michael the Paphlagonian (1034-41),
he held a judicial appointment at Philadelphia; and under the
third, Constantine Monomachus (1042-55), he became Professor
of Philosophy in the newly founded Academy of law, philosophy
and philology at Constantinople. In that capacity he aroused
a new interest in the philosophy of Plato, which he preferred
1 History of Pulius (y\ 37 f) p. 108. ed. Sathas 1899.
* ib, p. 1 10.
s. 26
402 THE BYZANTINE AGE. [CHAP.
to that of Aristotle, the favourite philosopher of the Church, thus
exposing himself to the imputation of heresy. As a public
teacher, he did much for the revival of Greek literature, and
particularly for the study of Plato; and students even from Arabia
and the distant East sat at his feet. He rose to the high position
of Secretary of State; but, when (in 1054) the friend of his youth,
Xiphilinus, withdrew to the famous monastery on the slopes of
the Mysian Olympus, he became a monk, and, on the death
of the emperor (1055), entered the monastery of his friend. It
was not long, however, before he returned to public life; and,
after the overthrow of the last of the Basilian dynasty (Michael VI)
in 1057, he held high office under Isaac Comnenus and both
of his successors. He became Prime Minister under the next
emperor, his own pupil Michael VII, who proved 'a worthless
sovereign', spending his time in composing rhetorical exercises
and sets of iambic or anapaestic verse, instead of attending to
public business '. In 1075 he delivered the funeral oration over
his friend Xiphilinus, the third of the patriarchs whom he thus
commemorated ; and, not long after the fall of his imperial pupil,
he died (1078).
His attainments as a scholar were most varied. In his speech
in memory of his mother*, he describes himself as lecturing on
Homer and Menander and Archilochus, on Orpheus and Musaeus,
on the Sibylls and Sappho, on Theano and 'the wise woman
of Egypt ', meaning probably Hypatia. By Menander he perhaps
intends proverbial lines from that i>oet, for, elsewhere, he mentions
McKavSpcio, and not Menander, immediately after the tragic poets
and Aristophanes'. In his high-flown eulogy of Constantine
Monomachus, the eloquence, wit and wisdom of the emperor
remind him of the great orators, lyric poets and philosophers
of old^ His voluminous writings include not only a history
of the century (976 — 1077) preceding the close of his life, but
also an iambic poem on Greek dialects and on rules of grammar,
and a brief description of the surroundings of Athens. In his
^ Fiiilay, iii 38.
' Sathas, Bibl, Gr, Medii Aevi^ v 59.
* ib, 538 ; Krumbacher, p. 504' n.
* Sathas, /. <*., v no.
XXIII.] PSELLUS. 403
Letters^ in which the Greek Classics are often mentioned, he
pays honour to the Athenians and Peloponnesians for the sake
of their ancestors *, and laments that the Academy and the Stoa
have fallen into obscurity and that the Lyceum has become
nothing more than a name *. In a Letter on Gregory Nazianzen
he has many interesting criticisms on the style of the ancient
writers'. His list of the forensic phrases of Athens includes
a passage on the reforms of Cleisthenes, with regard to the dis-
tribution of the demes among the new tribes, which we now know
to have been ultimately derived from Aristotle's Constitution of
Athens*, Psellus has been well described as the Photius of the
eleventh century. His general model in style is Plato, while
the short rhythmical and antithetical clauses of his Letters
resemble the sacred poetry of the Byzantine age. He exercised
a considerable influence on the writers of the next generation*.
The successor of Psellus as Professor of Philosophy was John
Italus, a keen student of dialectic, who (without
neglecting Plato and the Neo-Platonists) mainly ton on
devoted himself to the exposition of Aristotle, and
especially to the De Interpretatiom and Books 11 — iv of the
Topica^, A pupil of Psellus, Michael of Ephesus, commented
on part of the Organon (adding excerpts from Alexander of
Aphrodisias) and also on the Ethics'* \ while Eustratius of
Nicaea (r. 1050 — r. iiao) expounded the Ethia* as well as the
Second Book of the Later Analytics^.
' Ep. 10, quoted on p. 377 ; Gregorovius, Stadt AtAen, i 177.
' Ep. 186, p. 471, Salhas.
* First letter to Pothos printed in H. O. Coxe, Cat. BodL i 743—751.
^ II S 4 with Tatimonium in present writer's ed.
* Krumbacher, $ 184'; cp. Bury's Gibbon, t 504. A .'sjrnopsis* of
Aristotle's Logic, which bears the name of Psellus, is the original of the Latin
compendium of Petrus Hispanus and his predecessors. The mnemonic words
ypdfifiaTaf lypa^, ypa^ii, rtx^uiht are represented in Latin by Bariarm,
celarent^ darii^ ferio ; and similarly in the other ' figures '. Cf. Prantl, L^gik^
ii* 163 — 301.
* ib, § 185*.
^ ed. lieylbut in Berlin Ar. Ccmm, xx 461 — 6sa
* ib, pp. I — 406.
* Venice, 1534* Cp. Krumbacher, pp. 430* f.
404 THE BYZANTINE AGE. [CHAP.
Among the published works of Psellus we find an encomium
of more than 25 pages in honour of Joannes
lAuiSpua Maurdpus who, besides passing through the ordi-
nary education of his day, had made a special
study of Latin, had modelled his Greek on that of IsocrateSi
and not unfrequently lit up the sombre style of his Letters with
some glowing phrase Mike a rose in winter'*. Not long after
the accession of Constantine Monomachus (1042) he became
Professor of Philosophy at Constantinople 3 but we soon after-
wards find him in 1047 bishop of Euchaita, which lies between
the Iris and the Halys, a day's journey beyond Amasia in Pontus.
He was the founder of the annual festival which is still celebrated
by the Eastern Church in honour of Chrysostom, Basil and
Gregory Nazianzen; and he sets a noble example of Christian
toleration in an epigram in honour of Plato and Plutarch*. In
the history of Scholarship he deserves mention as the author
of an etymological work in iambic verse. The words selected
are suggested by the Greek text of the Scriptures and they are
arranged in order of subjects, beginning with words such as 0c(h^
ayycXof, ovpavos, ^^^^Pt v^t'f^t crcXi^i^, and with the names of the
winds and the four elements. Plato in the Cratylus had con-
jectured that Tvp was an old ' barbaric ' word, but had attempted
to supply a derivation for 717. Later etymologists had added -fi
to the list of primary words; and Joannes Mauropus agrees
with them, protesting against a contemporary who excluded yi^
from the primary words, and adding that, for monosyllables, we
are not bound to discover etymologies. The authority followed
by Mauropus was apparently Jacob, bishop of Edessa (701), who
produced a Christian version of an earlier work on 'etymology'
or 'Hellenism', ultimately founded either on Seleucus or some
contemporary grammarian in the age of Augustus and Tiberius'.
We have already noticed the Etymologicum genuinum and the
Etyfnologicum parvum as having been prepared
iIxfcTnl*''*'''' under the direction of Photius. Next in date to
these works is the Etymologicum (c, iioo) deriving
the epithet of Gudianum from the former owner of an inferior MS
> Psellus in Sathas, /. c, v pp. 1 48— 150. « Krumbacher, § 308*.
' Reitzenstein, Etytnoiogika^ pp. 175 — 189.
XXIII.] MAUROPUS. ETYMOLOGICAL LEXICONS. 405
of the same (1293), the Dane Marquard Gude (d. 1689), whose
collection was presented by Peter Burman to the Library of
Wolfenbiittel. Many items in this Etymologicum are borrowed
from the Et, genuinum and the Et, parvutn^ and their source
is denoted in the best ms, the codex Barberinus I 70 (hardly later
than cent, xi), by a monogram for ^curcos consisting of two circles
written above one another with the vertical stroke of T running
through the centre of each^ Some of the items so marked are
not to be found in our mss of the two Etymohgiea edited by
Photius, but all of them were probably taken from less imperfect
copies of the same works'. In general, the compiler fails in
judicious selection, while he attempts to combine divergent views,
and copies from his different authorities the same opinion in
varying forms*. For the preservation of the old lexicons the
ninth and tenth centuries were as fatal as they were fruitful
Photius and his circle diffused a wider interest in lexicography,
but the value of the works produced was constantly deteriorating,
the originals being abridged or expanded at the copyist's caprice.
In the twelfth century industrious scholars appear to have gone
back to the works of the age of Photius. Hence arose the
so-called Etymologicum Magnum^ which was founded mainly on
the Et, genuinum with additions from the Et. Gudianum and
from Stephanus of Byzantium and Tryphon 'on breathings',
while it dealt very freely with the Et. gen. by altering the headings
and the phraseology, suppressing quotations, adding passages
from Homer, and in general aiming at something more than an
expanded recension of its original \ It was compiled between
HOC and 1250. It was first printed (with many interpolations)
by Callierges (1499) who was the first to give the work the name
o{ Et, magnum. It was afterwards edited by Sylburg (1594) and
Gaisford (1848). The Etymologicum of 'the great grammarian'
Symeon* is an abridged edition of the Et, genuinum with additions
^ Reitzenstein, /. c,^ p. 138. The publisher of that work (B. G. Teubner)
has kindly supplied me with k facsimiU of the symbol, ^. Leopold Cohn
{^Deutsche Litteraturteitung^ 1897, p. 14 17) demurs to Accepting ^ as a
monogram for ^(^(lof), but gives no other explanation.
* ib, 151 f. • ib, 155. * I*. S4I i,
* Studemund, Anted. Far. Gr.i 113 f.
406 THE BYZANTINE AGE. [CHAP.
from the Et Gudianum^ Stephanus of Byzantium and a lost
'rhetorical lexicon'. It is later than iioo and earlier than 1150^
the approximate date of the lexicon of 'Zonaras', which derives
its etymological glosses from this source. An expansion of
Symeon's work is described as the 'great grammar '\
The Ltxica Segueriana are so called because they are pre-
served in a MS of cent xi formerly belonging to
sJS^erilna ^1^"^ Siguier (1588—1672, President of the French
Academy), now in the Paris Library {Coisiinianus
345). This MS, which contains a number of minor lexicons and
treatises on syntax, presents us with a vivid picture of the general
range of grammatical studies in Constantinople during the tenth
and eleventh centuries. It includes lexicons to Homer (that of
Apollonius), Herodotus and Plato (that of Timaeus), the lexicons
of Moeris and Phrynichus, and five anonymous lexicons, generally
called the Ltxica Segueriana^ (i) an anti-atticist work directed
against Phrynichus ; (2) a lexicon on syntax with examples going
down as far as Procopius (/?. 527 — 562) and Petrus Patricius
(f, 500 — 562) ; (3) a list of forensic terms ; (4) rhetorical terms
with notes on Greek antiquities, derived from a lexicon to the
Orators ; (5) a crwayaryi; Xc^ccdv xP^^f^^i 1" which the treatment
of words beginning with A is very lengthy owing to numerous
additions from Phrynichus, Aelius Dionysius and others'.
The Lexicon Vindobonense was the work of one Andreas
Lopadiotes (first half of cent. xiv). Almost its only
vindo^nen.* ^alue rcsts on the fact that it has preserved lines
from Sophocles' and Pherecrates not found else-
where. It is mainly founded on the abridged Harpocration \
The eleventh century claims one of the best of the Byzantine
poets, Christophorus of Mytilene (yZ. 1028-43),
who writes occasional verses and epigrams in the
iambic metre ^ The tragic cento called the Christus Paticns^
^ Reitzenstein, 154 f. Cp. Knimbacher, § 937'.
' The Lex, Seg, are printed in Bekker's Anted, Gr, pp. 75 — 476, including
A of (5) ; the rest of which has since been published in Bachmann's Anted, Gr,
i I — 444. Cp. Christ, | 635'; Krumbacher, | 436^
* Nauck 738, ^^iiioM Xa/9eijr tituipU iaruf if K4p9ot «cur6r.
* Krumbacher, § 338*.
s ed. Rocchi (1887) ; Krumbacher, § 307*.
XXIII.] LEXICA SEGUERIANA. 407
once ascribed to Gr^ory Nazianzen, is now assigned to the
eleventh or twelfth century'.
History is represented not only by Psellus, the friend of
the patriarch John Xiphilinus, but also by that
patriarch's nephew and namesake, who, at the
prompting of Michael VII (107 1-8), produced an epitome of
books 36 to 80 of Dion Cassius and thus preserved for us the
substance of the last twenty books, which would otherwise have
been completely lost*. The year 1080 approximately marks the
close of three other historical works, (i) the Chronicle (81 1 — 1079)
of John Scylitzes who carries on the works of George Syncellus
and of Theophanes; (a) the history (1034-79) of Michael
Attaliates ; and (3) the materials for the life of Alexius Comnenus
collected by Nicephorus Bryennius who makes Xenophon his
model, and whose work is continued and completed by his wife,
the daughter of Alexius, Anna Comnena. Late in this century,
or early in the next, we may place the Chronicle compiled by
Cedrenus, which begins with the Creation and ends with
1057 A.D.'
One of the foremost Byzantine rhetoricians is John Doxo-
patres, also known as John Siceliotes, an important
, .... 4 Rnetonciain
commentator on Hermogenes and Aphthonius .
He belongs to the first half of the eleventh century*. At the
close of the sanie century a widely popular collection of oriental
stories, which had been translated from Sanskrit into all the
languages of the East, was rendered from Syriac into Greek
under the name of ' Syntipas' by Michael Andreopulus, a Christian
subject of the Armenian prince Gabriel of Melitene. Through
this Greek rendering the stories passed to the West, where they
reappeared in the romances of the Seven Sages and of Dolo-
pathos, and even had their influence on the Gtsta Romanarum
and on the Decameron of Boccaccio*.
* KnimbAcher, § 31a'.
» «». § i5«*.
* Walz, Rh, Gr, ii and vi. Cp. Saintsbary, i 187 f.
* Knimbacher, § 195'.
* »**• § 393"'
408 THE BYZANTINE AGE. [CHAP.
The ecclesiastical writers of the century include Symeon, the
head of the Monastery of St Mamas in Constanti-
wSenf******* nople, one of the greatest mystics of the Eastern
Church and the precursor of the fanatic quietists
of the fourteenth century^; and the eminent biblical commentator^
Theophylact, archbishop of Bulgaria, who owes much to Chryso-
stom and Gregory Nazianzen*. His Exhortation^ addressed to
his royal pupil, Constantine, son of Michael VII, is founded
on Xenophon, Plato, Polybius, Diogenes Laertius, Synesius, and
especially on Dion Chrysostom and Themistius. It also shows
a striking absence of prejudice in its quotations from Julian ' the
Apostate'. His Patugyric on the emperor Alexius Comnenus
closes with an impressive appeal for the protection of learning*.
The twelfth century is marked by the name of Tzetzes
(c, mo — c. 1 1 80), the author of a didactic poem
on literary and historical topics extending over no
less than 12,674 lines of accentual verse, and displaying a vast
amount of miscellaneous reading. The name of Chiiiades is due
to its first editor, the author's own name for it being simply
PLpko% urropcfn;. The work is in the form of a versified com-
mentary on his own Letters^ which are full of mythological,
literary and historical learning. The following lines on the seven
liberal arts, founded on a passage in Porphyry, are a very favour-
able example of his style : —
5tvr4put M iyKixTua tiaOi^ftara iraXoOrrai
6 xOicXot, r6 av/iw4p€ifffui virrwf rC^ fta$iifuiTtif¥,
ypa/ituLTuc^f fnfropucilt, oi^^r ^Xoffo^lat,
Kal rQp rteedpup di nx'^uw tQp ifv* aMiw KtifUvuv,
T^t dpi$fio6arit, fMVffiKijtt koI rijt ytufUTplat,
Kal T^t oOp<wopdfio¥ot aCrifs dirrpwofdat^*
The contents of this prodigious work show that its author's
reading included, in verse, Homer, Hesiod, Pindar, the tragic
poets, Aristophanes, Theocritus, Apollonius Rhodius, Lycophron,
Nicander, Dionysius Periegetes, Oppian, the Orphica, Quintus
Smyrnaeus and the Greek Anthology. In prose, he was familiar
with historians, such as Herodotus, Diodorus, Josephus, Plutarch,
^ Krumbacher, § 63'. ' ib. § 5a'.
» ib, § 196". * xi 525 f.
XXIII.] TZETZES. ANNA COMNENA. 409
Arrian, Dion Cassius and Procopius ; with orators, such as Lysias,
Demosthenes and Aeschines; with philosophers, such as Plato
and Aristotle; with geographers, such as Strabo and Stephanus
of Byzantium ; and, lastly, with the satirist Lucian. The total
number of authors quoted exceeds 400. His other works in-
clude Allegories^ on the Iliad and the Odyssey in 10,000 lines
(c, 1145-58); a Commentary on the Iliad (r. 1143); hexameter
poems on Antehomerica^ Homerica and Posthomerica \ scholia on
Hesiod (before 11 38) and on Aristophanes, with important /ro-
legomena giving valuable information on the Alexandrian Libraries';
scholia on Lycophron, Oppian, and probably Nicander; a versified
epitome of the Rhetoric of Hermogenes ; and, lastly, a poem on
Prosody (after 1138). We learn much about Tzetzes from his
own writings; he often complains of his poverty and his mis-
fortunes and of the scanty recognition of his services. He was
once reduced to such distress that he found himself compelled
to sell all his books, except his Plutarch ; and he had bitter feuds
with other scholars. His inordinate self-esteem is only exceeded
by his extraordinary carelessness. He calls Simonides of Amorgos
the son of Amorgos, makes Naxos a town in Euboea, describes
Servius Tullius as 'consul' and 'emperor' of Rome, and con-
founds the Euphrates with the Nile. He is proud of his rapid
pen and his remarkable memory; but his memory often plays
him false, and he is, for the most part, dull as a writer and
untrustworthy as an authority*.
The patrons of Tzetzes included Isaac Comnenus, brother
of the best of the Byzantine emperors, John II (d. 1143); also
the latter^s son and successor, Manuel I (d. 11 80), and Manuel's
first wife the German princess Bertha (Irene). Anna Comnena,
the sister of John, may here be mentioned as the
writer of a life of her father Alexius I, which comnen*
supplemented and continued in 1148 the materials
collected by her husband, the distinguished soldier and diplo-
matist, Nicephorus Bryennius (d. 11 37). She is familiar with
Homer, Aristophanes, and the tragic poets, as well as with
Herodotus, Thucydides and Polybius, and her work is the earliest
^ Cp. Saintsbury, i 187. ' Sufra^ p. 119 n.
' Krumbacher, § 319*.
4IO THE BYZANTINE AGE. [CHAP.
monument of the literary revival inspired by the example of
Psellus'. John II and Manuel were among the
Prodronms' patroHs of Theodorus Prodromus (d. after 1159),
a poverty-stricken poet, who writes in colloquial
as well as classical Greek, and is specially successful in prose^
as an imitator of Lucian*.
The most memorable name among the scholars of the twelfth
century is that of Eustathius, whose philological
studies at Constantinople preceded his tenure of
the archbishopric of Thessalonica from 1175 to r. 1192. Of his
Commentary on Pindar^ written while he was still a deacon, the
only part preserved is a valuable preface on lyrical and Pindaric
poetry, on the poet's life, and on the Olympic games and the
pentathlum'; but there is nothing to show that he possessed
any more of the Epinician Odes than ourselves. His next work
is his paraphrase and scholia to Dionysius Periegetes*^ followed
by an important Commentary on the Iliad and Odyssey*, That
on the Iliad is twice as long as that on the Odyssey; both are
preceded by literary introductions in which the commentator
dwells with enthusiasm on the abiding influence of Homer on
the literature of Greece '. Both of them comprise many excerpts
from earlier writers, including Herodian's work on accentuation.
The title vaptKfioXaC implies incidental extracts made in the
course of general reading, and is specially appropriate to what
is primarily a compilation. Eustathius makes much use of the
Homeric glossary of Apion and Herodorus, which is partly
founded on the same materials as the scholia to the Venice MS
of Homer and has thus preserved some of the criticisms of
Aristarchus. Among his other authorities are Athenaeus, Strabo^
and Stephanus of Byzantium; also Heracleides of Miletus and
two Greek works of Suetonius, together with the lexicons of
Aelius Dionysius and Pausanias, the original Etymologicum magnum
> Knimbacher, §§ 110. I2i«. • ib, §§313, 333* ; p. 354 xar/m.
' I'rinted in Uisseii and Schneidewin's Findar^ 1843.
« ed. Bernhardy (1828), and C. MUller in Geogr, Gr, Min, ii aoi f.
^ ed. Stallbaum, 7 vols. 1825-30.
* In another work he refers to dramatic representations of Homeric scenes
at Thessalonica; Opusaila^ P* 81, Tafel.
XXIII.] EUSTATHIUS. MICHAEL ACOMINATUS. 41 1
(i.e. the complete text of the imperfectly preserved Et genuinum) *,
and Suidas, who is not quoted by any earlier commentator.
These are only a few of his text-books: 'from his horn of
plenty' (in the phrase of Gibbon) he 'has poured the names
and authorities of four hundred writers".
His great commentary on Homer has led modem scholars
to regard him as one of the most instructive of the Byzantines.
But he is much more than a mere scholiast; while in learning
he stands high among all his contemporaries, he is also a man
of political insight, and a bold and far-seeing reformer. His
Commentaries belong to his earlier life at Constantinople, when
his house was the chief literary centre in the capital and was
comparable with the Academies of ancient Athens '. His works
on the history of his own times refer to the years after he had
become archbishop of Thessalonica (i 1 75). During the disastrous
invasion by the Normans from Sicily in 11 85 he remained at the
post of peril, conciliated the Sicilian generals and induced them
to restrain the excesses of their troops \ and afterwards wrote
a narrative of the causes and the result of the invasion*. He
also did much towards raising the general intellectual and moral
standard among the Greek monks of his diocese. He protests
against their reducing their monastic libraries to the level of
their own ignorance by parting with their books, and implores
them to allow those libraries to retain their precious stores for
the sake of those who at some future time might be inspired with
a greater love of learning than themselves*.
On the death of Eustathius (c, 1 192-4) an eloquent panegyric
on that ' last survivor of the golden age ' was pro-
nounced by his former pupil, Michael Acominatus, Acominatus
who apparently became archbishop of Athens in
the same year as that in which Eustathius was called to Thessa-
lonica (1175). His brother, Nicetas Acominatus, distinguished
' Reitzenslein, Et, p. 151 n. ■ c. 53 (vi 105 Bury).
' Euthymius, ap. Tafel, Z># TAgsuU. p. 399.
* Finlay, iii 115.
* ed. Tafel (183a); Dekker (1844); also in Migne, cxxxv.
* De efnemlanda vitn mamuiua, c 1)8 (quoted on p. 377). Krambacher,
§ 111*.
412 THE BYZANTINE AGE, [CHAP.
himself as a statesman and as the historian of the years 1180
to 1 206, while his own tenure of the see of Athens is the brightest
page in the mediaeval history of Greece. On reaching his see,
he tells us of the ruined condition of Athens and the desolation
of Attica ; but, on taking up his official residence on the platform
of the Acropolis, he must have felt that few bishops in Christen-
dom had such a glorious cathedral as the Parthenon. In his
inaugural discourse, he describes his audience as the genuine
descendants of the Athenians of old, eulogises Athens as the
mother of eloquence and wisdom, and as indebted for her fame
not to the memorials of byegone times (among which he describes
the choragic monument of Lysicrates as the ' Lantern of Demo-
sthenes '), but to the virtue of her citizens. But he soon becomes
conscious that his eloquent discourse has been imperfectly under-
stood by the Athenians of his day ; and, as time goes on, he
is oppressed by the contrast between the Athens of the past and
of the present ; he sees the sheep feeding amid the scanty ruins
of the Painted Porch. The charm of the Attic landscape still
remains, and, from the height of Hymettus, he can view, in
one direction, the whole of Attica, and, in the other, the Cyclades,
spread out like a map before him ; but he feels that the ancient
race of orators and philosophers has vanished ; he composes the
only extant poem of lamentation over the downfall of Athens^;
and he consoles himself with the books which he has brought
from Byzantium, with Homer and Thucydides, with Euclid,
Nicander and Galen, all the volumes that he finds in the official
library of his see being contained in two chests beside the altar
in the Parthenon. On the capture of Constantinople during the
Fourth Crusade in 1 204, Athens was handed over to the Franks
and became a see of the Latin Church, and Michael withdrew to
the neighbouring island of Ceos, where he died in 1220 within
sight of the shores of Attica*.
Michael Acominatus had not yet ceased to be archbishop
of Athens, when certain 'Greek philosophers of grave aspect'
^ Boissonade, Ante, Gr, v 374.
' Krumbacher, § 199', and esp. Gregorovius, Siadi Athtn^ \ 304 — asj,
«40-4.
XXIII.] GREGORIUS CORINTHIUS. 413
are stated by Matthew Paris to have arrived from Athens at the
court of King John (r. 1202) ^ They were doubtless monks
from the East, but they were not allowed to remain
in England. Matthew Paris* elsewhere assures us Eni^nd *"**
that his older contemporary, John of Basingstoke,
archdeacon of Leicester, informed Robert Grosseteste, the learned
bishop of Lincoln, that, while he was studying at Athens, he
had seen and heard certain things unknown to the Latins. He
had there found a copy of the Tesiameni of the 7\veh)e Patriarchs^
which the bishop of Lincoln caused to be translated into Latin
by a monk of St Albans; and he had himself translated into
that language a Greek Grammar. During his visit, he had also
learnt much from Constantinia, the daughter of the archbishop
of Athens, a girl of less than twenty, who (besides being familiar
with the trivium and quadrivium) could predict pestilences and
earthquakes as well as eclipses. As the archdeacon died in 1252,
the only Greek archbishop of Athens, who could have been the
father of this learned lady, must have been Michael Acominatus.
But the latter assures us that he had no children; and, while
we may well believe that John of Basingstoke really visited Athens
and brought some Greek mss to England, we must conclude that
there is some mistake as to the identity of the learned lady of
whom he had often spoken to Matthew Paris".
Another learned ecclesiastic of this age is Gregorius, arch-
bishop of Corinth {c, 1200), author of an extant
work on Grteh Dialects. This is founded partly corinSw*
on Tryphon (cent i b.c.) and Joannes Philoponus
(cent, vi a.d.), on scholia and glossaries to Pindar, Aristophanes
and especially Theocritus, and probably also on the author's
independent reading of Herodotus, as well as Pindar and Theo-
critus. It aims at completeness but is defective iii arrangement ;
its popularity is, however, abundantly proved by its preservation
in numerous manuscripts\
^ Hist, Anglcrum (Minor)^ ed. Madden, iii 64.
' Chronica Matora^ ed. Luard, ▼ 185
' Gregorovius, /. r., i 131-4*
* ed. G. H. Schaefer (181 1) ; q>. Krumbacher, 1 148'.
414 THE BYZANTINE AGE. [CHAP.
History in the twelfth century is represented by the three
Chroniclers, Constantine Manasses, whose 6733
lines of accentual verse begin with the Creation
and end with the year 1081 ; and Zonaras and Glykas, both of
whom close their prose chronicles in 11 18*. The two principal
historians of this time are Cinnamus, whose work has survived
in an abstract extending from 1118 to 1176; and Nicetas
Acominatus, whose great history in 21 books covers the years
between 11 80 and 1206 and thus includes the Latin conquest
of Constantinople*.
His brother Michael, the archbishop of Athens, may be
classed among the rhetoricians of this century,
which also claims Michael Italicus (fl. 1147-66),
many of whose Letters are addressed to members of the imperial
house and to the leading men of the time. In one of them
he pulls to pieces a work composed by an unnamed patriarch
of Constantinople, pointing out that nearly the whole of it is
copied from Chrysostom, Basil and Gregory of Nyssa. In another
he writes to the poor scholar, Theodorus Prodromus, who hand-
somely calls his correspondent a second Plato*. Another prolific
rhetorician of this age is Nicephorus Basilakes, whose lament
over his brother who fell in the Sicilian war probably belongs
to the year 1155*.
Among ecclesiastical writers, Nicolaus of Methone (fl. 1143-
80) throws a considerable amount of light on the
of^Me^hone theological Controversies of the time, but his reputa-
tion has suffered since the repeated discoveries of
his unacknowledged indebtedness to Photius and others. His
critical examination of Proclus is borrowed almost verbatim from
Procopius of Gaza; but, although it is destitute of originality,
it shows that, owing to the renewed interest in ancient philosophy
which arose in the twelfth century, there was a special call for
defending the plain teaching of the Church against the subtleties
of Neo-Platonism*.
' Krumbacher, §§ 154-d'.
« ib. §§ iaa-3«. » ib, § i97«.
* *A p. 473*.
• ib. f 43>.
XXIII.] CONSTANTINOPLE AND THE WEST. 415
During the time of the Empire of Nicaea, and the rule of
the house of Lascaris, Le. from the loss of Con-
stantinople in 1204 to its recovery in 1261, the *«?*« of
most notable name in literature was that of Nice- Biemmydet
phorus Blemmydes {c. X197 — 1272), who is a poiiu/"*'
philosopher, as well as a theologian, geographer,
rhetorician and poet. His manual of Logic and Physics has
been preserved in many mss*. The contemporary historian of
this age is Georgius Acropolites (12 17 — 1282), a dignified per-
sonage, who avoids vulgarisms, and, instead of condescending to
the use of yctSapos (yaf3apos), the vulgar Greek word for an ass,
prefers its grander etymological counterpart dciSopos, 'the ever-
beaten one ' '. But the Greek Empire of Nicaea presents us with
nothing of importance in the history of Scholarship, and the same
is true of the contemporary Latin Empire of Constantinople
(1204-61). Learned men in the West had long _
Constftnn-
regarded the capital of the East as the treasure- nopie and
• the West
house of ancient literature. In the first half of
the tenth century, the arch-priest Leo of Naples had brought
back with him a MS of the legend of Alexander by Pseudo-Calli-
sthenes, and his Latin translation of the same had supplied a new
theme to the poets of the West*. In 1167, one Guillaume of
Gap, a student of medicine who became a monk, was sent to
Constantinople by the Abb^ of St Denis in search of Greek mss,
but it is probable that the mss with which he returned were only
connected with * Dionysius the Areopagite'*. When the Normans
took Thessalonica (1185), the collections of books, which they
sold for a mere trifle, found Italians ready to purchase them*.
Even before the Latin conquest of Constantinople, the Italians
are said to have bought up mss and sent off whole ship-loads
of them *. Great havoc was doubtless inflicted by that conquest,
and by the three conflagrations by which it was attended. On
» Krumbachcr, § i86». • id. p. aS;*.
* Zacher, Pseudo-Callisthenes (1867).
* Jourdain, RechircheSt p« 46; Delisle in Jmmal da Savants^ 1890^
7«5— 739-
* Eustathjus, De Thtss, a Latinis eapta^ c. 135.
* Michael Acominattu, i 17 (Gregorovitu, /. r., i i86).
4l6 THE BYZANTINE AGE. [CHAP.
19 August, 1203, the second of these conflagrations, which
originated in the wilful act of a few Flemish soldiers, lasted for
two days, when 'splendid palaces, filled with works of ancient
art and antique classic manuscripts, were destroyed ' '. ' Without
computing the extent of our loss, we may drop a tear' (says
Gibbon) 'over the libraries that have perished in the triple fire
of Constantinople". After the capture of the city (13 April,
1 204), when the Franks passed in procession through the streets,
they showed their contempt for a people of scribes and scholars
by displaying a pen and an ink-horn and a sheet of paper, but
the Greek historian of these events had his revenge when he
denounced the conquerors as 'ignorant and utterly illiterate
barbarians'*. During the seven and fifty years of the Latin
emperors, there was probably a certain amount of literary inter-
course between the East and the West In 1205, Pope Inno-
cent III exhorted the 'Masters and Scholars of the University
of Paris' to go to Greece and revive the study of literature in
the land of its birth ^ Philip Augustus founded a college on the
Seine where the Greeks of Constantinople might study the Latin
language \ Lastly, in 1209, according to Guillaume le Breton,
certain works on Metaphysics, composed (it was said) by
Aristotle, had recently been brought from Constantinople and
translated into Latin, but these libelli (he adds) were ordered
to be burnt as likely to foster heresy*.
The Byzantine age ends with the Palaeologi, who held sway
schoian between the recovery of Constantinople from the
under the Franks in 1261 and its capture by the Turks in
1453. The scholars who lived under that dynasty
are the precursors of a new era. They differ widely from those
who lived under the Macedonian (867 — 1057) and Comnenian
(1057 — 1 185) dynasties, in their treatment of classical texts.
^ Finlay, iii 161, after Nicetas, 356, and Villehardouin, 81.
• c. 60 ult,
' Nicetas, iypafifAaroit papfidpoit koI T4\to¥ draX^o/Si^oct, Gibbon, c. 60
(vi 409 Bury).
• '...in Graeciam accedentes, ibi studeretis literarum studia refbnnare,
unde noscitur exordium habuisse ' (Jourdain, Recherches^ p. 48).
• ib, p. 45>. • ib, p. 187.
XXIII.] PLANUDES. 417
While most of the Mss from the ninth to the twelfth centuries
(such as the Laurentian MS of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Apol-
lonius Rhodius, and the Ravenna MS of Aristophanes) maintain
the tradition of the Alexandrian and the Roman ages, those of
the thirteenth and following centuries show that Byzantine scholars
were beginning to deal with old Greek texts in a capricious
manner, and to tamper with the metres of ancient poets with
a view to bringing them into conformity with metrical systems
of their own invention*. The scholars of these centuries have
less in common with Photius, Arethas and Eustathius than with
the earliest representatives of the revival of learning in the West,
who are the inheritors of the latest traditions of the Byzantine age*.
Among the late Byzantine scholars who had much in common
with the precursors of the Renaissance the first
in order of time is the monk Maximus Planudes
(c. 1260 — 1 3 10). He had an exceptionally good knowledge of
Latin, having possibly been led to acquire that language by the
constant controversies between the Greek and Latin Churches.
It was probably owing to his knowledge of I^tin that he was
sent as envoy to Venice in 1296. Among the many Latin works»
which he translated into Greek, were Caesar's Belium GaltiaiMy
Cicero's Sommum Sapionis, Ovid's Metamorphoses and Hermdes^
and the smaller grammar of Donatus. His translation of the
Heroides was founded on a MS now lost, which must have been
superior to our existing mss. The value of this translation
is shown in the late Mr Arthur Palmer's edition (1898). Thus,
in vi 47, quid mihi cum Minyis^ quid cum Tritanide pinu^ the
version of Planudes alone has preserved the true reading Dodonide
which is confirmed by Ao»3a>vtiSo«... ^17701), used to describe the
material of the cutwater of the Argo by Apollonius Rhodius,
i 527 and iv 583. His independent works included a dialogue
> Wilamovritz, Eur, Her, i 194I, ' Diese Byzantiner nnd dgentlich gmr
nicht als Schreiber, sondern als Emendatoren aafzufassen ; sie tind nicht die
Collegen der braven stupiden Monche, die treufleissig nachmalten, was tie
nicht nur nicht veretanden, sondern auch nicht xu verstehen meinten, sondern
sie slnd unsere Collegen... Sie haben so manchen Vert fUr immer geheilt, and
noch viel ofter dat Auge von Jahrhunderten geblendet.*
' Krumbacher, p. 54 1' f.
s. 27
41 8 THE BYZANTINE AGE. [CHAP.
on Grammar with a treatise on Syntax ^ ; a collection of LetterSi
of special interest in connexion with the writer's studies'; a life
of Aesop, with a prose paraphrase of the 'Fables'; schotia on
Theocritus and Hermogenes; a work on Indian mathematicSi
and (probably) the scholia on the first two books of the Arithmetic
of Diophantus. Among his compilations were historical and
geographical excerpts from Plato, Aristotle, Strabo, Pausanias,
Dion Cassius, Synesius, Dion Chrysostom and Joannes Lydus^
some of them important in connexion with textual criticism.
He also abridged and rearranged (with a few additions) the
Anthology of Constantine Cephalas (p. 397), thus forming the
collection of Greek epigrams called the Antholoipa Planuden^
the only Greek Anthology known to scholars before the recovery
of the Anthology of Cephalas in 1607. The Planudean Anthology,
still preserved in the Library of St Mark's at Venice (no. 481), is
in the hand of Planudes himself. It ends with his name, and
with the date, Sept. 1302 (i.e. 1301 a.d.)'.
Among his eminent contemporaries was John Beccus, patriarch
from 1275 to 1282, who strongly supported the union of the
Eastern and Western Churches, even dying in prison for that
cause in I293^ The chief opponent of Beccus was Gregory
of Cyprus, patriarch from 1283 to 1289, whose Life and Letters
supply a pleasing picture of his times, while his interest in
education is proved by his mythological stories and by his prose
paraphrases of Aesop ^ Gregory's devoted pupil and strong
adherent, Nicephorus Chumnus (c, 1261 — f. 1328),
chlm*nu °"*" ^^ Connected with the royal house, his daughter
having been married to the son of Andronicus II.
He left public life for the retirement of the monastery in 1320.
His literary works were mainly directed against Plato and the
Neo-Platonists, and especially against Plotinus; but he also attacks
the Aristotelian philosophy. It thus appears that the controversy
on Plato and Aristotle, which was one of the characteristics of
the Renaissance, had its counter[>art as early as the Byzantine
^ Bachmann, Anted, Gr. ii i — 166.
' ed. Trcu, Breslau (1890).
' Krumbacher, | 113'. ^ ib.\ 39*.
* ib, H 30, 303*.
XXIII.] MOSCHOPULUS. THOMAS MAGISTER. 419
age. In this respect, amongst others, Nicephonis Chumnus is
a precursor of the Renaissance. In his rhetorical writings he
insists on the maintenance of the Attic standard of style, finding
his own models in Isocrates and Aristides, and also in his master,
Gregory of Cyprus. His rhetorical manner often mars the effect
of his Letters, some of which are professedly written in the
Laconic and others in the Attic style ; while a certain monotony
results from the frequent recurrence of the same construction and
the same combination of connecting particles*.
Maximus Planudes counted among his pupils and friends
Manuel Moschopulus (ft. 1300), the nephew o^ m^ ^ .
an archbishop of Crete. The reputation of Mos-
chopulus is largely due to his having extracted from the two
volumes of an anonymous grammatical work a catechism of
Greek Grammar, which had a considerable influence during the
early Renaissance '. He also compiled a school-lexicon of Attic
Greek, besides brief notes on the first two books of the liiady
as well as on Hesiod', Pindar's Olympian Odes, Euripides and
Theocritus*. His influence on the Byzantine text of Pindar was
unsatisfactory. Among the mss of Pindar a ' family' of forty-three,
most of them containing the Olympian Odes alone, is regarded as
representing the ' badly interpolated edition of Moschopulus".
Among his contemporaries was Thomas Magister, secretary
to Andronicus II (1282 — 1328). After becoming
a monk, and assuming the name of Theodulus, he mISSI"
devoted himself to the special study of the ancient
Classics. He was the author of several school-books, the chief
of which is a 'selection of Attic nouns and verbs'* founded
on Phrynichus, Ammonius, Herodian, Moeris and others, with
many additions from his own reading, especially in Herodotus,
Thucydides, Aristides and Synesius. He also wrote schoUa on
* Knimbacher, § 103*.
' On its relation to the Erotemata of Chiysoloras, Chalcondyles etc., q>.
Voltz, in Jahn's Jahrb, 139 (1889) 579 — 99; and Hartfelder*s Melamkihm
(1889), p. 255.
* Facsimile on p. 438. * Krambacher, f 314*.
* Seymour's SeltcUd Odes^ p. xxiii ; Tycho Mominsen*s ed., p. xxiv f.
* ed. Ritschl, 183a.
27—2
420 THE BYZANTINE AGE. [CHAP.
Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, and on three plays of
Aristophanes (Plutus^ Nubes^ Ranae). The scholia on Pindar^
which bear his name, are ascribed by Lehrs* to Triclinius.
Another scholar of the same age was Theodorus Metochites
(d. 1332), who, like his eulogist Thomas MagisteTy
Metochiteii* ^^ ^" ^^^ service of Andronicus II. Though
inferior to the foremost scholars of former genera-
tions, such as Photius and Psellus, he was one of the most
learned men of his time. His works include Fhiiosophical and
Historical Miscellanies^ with excerpts from more than seventy
philosophers and historians, which are often of textual importance.
His erudition is praised in the highest terms by his pupil,
Nicephorus Gregoras', a man of encyclopaedic learning, who is
best known as a historian, though he is also the writer of a
commentary on the wanderings of Odysseus, and of many works
still remaining in manuscript, including a treatise on Grammar
and Orthography*.
The foremost textual critic of the age of the Palaeologi was
Demetrius Triclinius (early in cent xiv). He ex-,
pounded and emended (and not unfrequently
corrupted) the texts of Hesiod, Pindar, Aeschylus, Sophocles,
Euripides (Hecuba^ Orestes^ PhaenissaeY and Theocritus. His
scholia on Aeschylus and Hesiod (r. 1316-20) still exist in his
own handwriting in Naples and Venice respectively*. His
transcript of Hesiod bears the date 13 16*; that of Aphthonius
(at New College, Oxford) is dated 1298. His ms of Aeschylus
was allied to a Venice ms of cent, xv, while that of Pindar was
copied from the Florentine ms D (cent, xiii — ^xiv)'. He acquired
a considerable knowledge of metre, but was misled to some
extent by the changes of pronunciation which had come, over the
Greek language in the course of the Byzantine age. His textual
* PindarscholUn^ 97— 9« Krumbacher, § aas*.
* vii II p. 171 ed. Bonn, pifi\io0i^Kij yi^p ^¥ tfi\J/vxot koI rCw ^^frovfihttv
wp6x^^pot eifwopla (Krumbacher, § 226*),
* id. § ia8«.
* Wilainowitz, Eur, Her, i 194^, *Triklinios ist in Walirheit ehcr ab der
erste modeme Tragikerkritiker zu fUhren denn als ein zuverlassiger Vertreter
der Ueberlieferung.' * Krumbacher, § a 37*.
* Facsimile on p. 418. ' Wilaroowitz, /. c.
XXIII.] TRICLINIUS. MANUEL PHILES. 42I
emendations dilTer widely in value. In the case of Pindar in
particular, 'he altered the text to conform to his crude rules
of grammar and metric His notes are full of conceit and self-
assertion. Their value has been said to be chiefly negative ; any
text is suspicious which contains the readings recommended by
him". His edition is now represented in a family of twenty-
eight MSS*.
Early in the fourteenth century the monk Sophonias wrote
p3iraphT2Lseso(Anstot\e*sCafegoneSfjPnorAnafytics, ^ ^ ,
SophoniAS
Sophistici EUnchi^ De Anima\ De Memoria and
De Somno^ which were once attributed to Themistius and owe
their value solely to their excerpts from the best of the earlier
commentaries. In the same century scholia on the whole of
the Organon were compiled by Leon Magentinus,
metropolitan of Mytilene*. The rhetorician and MafSntinui
grammarian, John Glykys, who was highly esteemed
by his pupil, the historian Nicephorus Gregoras, and was for a
short time patriarch of Constantinople (1319)1 wrote
a Syntax more remarkable for its lucidity than for
its learning, in which he quotes largely from Homer, Thucydides,
Plato and Demosthenes, as well as from the Septuagint*.
Among the miscellaneous works of John Pediasimus ^ ., ,
{fl, 1282 — 1 341), professor of philosophy at Con-
stantinople, were some scholia on Hesiod's Theogpny and Shield
of Hercules^ and on the Syrinx of Theocritus*. Our list of late
Byzantine scholars may here close with the name
of Manuel Chrysoloras, who was bom a century chiyi»"ora«
before the fall of Constantinople, and died forty
years before that event, having meanwhile played a leading part
in the revival of Greek learning in Italy.
Among the late Byzantine poets, the counterpart of Theodorus
Prodromus in the twelfth century is Manuel Philes _^
in the fourteenth (c, 1275 — 1345). The favourite
metre for his dialogues, and for his writings on zoology and on
' Seymour's Selected Odes^ p. xxii.
' Tycho Mommsen's ed. p. xxx t
* ed. Hayduck, 1883. * Krambtcher, | i8a'.
• t^. § 349*. * a. I 938".
422 THE BYZANTINE AGE. [CHAP.
works of art, is the iambic trimeter, in his use of which he never
allows the accent to fall on the final syllable*. While Philes
remains true to the classical types of metre and language, his
contemporary Constantine Hermoniacus was prompted by a
despot of Epirus (1323-35) to produce in the language of daily
life a new version of the Iliad written in short trochaic lines
consisting of only four accentual feet*. Philes wrote a poem
in memory of his patron Pachymeres (1242 — c, 13 10), whose
great historical work continues from 1261 to 130S
the ample narrative of Acropolites, while his minor
writings include a treatise on the quadrivium and an abstract
of the philosophy of Aristotle*. Half a century later we have
the ecclesiastical historian, Xanthopulus (1295 — c. 1360), whose
history practically ends with 610 a.d. He was coeval with the
emperor John Cantacuzenus (1295 — 1383), who, on his abdication
^1^ i355> withdrew to a monastery, where he composed a history
of the years 1320 to 1356, in which he records ' not a confession,
but an apology, of the life of an ambitious statesman'*. He was
also coeval with Nicephorus Gregoras (1295 — c, 1360), who was
educated under Theodorus Metochites, and (like Pachymeres)
showed a special partiality for controversial theology while writing,
in a style modelled on that of Plato, the history of the period
between the I^tin conquest of Constantinople and the end of
his own life (1204 — 1359)'. After these historians a whole
century elapses before we reach the Athenian Laonicus Chalcon-
dyles (fl, 1446-63), a brother of the first modern editor of the
Iliad and an imitator of Herodotus and Thucydides, who begins
with 1298 and ends in 1463 his account of the expansion of the
Ottoman power; Ducas, who describes, in a literary form of
popular Greek, the period from 1341 to 1462 ; Phrantzes
(140 1 — c, 1477), who writes, in a style intermediate between that
of Chalcondyles and Ducas, the history of the years 1258 — 1476;
and Critobulus of Imbros, an imitator of Thucydides, who, in
sharp contrast with Ducas and Chalcondyles, avowedly takes the
* Krumbacher, 8 314*. * ib, § 371*.
* ib, § 116*.
* Gibbon, c. 63 (vi 489 Bury).
* Krumbacher, f laS'.
XXIII.] HISTORIANS AND RHETORICIANS. 423
Turkish point of view in tracing the victorious career of the
conqueror of Constantinople ^
The rhetoricians of this age include the essayist Demetrius
Cydones (c. 1325 — c. 1396), who studied Latin at bw -• i^
Milan, and imitated Plato not only in his lament
over those who fell in the civil feuds of Thessalonica (1346), but
also in his appeal to the Greeks to be at unity among themselves
and with the Latin Church (1369)*. They further include the
emperor Manuel Palaeologus (1350 — 1425), who vainly visited
Italy, France and England (1399 — 1402) in quest of aid against
the Turks. In the precepts addressed to his son, he imitates
Isocrates; and, in one of his Letters^ we find him thanking
Demetrius Cydones for a copy of the lexicon of Suidas, which,
arriving at a time when the emperor was short of funds, is
humorously described as having made him rich in words, but
not in wealth*. Lastly, we have the 'rhetorical epitome' of
Matthaeus Camariotes, who continued to teach Philosophy,
Rhetoric and Grammar, even when the Turks were threatening
Constantinople (1450), and who begins his rhetorical monody
on the troubles of his time by sighing with the Psalmist for ' the
wings of a dove * *.
The ecclesiastical writers of this age are mainly absorbed in
the controversy with the Hesychastae^ or Quietists,
as represented primarily by Gregorius Palamas ^"5|S**^"*
(d. 1349), who, in quest of a life of contemplation,
left the court of Constantinople for the monasteries of Mount
Athos. Among his supporters in this controversy were Philotheus
and Nilus Cabasilas, while his principal opponents were Nicephorus
Gregoras and John Cyparissiotes, who continued the attack on
the Quietists begun by the Calabrian monk, Barlaam (/f. 1339-48).
Nicolaus Cabasilas, the nephew of Nilus, and the last of the
great Greek mystics, died in 137 1. A century later saw the death
of Bessarion, who meanwhile had transferred his allegiance from
the Eastern to the Western Church, and had done much for the
promotion of Greek Scholarship in Italy as a patron of learning,
* Knimbacher, §{ 131-5". • »*. | lo;".
• >*. 1 110*. • ib, pp. 451, 498«.
424 THE BYZANTINE AGE. [CHAP.
as an enthusiastic student of Plato, and as founder of the Library
of St Mark's at Venice.
Of the extant remains of Byzantine literature, apart from
theological works, nearly half belong to the domain
SchoUnhrp ^^ Scholarship in the widest sense of the term.
The scholars of the Byzantine, and of the latter
part of the Roman age, are unsystematic and diffuse, are deficient
in originality of thought and independence of character, and are
only too ready to rest satisfied with a merely mechanical repro-
duction of the learning of the past. In matters of Scholarship
they seldom show a real advance, or even display a sound and
impartial judgement. But, if they are themselves to be judged
in a spirit of fairness and candour, they cannot be compared
with the great Alexandrian critics, from whom they are parted
by a thousand years, in the course of which the cultivation of
Scholarship was attended with ever increasing difficulty and dis-
couragement. A Planudes or a Triclinius cannot reasonably be
judged by the same standard as an Aristophanes or an Aristarchus ;
and a Moschopulus has as little as a Melanchthon in common
with the great Alexandrians. Even the Byzantine scholars of
the ninth and eleventh centuries did not enjoy the advantages
of the Alexandrian age, or of our own ; but they served to
maintain a continuity of tradition by which the learning of
Alexandria has been transmitted to Europe. They must be tried
by the standard of their own contemporaries in other lands:
a Photius must be compared with an Alcuin ; a Psellus with
an Anselm. The erudite Byzantines who lived under the dynasty
of the Palaeologi, men like Planudes, Moschopulus, and Theo-
dorus Metochites, will be seen in their true light, if they are
regarded as among the earliest precursors of the Renaissance.
For it must be remembered that, for the revival of Greek learning,
we are indebted not only to the Greek refugees who in the middle
of the fifteenth century were driven from Constantinople to the
hospitable shores of Italy, or even to the wandering Greeks of
the previous century. The spirit of the Renaissance was at work
in Constantinople at a still earlier time. In the ninth century,
that spirit is embodied in the brilliant personality of Photius,
which illuminates an age of darkness and barbarism. In the
XXIII.] BYZANTINE SCHOLARSHIP. 425
tenth, the intelligent knowledge of antiquity and the aspiration
after its continued preservation appear to decline, while the
despotic will of Constantine Porphyrogenitus threatens to bury
the remains of earlier Greek literature under a mass of encyclo-
paedic works projected on a magnificent scale but executed in
a most mechanical manner. But, in the same age, we may
gratefully acknowledge the efforts made by intelligent custodians
and expositors of the treasures of the past, such as Arethas the
bibiiophiie^ and Suidas the lexicographer. In the eleventh century
the comprehensive intellect of a Psellus is attracted to the study
of antiquity as a whole, in the way that was afterwards character-
istic of the foremost humanists of the Renaissance ; while, under
the Comneni (1057 — 1185) and the Palaeologi (1261 — 1453), the
humanistic spirit is unmistakably prominent It has accordingly
been well observed, that historians of the Renaissance must in
the future go back as far as Moschopulus and Planudes, and,
even further still, to a Eustathius and a Psellus, an Arethas and
a Photius. To obtain a continuous view of the course of
grammatical tradition, we must remember that the works, which
enabled Theodorus Gaza, Constantine Lascaris and Manuel
Chrysoloras to promote the study of the Greek language and
literature in Italy, were directly derived from Greek and Byzantine
sources, from the canons of Theodosius, and the catechism of
Moschopulus, while the ultimate originals of both of the latter
were the works of Dionysius Thrax in the Alexandrian, and
Apollonius and Herodian in the Roman age.
Although it was mainly by the preservation and transmission
of ancient literature that Byzantine scholarship had an important
influence on the learning of the West, there was no lack of
original and independent scholars who applied their powers to
the emendation and interpretation of the old Greek Classics,
and even to the elaboration of new metrical systems. Their
weakest side was Grammar. They laid little stress on Syntax
and not much more on Accidence, while they paid special
attention to Accentuation and Orthography, the latter subject
deriving a peculiar importance from the changes which had
affected the pronunciation of the Greek language. But the
scientific study of Grammar was set aside for the preparation of
426 THE BYZANTINE AGE. [CHAP.
mere manuals for the use of beginners. The innumerable treatises
on Accidence, Syntax, Prosody, and Metre, which abound in
most collections of mediaeval mss, cannot be r^arded as works
of Scholarship but merely as commonplace text-books and exercise-
books for use in the schools of Constantinople. These treatises
seldom agree with one another, every teacher and transcriber
having in turn applied the processes of combination or inter*
polation to altering his copy at his own caprice*.
It would be interesting to ascertain what portions of ancient
literature were in the actual possession of the
Classics Byzantines, and which were their favourite works.
Century ?x^ In and after the ninth century they possessed little
more than ourselves of the remains of classical
Greek literature, such as Homer, Hesiod, Pindar, the Attic
dramatists, the prae-Alexandrian historians and orators, and Plato
and Aristotle*. But they were better provided with the works
of the learned specialists and of the later historians. The com-
pilers of excerpts in the time of Constantine Porphyrogenitus
(912-59) had before them complete copies of many of the latter
(such as Dexippus, Eunapius, Priscus, Malchus, Petrus Patricius,
Menander Protector and John of Antioch), now surviving in
fragments only. Considerable portions of Polybius were unknown
to them, but many fragments of that historian have been preserved
to us through these excerpts alone. It was only in an imperfect
form that Dion Cassius was known to 2^naras and Xiphilinus.
The loss of a large part of Greek literature may be ascribed
to the general cessation of literary activity from the middle of
the seventh (the age of Theophylact Simocattes) to the middle
of the ninth century (the age of Photius). In the tenth, many
prose works may have perished owing to the compilation of
excerpts under Constantine Porphyrogenitus. There was probably
a considerable destruction of ancient literature in the three fires
of Constantinople which attended its capture by the Franks in
1204. But its capture by the Turks in 1453 probably did
comparatively little damage to the surviving remains of ancient
libraries. By that time Greek mss had already been recognised
^ Abridged from Krumbftcher, pp. 499 — 503*. ' p. 394 supra.
XXIII.] THE PRESERVATION OF THE GREEK CLASSICS. 427
as a valuable commodity. Possibly in the first storming of the
city much was destroyed, but it is expressly stated by a con-
temporary writer that, on the fall of Constantinople, the Turks
made money of the mss which they found, and that they
despatched whole cart-loads of books to the East and the West^
Another historian, who writes as a friend of the Turks, notices
the destruction of books sacred and profane, stating that some
were destroyed, but 'the greater number' were sold for a mere
trifle*. There is probably a good deal of exaggeration in the
statement made by a Venetian, Laurus Quirinus, who, writing
to Pope Nicholas V, on 15 July, 1453, says, on the authority of
a cardinal, that more than 1 20,000 volumes had been destroyed '.
The debt of modem Scholarship to the Byzantine age can-
not be better summed up than in the following extract from
Mr Frederic Harrison's Rede Lecture of 1900: —
'The peculiar, indispensable service of Bysantine literature was the
preservation of the language, philology, and archaeology of Greece. It it
impossible to see how our knowledge of ancient literature or civilisation could
have been recovered if Constantinople had not nursed through the early
Middle Ages the vast accumulations of Greek learning in the schools of
Alexandria, Athens, and Asia Minor ; if Photius, Suidas, Eustathius, Tzetces,
and the Scholiasts had not poured out their lexicons, anecdotes, and com-
mentaries; if the Corpus Scriptorum histifriae Bytantimu had never been
compiled; if indefatigable copyists had not toiled in multiplying the texts
of ancient Greece. Pedantic, dull, blundering as they are too often, they are
indispensable. We pick precious truths and knowledge out of their garrulities
and stupidities, for they preserve what otherwise would have been lost for
ever. It is no paradox that their very merit to us u that they were never
either original or brilliant. Their genius, indeed, would have been our loss.
Dunces and pedants as they were, they serrilely repeated the words of the
immortals. Had they not done so, the immortals would have died long ago *^.
When the Byzandne age, in the fullest sense of the term,
ended in 1453 with the conquest of Constandnople by the Turks,
* Ducas, c. 4s (p. 311 ed. Bonn), rdr M fiiflKmn Ard^ar, Mp AptBitJbm
iid^wtipop' di ^rdf ¥onUfJuiTot M«a filfikoi ^irpd^Mrra, 'A^itfrvrcXurW, nX«rt#-
¥iKol, 0to\oyiKol Kol dXXo wBp ctSot fiifikov, Krumbacher, f S15*, pp. 503-^
* Critobulus, c. 6), 3 (Bury's Gibbon, vii 194 n).
* Letter in Cotton M88 quoted in Hodius, Di Crtucis lUmiribm^ 174a,
p. 193.
* Bytaniim History in /A# Early Middle Agu^ p. 36.
428 THE BYZANTINE AGE. [CHAP. XXIII.
the attention of the youthful conqueror, Mohammed II, was
arrested, as he rode through the hippodrome, by the brazen
column composed of three serpents intertwined, which is still
to be seen on the Atmeidan, More than nineteen centuries
had passed since the heads of those serpents had first supported
the historic tripod which the Greeks had dedicated at Delphi
in memory of their victory over the barbarians at Plataea. A
blow from the conqueror's mace shattered part of one of the
serpents' heads, and that shattered head was an expressive
emblem of the fact that the power of the Greeks to resist the
barbarians was now at an end. But we may gratefully remember
that the capital of the Eastern Empire had, with all its elements
of weakness, proved strong enough to stand for centuries as the
bulwark of Europe against the barbarians of the East, thus
sheltering the nascent nations of the West, while they slowly
attained the fulness of their maturity, and, at the same time,
keeping the treasures of the old Greek literature in a place of
safety, until those nations were sufficiently civilised to receive
them. From our survey of the history of Scholarship in the
Byzantine age, we now turn to the story of its fortunes during
the corresponding period of the Middle Ages in the West of
Europe.
^^N ^i 9i. Tt A4 ^^ I ^ ^>^
I #%/
End of Scholia on Hesiod's Works and Days by Manuel Moschopulus,
COPIED BY Demetrius Triclinius 1316 a.d.
Codex S. Marci Venetus 464, fol. 78; Wattenbach et von Velsen, Exempia
Codicum Graecarum, xxi (pp. 419 f su/ra).
BOOK VI.
THE MIDDLE AGES IN THE WEST
semper aut discere aut docere aut scribere duke habuu
Beds, Historia Ecclesiastical v 24.
mihi satis apparet propter se ipsam appetenda sapientia.
Sbrvatus Lupus, Ep. x.
in otio^ in negotio^ et dacemus quad scitnus et addisdmus quod
nescimus,
Gerbert, Ep, 44.
claustrum sine armario <est> queui castrum sine armamentaria,
Geoffrey of Sainte-Barbe-en-Auge to Peter Mangot (r. 11 70),
in Mart^ne, Thesaurus navus Anecdotorum^ i 511.
notitia linguarum est prima porta sapientiae,
Roger Bacon, Opus Tertium, c 28, p. 102 Brewer.
On peut dire que la philosophie scholastique est nie it Paris et
gu'eile y est morte, Une phrase de Porphyre^ un rayon dirobh h
lantiquitS^ la produisit; PantiquiU tout eniikre tktouffa,
Victor Cousin, Ouvrages Inidits ^AbUard^ p. Ix (1836).
Conspectus of History of Scholarship, ftc,
in the West, 600 — zooo A.D.
Italy
600
604 d. Gregory I
61* f. Bobbio
615 d. Columban
Greek monasteries
founded in Rome
by Martin I (649-
55)
6^ Greek declines
in Italy
700
715--31 Gregory II
796 t. Noval(
570-636 Isi«
dore of
SevUle
niuslllbp
of Toledo
690 d. Julian
bp of To-
ledo
73&-80 Greek refu*
gees in Italy
731-4X Gregory III
770 Petrus Pisanua
774 end of Lombard
Icmgdom
725-97 Paulus
Diaconus
795-817 Leo III
800-
Charles the Great
crowned at Rome
8i7-a4 Pascal I
818-50 Greek refu-
gees in Italy
893 Dungal at Pavia
816 d. Pacificus of
Verona
858-67 Nicholas I
900
916-94 Gtsta BertM-
gturii
994 d. Bercngar
961-9 Otho I crowned
at Rome king of
Italy and emperor
967 d. Gunso of No-
vara
979 d. Luiiprand bp
of Cremona
974 d. Ratherius bp
of Verona
990-1003 Silvester II
{fitrhrrt)
1000
8]>ain
714 Arab
Conquest
of Spain
•Ftmnoo'
W, FrtuMand
*a«nDaiiy'
E, Frankla$td
535-600 Venantius
Fortunatua
'Virgiltus Maro'
613 Frank kinedoms u-
nited under Qothar 1 1
690 f. Fleury
695 f. St Riquier
630 f. Ferri&res
634 f. Rtfbais
650 f. Ptfronne
656 f. Suvelot
658 Fredegarius
669 f. Corbie
688 d. St Wandrille
614 f. St Gallen
645 d. Gallus
791 f. PrOm
795 d. St Giles
739 Saracens defeated
by Charles Martel
794 f. Reichenau
759 end of Merovingian
& beginning of Caro-
lingian line
749-66 Chrodegang abp 744 f. Fulda
of Mets 7S4 d. Boniface
779-814 Sole rule of j.
Charles the Great
796-804 Alcuin at Tours
f. Lorsch
iiC*""^
810 Dungal at St Denis
814-40 Louis the Pious 899 f. Corvey
891 d. llieodulfus bp — «- i?:-C»-i
and founder of school j
of Orleans :
896 Ermoldus Nigellus
837 Thegan
840-77 Charles the Bald
805-69 Servatus Lupus
84s Joannes Scotus
(d. 875)
850 d. Freculphus
840-60 SeduUus at Li^;e
865 d. Radbertus
877 d. Eric of Auxerre
881-8 Charles the Fat
(99 I. i^rvev
i 70-840 Einnard
43 Treaty of Verdun
776-856 Rabanus
Maurus
809-49 Walafrid
Strabo
830 f. Hirschau
850 Ermenricb of
Ellwangen
859 Rudolf, Ann,
tuld,
874 Agius, Poeta
Snxo
890 Salomo III,
abbot of St Gallen
908 d. Remi of Auxerre
910 f. Cluni
915 d. Regino
993 d. Abbo Cemuus
930 d. Hucbald
949 d. Odo of Cluni
950 b. Gerbert of
Aurillac
987 end of W. Carolin-
([ians & beginning of
tne of Hugh Capet
991-6 Gerbert abp of
Rheims
j 91 1 end of £. Caro-
I lingians
919 d. Notker Bal-
bulus
918-36 Hairy of
Saxonv
995 Loinaringia re-
covered for Ger-
many
936 Echaiis Cmptwi
936-73 Otho 1
96^ a. Bruno abp of
Cologne
973 d. Ekkehard I
973-8 J Otho II
98^ Wahhcr of
Speier
984 Hroswitha of
Ganderaheim
996-1009 Otho III
Brltlili Um
609-5 Augustine abp
of Canterbury
651^^ Aidaa bp of
Lindisfame
668-90 llieodore of
Tamis abp of Can-
terbury
673 b. Bode
675 b. Booifiice
688-796 Ina, king of
Wessex
690 d. Benedkt
Biacop
650-709 Aldbdm
739 Egbert abp of
York
734 d. Tatwioe abp
of Canterbury
735 f Bede,
b. Alcuia
778-81 Alcnin bead
of the sdiool of
York
810-5 h. JoanBct
Scotus
871— <. 900 Alfred
949-58 Odo abp of
Canterbury
959-88 Dunstan abp
of Canterbury
e, 955—1030 Alfric
of Eynsnam
969 f. Ramsev
985-7 Abbo of Fkury
at Ramsey
Cantmntdjrom p. 904.
b. b^m ; d. di»d\ f. /omuUd,
CHAPTER XXIV.
FROM GREGORY THE GREAT (c, 54O--604)
TO BONIFACE (675—754).
The Roman age has already been described as coining to an
end in the memorable year 529, when the Monastery of Monte
Cassino was founded in the West and the School of Athens
closed in the East. The history of Scholarship during the
Middle Ages in the West, to which we now turn our attention,
covers a period of rather more than eight centuries, extending
from about 530 to about 1350 a.d. Shortly after the beginning
of this period, we have the birth of the biographer of Benedict,
Gregory the Great (540X the father of mediaeval Christianity;
and, shortly before its end, the death of Dante (1321), who
embodies in his immortal poem much of the scholastic teaching
of the age. In our survey of this period, we propose to pass in
review the names of special interest in the world of letters, so far
as they have definite points of contact with the history of classical
learning. The present chapter begins with the biographer of
Benedict, and ends with Boniface.
Gregory the Great (c. 540 — 604), who became Pope in 589,
belonged to a senatorial family and received a
liberal education which made him second to none ^^^
in Rome^ He had already filled the high office of Praetor, when
he withdrew from a secular life and devoted his ancestral wealth
to the founding of six monasteries in Sicily, and a seventh in
Rome, which he selected for his own retreat As papal envoy
in Constantinople (584-7), notwithstanding his ignorance of
Greek, he entered into a controversy with the Patriarch himselfl
^ Greg. Tur. ffist. Franc, x t ; Paulas Dtacontts, Viia Grtg. c 1.
432 THE SIXTH CENTURY IN THE WEST. [CHAP.
In one of his Letters^ he complains that there were none in
Constantinople who were capable of making a good translation
from Latin into Greek, an expression implying, on his own party
some slight acquaintance with the latter language, although, in
another letter, he disclaims all such knowledge, adding that he
had never written any work in that language'. In his Magna
Moralia he sets forth an allegorical interpretation of the Book of
Job, which he was not capable of studying either in Hebrew or in
Greek, but only in the earlier and the later Latin versions. It
was his own influence that led to the general recognition and
acceptance of the Latin Vulgate. Towards the close of the long
letter prefixed to the Moralia^ he confesses his contempt for the
art of speech, and admits that he is not over-careful in the
avoidance of barbarisms or inaccurate uses of prepositions,
deeming it ' utterly unworthy to keep the language of the Divine
Oracles in subjection to the rules of Donatus*'; and this principle
he applies to his own commentary, as well as to the sacred text.
His attitude towards the secular study of Latin literature is well
illustrated in the letter to Desiderius, bishop of Vienne. He is
almost ashamed to mention the rumour that has reached him, to
the effect that the bishop was in the habit of instructing certain
persons in grammatical learning. ' The praises of Christ cannot
be pronounced by the same lips as the praises of Jove'*. He
hopes to hear that the bishop is not really interested in such
trifling subjects*. Elsewhere, however, the study of Grammar
and the knowledge of the liberal arts are emphatically commended
on the ground of the aid they afford in the understanding of the
Scriptures; but the genuineness of the work, in which this
opinion is expressed*, is doubtful. Later writers record the
tradition that Gregory did his best to suppress the works of
* Epp» vii 30.
* Ep, xi 74, nos nee Graece novimus, nee aliquod opus aliquando Giaece
conscripsimus (ep. vii 32, quamvis Graecae linguae nescius).
' Migne, Ixxv 516 B.
^ 'In uno se ore cum lovis laudibus Christi laudes non capiont'; a
reminiscence of Jerome's Ep, ad Damasum, 11 § 13, ' absit ut de ore Christiano
sonet lupiteromnipotens', xxii 386 Migne (R. L. Poole's Alediival Thought^ 9).
* nugis et secularibus litteris ; Ep. xi 54.
* Book V of Comm, on / Kings 3, 30, Migne Ixxix 356.
XXIV.] GREGORY I. lORDANES. GILDAS. 433
Cicero, the charm of whose style diverted young men from the
study of the Scriptures*, and that he burnt all the books of Livy
which he could find, because they were full of idolatrous
superstitions'. It was even stated that he set the Palatine
Library on fire, lest it should interfere with the study of the
Bible, but the sole authority for this is John of Salisbury'
(d. 1 180), and the statement is unworthy of credit ^
In the same century we have an interesting group of three
historians, all of whom exemplify the prevailing
decline in grammatical knowledge. The first of
these is lordanes, the author of a universal chronicle, who, in his
abridgement (551) of ih^ History of the Goths by Cassiodorus,
borrows his preface from Rufinus and his opening words from
Orosius, and confesses his debt to others in delightfully ungram-
matical Latin'. The justice with which he describes himself as
agrammatus* is apparent on every page of his work. He makes
dolus and fluvius neuter, and flunun^ gaudium and regnum
masculine; and abounds in errors of declension and conjugation;
but even his blunders in grammar, gross as they are, cannot
conceal the debt which he obviously owes to the rhetorical
phraseology of Cassiodorus, to whom he is also indebted for all
his learned quotations I
The interval between the consulship and the death of
Cassiodorus corresponds to the life of Gildas of
Bath (516 — 573), the first native historian of Britain.
The laming he had derived from St Iltul, the 'teacher of the
Britons \ was enlarged by a visit to Ireland; and he even founded
a monastery in Brittany. Much of the earlier part of his ' lament
^ In Edict of Louis XI (1473); ^' Lyron, Singuiaritaies HistorUoi, i 167
(Tiraboschi, Leiteratura ItaUana^ W 2, 10, vol. iii, p. 118 ed. 1787).
' S. Antoninus, Summa Theoi. iv 11, 4 (itnd^,
' PolicreUicus, ii »6, viii 19.
* On Gregory, cp. Tiraboschi, Ltti, Ital, iii 109—115 (ed. 1787); Bayle's
Diet,, s.v. ; Heeren, CL Litt, im MUtelaUtr, i 7&— 81 ; Milman, Lai. Christ,
" 97—145; Ebcrt, Lit. des MUttlali$rs, i« 54«-^; »«<! Teuffcl, I493; ^//. ed.
Ewald and Hartmann in Men, Gtrm, Hist. 1887-^
' Sdto me maiorum secutum scriptis ex eoram latissima prata paucos flores
legisse.
* Get, 165. ' TeuflTel, 1 485.
s. 28
434 THE SIXTH CENTURY IN THE WEST. [CHAP.
on the ruin of Britain' is derived from St Jerome's Letters and
from a Latin version of the Ecclesiastical History of Eusebius.
The work as a whole is written in a verbose, florid, fantastic and
exaggerated form of monastic Latin, and its prolix periods often
tend to obscurity ^
It was in the year of the death of Gildas (573) that Gregory,
the historian of the Franks (r. 538 — 594), became
iJm*^ ^ bishop of Tours. In the preface to his History he
refers to the decay of literature in Gaul'. His
works in general show a certain familiarity with Virgil, especially
with the first book of the Aeneid^ but he cannot quote three lines
of verse without making havoc of the metre'. Yet he ventures to
criticise the versification of king Chilperic^ who, besides writing
Latin poetry, had (like Claudius) attempted to add several new
letters to the Latin alphabet. He is familiar with the preface to
the Catiline of Sallust; but his quotations from Cicero are
borrowed from Jerome, and those from Pliny and Gellius are
probably second-hand. He repeatedly apologises for his imperfect
knowledge of grammar'. He combines the plurals hcuc and quae
with a singular verb ; he writes antedictus cives for antedictos^ and
percolibantur (i.e. peradebantur) for percellebantur ; and one of his
favourite constructions is the accusative absolute. The study of
his works shows that, in his day, the pronunciation of Latin
» Cp. Ebcrt, i> 561-5; TcuflTel, § 486, i.
' Decedente atque immo potius pereunte ab urbibus Gallicanis liberalium
cultura litterarum...Vae diebus nostris, quia periil studium litterarum a nobis.
' H, F, iv 30 and Mart. \ 40.
^ H, F. y 44, ' scripsit alios libros idem rex versibus, quasi Sedulium
secutus; sed versiculi illi nulla paenitus metricae conveniunt ratione*. Never-
theless, posterity placed the statue of Chilperic over the S.W. door of Notre-
Dame, with a lyre in his hand in the attitude of Apollo (Montfaucon, Afon, de la
Monarchies t. i). Mfile, however, VArt Rdigieux^ 438, identifies this as David.
^ //. F.'vi I, veniam precor, si aut in litteris aut in syllabis grammoticam
artem excessero, de qua adplene non sum imbutus. Vit, Pair. 1, praef,^ non
me artis grammaticae studium imbuit neque auctorum saecularium polita lectio
erudivit. Liber in gloria con/essorum, praef., timeo, ne, cum scribere coepero,
quia sum sine litteris rethoricis et arte grammaiica, dicatur mihi a litteratis :
*0 rustice et idiota...qui nomina discernere nescis; saepius pro masculinis
feminea...commutas; qui ipsas quoque praepositiones...loco debito plenimque
non locas'...sed tamen respundebo illis et dicam, quia: 'opusvestrum facio et
per meam rusticitatem vestram prudentiam exercebo '.
XXIV.] GREGORY OF TOURS. MARTIN OF BRACARA. 435
difTered from the spelling; e was confounded with 1, and 0
with »; many of the consonants were pronounced feebly or
suppressed altogether; aspiration was little observed, and a
sibilant sound was introduced into ci and //. Meanwhile, the
vocabulary was being enlarged by the addition of words borrowed
from Greek and Hebrew and even from barbarous languages, and
by the use of old words in new senses. The departure from
classical usage is most striking in matters of syntax, while there is
comparatively little change in the inflexions. Gregory of Tours
is primarily an authority for the history of the Franks during the
century preceding his own death ; but he also supplies important
evidence on the characteristics of the Latin language in the days
of its decline*. The decay of letters is lamented in the next
century by Fredegarius Scholasticus (fl, 658), who,
in a Chronicle written in a Burgundian monastery,
complains that the world is on the wane, intellectual activity is
dead, and the ancient writers have no successors'.
Among the older contemporaries of Gregory, bishop of Tours,
was Martin, archbishop of Bracara, whom he
describes in general as second to none of his own Bracm" d.'ato
age in the world of letters, and in particular as the
author of the Latin verses over the S. door of the church of
St Martin at Tours. In his ethical works, and especially in his
treatise de ira and the formula honestae vitae\ he makes much
use of Seneca, and these works were long ascribed to Seneca
himself*.
The decline in Scholarship which has been traced in the
historians is also to be noticed in the poets of this p^^ .
age. The poets of the middle of the sixth century Mwrimianut,
include the Tuscan Maximianus, who spent his corippus,
youth in Rome, and wrote in his later years the 'o'*^**"*
six elegies which had a singular fascination for students in the
1 Max Bonnet, Li Latin de Grignre de TounKi^). Cp. Ebert, i' 566-
79, and Tcuffel, § 486, 3 — 9.
* Bouquet, ii 413 (Haase, De Medii Atvi Stud. Pkiloi. 18); cp. Putnam,
Books in the Middle Ages^ i 118.
' Included in Supplement to Haase*8 ed. of Seneca.
^ Teuffel, § 494, 1 ; Schans, 1 470.
436 POETS OF THE SIXTH CENTURY. [CHAP.
Middle Ages*. He is a Christian who poses as a pagan. Familiar
with Virgil, Catullus, and the elegiac and lyric poets of the
Augustan age, he is not always correct in points of prosody,
his metrical mistakes including verkundia 2Sid pedagogus*. Irre-
gularities of prosody are also frequent in the metrical version of
the Acts of the Apostles produced by Arator, who studied at
Milan and Ravenna. In the same age the African Corippus
(550) writes epic poems on historical subjects in a fluent style
inspired by Virgil and Claudian, while he also imitates Ovid,
Lucan and Statius, being, in point of prosody, the most correct
of all the poets of his time. His contemporary, Venantius
Fortunatus (c, 535 — c, 600), was educated at Ravenna, left Italy
for Gaul, where he found a friend in Gregory of Tours, and,
towards the end of his life, became bishop of Poitiers. He is a
devoted adherent of Radegunde (the widow of king Clothar I)
and her foster-daughter. He tells us that Radegunde was a
profound student of St Gregory, St Basil and St Athanasius, and
that Gertrude, abbess of Nivelle, had sent messengers to Rome and
to Ireland for the purchase of books'. He also mentions the
custom of giving recitations from Virgil and other poets in the
Forum of Trajan^. His elegiacs and hexameters include many
reminiscences of Virgil and Ovid, Claudian and Sedulius, Prosper
and Arator, while he is himself imitated by later versifiers such as
Alcuin and Theodulfus, Rabanus Maurus and Walafrid Strabo*.
He describes a castle on the Mosel, and a voyage from Metz to
Andemach*, without attaining the charm of the Moulla of
Ausonius. He addresses the bishop of Tours in a generally
correct set of Sapphics after the Horatian model, unhappily
ending with care Gregori, In the same poem he mentions
Pindar {Pindarus Graius)^ and, in the prose preface to his Life
of St Martin^ he even quotes four rhetorical terms in the original
Greeks He flatters the poets and orators of his day with the
^ Keichling in Mon. Gertn, Pacd, XI I pp. xx, xxxvii f.
' Manitius in RKein, Afus. xliv 540; R. Ellis in A. f P, v i — 15 and
CL Rev. XV 368; ed. Petschenig (1890), Webster (1900).
• viii I, * ill ao; vi 8.
^ Manitius, Index iii and iv to ed. by Leo and Krusch in Mon. Hist, Gtrm,
(1881-5).
* iii 13; X 9. ' ivix^ipriiJMTa^ ^XXci^cit, biaipivtitt rap€if$49(iu
XXIV.] 'VIRGIL' THE GRAMMARIAN. 437
assurance that they found their inspiration in Homer and
Demosthenes'; but his own study of his classical predecessors
does not prevent his perpetrating such mistakes as ddhuc^ initium^
iddlum^ ecclisia and Mnitas; and he succeeds in making four
false quantities in the six Greek names included in the single
line, Archyta^ Pythagoras^ Ardtus^ CatOy PldtOy Chr^sippus*.
Three, however, of his sacred poems are widely known. Ambrose
is his model in Vexilla regis prodeunty while the triumphant
trochaic tetrameter of the Roman soldiers, and of Pnidentius, is
the type followed by Pange lingua gioriosi proelium certaminis.
The ordinary elegiac couplet is used in the description of Spring
(Salve festa dies) written for Felix, bishop of Nantes, whom he
belauds as a perfect Greek scholar and as ' the light of Armorica'.
It is only in these three poems, and in the modern hymns
translated from them', that Fortunatus may be said to have
survived to the present day*.
The decadence of Latin in the seventh century (one of the
darkest ages in Latin literature) is exemplified in
the person of the grammarian Virgilius Maro, who ~^mi!ri«n*'
may be placed early in that century, or late in the
sixth*. He assures us that his master Aeneas gave him the name
of Maro, 'quia in eo antiqui Maronis spiritus redivivit'. He
describes certain grammarians as wrangling for a fortnight over
the vocative of ego^ and as drawing their swords after an equally
long discussion on inchoative verbs. His only value lies in the
way in which he illustrates the transition from Latin to its
Proven9al descendant, and from quantitative to rhythmical forms
of verse. He is described as belonging to the school of Toulouse*.
He records the custom of having two separate Libraries (i) of
m
* VIII I.
' vii II, 35; cp. index ret metrieae in Leo*s ed.
' Moorsom*8 Ccmpanwn to Hymns A» and M,^ pp. 58 — 66*.
^ Cp. Ampere, Hist, Litt. ii 311 f; Otanam, La CiviHsetti^n CMtiami
chtt les Francs t pp. 411-9 (ed. 1855); Ebert, i* 533; Teuffel, f 491 f; and
Saintsbury, i 396-9.
* Ozanam, 438 f. His only extant works are the EpitomM ad Faktamsm
pueritm, and the Epistoloi ad Julium germastHm diaeof$9em (Mai, CL Attct.
V i); cp. HUmer(Wien, i88«).
* Abbo of Fleury (d. 1004), Qtuust, Gr. ed. Mai, CL Auct, t $49.
438 GREEK IN IRELAND. [CHAP.
Christian, (2) of pagan literature*. He also tells us that his
preceptor ' Virgilius Assianus ' wrote a work on the twelve kinds
of Latin. With the help of Greek, he coins new words: scribere
becomes charaxare^ rex appears as thors (from $p6vo9), and a
cryptic form of Latin comes into use, which has points of
similarity with the Irish monk's Hisperica famina (cent vii),
where, amid much that is singularly obscure, it is a relief to find
so clear a phrase as : — ^parties solitum elaborant agrestres orgium^J
It is characteristic of the Irish origin of this strange composition
that we here find two words borrowed from Greek.
While the accurate knowledge of Latin was declining in Gaul,
even Greek was not unknown in Ireland'. That
ircUnd *" island had reaped the benefit of its remoteness
from those incursions, which, in the fifth century,
had wrought havoc on the civilisation of almost all the lands of
the West. It was in the same century (r. 405) that St Patrick,
who had been educated under St Martin of Tours, crossed the
seas to convert the Irish to the Christian faith. In 445 he
established an archiepiscopal see at Armagh^; and, four years
later, the first invasion of Britain by the English drove
Christianity into the mountains of Wales and the borders of
Scotland, and even to the many monasteries which had recently
been founded in Ireland^ The knowledge of Greek, which had
almost vanished in the West, was so widely diffused in the schools
of Ireland, that, if anyone knew Greek, it was assumed that he
^ Ep, p. 41.
' Mai, /.r., V 479 f; Ozanam, La Civiiisation ChrkUnnt ctut les Frafus
(1855)1 4>3~5>i 483 ff ^^^ £tudes Germ, ii 479 f; Teuffel, § 497, 7; Hisperica
Famina^ ed. Stowosser (1887) ; ed. Jenkinson (announced) ; R. Ellis xnjaum.
PhiloL xxviii (1905) 209 f; Zimmer, Nennius vindicaius (1893), 191 f, assigns
it to S.W. Britain (first half of cent. vi).
' Cp. Cramer, De Graecis MecUi Aevi Studiis (1849), ^ 4^! Ozanam, l,c,
475-83; Haur^au, Singularitis Historiques et LitUraires (i86i), pp. f — 36;
G. T. Stokes, Ireland ofui the Celtic Church (1886), Lect. xi; and H. Zimmer,
Keltische Kirche in Britannien u. Irlandt in ReaUncyclopadie f. prot, Tke^,
(1901), abstract in Eng. Hist, Rev, 1901, p. 757 f.
^ Zimmer places the death of St Patrick in 459 ; Stokes in 463.
* Cp. T. Moore's History of Ireland^ vol. i c. 10; and Eichhom, AUg*
Gesch. (1799) ii 176—188.
XXIV.] COLUMBAN IN THE VOSGES. 439
must have come from that country. The Irish passion for travel^
led to the light of learning which had lingered in the remotest
island of the West being transmitted anew to the lands of the
South".
The Irish monk, Columban, born in Leinster about 543, had
received an excellent education on one of the many
islands of Lough Erne before he entered the monas-
tery of Bangor on the Eastern coast of Ulster. The monastery
was then at the height of its fame, and it was doubtless owing to
the classical training he had there received, that he was able at
the age of 68 to address a friend in a lengthy poem of Adonic
verse, from which the few following lines are taken : —
'Inclyta vates, Doctiloquorum
Nomine Sappho, Carmina linquens,
Versibus istis Frivola nostra
Dulce solebat Sutcipe laetus*.
Edere caimen. Migne, Ixxx 191.
Elsewhere he quotes Juvenal, and recommends the reading of the
ancient poets as well as the ancient fathers'. About 585, he was
suddenly smitten with a longing for foreign travel. Attended by
twelve companions, he left for Gaul ; and, having been invited to
settle in ^Burgundy, he founded in the woodland solitudes of the
Vosges the three monasteries of Anegray, Luxeuil {c, 590) and
Fontaines \ It was about this time that he composed his Rule»
which has much in common with that of Benedict, and prescribes
the copying of mss, besides teaching in schools and constant toil
in field and forest*. He was banished from Burgundy about 610,
and, after withdrawing to Nantes, returned towards the Rhine,
passing from Ziirich to Zug and ultimately to the Lake of
^ Fiia S. Gain, ii 47 (Pertz, Men, ii 30), Scotoram, quibos consuetude
peregrinandi iani paene in naturam conversa est.
* On 'Scots on the Continent', see A W. Haddan*s Remains (1876),
)58_)94 ; cp. H. Zimmer*s Irish RUwuni in Midiaevai Caitun (E. T.) ; and
Greith, Gesch, d, altirist/Un Kirtht in ihrtr Vtr^imdumg mU R^m^ GalHin u.
Alemannien (Freiburg in B., 1867).
» Usshcr, Ep, Ilib. SylL p. 1 1 f.
^ Life by Jonas, cc. 9, 10. Cp. Margaret Stokes, Thru MmUhs in the
Forests of Frame (1895).
* Margaret Stokes, Six Months in tht Apensusus, a PUgrimags in March ef
vestiges of the Irish Saints in liafy (189s).
440 COLUMBAN AND BOBBIO. [CHAP.
Constance, where he spent two or three years in preaching to
the heathen. When he left for Italy {c. 612), he was welcomed
by the king of the Lombards and his queen Theodolinda ; and,
S.E. of the Lombard capital of Pavia, he founded on the stream
of the Trebbia the monastery of Bobbio^ (c 6x3). In a cavern,
high above the opposite bank of the stream, he died in 6x5*.
His life was written in the same century by Jonas, a monk of
Bobbio, who quotes Virgil and Livy, and has evidently formed
his style on the study of the Classics. Columban's ' belt, chalice
and knife ' are still shown in the sacran'um*.
The monastery founded by the Irish monk became a home of
learning in northern Italy. In course of time its library received
gifts of MSS of the fourth and fifth centuries, originally transcribed
for men of letters in Rome, and others of later date, presented by
wandering countrymen of the founder, such as Dungal^ the Irish
monk who presided over the school at Pavia in 823. The first
catalogue, which contained 666 mss, including Terence, Lucretius,
Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, Persius, Martial, Juvenal and Claudian, with
Cicero, Seneca and the elder Pliny, was drawn up in the tenth
century, and has been printed by Muratori*. It is arranged
according to the authors and the donors of the mss. The
second, 'restored' in X461 and including 280 volumes, was
discovered and published in X824 by Peyron*. The library was
explored by Giorgio Merula (1493)^, Tommaso Inghirami (X496),
^ On the spot it is pronounced Bobio^ according to the old spelling of the
name. The epitaph on Bp Cummian (d. 730) has Ebovio (Margaret Stokes*
Six Afonths in tht Apennines^ p. 151).
' In the same year died Aileran, an Irish monk who borrows from Origen,
Philo and Josephus the best part of a brief explanation of certain Biblical
names (Migne, Ixxx 337-34)'
' M. Stokes, pp. 14, lySf. On Columban, cp. Ozanam, Civ. Ckrit, c. iv;
Ebert, i' diyf; Milman, ii 184 — 195; Dr Moraii, An Irish Missionary and
his Work (1869); G. T. Stokes, Ireland and tht Celtic Church, Lea. vii ; and
M. Stokes, Lc,
* Wattenbach, Schri/twescn im MA, p, 489. Gottlieb, however, maintains
that the work of the elder Dungal against Claudius of Turin was given by a
later Dungal in cent, xil (Traube, Abhandl, Bayr, Akad. 1891, 333-7).
* Ant, Ital, iii 809—880, esp. p. 818; cp. G. Becker's Caialogi Bibliathi*
carum Antiqui (1885), p. 64 ; and L6on Mattre's £coleSt p. 197.
* Fragmtnta Oral, Cic, p. iiif. ' Centralbi./, BiU, v 343 f.
XXIV.] MSS FROM BOBBIO. 44 1
and Aulo Giano Parrasio (1499). Many valuable mss were removed
by Cardinal Borromeo, some of them being placed in the Ambrosian
Library, which he was founding at Milan (z6o6), while others were
sent to the Vatican at the instance of Paul V (16 18). In 1685
the monastery was visited by the learned Benedictine, Mabillon'.
During the i8th century a number of the remaining volumes
were transported to Turin. The greater part have thus been
dispersed through the libraries of Rome, Milan and Turin, while
some have found their way to Naples and Vienna'. It is
practically certain that the Ambrosian palimpsest of Plautus'
and those of several of Cicero's Speeches (cent iv) and of the
Letters of Fronto, discovered in the Ambrosian Library early in
the 19th century, all came from the monastery founded by the
Irish monk at Bobbio ; but the monks of that monastery, while
they deserve our gratitude for preserving these mss at all, have
made the task of deciphering them needlessly difficult by inscribing
on these ancient scrolls later copies of works so easily accessible
as the Vulgate, and the Acts of the Councils and the works of
St Augustine. Among other mss, which once belonged to Bobbio,
may be mentioned fragments of Symmachus and the Theodosian
Code; scholia on Cicero* (cent, v), mss of St Luke (v-vi), St
Severinus (vi), Josephus (vi-vii), St Ambrose, St Augustine and
St Maximus (vii), Gregory's Dialogues (r. 750), and St Isidore
(before 840)'. Lastly we cannot forget the 'Muratorian fragment'
' Iter Italicum^ 1 1 5. He describes it as * the Bobian (called by the ancients
the Ehobian) monastery'.
' M. Stokes, i%i-i. On the MSS in Turin, cp. Ottino (1890); on those in
Rome and Milan, Seebass in CetUralbl, f, BibL xiii; on others, Gottlieb, ib,
iv 44« f, and Gebhardt, Uf, v 343-61, 383—431, .^38.
' Studemund, Apographum^ p. v f, Neque unde neqae quo tempore codex
in bibliothecam Ambrosianam pervenerit, certo constat... Ubi sacer codex
conscriptus sit nescimus. Bobbii eum conscriptum esse et vnlgo credunt et
inde probabile fit, quod rude ac parum elegans scripturae genus
amanuensem non Italum fuisse persuadet ; itemque genus scripturae Anglo-
saxonicum quo supplementa ilia insignia sunt, vix amanuensi ex Italia oriundo
tribuerim.
^ ed. Orelli, V ii S14 — 369; recent literature in Bursian's Jahrtsh, cxiii
(1903) 193 f.
^ FacsimiUs from all the nine MSS here dated are published by the Palaeo-
graphical Society. The Medicean Virgil (v) also came from Bobbio.
442 ST GALLEN AND RESBACUS. [CHAP.
(cent viii or earlier), the earliest extant list of the books of the
New Testament
When the founder of Bobbio left for Italy, one at least of his
companions, Gallus by name, remained on the shore
8t*Qiiiien*"** ^^ '^^ Lake of Constance. Accompanied by several
of the other Irish monks, he founded on a lofty site
in the neighbourhood (614) the monastery which has given the
name of St Gallen to the town which surrounds it. The founder
died in extreme old age about 645. The monastery of St Gallen
has proved no less important than that of Bobbio as a treasure-
house of Latin as well as Irish literature. As we shall see in the
sequel, at least four unique mss of Asconius, Valerius Flaccus,
Statius and Manilius were there discovered in 14 16 by Poggio»
together with a complete copy of Quintilian \ The Library still
possesses a few leaves of a ms of Virgil belonging to the fourth or
fifth century*. Another pupil of Columban, Agilius (St Aile), was
the first abbot of the monastery founded at Resbacus (R^bais, £.
of Paris) in 634', and the mss there copied included Terence,
Cicero, Virgil, Horace, Donatus, Priscian and Boethius^
Within less than 25 years after the Irish monks had founded
Bobbio and St Gallen, and thus unconsciously
Seviilr* **' promoted the preservation of some of the most
important remains of Latin literature, Isidore, bishop
of Seville {c. 570 — 636), produced an encyclopaedic work which
gathered up for the Middle Ages much of the learning of the
ancient world. The work is known as the Origines^ and is
remarkable for the great variety of its contents and for its
numerous citations from earlier authorities. The friend, for
whom it was composed, divided it into 2a Books, describing the
whole as a vast volume of ' etymologies * including everything that
ought to be known. Books 1 — iii are on the liberal arts, grammar
(including metre) filling a whole Book ; iv, on medicine and on
^ Cp. F. Weidmann, Gesch* d. Bibliotluk von Si Gallen (1841); Catalogues
of the MSS in G. Becker's Caialogi (1885); cp. L^on MaUre*s J&coUs, p. 178 f,
and Ozanam's Civ. Chrit. p. 487 f.
' Facsimile on p. 185. ' Jonas, Vita S, Columbani, 36.
* Greith, AUirische Kirche^ p. 391 (Denk, GtUlo-Frdttkisch, UnUrricht^
157 f). Perrona Scottorum (P^ronne, near Corbie) was founded by Irish
monks c» 650.
XXIV.] ISIDORE OF SEVILLE. 443
libraries; v, on law and chronology; vi, on the books of the
Bible; vii, on the heavenly and the earthly hierarchy; viii, on
the Church and on sects (no less .than 68 in number); ix, on
language, on peoples, and on official titles; x, on etymology;
XI, on man; xii, on beasts and birds; xiii, the world and its
parts; xiv, physical geography; xv, political geography, public
buildings, land-surveying and road-making; xvi, stones and
metals ; xvii, agriculture and horticulture ; xviii, the vocabulary
of war, litigation and public games ; xix, ships and houses, dress
and personal adornment ; and xx, meats and drinks, tools and
furniture The work is mainly founded on earlier compilations,
Book II being chiefly taken from the Greek texts translated by
Boethius; the first part of iv from Caelius Aurelianus; xi from
Lactantius; and xii — xiv, xv &c., from Pliny and Solinus;
while its plan, as a whole, and many of its details, appear to have
been borrowed from the lost Praia of Suetonius'. The author
also makes use of Lucretius, Sallust, and an epitome of Vitruvius,
with Jerome, Augustine, Orosius and others". The work was so
highly esteemed as an encyclopaedia of classical learning that, to
a large extent, it unfortunately superseded the study of the classical
authors themselves. Among its compiler's other writings is a
Chronicle founded on Julius Africanus and on Jerome's rendering
of Eusebius (ending with 615), a History of the Goths, a con-
tinuation of Gennadius De Viris liiustribus^ and a treatise De
Natura Rerum^ widely known in the Middle Ages. We gain a
vivid impression of his own surroundings from the verses written
by himself for the 14 presses (armaria), which composed his
library and were adorned with the portraits of 22 authors.
Theology is represented by Origen, Hilary, Ambrose, Augustine,
Jerome, Chrysostom and Cyprian ; poetry by Prudentius, Avitus,
Juvencus and Sedulius; ecclesiastical history by Eusebius and
Orosius; law by Theodosius, Paulus and Gaius; medicine by
Cosmas, Damian, Hippocrates and Galen ; and, besides these 20,
we have Gregory the Great and Isidore's elder brother, Leander.
Each of these is commemorated in elegiac verse, beginning with
^ Nettleship, i 330 f.
' Dressel, De Isidori Origimtm FonHhus^ Turin (1874).
444 GREEK IN SPAIN. [CHAP.
three couplets on the library in general, implying that it contained
secular as well as sacred literature : —
'sunt hie plura sacra, sunt hie mundalia plura:
ex his si qua placent carmina, toUe, lege,
prata (vides) plena spinis, et copia flonim;
si non vis spinas sumere, sume rosas...*
The series ends with some lines addressed ' To an Intruder ', the
last couplet of which runs as follows : —
'non patitur quenquam coram se scriba loquentem;
non est hie quod agas, garrule, perge foras'^
Though Isidore was himself familiar with many portions of pagan
literature, the only authors which he permitted his monks to read
were the Grammarians. He held it safer for them to remain in
humble ignorance than to be elated with the pride of knowledge,
or led into error by reading dangerous works ^ In support of
this narrow view, he even appeals to the Vulgate rendering of
Psalm Ixxi where, by combining the end of verse 15 (as translated
from an inferior variant in the lxx) with the beginning of the
following verse, he obtains the singular text : — quia fion cagnovi
litteraturam^^ introibo in potentias Domini*, Had he referred to
Cassiodorus, he might there have found a better motto in the
prayer :— /m^j/a, Domine^ legentibus profectum^.
Isidore has the reputation of having been Mearned in Greek
and Latin and Hebrew'*. He distinguished between
Splin**' *" ^^^ varieties of Greek, i.e. the four dialects and the
Kocnf, and eulogised it as excelling all languages in
euphony^ But his knowledge of the language was very slight
Acquaintance with Greek is attested in Spain at a still earlier date
' Migne, Ixxxiii 1107; cp. J. W. Clark's Care of Bookt^ p. 46.
' ib, 877, liidori Regula^ c. 8, gentilium libros vel haereticorum volumina
monachus legere caveat ; melius est enim eorum pemiciosa dogmata ignorare
quam per inexperientiam in aliquem laqueum erroris incurrere.
' 7/>a/ufiarc{at v, I. for vpar^iuiTtiat,
^ Sententiantm Liber, iii 13.
' Insi, \ 33. On Isidore in genera], cp. Ebert, i' 588— doi; TeufTcl,
§ 496 ; Saintsbury, i 400 f.
* Migne, Ixxxi 53 D, 86 B.
^ Ep, ix 1 , 4.
XXIV.] GREEK IN GAUL. 445
in the person of the 'world-renowned Spaniard' who took a
prominent part in the Council of Nicaea, Hosius, bishop of
Cordova (d. 357), who is said to have brought a Greek teacher
back with him from the East to aid him in the study of Plato.
John, the Gothic bishop of Gerona (590), had in his youth spent
seven years in Constantinople with a view to perfecting himself in
Greek and Latin'; and, about the time of Isidore's death, some
knowledge of Greek is shown by Julian, bishop of Toledo (d. 690),
who gives Greek titles to two of his works', and touches twice on
the beauty of the style of Demosthenes'; while, in 657, another
bishop of that see, Eugenius III, declares that it would need the
powers of a Socrates or a Plato, a Cicero or a Varro, to do justice
to the memory pf Gregory the Great*.
About the same date (659) in Gaul, we find St Ouen,
archbishop of Rouen, urging the superiority of
sacred over secular writings by asking what was
the worth of philosophers such as Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato and
Aristotle, or the ' sad strains of those wicked poets ', Homer,
Virgil and Menander, or the histories of Sallust, Herodotus and
Livy, or the eloquence of Lysias, Gracchus, Demosthenes and
Tully, or the acumen of Horace, Solinus, Varro, Democritus,
Plautus and Cicero*. The odd juxtaposition of some of these
names excites suspicion, and the mention of Tully and Cicero,
Democritus and Menander, suggests a' doubt whether St Ouen
had really read the secular writings on which 'he casts such
profound contempt About a century before his death, two
celebrated Graeco-Latin Mss, the Codex Bezat of the Gospels and
Acts, and the Codex Ciaromontanus of St Paul's Epistles, had
been copied in Western Europe, possibly in Gaul itself; and
Gaul may also claim a Graeco-Latin glossary of the seventh
century'. In the same century the library at Ligugtf contained
'nearly all the Greek and Latin Fathers *^ Early in the next, we
* Isidore, De Viris HL^ c. 44.
' irfKr/viacriKCnf and cUrufc^rwy; Migne, xcvi 453, 495.
' ib, 717.
* Mignc, Ixxxvii 415 c.
* Mignc, Ixxxvii 479.
* Harley MS 5791 ; PaUeographical Sodety'i Faaimila^ il 45.
7 Hist. Litt, di la Frame^ ii 449.
446 CHRODEGANG OF METZ. [CHAP.
find a Greek hermit living to the S. of Nfmes in the person of
Aegidius (St Giles), who is described as a native of Athens
(d- 725)-
While the evidence for a knowledge of Greek at this time is
slight indeed in Gaul, it is even slighter in Germany,
where there is no proof of any interest in Greek
before the revival of learning under Charles the Great. Literary
interests were, however, partially revived in the northern monas-
teries under the influence of the Benedictine Chrodegang,
archbishop of Metz (742 — 766), who had been Chancellor to
Charles Martel from 737 to 741. The rules which he framed
for the restoration of discipline^ were adopted in the monasteries
of France, Italy, Germany and England, and a certain uniformity
was thus secured in the singing, the language and the script of
the monastic schools which continued until the time of Alcuin*.
Meanwhile, in Italy, four of the popes of the seventh and
eighth centuries were actually Greeks by birth.
Again, in 648, Maurus, archbishop of Ravenna,
writes in Greek' to Pope Martin I (649 — 655), who sends to
personages in the East a number of letters written in Greek ^ but
there is no proof that the Greek was his own, though in the
Lateran Council of this time (649) we have many references to
the Greek Fathers. It is supposed that it was under Martin I
that the first Greek monasteries were founded in Rome*. The
reply sent by Pope Agatho {c, 679) to a Byzantine emperor is
preserved in Greek as well as in Latin, together with the Greek
original of another letter. The Acts of the third Council of
Constantinople were translated from Greek into Latin by Pope
Leo II (683). But Greek must have been on the decline, as the
year 690 is regarded as the date of the temporary extinction of
that language in Italy*. In the following century the iconoclastic
^ D'Achery's Spicile^um, i 564 f; Migne, Ixxxix 1053 — 1116; Life in
Pertz, Man, xii 55^-71.
' Denk, Gallo-Frdnkisch, Unierricht^ 171-6; cp. Putnam's Books in the
Middle Ages, x iiSf.
* Migne, Ixxxvii 103. * ib, 119 — 198.
* Hardouin, Cotuiles, Hi 719; Gidel, Nouvdles J^tudes^ p. 150.
* Martin Cnisius, Annates Suevici, 174 (Gidel, p. 156).
XXIV.] GREEK IN ITALY. 447
decrees of 727 and 816 drove many of the Greek monks and their
lay adherents from the Empire in the West to the South of Italy
and even to Rome itself. Gregory III (731 — 741) built them
a monastery dedicated to St Chrysogonus. In 750 the Greek
Pope, Zacharias, received the Greek nuns who brought from the
convent of St Anastasia a celebrated image of the Virgin and
the relics of St Gregory Nazianzen; Paul I (761) was equally
hospitable to the monks, who probably procured for him the
Greek mss which he sent to Pepin-le-Bref ; while Hadrian I (780)
enlarged for the benefit of the Greeks the church which had been
known since the end of the sixth century as that of S. Maria in
schola Graeca^ but was thenceforth called S, Maria in Cosmedin^
the new name being taken (as at Ravenna) from the quarter
of Constantinople named Kosnudion, In 818 the existing
monasteries were too few to contain all the Greek monks that
flocked to Rome, and Pascal I gave the fugitives the monastery
of St Praxedis, while other popes in the same century, e.g.
Stephen IV (817) and Leo IV (850), founded monasteries for them
in Rome and in Southern Italy'. The South of Italy continued
to be politically connected with Constantinople from the time
of the recovery of Italy by the generals of Justinian (5 5 3)' to its
capture by the Normans (1055), and, in the extreme South,
Greek monks of the Basilian order were still in existence in the
age of the Renaissance. Even at the present day there are
villages in the ancient Calabria near the 'heel', and in the modem
Calabria near the 'toe' of Italy, where Greek continues to be
spoken with slight varieties of dialect, while, the tradition of Greek
as a living language lingers in other parts of those regions'. The
decline of learning in Northern Italy, at the time when the Greek
monks were flocking to her Southern shores, is attested by
1 Muratori, Script. Ital, III i ii5» 134. Cp. Gardthausen, Gr, PaUi^graphU^
p. 418.
' Bury, Later Roman Empire^ ii 439 f, 447 f.
' Morosi, Studi sui diaUtti grtci delta terra tT Otranto^ Lecce (1870), and
DiaUtii...in Ca/a^r?Vi (1874), and Zambelli, 'IraXocXXi|ri«d, pp. 43, 401; cp.
Roger Bacon y Opus Tert, 33; Cramer, i 46; Gidel, NwveUa £tudei^
145 — 156, and Tozer in y. H. 5"., x 11 — 41, esp. 38 f; also A. Dresdner,
KuUur u. SUtengtsckkhtt der italUmsckem Gwilichkni im 10. u, \\. Jakr-
hundert (1890), p. 195 f.
448 GREEK IN BRITAIN AND IRELAND. [CHAP.
Lothair I, who, in his decree of 823, deplores the general
extinction of learning and reorganises education throughout his
Italian dominions by instituting central schools at nine important
places, — Pavia, Ivrea, Turin, Cremona, Florence, Fermo, Verona,
Vicenza and Friuli*. The head of the school at Pavia was an
Irishman.
Early indications of a knowledge of Greek in Britain have
been traced in certain Latin renderings from the
and'lL^reUnd ^^^ Testament apparently taken directly from the
Lxx. These are contained in the anonymous work
Dc Mirabilihus Sacrae Scripturae (c, 660), and in a MS of Irish
Canons (early in cent viii)*. Three Greek letters (•«) may be
seen on an ancient block of tin, now in the Penzance Museum*^
and some slight knowledge of Greek is implied in an Irish Canon
of the end of the seventh century, where a monk is thus defined : —
pwnachus Graece^ Latine unalis^ sive quod solus in eremo vitam
solitariatn ducat^ sive quod situ impedimento tnundiali tnundum
habitet\ In the Book of Armagh (c. 807) the Lord's Prayer is
written in Latin words but in Greek characters ; and, down to the
days of archbishop Ussher, a church at Trim was called the
'Greek church '^ while its site was still known in 1846 as
the * Greek park'*. The Irish monk, Virgil the geometer, who
became the first bishop of Salzburg at the end of the eighth
century, was charged by Boniface with believing in the existence
of the antipodes'; and, half a century later, an Irish monk of
Li^ge, named Sedulius, was copying a Greek Psalter, writing Latin
. ^ Muratori, Script, Rer, Ital, I ii 151; Antiq. Medii Aevi, iii 815;
Tiraboschi, iii 179 f*
' J. R. Lumby, Greek Learning' in the Western Church during' the seventh
and eighth centuries, Cambridge (1878), p. 3. ' In the AS church the Greek
creed was sung in service, as at St Gallen and Reichenau * ; * King Athelstan's
psalter ' includes the Lord's prayer and the apostles' creed in AS characters,
but in the Greek language ; see esp. Caspari's Quellen tur Gesch, des Tauf*
symbols, iii (Christiania, 1875) 188-99, 319-34, 466 — 510 (Mayor and Lumby
on Bede, p. 398 f).
' Haddan and Stubbs, Councils etc. i 699.
* ib. i i7of.
* Ussher, £p, Hibem. Syll. note 16.
* G. T. Stokes, Irelcmd and the Celtic Church, p. 118 n.
7 ib. 134; Ozanam, 133 f. Boniface, Ep. Ixvi, Jafl<6 iii 191.
XXIV.] THEODORE OF TARSUS. 449
verses', making extracts from Origen and expounding Jerome*.
Another Irish monk, the grammarian Dicuil (c. 825), in a short
treatise on Geography' ranging from Iceland to the pyramids of
Egypt, gives an impression of very wide attainments by naming the
following Greek authors : — Artemidorus, Clitarchus, Dicaearchus,
Ephorus, Eudoxus, Hecataeus, Herodotus, Homer, Onesicritus,
Philemon, Pytheas, Thucydides, Timosthenes and Xenophon of
Lampsacus. His work is mainly founded on Caesar, Pliny and
Solinus and includes quotations from Pomponius Mela, Orosius,
Priscian and Isidore of Seville ^ Macrobius and Priscian are his
authorities on grammar*.
While Ireland sent forth Columban to found monasteries in
Eastern France and Northern Italy in 585 and 612 respectively,
Rome, in the person of Gregory, sent Augustine to Britain in the
interval between the above dates. Augustine arrived in Kent
in 597 and died archbishop of Canterbury in 605. Some sixty
years later, the archbishopric was offered by Pope Vitalian first to
Hadrian, who is described as ' most skilful in both the Greek and
Latin tongues ', and finally to Theodore, who was bom at Tarsus
and educated at Athens, and therefore familiar
with Greek*. This Greek archbishop (668—690) of tI™.'*
founded a school at Canterbury for the study of
Greek, and bestowed upon his foundation a number of books
in his native language. Nine hundred years later, archbishop
Parker showed an antiquarian at Canterbury copies of 'Homer
and some other Greek authors, beautifully written on thick paper
with the name of this Theodore prefixed in the front, to whose
library he reasonably thought (being led thereto by show of great
^ Paf/tu La/ini Aevi Car, iii 151 — 137 Traube. He often borrows from
Virgil, Ovid and Fortunatus.
' G. T. Stokes* pp. 115-8; cp. Ebert, ii c. 6; Pirenne, SednUus tU IMlgw
(Bruxelles, 1882) ; Traube, AbkanM, Bayr. Akad, 1891. 338— 34<^* His comm.
on Eutyches, founded on Macrobius and Priscian, shows a knowledge of Greek
(Hagen, AhkH. Hehf. i — 38).
• Dt Mensura OrHs Terrtu,
• ib. 214-6; Ebert, ii 391-4; cp. Letronne, Rechertkts^ ii 3, vi 8.
» Tcuffcl. § 473. 9.
• Described by the Greek Pope Zacharias in BomfaHi Epp.^ 185 JalKf, as
' Greco- Latinus ante philosophus et Athenis eniditus '.
s. 29
4SO ALDHELM. [CHAP.
antiquity) that they sometime belonged''; but there is no doubt
that this MS of Homer, which is still preserved among the Parker
Mss in the Library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, belonged
not to Theodore of Tarsus (who had died eight centuries before it
was written), but to Linacre's friend, William Tilley of Selling '.
With the help of Hadrian, who had declined the archbishopric,
Theodore made many of the monasteries of England schools of
Greek and Latin learning, so that, in the time of Bede (673 — 735),
some of the scholars who still survived, such as Tobias, bishop of
Rochester (d. 726)', were as familiar with Latin and Greek as
with their mother-tongue*. The Worcestershire monk, Tatwine,
who became archbishop of Canterbury (d. 734), besides writing
riddles in Latin verse, was the author of a Latin grammar founded
on Donatus and his commentators*; and the tradition of Greek
descended to the early days of Odo (875 — 961), archbishop of
Canterbury*.
Among the pupils of the school at Canterbury was Aldhelm
{c. 650 — 709), who was also educated under the
Irish scholar, Maidulf, the founder of the monastery
of Malmesbury, of which Aldhelm afterwards became abbot
Most of his literary labours were associated with Malmesbury,
which continued to be a seat of learning down to the later
Middle Ages. Aldhelm visited Rome in 690 and was bishop
of Sherborne from 705 to his death. The church that he built
at Bradford on Avon is still standing. In the records of his life
we are told that 'he had mastered all the idioms of the Greek
language, and wrote and spoke it, as though he were a Greek by
birth'. 'King Ina had hired the services of two most skilful
teachers of Greek from Athens'^; and Ina's kinsman, Aldhelm,
' made such rapid strides in learning that ere long he was thought
' Lambarde, Perambulation of /Cmt, p. 233 ed. 1576 ; Milman, Lai.
Christ, t ii 373.
* M. R. James, Abp. Parker's MSS (1899), p. 9.
' Bede, H. E, v 8, «o, 13.
* ib,vii (with Mayor's note on p. 198).
» Teuffel, § 500, 4.
* Migne, cxxxiii 934 B — c.
^ Migne, Ixxxix 66.
XXIV.] BEDE. 451
a better scholar than either his Greek or Latin teachers'*. He
often introduces Greek words into his Latin letters, an affectation
censured by William of Malmesbury'; he alludes to Aristotle and
the Stoics, and employs Greek terms in defining Greek metres.
His dialogue on Latin prosody (which fills forty-five columns in
Migne) is enlivened with a number of ingenious riddles in verse,
which the pupil is expected to solve and to scan. In writing
on Latin metres, he naturally quotes Latin poets, such as Terence,
Virgil, Horace, Juvenal and Persius. His principal prose work,
De Laudibus VirginitatiSy ends with a promise (which was duly
fulfilled) of treating the same theme in verse: — 'the rhetorical
foundations being laid and the walls of prose constructed, he
would roof it with dactylic and trochaic tiles". His Latin prose
is unduly florid ^ His prose and verse alike are marked by a love
of Greek idioms and of alliteration'. His main claim to distinction
is that 'he was the first Englishman who cultivated classical
learning with any success, and the first of whom any literary
remains are preserved**.
While Aldhelm has been justly called the father of Anglo-
Latin verse, his younger and far more famous con-
temporary, Bede (673 — 735), has left his mark in
literary history almost exclusively in the field of prose. He spent
^ ib, 85. His familiarity with Greek and Latin is mentioned hy the
' Scottus ignoti nominis ' who wants to borrow a book for a fortnight and
offers himself as a pupil : — dum te praestantem ingenio facundiaque Romana
ac vario flore litterarum, etiam Graeconim more, non nesciam, ex ore tuo,
fonte videlicet scientiae purissimo, discere malo, quam ex aliqno (alio?)
quolibet potare turbulento magistro; Bonit Ep, 4 (Mayor's ^«dSr, p. 298).
* Gtsta Pmti/Uum, v | 196, p. 344; Warton's Eng, Pairy, Diss, il,
p. cxxxv (ed. 1834); Cramer, i 41.
* H. Morley's English IVriiers, ii 135.
* Cp. £p. ad EaA/ridum, Ixxxix 94 Migne,...' Hibemiae nts, diacentium
opulans vernansque (ut ita dixerim) pasoiosa numerositate lectoram, quenud-
modum poli cardines astriferis micantium omantur vibraminibns sidemm'.
* The flowers of his eloquence are reserved for Irish friends or Irish pupils '
(Haddan's /Remains, 167). His metrical studies are mentioned in his letter to
Hcdda, bp of Winchester (676—705), Jaff^ iii 31.
" Ebert, i' 611-34; Milman, ii 479 f; Teuffel, ( 500, a; Mayor's B^^
p. 101; Traube, S, Ber, Bayr, Akad, 1900, 477-9; Bp Browne (1903).
* Stubbs in Diet. Chr, Biogr, Cp. Osanam, Civ. Ckrk. p. 493-7.
452 BEDE. [CHAP.
his whole life in the monastery of Jarrow, dividing his time
between the duties of religion and learning ^ He began his literary
work at the age of 30, finding copious materials in the books
which had been brought from Rome and elsewhere by his own
teachers, Benedict Biscop and Ceolfrid. Even on his death-bed
he was working still, and the last hours of his life saw the com-
pletion of his translation of St John's Gospel into Anglo-Saxon*.
In the Historia EccUsiastica gentis Angiorum (731) we have in-
teresting references to the generosity with which Irish professors
received English pupils (in 614) and furnished them gratis with
books and teaching', the diffusion of learning by Theodore and
Hadrian and their pupils^ the studies of the English in Rome',
and the collection and circulation of books in England*. The
author appears throughout as a master of the learning of his times,
as (in Fuller's phrase) 'the most general scholar of his age '^ His
diction, which is clear, natural and comparatively pure, gives the
surest proof of mental discipline won by the study of the ancients
and of the chief Fathers of the Church.
Of Benedict Biscop he tells us that, from each of his five
visits to Rome, he returned with great store of books* and
pictures. Bede's chronological works are founded on Jerome's
edition of Eusebius, and on Augustine and Isidore. His skill in
Latin verse is shown in his elegiacs on Queen Etheldrida', and in
his hexameters on the miracles of St Cuthbert He also wrote a
treatise on metre, with an appendix on the figures of speech used
in the Scriptures. His Greek learning is indicated in this treatise
and in the references to a Greek ms of the Acts which are to
be found in his Liber Retractionum, The Latin authors most
frequently quoted by him are Cicero, Virgil and Horace, and
^ H.E.y. 14 (quoted on p. 439).
' Cuthbert quoted in Mayor's Betie^ p. 179, and Fuller, ib, 193.
• iii 37. * iv 18; V 10.
• V 19. • V 15, ao.
' Fuller's IVorthits^ p. 192, ed. 1662.
• Vitcu Abbatwn, Of his fourth journey it is stated ' eum innumerabilem
librorum omnis generis copiam apportasse*. He also obtained books at
Vienne; and his sixth journey (685) was almost entirely devoted to the
collection of books, including classical works.
• //. E, iv ao.
XXIV.] BONIFACE AND FULDA. 453
(doubtless at second-hand) Lucilius and Varro. The decline of
learning at his death is lamented by William of Malmesbury in
the brief tribute paid to his memory : — sepulta est cum to gestorum
omnis paene notitia usque ad nostra tempera (cent, xii).- adeo nullus
Anglorum studiorum eius aemulus^ nullus gloriarum eius sequax
/uit\
It was not until long after the death of Bede that his Historia
Eccksiastka became known to his contemporary
Boniface, or Winfrid (675 — 754), who was born two fnd pITidm
years after the birth of Bede and died twenty years
after his death. A native of Crediton, he was educated at Exeter
and Nursling. With the sanction of Gregory II (719) he preached
in Thuringia and Friesland, converted the Saxons and Hessians,
became a bishop in 723 and archbishop of Maintz in 745, resigning
that dignity to return to Friesland in 753 and to die a martyr's death
in the following year. His devoted follower, Sturmi of Noricum,
had already founded a settlement in the woodland solitudes of
Hersfeld, and, penetrating still further into the depths of the vast
forest of beech-trees, had tracked the stream of the Fulda for
nearly 30 miles to the South, until he reached a still more lonely
place, where a plot of land extending four miles every way was
given to God by the pious Carloman and a notable monastery (that
of Fulda) built with the approval of Boniface (744)'. Boniface is
best known as 'the apostle of Germany \ In literature his works
are of slight importance. They include two text-books on metre
and on grammar (founded on Donatus, Charisius and Diomedes)',
a set of acrostic hexameters on the virtues and vices, and some
sermons and letters written in an inelegant type of Latin. Among
these last we find letters from English abbesses written in the
florid style of Aldhelm, in which he is addressed, carissime Jrater^
> Gesta^ \ 63 (Mayor's B^de^ 187). On Bede, q>. TenfTel, ( 500, 3 ; And
Ehert, i* 634 — 650, translated (with other authorities) in Mayor and Lamby*f
ed. of H. E. lit, iv; also Oianam, Civ. Ckrit, 498 f, and H. Morley*f BngHsh
Wi-iters^ \\ 1 40— 157. The Latin poets known to Aldhelm and Bede are
enumerated by Manitius, S, Ber, d, Wien^ Akad, 1886, 535 — 634.
' Bonifacii Ep, 75 ; Pertx (ii 368), Vila Sturmii (Milman, Lai, Christ, it
304 0-
> Bursian, i 15, and in Bayer, Akad, 1873, 457 ft wudL/aknsk, i 8.
4S4 BONIFACE AND FULDA. [CHAP. XXIV.
while his own letters are described as duicissitnae^. One of his
relatives, a nun who afterwards presided over the convent of
Bischofsheim, sends him with much misgiving a short set of Latin
hexameters'. He writes to his friends in England for books, and
asks a learned abbess to make him a copy of St Peter's Epistles
* in letters of gold ". The only trace of any knowledge of Greek
in his letters is to be found in a few Greek words written in Latin
characters \ His sense of grammatical accuracy is so deeply
shocked, when he hears of an ignorant priest administering the
rite of baptism in nomifu Patria et Filia et Spiritu sancta^ that he
almost doubts the validity of the rite*. At the age of 60 he was
still capable of writing elegant hexameters congratulating the
Greek Zacharias on his elevation to the papacy*. When he died
in Friesland, his body was conveyed to the monastery which had
been founded under his sanction at Fulda. The monastery
adopted the Benedictine Rule, and soon rivalled St Gallen as a
school of learning, numbering among its inmates Einhard, the
future biographer of Charles the Great, and Rabanus Maurus,
the earliest praeceptor Gennaniae, In 968 it was deemed the
most important in all Germany. It has since been turned into
a Seminary, while the abbey-church hard by has become a
Cathedral ; but the bones of the founder still rest in the ancient
crypt, and, in the midst of the many towers of the town that has
gathered round the monastery, a statue of bronze continues to
perpetuate the memory of Boniface ^
' Ep, 14 = Ep, 3 Migne.
' Ep. 7 1 Migne.
» Ep. 33 JafK.
^ Apo ton gramma/on oftis (=a lUterarum sacris), Ep. 9.
' Ep. 58 Jaflfi^, Ixxxix 929 Migne.
• id. 748.
' On Boniface, cp. Ozanani, Civ, Chrit. c. v, 170 — 119, 503-6; Ebert,
i* 653-9; Teuflfel, § 500, 5; Bursian, CI. Philol. in DetUichland^ \ 14 f;
Norden, Kunstprosa, 669; and on the School of Fulda, Specht, Unterrickis-
wesen in Daitschland^ 1885, 196 — 306.
CHAPTER XXV.
FROM ALCUIN (c. 735 — 804) TO ALFRED (849 — 900).
In the present chapter we are mainly concerned with the
interest taken in the study of the Classics from the age of Charles
the Great to that of Alfred. As a scholarly adviser, the Welsh
monk Asser was to Alfred what the English deacon Alcuin was to
Charles the Great.
Among the pupils of Bede was Egbert, archbishop of York,
and among the pupils of Egbert in the cathedral
school of that city was Alcuin {c. 735 — 804), who
was probably born in the year of Bede's death. He owed less,
however, to the general supervision of archbishop Egbert than to
the direct teaching of his master iElhert, who (in 766) succeeded
Egbert as archbishop. More than once his master went abroad
in search of new books or new studies' ; and, on one of these
occasions, his pupil accompanied him to Rome. In 778 Alcuin
was himself placed at the head of the School and Library of York.
We still possess the Latin hexameters, in which he gives us an
enthusiastic description of the Library and a list of the authors
which it contained*. Among prose authors he mentions Jerome,
Hilary, Ambrose, Augustine, Athanasius, Orosius ; Victorinus and
Boethius ; Gregory and Leo ; Basil and Chrysostom ; Cassiodorus
and Fulgentius; Aldhelm and Bede; among ^ earlier writers, in
prose or verse, Pompeius (Trogus) and Pliny ; Aristotle (doubtless
^ De Samtis Euboricoi urHt, 1455.
' De Pont, Eccl, Ehor, 1535 — 1603, ct 843 Migne, and in Poitoi Lai. Aevi
Car. i 103 f ; well rendered in West*! Aleuin^ p. 34.
456 CHARLES THE GREAT AND PAULUS DIACONUS. [CHAP.
in Latin') and Cicero; Virgil, Lucan and Statius; among later
poets, Sedulius and Juvencus, and, among grammarians, Donatus
and Priscian. His enumeration of all these and other authors
shows that, in the last quarter of the eighth century, the Library
at York far surpassed any, even in the twelfth century, in England
or France, whether at Christ Church, Canterbury, or at St Victor's
in Paris, or at Bee in Normandy*. Alcuin himself had copied
text-books at York in his youth', and scribes were afterwards sent
there to copy mss for his monastery at Tours.
Alcuin paid a second visit to Rome in 780 ; and, on his return
in the following year, met Charles the Great at Parma, and was
thus led to take part in the revival of learning which marks that
monarch's reign \ He had already visited the Frankish court at
Aachen on his return from Rome, twelve years before, in the year
of Charles' accession (768). He was now invited to become the
head of a school attached to the court ; and, after obtaining the
consent of his king and his archbishop, was installed as master of
the school in 782, and continued to preside over it for eight years.
The school is best regarded as a migratory institution attached to
the court, whether at Aachen or elsewhere^ Charles was as
familiar with colloquial Latin as with his native German; he
seems also to have understood Greek, though he spoke it imper-
fectly*. His instruction in Latin and Greek appears to have been
derived from an elderly grammarian, Peter of Pisa, while Greek
was taught at his court (782-6) by Paulus Diaconus (c. 725 — 797),
a Benedictine monk, who had learnt his Greek at Pavia, and had
lived at Beneventum (which was closely connected with the
Greeks), and who wrote his celebrated History of the Lombards at
Monte Cassino, af^er his final retirement from the world. He
' Possibly the abridgement of the Categories bearing the name of Augustine
(Haur^u, Hht, de la Philosophie Scolastiquc^ i 93'7)>
* L^n Mattre's £coles, pp. 190, 195; MuUinger's Schools of Charles the
Great f p. 61.
» ^/. .=J8.
^ So completely had the tradition of learning l>cen broken in Gaul that
a contemporary states that before his reign 'nullum studium fuerat liberalium
artium' (Monachus Engolismensis, ap. Duchesne, ii 76). Cp. Monach. Sangall.
i I {Alon, Carolina^ p. 631).
* L^on Mattre, p. 39. * Einhart's Vita Caroli, c. 15.
XXV.] ALCUIN AT TOURS. 457
shows his knowledge of Greek in his History^ in his summary of
the abridgement of Verrius Flaccus by Pompeius Festus', and in
his revision of the Homilies which were issued by Charles in 783
with the following memorable pronouncement: — *We impose
upon ourselves the task of reviving, with the utmost zeal, the
study of letters well-nigh extinguished through the neglect of our
ancestors. We charge all our subjects, as far as they may be able,
to cultivate the liberal arts, and we set them the example ". The
revision of all the church books enjoined in 789 stimulated a high
degree of activity in the scriptoria of Frankland*.
After a short absence in England (790-3), Alcuin, who had
already been appointed abbot of St Loup near Troyes and of
Ferri^res near Orleans, was made abbot of St Martin's at Tours,
which he soon restored to a commanding position among the
schools of the land. He taught his monks to use the pen instead
of the spade and hoe, telling them that copying mss was better
than cultivating the vine\ Under his rule the clear and precise
hand known as the Caroline Minuscule was developed at Tours* ;
and 'the script, which was accepted as the standard in the
imperial schools, served seven centuries later as a model for the
first type-founders of Italy and France ". Alcuin sent some of his
monks to England for books^ and continued in constant corre-
spondence with scholars in the land of his birth and the land of
his adoption. He was himself a scholar and a teacher to the last :
* in the morning of his life * (in the language of one of his letters)
' he had sowed in Britain ; and now, in the evening of that life,
he ceased not to sow in France '■. He died in 804, four years
after Charles had been crowned Emperor in Rome.
1 Ncttleship, i 201 ; Tcuffcl, 1 161, 6.
* Pertz, Leg, i 44 (Mullinger*s Schools of CharUs the Grtat^ p. 101).
Cp. (on Paulus Diaconus) Ebert, ii 36 — 56 ; Teuflel, 1 500, 6 ; Balzani*s Early
Chroniclfrs of Italy ^ 66—90.
' Wattenbach, Schriftwesen im MA^ «73*; E. M. Thompson, Pataeo^
graphy, 233.
^ Foclere quam vites melius est scribere libros (ad Musoium),
* Delislc, Mtm. deVAcad, des Inscr, (1885), xxxii 39 — 56, with ^facsimilgs ;
Traubc, S. Ber. Bayr, Akad, 1891, 417 f; E. M. Thompson, /.r., 133 f.
* Putnam , Boohs and their Mahers in the Middle Ages, i 107 (after Deltsle, U,).
7 Ep, 38. • Ep. 43 (78 JaiW), c. 409 Migne.
4S8 alcuin's prose works. [chap.
Among Alcuin's prose works a prominent place is here due to
his dialogues on Grammar, Rhetoric, and Dialectic. He is mainly
a grammarian \ In his first dialogue On Grammar^ the seven
liberal arts are compared to the seven pillars of the house of
Wisdom', and are described as the seven steps by which the
student ascends to the heights of Theology. The substance of his
second dialogue is taken from earlier grammarians, among whom
Donatus and Priscian are mentioned, while the definitions are
borrowed from Isidore. The interlocutors are a well-informed
English youth of fifteen, who answers the inquiries of an eager
Frank who is one year younger, while the master himself presides
over the disputation. Grammar is here somewhat narrowly
defined as the science of written sounds, the guardian of correct
speaking and writing. In the dialogues On Rhetoric and Dialectic
the persons concerned are Charles and Alcuin, and the principal
authorities followed in the former are Cicero De Inttentione and
Julius Victor, and, in the latter, Boethius, Isidore and the
Pseudo-Augustinian Categories. The importance of Dialectic is
also urged in the dedication of the treatise On the JVinity^ while
the fragment On the Seven Arts shows that Cassiodorus was
studied in the age of Alcuin. The tract On Orthography
discusses in alphabetical order a number of Latin words which
were apt to be wrongly spelt, and is useful in connexion with the
pronunciation of Latin and the criticism of the texts of the time.
The student is here told to distinguish between alvus and aldns^
vellus and bellus^ acervus and acerbus ; also between vel and fel^
quod and quot^. It may be noticed with regret, that, in the course
of this tract, the author strangely derives hippocrita (simulator)
from hippo 'falsum ' and chrisis 'judicium **.
His Life of St Wiliibrord^ the precursor of Boniface, supplies
evidence as to the flourishing state of learning in Ireland :
Willibrord left Northumbria, quia in Hibernia schoiasticam erudi-
tionetn viguisse audivit (c. 4). The 1657 hexameters of his
patriotic poem On the Kings^ Bishops and Saints of York contain
many reminiscences of Virgil and Prudentius. His Epigrams
^ Cp. Haur^tu, i 136. * Prov* ix i.
' MuUinger, 78 f. ^ Migne, ci 910 B.
XXV.] ALCUIN AND VIRGIL. 459
consist partly of inscriptions for various monastic buildings, or for
the beginning or end of mss. The epigram ad Musaeum Hbros
scribentium (67) includes a couplet of some interest in connexion
with Alcuin's letter urging Charles to require copyists to attend to
matters of punctuation* : —
'per cola distingimnt proprios et commata census,
et punctos ponant ordine qaisqiie suo*.
Of his 300 Letters^ (all written in France, and five-sixths of them
at Tours, during the last eight years of his life), the most in-
teresting are those addressed to his friends in England or to
Charles the Great or to his former pupil Amo, bishop of Salzburg.
They are well written, and clear and natural in expression, the best
in point of style being those addressed to the king*.
Alcuin's Greek quotations are mainly borrowed from Jerome,
and his knowledge of the language (illustrated in a letter to
Angilbert^ where he quotes from the lxx version of the Psalms)
is obviously very slight'. In the School of the Palace Angilbert
was known as Homer, another as Macharius and Alcuin himself
as Flaccus. He is familiar with Horace. Virgil he had studied
with enthusiasm in those early days at York when, in the language
of his biographer, he was VirgUii amflius quam PsiUmorum
ama/or*; but, in after-life, when he had become celebrated as a
teacher, he is described as saying to his students : — ' The sacred
poets are sufficient for you, and there is no reason why you should
be corrupted by the luxuriance of Virgil's language". The library
at Berne, however, possesses a MS of Virgil in Caroline minuscules
(cent, ix), which is believed to be either written in Alcuin's hand
^ Ep. 113 Jaffi^, 10 1 Migne.
' Alcuiniana (1873); cp* SickePs AkuinstudUn in Vienna Acad. 1875,
461—550-
» Separately edited by H. Schiitze (1879).
< Ep. 37 (251 JafK).
* Alcuin's Greek scholarship (like that of many others) is mach exaggerated
by Tougard, VHellhtismt dans Us ^erivains du Mcyen-Agt du vii au xii s»
(1886), p. 33.
* Akuini vita^ c i.
^ ib. c. 10, suflficiunt divini poetae vobis, nee egetis luxnriosa sennonis
Virgilii vos pollui facundia ; cp. Maitland's DarkAgis^ 183', and Mallinger, 1 1«.
460 ALCUIN'S INFLUENCE, [CHAP.
or at least transcribed from his own copy\ and which certainly
once belonged to his monastery at Tours'; and there is no
prejudice against the poet in his own verses to his brethren at
York (260 f) :—
' Moenibus Euboricae habitans tu sacra iuventus,
fas idcirco, reor, comprendere plectra Maronis,
somnigeras subito te nunc excire Camenas,
carminibutque sacris naves implere Fresonum*.
Yet even here, he seems to regard Virgil mainly as a model for
sacred verse. Elsewhere he regrets that one of his friends is less
familiar with the four Gospels than with the twelve Acne<ides (jiV)*.
But, notwithstanding his * timid mistrust of pagan learning', *he
loved the temple of the Muses, and was at once their high-priest
and their apostle in the days when the worshippers at their shrine
were few'*.
Alcuin has been described in the Benedictine History of the
Literature of France* as 'the most learned man of his age', while
recent writers have credited him with 'ability as an administrator'^
and with 'a certain largeness of view, in spite of his circumscribed
horizon'. He was conscious 'of the continuity of the intellectual
life of man', and 'of the perils that beset the transmission of
learning from age to age'. 'In every way that lay in his power»
he endeavoured to put the fortunes of learning for the times that
should succeed him in a position of advantage, safeguarded by an
abundance of truthfully transcribed books, sheltered within the
Church and defended by the civil power'*. The tradition of
learning had descended from Benedict Biscop, Bede and Egbert
to Alcuin ; and the influence of Alcuin, which passed from York
to Tours, was transmitted through Rabanus to Fulda and thence
to Auxerre and Ferri^res, to Old and New Corbie', and Reichenau^
St Gallen and Rheims, while part of that influence finally reached
C. G. MUller, AnaUcta Btrnensia^ iii 33 f (Comparetti, Virgilio^ i I3«).
Chatelain, Pal. des CI, Lat, pi. 67.
Ep, 34 {AUuiniana, p. 71 4).
MuUinger, p. 137.
iv344.
A. F. West, AlcuiUf it%(.
p. 473 '«>«•
XXV.] LORSCH AND ST WANDRILLE'S. 461
Parish Alcuin marks the beginning of the period in the history
of European education which is described as the Benedictine
Age, the age extending from the brief revival of learning under
Charles the Great to the rise of the University of Paris (c. i lyo)*.
Among the monasteries founded by Charles was that of Lorsch,
£. of the Rhine, near Worms (763); while among those that
witnessed a revival of learning in his time was that founded near
Caudebec, to the W. of Rouen, by St Wandrille (d. 668), a pupil
of Columban. Part of the building is still in use, while the rest
remains beautiful even in its ruins. A school was there established
by the abbot Gervold (d. 806), and a scriptorium instituted by a
priest named Harduin, who himself copied the four Gospels
Romana literal ^ i.e. apparently in uncial characters \ In a
fragment of its Chronicle we find many words borrowed from the
Greek such as scemay onomatay paralisis^ tirannideniy anaglifiais^
while curia is explained by IxmUuteriofi and turricula by pyr-
giscos^, A knowledge of Greek is also shown in the Chronicle of
Freculphus, a pupil of Rabanus Maurus and bishop of Lisieux
(d. 850)*.
In the age of Charles the study of Greek was incidentally
promoted by intercourse between the West and the East, whether
in the form of diplomacy in general, or in the way of overtures for
the intermarriage of members of the two imperial houses. Thus
there were negociations for a marriage, first between Charles and
the empress Eirene (d. 803), and next between a daughter of the
former and a son of the latter (the ill-fated Constantine VI).
In this second case the daughter, and the priests who were to
accompany her, learnt Greek in view of a project that ended in
' ib, 165. On AIcuin*s life and works (Migne, c, ci), see Lorenz (1819,
E. T. 1837); Monnier (1853); Werner (1881*); Dttmniler's PMioi Lat,^
i 160—351 (1881); Jtflr<6*s AUuimana (1873); Ebert, ii is — 36; Mnllinger,
and West ; also H. Morley*s English WriUriy ii 158— 17s; and the literatme
quoted in these works. For the whole of the period between 768 and 1180,
cp. L^on Mattre, L$s £coUs £pis€opalis ii MimmsHqua (1866).
* L^on Mattre, 173; Rashdall's Umtftrsitia^ i s6, S93.
' Gesta abb, FontantlL c. 16 in Pertz, Mon, ti S9S.
^ Wattenbach, Sckriflwtstn^ 370**
* Migne, cv 741 B — C.
* Migne, cvi iis8, 1147, ii6s (Tougard, s6).
462 THEODULFUS. [CHAP.
nothing'. Late in 804 Charles is said to have founded a school
at Osnabruck, where Greek as well as Latin was studied, partly
for the purpose of training envoys capable of speaking Greek at
Constantinople^ Hatto, bishop of Basel, gave a Greek name
{hodoeporicum) to the narrative of his fruitless journey to Constan-
tinople, and Greek words occur in his writings. The envoys
subsequently sent by the emperor of the East greeted the emperor
of the West as ^ imperatorem Kal fiaaiXia*. Near the close of his
life, Charles is said to have carefully compared the Latin text of
the Gospels with the Greek and the Syriac*.
Among the friends of Alcuin and the advisers of Charles was
Theodulfus, who practically succeeded Alcuin as
Theodulfus
head of the palace school, and in 798 became
bishop of Orleans and abbot of Fleury. He is memorable not
only as the initiator of free education, but also as an accomplished
Latin poet. In one of his poems he mentions his favourite
authors; they include the Fathers and Isidore, the 'pagan
philosophers' with Prudentius and other Christian poets, the
grammarian Donatus and his commentator Pompcius, together
with Virgil and Ovid. In reference to these last he favours the
mystic or allegorical interpretation of mythology \ In another
poem he supplies us with the earliest poetic description of the
seven liberal arts\ Under Louis the Pious he was suspected of
disloyalty and imprisoned from 818 to his death in 821. In his
prison he composed the famous hymn beginning Gloria iaus et
honor tibi^^ which continued to be sung in France during the
procession on Palm Sunday for nine and a half centuries, down
to the outbreak of the Revolution ^
' Cedrenus, ii i\ Bonn.
' Migne, xcviii 894 B. The genuineness of the 'capitular' for the founda-
tion of Osnabruck has been disputed by Rettberg (Uursion, CL Philol. iu
Deutschland^ \ 18; cp. Cramer, ii 17).
' Thegan, Dt gestis Ludovici^ c. 7; Gidel, NouvelUs £iudet, 157— 161.
^ Carm, 14, 19, i 543 Dlimmler's Poitae Lai, aevi Carol.^ In quorum
dictis quamquam sint frivula multa, Plurima sub falso tegmine vera hiteiit.
* Cann. 46, i 544 Diimmler.
' Carm, 69, i 558 Diimmler; Moorsom's Historical Companion, 'All glory,
laud, and honour*.
' Kbert, ii 70—84; K. Lersch (Halle, 1880).
XXV.] CLEMENT, DUNGAL, DONATUS. 463
Among the Irish monks who represented learning under
Charles the Great were Clement and DungaL The
- ^, , . , 1 ,. ^ ^ ,. Clement,
Acts of CharUSy written by a monk of St Gallen Dun^ai,
late in the ninth century, telb us of *two Scots i>on*»»«
from Ireland', who 'lighted with the British merchants on the
coast of Gaur, and cried to the crowd, 'if any man desireth
wisdom, let him come unto us and receive it, for we have it for
sale'*. They were soon invited to the court of Charles. One of
them, Clement, partly filled the place of Alcuin as head of the
palace school'. The other ' was sent into Italy, to the monastery
of St Austin at Pavia'. In the MSS the name of the second
Irishman is either wrongly given as Albinus (i.e. Alcuin) or is
left blank. It may here be suggested that the missing name is
obviously that of Dungal. That learned Irishman was asked by
Charles to explain the double eclipse of 810, and his letter in
reply proves his familiarity with Greek and Latin poets, and with
Virgil in particular*. Under the emperor's grandson, Lothair
(823), Dungal was placed at the head of the school at Pavia^
Another Irish monk, Donatus (c. 800 — 876), who, in his early
wanderings in North Italy, was welcomed in 829 as bishop of
Fiesole, alludes, in the latest prayer of his life, to the ' prophetic '
lines in the Fourth Eclogue^ and tells us in his own epitaph that
he had ' dictated to his pupils exercises in Grammar, and schemes
of metre, and Lives of Saints '*.
The life of Charles the Great was written in admirable Latin
by Einhard (c. 770 — 840), a layman educated at
Fulda, who, from about 795, did good service at the
court of Aachen as architect as well as diplomatist He had an
excellent library, and was a diligent student of the ancient Classics.
After the death of Charles in 814 he withdrew from the court and
built two churches in the Odenwald, living at the place afterwards
known as Seligenstadt from 830 till his death ten years later. His
> Pertz, Mon, ii 731; Mon, Carolina^ 631; Ebert, iii 914 f.
* MuUinger, 11 1 f.
• Mignc, cv 447 — 458 ; Mon, Carolina^ 396.
^ pp. 440, 448. The possible identity of Dungal of Pavia with the recluse
of St Denis (810) is admitted by Traube, AbhandL Bayr, Akad. 1901, 333 f.
^ Pottae Lat. Aevi Car, iii 691 Traube; M. Stokes, Six Months in the
Apennines^ ao6, 147 f.
464 EINHARD'S life of CHARLES THE GREAT. [CHAP.
Life of Charles\ which was finished shortly after his hero's death,
has been justly described as a 'classic monument of historic
genius", as 'one of the most precious bc(|uests of the early
Middle Ages ", as the ' ripest fruit of that revival of humane and
secular learning, which had been brought about by Charles
himself \ In comparison with the ancient Romans, its author
describes himself as a homo barbarus^ and all the tribes between
the Rhine and Weser, the Baltic and the Danube, as 'barbarians.'
But it marks the highest point attained in the classical studies of
the Caroline age. To Einhard Charles is a new Augustus, and
the culmination of his hero's connexion with old Rome is his
coronation in Rome itself (800). Einhard's model in Latin style
is the Life of Augustus by Suetonius^ and he also gives proof of a
careful study of Caesar and Livy. In his preface he quotes the
Tusculan Disputations^ and he also imitates the rhetorical works
of Cicero and certain of his speeches, — the Second Verrine^ the
First Catilinarian^ and the Pro Milone*, It was probably owing
to the architectural tastes of Einhard that the work of Vitruvius
became first known in Germany and was preserved for other lands
and later ages. The oldest extant ms, the Harleian, once belonged
to Goderamnus of Cologne, abbot of Hildesheim (1022-30); but
it is little later than Einhard. Einhard writes to a student at
Fulda, asking him to make inquiries as to the meaning of certain
technical terms in Vitruvius^. The copy of that author formerly
preserved at Fulda appears to have been subsequently sent to
Reichenau*.
Except in the case of Einhard, the revival of learning pro-
moted by Charles the Great, with the aid of Alcuin, was mainly
concerned with sacred literature, and it was of no long duration*.
> JafW-Waltcnbach, EinharH Vita Caroli Magni, iSjd*.
' MuUinger, 116.
' Ilodgkin, Charles the Greats 131.
^ Ebert, ii 94; cp. Wattenbach, Dcutschlands Geschichtsquellen^ i' 178 — 187.
• See parallel passages in Preface and notes to cc. 18—37 in JaflRf*
Wattenbach's ed. ; also F. Schmidt (Bayreuth, 1880), and (on his other models)
Manitius in Ntues Archiv fiir alt, deutsche Gesch, vii 517-68.
• Manitius, /.f., 565 f. ' Ep. 56 JaflRf.
• Vitruvius, ed. MUller-StrUbing, p. iii f.
• BsLTtoli, / Precursori det Einascimenio {1^16)9 10 — 16.
XXV.] ERMOLDUS NIGELLUS, AND THEGAN. 465
After the death of Charles literary interests soon began to decline
under his feeble son, Louis the Pious (d. 840), though Louis
himself (like his father) 'knew Latin and understood Greek'.
His early conquest of Barcelona (801), and his successes with the
Bretons (818) and the Danish king Harold (826), were sung in
6000 elegiac verses by a student of Virgil, the monk of Aquitaine,
Ermoldus Nigellus'. Thegan, the high-bom bishop, who wrote
the Life of Louis^ declares that a poet would need the united
powers of Homer, Virgil and Ovid to describe the guilt of the
low-bom bishops who opposed their emperor (833)'. In 829 the
prelates of Gaul were compelled to urge him to 'cause public
schools to be established in at least three fitting places' of his
realm, in accordance with the canon of 826 enjoining the appoint-
ment of * masters and doctors to teach the study of letters and of
the liberal arts ''. During his reign the school of the monastery
at Tours lost its recent importance, while the school of the palace
was under the Irish monk, Clement, who compiled a grammar for
the son of Louis, the future emperor Lothair (d. 869). Charles
the Bald, the son of Louis the Pious by his second wife, the
accomplished Judith, was king of France from 840 to 876 and
emperor of the West for the last year of his life. At the
head of his school he placed the foremost philosopher of the
early Middle Ages, John the Scot (to whom we shall return in the
sequel), and he is praised for inviting teachers of philosophy not
only from Ireland but also from Greece \
The ancient and important school of Fulda, which had been
founded under the sanction of Boniface ^ was the scene of the
leamed labours of the most proficient of the pupils of Alcuin.
Hraban or Rabanus, born at Mainz in 776, was
educated at Fulda, and (after 801) at Tours under J^!^^
Alcuin, who gave him the name of Maurus, the
favourite pupil of Benedict. Rabanus himself became a teacher
at Fulda, where he treasured the notes he had taken of
> Pcrtz, Mon, ii 464 f ; Poitae Lot, Atvi Car. \\ 1—93; Ebcrt, ii 170-8.
' Vita Ltidav, 44 (Milman, Hi 141).
s R. L. Poole's Meduval Thtrnght, ^4 f*
* Eric, p. 478 infra,
' P- 453 i^pra,
s. 30
466 RABANUS MAURUS. [CHAP.
Alcuin's lectures at Tours \ He continued to teach as abbot in
822, among his pupils being Servatus Lupus and Walafrid Straba
At Fulda he founded the Library, and part of his teacher Alcuin*s
epigram ad Musaeum was inscribed over the door of the Scrip^
torium*. In 842 he retired to a lonely hill a few miles from
Fulda, and there composed his encyclopaedic work De Universe,
He became archbishop of Mainz in 847 and died in 856.
Apart from extensive biblical commentaries, he wrote several
educational works. In one of these he was the first to introduce
Priscian into the schools of Germany. He also wrote a short
treatise on alphabets and abbreviations ; and a chronological work
founded on Boethius, Isidore and Bede. His treatise on clerical
education ends with a few chapters on pagan learning, which he
describes as helpful towards the understanding of the Scriptures'.
He also reviews the liberal arts, especially Grammar, which he
defines as the * science of interpreting the poets and historians ; and
the art of correct writing and speaking'^, thus recognising lYiQliterary
side of Grammar more strongly than Alcuin. Dialectic* and the
other arts are to be carefully studied for ecclesiastical purp>oses.
The former is the ' disciplina disciplinarum ; haec docet docere,
haec docet discere ". Rabanus recognises that the writings of the
Platonists in particular contain many useful moral precepts, and
much that is true on the worship of the one God. A large part of
this work is compiled from Augustine and Cassiodorus, and from
Gregory's Cura Fastoraiis, His vast encyclopaedia De Unwerso
is practically a theological edition of Isidore. His latest work,
De Aniffia, founded on Cassiodorus, is strangely followed by a few
chapters on the military discipline of the Romans, copied from
Vegetius for the benefit of Lothair II. Certain glosses on Aristotle
and Porphyry implying an adherence to Nominalism are accepted
by their discoverer, Cousin, as the work of Rabanus, though they
are attributed by others' to one of his pupils. Rabanus has the
' Ne vaga mens perdat cuncta dedi foliis; | hinc quoque nunc constant
glussae parvique libelli. Migne, cxii 1600.
» Wattenbach, Schriftwesen, 364*. Cp. Dummlcr, Ostfrank. Reich, \\ 65a,
n. 13.
* De Cleric. Inst, iii c. i6f.
* c. 18. • c. lo. • c. a6.
' Pranll and Kaulich (Selh, in Enc, Brit, xxi 4^0 ^).
XXV.] WALAFRID STRABO. 467
reputation of knowing Greek, and in his writings we have passages
assuming some slight knowledge of that language. Thus, in dis-
cussing the derivation and meaning of syllaha^ after quoting
Priscian, he has recourse to Greek : — ' nam syllaba dicta est airh
toy) (rvAAa/x)3avciK ra ypafifiaTa*\ He appears to have no direct
knowledge of Homer, although he mentions the //tad and Odyssey,
as well as the Aeneid, as examples of a mixed kind of poetry
(coenon vel mictany. He is said to have held that Latin was
derived from Greek, and that a knowledge of Greek was an aid to
the more accurate knowledge of Latin*. At Fulda twelve monks
were regularly employed as copyists, and down to the seventeenth
century there was a large collection of mss, most of which were
unfortunately scattered during the Thirty Years* War. The
library of the Westphalian monastery of Corvey (founded 822) is
mentioned in the ninth century, and learning also flourished at
Regensburg (652) on the Danube, and at Reichenau (724) on an
island of the Untersee, W. of the Lake of Constance*.
The most important pupil of Rabanus was Walafrid Strabo
{c, 809 — 849). Unlike his master, he had a genuine
gift for poetry; he studied Christian and pagan siniSo*''*^
poets, and wrote on sacred as well as secular
themes. Of his sacred poems the most striking is that on the
Visions of Wettin, an early precursor of Dante's Divina Commedia.
His two great secular poems are (i) On the statue of Theodoric,
and (2) his Hortulus, a description of the plants in the monastic
garden of Reichenau, which was widely read during the Middle
Ages and the Renaissance. Its charm and freshness are not im-
paired by occasional reminiscences of Virgil and Columella. In
^ Op. i 39; Migne, cxi 617; from Isidore, Etym, \ 16, i.
' i 303; Migne, cxi 4^; from Suetonius, Dt Poitis (p. 5 ReiflTerscheid),
ap. Dioniedem, lib. iii 481 Keil. In cvii 408 quidam ttoquems is his authority
for a passage nearly identical with Cic. Oraior^ § 69; this quotation (which I
have not seen noticed elsewhere) must have ultimately come from a writer who
had a complete MS of the Oralor* The codices mtUili begin with § 91.
* Trithcmius (Migne, cvii 84 11), np. Cramer, ii 13. Cp. Kdhler*s Hrabamis
MauruSy 1 3 f.
^ Ziegelbauer, Hist, Lilt. Ord, S» Ben. i 487, 569, ap. Heeren, C/. Litf,
im MA, i 163 f. On Rabanus, cp. Ebert, ii 110 ; Mnllinger*s ScAools, 138 — 151 ;
and West's A/cuiN, 134 — 164 ; Ofera in Migne, cvii— cxii.
30—2
468 ERMENRICH OF ELLWANGEN. [CHAP.
his other poems his principal model is Prudentius. He is also
the author of the original form of the Glossa Ordinaria (subse-
quently revised by Gilbert de la Porr^e and Anselm of Laon),
which occupies the top and side margins of mss of the Vulgate.
He brought out a new edition of the Life of Gaiius and of
Einhard's Life of Charles the Great, His only independent work
in prose, was connected with Ecclesiastical History, being written
at the request of the librarian of his monastery. He died in the
prime of life, having been accidentally drowned in crossing the
Loire. He was certainly a man of singular literary versatility;
and his influence, as tutor to Charles the Bald and as abbot of
Reichenau, was always healthy and bore lasting fruit*.
A remarkable picture of the varied learning of the time is
presented by a letter written {c, 850) by a pupil of
ofE'iTwrngen Walafrid, Ermenrich of Ellwangen*, to Grimold,
abbot of Weissenburg and St Gallen.
After discussing the difference between the mind and the soul, he passes
on to points of Grammar, dealing particularly with accent, quantity and
pronunciation, and naming as authorities, not only Alcuin and Bede, Priscian
and Donatus, but also Consentius, Sextus Pompeius and Servius. He next
introduces a specimen of the allegorical interpretation of Scripture, with a
digression on the nature of the soul. With the aid of Virgil and his com-
mentators, he adds some remarks on pagan mythology, incidentally expressing
his contempt for the pagan poets, whose works he condescends to regard as of
the nature of manure, useful for fertilising the fields of sacred literature. He
knows that Virgil has imitated Theocritus in the Eclogues, Hesiod in the
Georgics and Homer in the Aetieid, but his knowledge of these facts is clearly
due to Servius alone'. He refers in conclusion to the monastery of St Gallen,
adding a specimen of his proposed poetic life of the founder, with some sets of
verses in praise of his own preceptor, and on the sacred theme of the Trinity.
In the course of this letter he quotes Lucretius (i 150-6),
Virgil and Servius, Ovid, Prudentius, Juvencus, Arator, the Latin
Homer, the epitaph on the son of Cato the Censor, the Mosella
of Ausonius, Priscian's translation of Dionysius Periegetes, and
* Migne, cxiii— cxiv ; poems in Poitai Lat. Aevi Car, ii 159 — 433 DUmmler;
Ebert, ii 145 — 166; Specht, 510.
' Edited (from a Ms at St Gallen) by Diimmler (1873); cp. Bursian in
fahresb, i 10 f.
' p* 119 supra.
XXV.] SERVATUS LUPUS. 469
lastly Pliny, Boethius and Fulgentius^ The letter also displays
some slight knowledge of Greek vocabulary (as well as ignorance
of Greek Accidence and Prosody) by the introduction of isolated
words or single lines, sometimes in Greek and Latin combined
But, as a whole, it is a specimen of superficial learning rather
than true taste. The writer's erudition was, however, recognised
by his being made bishop of Passau in 865, nine years before his
death*.
A far more agreeable picture is presented to us in the 130
Letters of Servatus Lupus, bom of a noble family in
the diocese of Sens, educated at Ferriferes and at ^^^^^^
Fulda, and abbot of the former from 842 to his
death, little more than twenty years later. At Fulda he had not
only been educated for six years under Rabanus, the most learned
theologian of the day, but had also obtained literary advice and
instruction from Einhard, the ablest scholar of the time. While
Alcuin, the instructor of Rabanus, was exceedingly narrow in his
literary interests, Lupus, the pupil of Rabanus, has a far wider
range. In his literary spirit he is a precursor of the humanists of
the Renaissance. To one of his correspondents he expresses his
regret that the pursuits of literature are almost obsolete'; to
another, his delight at their revival in his own neighbourhood \
In writing to Einhard he confesses that a love of letters had
been implanted in him almost from his very boyhood, and
contrasts the revival of letters in Einhard's own time, under
Charles the Great, with their decline in the days when 'men
scarcely tolerate any who attempt to acquire knowledge". He
is himself an eager borrower, and a wary lender, of books. He
asks one of his relations to send a capable monk to Fulda and
borrow from the abbot a copy of Suetonius 'in two moderate-sized
volumes, which he can either bring himself, or send by a trusty
messenger'*. He begs the archbishop of Tours to send him a
copy of the commentary of Boethius on the TopUa of Cicero'.
' Gottlieb, Bibliotheken^ p. 441.
" Ebert, ii 179 — 184.
' 34, nunc litterarum ttadiis ptene obsoletis.
^ 35f reviviscentem in his nostris regionibus sapientiam.
• Ep. I. • 91. » 16.
470 SERVATUS LUPUS [CHAP.
He writes to the abbot of York to ask for the loan of the
Questions on the Old and New Testaments ascribed to St Jerome
by Cassiodorus, also those of Bede, the seventh and following
books of St Jerome on Jeremiah, and the twelve books of the
Institutions of Quintilian*. Not content with borrowing from
Fleury in his own neighbourhood and from other monasteries in
France, and from Fulda and York, he even writes to Rome.
Thus he applies to pope Benedict III (855-8) for the above books
of St Jerome, and for certain mss of Cicero de Oratore, and of
Quintilian, which he had seen in Rome (849), the latter being * in
a single volume of moderate size \ He adds that his monastery
already possessed parts of the last two works, and concludes by
begging for the loan of the commentary on Terence by Donatus*.
He is himself so cautious about lending a MS which is in constant
demand, that he has almost resolved on despatching it to some
place of security for fear of losing it altogether'. In the same
letter he answers a number of minor questions on points of
spelling and prosody by appealing to the grammarian Caper, and
by quoting thrice from Virgil, twice from Martial, and once from
Prudentius, Alcuin and Theodulfus. He lends the bishop of
Auxerre St Jerome's commentary on the Prophets before he has
had time to read it himself, and (doubtless in answer to some
inquiry) informs him that Caesar had not really written a History
o/jRome, but only the Commentaries on the Gallic IVar^ of which
the bishop had doubtless heard, and a copy of which would be
sent as soon as possible, adding that the continuation was the
work of Caesar's secretary, HirtiusV With a view to correcting
his own texts, he borrows extra copies of works already in
his possession. He thanks a friend for revising his copy of
Macrobius and for sending a ms of the commentary of Boethius ;
he inquires about a ms of Cicero's Tusculan Disputations^ and,
in the same letter, answers questions on prosody by quoting
Virgil and Juvencus as well as Servius and Priscian\ He in-
forms a monk of the Benedictine monastery at Priim that he
intends to compare his own copy of Cicero's Letters with the
text which he has just received, and thus arrive at the truth;
* 6a. ■ 103. • ao.
* 37- • 8.
XXV.] AND THE CLASSICS. 47 1
he also asks for his friend's copy of Cicero's translation of
Aratus, with a view to filling up some lacunae in his own*.
He declines to send a ms to a monk at Sens, because his
messenger will be exposed to the perils of a journey on foot*.
He cannot lend Hincmar the ColUctaneum of Bede on the
Epistles of St Paul, because 'the book is too large to be con-
cealed in the vest or the wallet, and, even if either were possible,
it might be a prey to robbers tempted by the beauty of the ms '•.
He is prevented from sending Gellius to Einhard because the
abbot has once more kept it in his own possession \ He is
interested in obtaining, through Einhard, carefully copied speci-
mens of uncial characters'; and it may be remembered that it
was in this age that Charles the Bald caused a ms of the Gospels
to be copied in letters of gold for the abbey of St Denis*, with
the donor's portrait as frontispiece, and that he received a ms of
the Bible in Caroline minuscules' from the abbot of Tours, where
that hand had been formed under the rule of Alcuin.
His attitude towards the Classics may be partly illustrated by
a letter in which he good-humouredly describes a presbyter of
Mainz, named Probus, as charitably including Cicero and Virgil
(whose works he is copying) in the number of the elect". His own
literary tastes are more clearly shown in his first letter to Einhard,
where, after saying that, in his judgement, 'learning should be
sought for its own sake ", he adds that he had found the authors
of the day far removed from the dignity of the Ciceronian style
emulated by the foremost of the Latin Fathers, until at last he
lighted on Einhard's admirably written Life of Charles the Great^^.
A wide knowledge of Latin literature is displayed in his frequent re-
* 69. • 10. • 76. * 5.
' 5 (cxix 448 c, Migne), scriptor regius Bertcaudus dicitar antiquanim
littcranim, duntaxat eanim quae maximae sunt, et unciales a quibuadam vocari
existimantur, habere mensuram descriptam. Itaque, si penes vos est, mittite
mihi earn per hunc, quaeso, pictorem, cum redierit, schednla tamen dili-
gentissime sigillo munita.
• Hist. Litt, dt la Frante^ iv i8« f.
' Specimen in Lecoy de la Marche, I.M Manustrits (Quantin), p. 69. It
was written (c. 845-50) by a monk of Marmoutier.
' 10 ad fHim. * Quoted on p. ^tg»
" p. 434 A.
472 SERVATUS LUPUS. [CHAP.
ferences to Latin authors. Among historians, we find Livy *, Sallust,
Caesar, Suetonius, Justin and Valerius Maximus'; in rhetoric,
Cicero and Quintilian; among poets, Terence, Virgil, Horace
and Martial ; and, among grammarians. Caper, Gellius, Donatus,
Servius, Macrobius and Priscian. He describes a knowledge of
German as 'most necessary at the present day'^; at the same
time, he protests against the rumour that he had himself gone to
Fulda to learn that language ; it would not have been ' worth his
while to go so far for such a purpose ' ; he had really spent his
time there in copying mss, ad oblivionis remedium et eruditionis
augfnentum^. There is hardly any sign that he knew Greek. He
consults Einhard about certain Greek words in Servius*; and,
when he is himself consulted on similar points by Gotteschalk, he
hints that the niceties of the language are best ascertained from
the Greeks themselves*. He states that blasphemus is obviously a
Greek word, because of the collocation of/ and //, and he proves
from Prudentius that the second syllable is long, but he adds that
he is informed by a Greek that, ' among the Greeks ' (who in this
case clearly allowed the accent to supersede the quantity), ' it was
always pronounced short ', — an opinion shared by Einhard'. Even
in his treatise on the tenets of the Latin Fathers, written in answer
to an inquiry from Charles the Bald', he cannot refrain from
quoting Cicero and Virgil*.
The importance of the age of Servatus Lupus, in regard to the
preservation and transmission of mss, may be inferred from the
large number of mss of the ninth century and the first half of the
tenth, which are recorded as having belonged to the monastic
libraries of France'*. It was also about this time that classical mss
' 34, illud quod sequitur tangere nolui donee in Livio vigilantius inda-
garem.
' Cp. Traul)e in S* Ber, Bayr, Akad. 1891, p. 402. '
• 70. * 6. '5 ad Jin,
• yy ad Jin. ' 70 p. 467 c — D. • 138.
" Migne, cxix 633. For the Letters see Migne cxix 431—610, and cp.
Nicholas, ^tude (1861); De la Rocheterie, in Alhnoires i (1865-73) 369 — 466
of the Acad, de Sainte Croix d*OrUans\ Mullinger's Schools oj Charles the
Great (1877) c. 4; Sprotte's Biographic (1880); and ed. by Du Dezert (Paris,
1888); also Ebert, ii 103-9; Manitius in Rhein, Mm, (1893) 313 — 310; and
Norden's Kunstprosa^ 699 f.
*" Nonlen, 704 f.
XXV.] PASCHASIUS RADBERTUS. 473
first found their way into Germany, the writers of the golden age
being scantily represented by Virgil, Lucan, Livy and portions
of Cicero, while later authors were more frequent, especially
Macrobius, Martianus Capella and Isidore.
While the monastery of Ferri^res, near Sens and the Upper
Seine, was the home of Lupus, that of Corbie on
the Somme, near Amiens, is similarly associated R^Sbertut*"*
with his contemporary Radbertus, who also bears
the name of Paschasius {c. 790 — 865). He joined in founding
the New Corbie in Westphalia (822). His familiarity with Latin
literature is shown by the passages which he tacitly borrows from
Cicero, Seneca, Virgil and Horace, and there is some slight
evidence that he was acquainted with Greek*.
In the reign of Charles the Bald (840 — 877), whom Lupus
describes as Moctrinae studiosissimus ", there is a certain revival
of interest in literature, but it resembles the final flicker of an
expiring flame rather than 'a light that rises to the stars'. This
last is the flattering phrase used by Eric of Auxerre (d. c, 877) in
a letter addressed to the king. He even describes Greece as
lamenting the loss of those of her sons whom the liberality of the
king has attracted to Gaiil, and nearly all Ireland, with the band
of her philosophers, as disdaining the perils of the sea and
embracing a voluntary exile in answer to the summons of one
who was a Solomon in wisdom*.
The chief representative of Ireland and philosophy at the
court of Charles the Bald was Joannes Scotus, or ,
•' ^ Joannes
John the Scot* (c, 810-5 — c 875), who, from about Scotus
845, was the head of the palace school and thus **"
took part in a temporary revival of learning. In his person the
' Migne, cxx ; Tougard, VHelUnum€^ p. 30; Ebett, ii 430 f. His four
poems (including an ^ egloga *) are printed in Poitae Lai, Aevi Car. iii 45 — 53
Traubc.
' Ep. 119. ' Migne, cxxiv 1133.
^ Known to his contemporaries %% Jtanms Scotus, ScoHms, or Seot^gata;
and called by himself, in his translation of ' Dionysios ', Joemms lemgona
(changed in later MSS into Erugena and Eriugma), Erigma appears later
still, And /onnftes Scotus Erigitta not earlier than cent. XVI (Christlieb, I5f,
ap. R. L. Poole's Medieval Thought, 55; and Traube in Futoi Lot. Am
Car. iii 518).
474 JOANNES SCOTUS. [CHAP.
Greek Scholarship of Ireland found a welcome in France in the
days when England was being overrun by the Danes. His
favourite manual was Martianus Capella. He was also familiar
with the Greek Fathers, such as Basil, Chrysostom and Gregory
Nazianzen (whom he oddly identifies with his namesake of
Nyssa), and he had a special admiration for Origen*. In the
phrase of William of Malmesbury, his mental vision was 'con-
centrated on Greece". While his Latin style is recognised as
correct and even elegant, he is fully conscious of the inadequacy
of his Greek scholarship. He is familiar with Plato's Timaeus\
and it has been supposed^ that he knew the original text ; at any
rate, his Latin quotations from the Timaeus are independent of
the translation by Chalcidius. His general familiarity with Greek
is fully proved by the fact that he was chosen to execute a Latin
translation of ' Dionysius the Areopagite '. A copy of the original
had been sent as early as 757 by Pope Paul I to Pepin-le-Bref,
and a splendid MS of the same had subsequently been presented
to Louis the Pious by the Byzantine emperor, Michael the
Stammerer (827). The author was regarded as the patron-saint
of France, and Hilduin, the abbot of St Denis, had in vain
attempted to produce a satisfactory version. Thus it fell to the
lot of an Irishman of the West to introduce the works of a Greek
mystic of the East to the knowledge of a Franco-Roman king.
The faithful and literal rendering executed by Joannes Scotus was
regarded as an interpretation which itself needed an interpreter..
Such was the opinion of the papal librarian, Anastasius, who had
himself learned Greek at Constantinople, and wondered how ' this
barbarian living on the confines of the world, who might have
been deemed to be as ignorant of Greek as he was remote from
civilisation, could have proved capable of comprehending such
mysteries and translating them into another tongue '\ The
* Cp. Baur*s Lehre von der Drtieinigkiit^ ii 363 — 344 (Poole, 60).
' Gesta Regum Angl. ii § lai, in Graecos acriter oculos intendit.
^ \ii De Div, Nat, i 31 he quotes in Latin 30 D f. In iii 37 he refers to the
planets, ' quae semper circulos suos circa solem peragunt, sicut Plato in Timaeo
edocet*. ^ Ilaureau, i' 153.
* Migne, cxxii 93 c— I). The date of the translation is 858-60. The
original was found in France and not brought from Ireland ; and the same is
true of his later translation of Maximus on Greg. Naz.
XXV.] HIS PRINCIPAL WORKS. 475
influence of ' Dionysius ' is apparent in many parts of the great
work of Joannes Scotus, De Divisiotu Naturae^ and particularly
in the last book, with its doctrine of the final absorption of the
perfected soul into the Divine Nature \ where, by a fusion of Neo-
Platonism and Christianity, he forms a 'theory of the Eternal
Word as containing in Himself the exemplars of created things',
a theory impl)dng the formula universalia ante rem. Another
important work, his Liber de Prtudestinaiione^ was written at the
request of Hincmar, archbishop of Rheims, and a man of some
pretensions to a knowledge of Greek', in criticism of the
Augustinian doctrine ais stated by Gotteschalk (840). In his
reply (851) he constantly resorts to the aid of Dialectic. He also
anticipates the doctrine of the Schoolmen by insisting that true
philosophy and true religion are identical with one another*.
He describes the course of his argument as passing through the
four stages of 'division, definition, demonstration and analysis',
adding the Greek name of each*. When the Latin Fathers fail
him, he appeals to the Greek, and, when the Fathers desert
him, he takes refuge in the philosophers. The mistakes of his
opponents he compassionately describes as mainly due to their
ignorance of the Greek language. His treatise was opposed by
theologians at Lyons and Fulda, and by Prudentius, bishop of
Troyes, who traces in its pages *the folly of Origen' and the
trickery of an unsanctified sophistry, and meets his opponent's
'assumption of superiority on the ground of his classical learning'
by appealing to Jerome's abjuration of Cicero. Jerome had
maintained that the Scriptures should be understood in their
simplicity instead of serving as a battle-ground of the rhetoricians;
while Joannes Scotus had dragged his readers back to Greek
sources for all that he had failed to find in Latin. Lastly,
Prudentius attacks the work of Martianus Capella, which was
* Abstract in R. L. Poole, 60 — 73.
' Migne, cxxv 538 A — B. Cp. Carl von Noorden*8 Hinkmar (1863);
Schro«rs (1884) ; and Traube, in PoHiu Lai, Atvi Car, iii 406-^0.
• Dt Div. Naturaif i i ; Haur^o, i' 153 n. i.
^ {tUBoioi) dtcupcriin^, 6^0tu^, dirodfucruti^ and dntXvrui^. Cp. David the
Armenian's Prolegomena to Porphyry's Isagogex tlffi M ri^oaptt al diaXtKraral
fUOoboi' tlaX ykp dicupcTiir^, 6pMTiiri(, drodficri*^, dyaXvrur^ (J. A. Cramer's
Anted, Paris, tv 443) ; also Fr. Cramer, De Gr, Meiii Aevi Studiis^ ii 34 n. 156.
476 JOANNES SCOTUS. [CHAP.
deemed to have been mainly responsible for leading the author
into this labyrinth of error, and tempting him to prefer the
teaching of Varro, which was supported by that of Capella,
although it had been refuted by St Augustine. The close
attention paid to Capella by Joannes Scotus is further exemplified
by the Commentary discovered by Haurdau among the mss of
the ninth century which once belonged to the great Benedictine
monastery of Saint-Germain-des-Pr^s '.
The controversy between Joannes Scotus and his opponents
may well be regarded as a turning-point in the history of mediaeval
scholarship^ The mechanical tradition handed down by Bede
and Alcuin is now superseded by a spirit of inquiry and discussion,
and the claims of reason, as contrasted with those of authority,
are eagerly maintained*.
It is probable that Joannes Scotus remained in Frankland,
even after the death of Charles the Bald (877). An English
tradition makes him end his days at Malmesbury, where he is
said to have been stabbed to death by the pens of his pupils \
and where the traveller, Inland ^ afterwards saw 'an image set up
in the abbey church ' in his honour.
The I^tin authors quoted by him include Virgil and Horace,
Pliny and Boethius^ His knowledge of Greek was quite excep-
tional for the age in which he lived. His partiality for that
language is proved by his selecting a Greek title for his principal
work, TTcpi ^vo-cuK fi€pi(rfiovy id est De Divisione Naturae^ in the
course of which he is constantly quoting 'Dionysius' and Gregory,
and frequently referring to the Categories of Aristotle. "If anyone
wishes to know more about the ' possible ' and the * impossible ',
legat if€p\ ipfiriv€iaSf hoc est, J?e Interpretatione Aristotelefn " '. In
the dedicatory preface to his translation of the ' Areopagite ', he
praises the king for prompting him not to rest satisfied with the
' Notices €i ExiraitSf xx (Ilaureau, i 153). Cp. K. L. Poole, 76, 11. 35.
"^ Mullingcr, p. 189.
^ De Div, Nat, i 69 p. 51 3 B, ratio iinniutabilis nuUiusf auctoritatis adsttpu-
latione roborari indiget.
^ William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum Angl, ii § iia, discussed in
R. L. Poole's Medieval Thought^ 313 — 319, and Traube, /. c, iii 513.
* Itinerary t ii 16'. ' Migne, cxxti 498.
' 1^. 597 C'
XXV.] HIS KNOWLEDGE OF GREEK. 477
literature of the West, but to have recourse to the 'most pure
and copious waters of the Greeks '. In approaching his task, he
modestly describes himself as a mere tiro in Greek; and although,
in a work extending over 160 columns of print, he succeeds in
presenting a closely literal rendering of his original, the general
truth of his description of his own attainments, when put to the
test of original composition, is clear enough in the few Greek
hexameters which he addresses to the king of France and the
archbishop of Rheims'. They are sufficiently bad to discredit
bishop Bale's story' that their author had studied Greek at
Athens. Even his Latin elegiacs he occasionally intersperses
sacro Graecorum mctarty Le. with Greek words written in Greek
characters. It was probably in connexion with his own study of
Greek that he drew up a Latin abstract of the treatise of
Macrobius on the differences between the Greek and Latin
verbs*. Aristotle who, in his judgement, is 'the acutest of the
Greeks in the classification of all created things', is specially
quoted in connexion with the ten Categories, which 'apply to
things created, and not (as St Augustine has shown) to the
Creator '^ Plato, however, had seen that all inquiries as to the
nature of the existence of things created had for their aim the
knowledge of the Creator; he therefore follows Plato. His
Platonism makes him a Realist, and his extreme Realism ends in
Pantheism. ' John the Irishman ' has been happily characterised
by a countryman of his own as 'an erratic genius', 'brilliant,
learned, heretical'*. His principal work was regarded as the
source of certain heresies in the early part of the thirteenth
century. It was accordingly committed to the flames by the
orders of Pope Honorius III (1226), and the editio priruepi^
* ib. 1337 ; also in Traube, /. r., iii 51^56, with other Carmina Scottorum
Latina et Graecanica, ib, 685 — 701. The Versus Romae are there (p. 554)
placed later than 878, and the allegorical treatment of Ovid's Met,, in the
Integumenta, not earlier than cent, xiii (p. 536). Both were once ascribed to
Joannes Scotus.
« R. L. Poole, 31 if.
* Ussher, Ep, Hib, p. 135; Teuffel, | 444, 9; Keil, Gr, Lot, v 595 f ;
p. 115 supra,
* De Div, Not, i 14.
» G. T. Stokes, Ireland and the Ceitie Chunky p. 918.
478 ERIC AND REMI OF AUXERRE. [CHAP.
published by Thomas Gale at Oxford in 1681, was placed in the
index of prohibited books a few years after its publication^
Two of the contemporaries of John the Scot may here be
Eri nd briefly mentioned, both of them natives of Auxerre.
Remi of The elder of these, Eric (841 — 877 ?), was educated
uxerre under Servatus Lupus at Ferriferes. Among the
fruits of his studies which he sent with a set of elegiacs to the
bishop of Auxerre, we find a series of extracts from Suetonius and
Valerius Maximus, copied under the direction of Lupus. The
six books of his metrical Life of St Germanus of Auxerre show
a familiarity with Virgil, and some slight knowledge of Greek*.
He is also the author of a number of notes on the translation of
Aristotle De Interpretatione by Boethius, the Eisagoge of Porphyry,
and the Categories of Aristotle, as 'translated from Greek into
Latin by St Augustine'. This last, however, is not really a
translation from Aristotle, and it must therefore be inferred that
in the tenth century the text of the Categories was still unknown'.
Eric's distinguished pupil, Remi of Auxerre, taught at Kheims
{c» 893), and was the first to open a school in Paris (900; d. 908).
His commentaries on Donatus^ and Martianus Capella' are still
extant. Greek words occur in his treatise on Music and in his
commentary on Genesis and on Donatus. In the latter, which
remained in use to the times of the Renaissance, his chief Latin
authority is Virgil. He also commented on the Carmen Paschale
of Sedulius*.
' On Joannes Scotus, see O^a ed. Floss (Migne, cxxii) and the literature
there quoted ; also Guizot's Civiitsation en France, iii le^on 19, pp. 137 — 178;
Maurice, AleJiaeval Philosophy, 45 — 79; Haur^u, i 148 — 175; Ebert, ii
157 — 367; Milman, Lat. Christ, iv 330 f; Mullinger*s Schools 0/ Charles the
Great, c. 5 ; K. L. Poole's Medieval Thoti^^ht (1884), 53—78; H. Morley's
English Writers, ii 150-9 ; and A. Gardner (1900). Cp. Traube, Lc,
' Ebert, ii 385 — 193 ; Traube, /. c, iii 411. He has also some knowledge
of Caesar, the Odes and Epodes of Plorace, and of Persius and Petronius,
ib» 414; and Heiricus magister is quoted in scholia on Juvenal, ix 37.
' Haureau, i 188 and 196; cp. Traube, /. r., 434.
* ed. W. Fox (1903); cp. Haase, De Afedii Aevi Stud. PhiloL 36 f note;
Bursian, CL PhiloL in Deutschland, i 37 and note.
^ Haureau, i 303-5; cp. Ebert, iii 334 f.
' Hiimer in Vienna Akad. April 1880.
XXV.] CLASSICS AT PAVIA, MODENA, ST GALLEN. 479
The Irish monk Dungal' (d. 826) is not only a student of
Cicero and Macrobius, but he also shows some
slight knowledge of Greek by using the word /n/ny mt^Pt^ll^
and the phrase Kara avriUpao'cv, and by explaining Moden* and
the term apologia 'secundum propnetatem Graeci
sermonis". Half a century later, we find traces of classical
studies not only in Dungal's school at Pavia, but also at Modena.
While the Franks on their march to rescue Louis II at Beneventum
(871) sang rude rhymes regardless of inflexions and abounding
in biblical citations only', the citizens who guarded the walls of
Modena chanted far more elegant lines of accentual Latin verse
recalling the ancient sieges of Troy and Rome : —
'O tu, qui senras armis isU moenm,
Noli dormire, moneo, sed vigila:
Dum Hector vigil extitit in Trola,
Non earn cepit fraudulenta Gretia*, etc.^
Towards the close of the century there is evidence of the study of
the Classics at St Gallen, which possessed Irish translations from
Hippocrates and Galen, and the Greek Grammar of Dositheus*.
Among the mss added to its library by Hartmund (c. 841 — 883)
were a (Latin) Josephus, Justin, Solinus, Orosius, Martianus
Capella, Priscian and Isidore*; and Latin verse was written (and
forms of deeds and letters drawn up) by the versatile abbot
Salomo III (890)'. A learned monk of St Gallen, Notker the
Stammerer (r. 830 — 912), laboriously copied out for the episcopal
chancellor of Charles the Fat a Greek ms of the Canonical
Epistles which had been lent by the bishop of Vercelli'. Notker
intersperses Greek words in his Latin*; he ends a letter explaining
certain musical symbols with the words: Salutant te ellinid fratres^
1 p. 463 supra, " Migne, cv 455, 473, 467.
' Traube, /. r., 403-5.
^ Muratori, AtU, Ital.y diss. 40 (Hallam, Lit, x^ 96 f); cp. Ebert, iii 174 f;
Trau1>e, O Roma nobilis (1891), p. 9 ; and Poitat Lai. Aevi Car. iii 703-5.
* Burstan, i 38 f. * fi^. i 33 n.
7 ih. i 39. Ebert, iii 150 f, 154 f. On his encyclopaedia cp. G. Meier, Die
sieben frcien Kiinste^ i 16^. On his life cp. DUmmler, Mittk. d. onHq, Ga,
Ziirich^ xii 363 ; for his poems, see PoUae Lai. Medii Aitri, ir 396 f.
' Pertz, Afon, ii 101; Migne* cxxxi 989 c.
• Migne, 1015 A — B.
480 ECCLESIASTICAL USE OF GREEK. [CHAP.
implying that some at least of his brother-monks were students of
Greek \ But his desire for a translation of Origen suggests that
he was unfamiliar with that language. The words of his profoundly
pathetic anthem. Media vita in tnortc sumus^ suggested by the
sudden death of a workman engaged in building a bridge over
the gorge of the Goldach at MartinstobeP, continued to be sung
at compline during part of Lent, and have found their way into
the English Order for the Burial of the Dead. About the
same time another monk, vaguely described as ' Poeta Saxo ', was
composing his Latin epic on Charles the Great, beginning with
four books of hexameters (partly founded on Einhard) and ending
with a book of elegiacs lamenting the death of Charles and the
invasions of the Normans'. The part of the Chronicle of Regino,
abbot of Priim, which relates to the year 889, is written in the
style of Justin \ In the same century a Graeco-Latin Glossary
was drawn up at I^on*; a similar work existed in the library of
Corbie, and Greek mss in those of St Riquier and
of Eintied!!in* ^^ Rheims*. In century viii or ix, an unknown
'monk of Einsiedeln' visited Pavia and Rome, made
a plan of the latter, and returned with copies of Latin and even
of Greek inscriptions^ There is evidence of the
u»e of Greek *' ccclesiastical use of (]reek (especially in the chanting
of the Creed) in the dioceses of Miinster, Rheims
and Poitiers, and at the Cathedral of Vienne'; and, in the rite for
* Ekkehart minimus, in H. Canisius, Thesaurus^ ii 3 p. 198 (ed. 1795).
On St Gallen in c. ix and x cp. Wetzel (1877), and Specht (1885), 109, 313-18.
^ Von Arx, St Gallen^ i 93-5; Scheffiers Ekkehardt note 186.
' Pertz, MoH. i 117 f; Jaflfe*s CaroiinUf 543 f; Ebert, iii 135 f. PoHat Lai,
Afedii Afvi, iv i — 71 Winterfcld. He has been identified with the poet Agios
(of Corvey), author of a fine elegiac poem in memory of Halhumoda, the first
abbess of Gandersheim (d. 874); Traube, PoUtae Lot, Aevi Car, iii 368 — 88;
HiiflTer, Korveier Studien (1898).
^ fiursian, i 40.
* ed. E. Miller in Notices et Extraits^ xxix 1, 1 — 330 ; cp. P. Piper, dit
alteste deutsche Literature 338 f.
' Appendix to Leon Mattre, Scales; Tougard, VHellittisme^ 36 f.
7 Arum, Einsiedletuis, Momnisen in Ber, d, Sdchs, Ges, 1850, p. 987 f. Cp.
p. 149 supra. The author was probably a monk of Keichenau (Specht, 311).
* Mart^ne, De Antiquis Ecclcsicu Ritibus^ \ 88, 103, 11 4, 117 (ed. 1736);
Tougard, 30.
XXV.] HUCBALD. ABBO 'CERNUUS*. ALFRED. 481
the consecration of churches, the bishop was required to write in
the dust with his staff the letters of the Greek alphabet, the
evidence for this custom extending over centuries viii to xv\
Greek was the language used in the fourteenth century in chanting
the Gloria in excelsis at the midnight Mass at Tours, and also,
from the thirteenth century to the Revolution, in the annual Mass
at St Denis on the octave of the patron Saint of France*.
But Greek studies, on the whole, fell into decline during the
two centuries after the death of Joannes Scotus. They survived,
to some slight extent, among those who had been trained in his
school, such as Hucbald (d. 930), who celebrated „ ^ .^
Hue Mud
Charles the Bald in 146 hexameters, in which
every word begins with the letter C', and also sang of the victory
of Louis the Stammerer over the incursions of the Normans.
Some of Hucbald's verses are varied with Greek words, which
also occur in his treatises on music ^. Louis himself gave the
name of Alpha to a monastery which he had founded in
Burgundy, and that of Carlopolis to Compi^gne*. The Latin
poem on the siege of Paris by the Normans
(885 — 7), written by Abbo *Cemuus*, monk of
Saint-Germain-des-Pr^s (d. 923)'9 abounds in Greek words; and
in 'book iii' of his poem, all such words are explained by
interlinear glosses in Latin'.
The ninth century closes in England with the name of Alfred
(849 — c, 900). He was taken to see Rome at the Aifr^
age of five, and again at the age of seven. Not-
withstanding the general decay of learning, and the disquiet
* Mart^ne, ii 679; cp. Roger Bacon*s Gk, Gr. pp. 35, 83, 195, and 0pm
Afaj'us, i 94 ( = iii 117) Bridges.
* Mart^ne, i 179; Tougard at; cp. Gaidthausen, Gr, Pal. 44a. The
•Greek Mass in honour of St Denys' was printed in 1656 and 1777 (Egger,
HelUnisme en France ^ i 49).
> Carmina clarisonae calvis cantate Camenae &c; Migne, cxxxii 1041 f;
Ebert, iii 167 ; Pottat Lot, Mtiii Aevi^ iv 167 f.
* Tougard, 40.
* Gidel, i89r.
* Perts, Mon, ii 776—805; Migne, cxxxii 7M; Poittu Lai. MiiU Atviy vt
71 f.
"> Tougard, 39; Ebert, iii H9f ; Freeman, Historical Essays^ i aas— 34.
s. 31
482 ALFRED. [CHAP. XXV.
caused by the Danish invasions, he led a studious life in his
youth, and, after succeeding to the throne in 871, began a series
of translations from Latin authors with the aid of the Welsh
monk, Asser. In English literature Alfred is 'our first translator.'
In his rendering of Boethius (c, 888) he does not hesitate, in the
interests of his people, to add to the original whenever he thinks
fit. Thus in one case he expands three lines of Latin into nearly
thirty. He also translated the Universal History of Orosius,
adding or omitting, as he deemed best A third translation
(in which his own name does not appear) is that of Bede's
Ecclesiastical History) and a fourth, that of Gregory's Cura
Pastoralis, It is only in this last that the king states his general
design as a ti^nslator. He laments that there were but few South
of the Humber, and none South of the Thames, who could
understand the Divine Service, or even explain a Latin epistle
in English. He had therefore thought it good to translate into
English the books that were most necessary to be known. At the
king's request, the bishop of Worcester produced an abridged
translation of Gregory's Dialogues, A similar translation of
St Augustine's Soliloquies is ascribed to Alfred himself. In the
introduction to the latter he refers to his previous works under
the parable of the wood 'from which he and his friends had
brought the fairest trees and branches they could bear away,
leaving many remaining for those who should come after them".
^ H. Morlcy's English Writers^ \\ 166—191, Pauli's Life^ and the rest of
the literature on p. 194, with that produced at the ' MiUenary ' of 1901, esp.
Plummer*8 Fbrd Lectures,
CHAPTER XXVI.
THE TENTH CENTURY.
The six centuries extending from the beginning of the sixth to
the end of the eleventh are proverbially known as the Dark Ages;
and, of all these centuries, the tenth is held in lowest esteem. It
is the age of gloom, the age of iron, the age of lead\ England
was being repeatedly overrun by the Danes, and the monastic
reforms of Dunstan only incidentally promoted the interests of
learning. The Normans had definitely established themselves in
France (912), where the line of Charles the Great came to an end
in 987, to be succeeded by the House of Capet Hordes of
Hungarian^ had meanwhile been ranging over the whole of
Germany, the South of France and the North of Italy ; in the last
year of the ninth century they had set on fire the monastic library
of Nonantola, near Modena', and, on their return to the Norths
they inflicted the same fate on the monasteries of St Gallen and
Fulda*. In Germany, the line of Charles had been followed in
911 by that of the Saxon kings, the second of whom, Henry the
^ Baronius, AnnaUt^ 900 A.D., 'saeculuiii...feiTeum...plumbeuni...obsctt-
nim ' ; * obscurum * is the epithet selected by Cave. Leibnitz, Introd, in Scri/i.
Rtrum Brunsvic. § 63 (1707), paradoxically regards it as (in Germany
at any rate) a ' golden age *, compared with cent, xiii ; while Guizot and
Hailam {Lit. \ 4^) agree in describing cent, vii, rather than cent, x, as the
nadir of the human intellect in Europe ; and (in contrast to Leibnitz) Charles,
Roger Baton, 97, considers it generally agreed that cent, xiil is the 'golden
age * of the Middle Ages. Cp. Muratori, Anii^, iii 831 ; Mabillon, Acta SS»,
s. V, /^raef. it ; //ist. Litt. de la France^ vi 18 f, and Mosheim's Ectl, Hist,
1590(1863).
' Muratori, Anna/i, ann. 899. Mabillon ( ^. Lit. 95a) found only two
MSS there.
* Milman, Lot, Christ, iii 480.
31—2
484 REGINO. JOHN OF VANDlfiRES. RATHERIUS. [CHAP.
Fowler, was the first to check the Hungarian inroads (933), which
were finally quelled by his son Otho the Great (955), who was
crowned emperor of the West in Rome (962) and was succeeded
by Otho II and Otho III. When the third Otho received the
imperial crown in Rome from the German pope, Gregory V (996),
the sixty years of the abasement of the papacy came to an end.
Three years later, Gerbert, the foremost scholar of the age, became
pope of Rome. The century closed with the youthful emperor's
impressive visit to the vaulted chamber where Charles the Great
still sat enthroned beneath the dome of Aachen' ; and, within the
next three years, the emperor and the pope had both passed
away.
In this century learning flourished at the ancient capital of
Aachen, under the guidance of Bruno, brother of Otho I and
archbishop of Cologne from 935 to 965. It also flourished further
to the South, in the region of the Meuse and Mosel at Toul and
Verdun, which were occupied by colonies of monks from Greece
and Ireland*. It was in the same region that an abbot of Priinii
Regino, who died at Trier in 915, produced a
chronicle displaying its author's acquaintance with
Justin', and a treatise on harmony in which Greek terms are
correctly explained*. John of Vandi^res (between
vindr^ret ^^^^ *"^ Toul), afterwards abbot of Gorze (near
Metz), studied the current Introductions to the
logical works of Aristotle with a view to understanding the references
to the Categories in the De Trinitate of Augustine' ;
and Ratherius of Liege (d. 974), thrice bishop of
Verona, quotes Greek and also Latin authors, among the latter
being Plautus, Phaedrus, and Verona's poet, Catullus*. In his
^ Otho of Lomello (discussed by Lindner, and Hodgkin, Charla ihd
Gnat, 350).
' Mabillon, Annal. iv 90 ; Mart^ne, 7^h€saur. iii 1066 ; Calmet, Hist.
Lorr, i, Hist, Episc. Tuil, c. 51 ; Hist, Litt. tie la France^ vi 57 ; Cramer, D§
Graecis Medii Aevi Studiis, ii 37; Gidel» Nouuelles Etudes, 195; Haddan*t
Jfemains, 386.
' Bursian, C/. FAil. in Deutschlandt i 40.
• Migne, cxxxii 491—9 (Tougard, HelUnisme^ 38 f) ; Ebert, iii 396—331.
• Mabillon, Acta SS. O, S, B, vii 393.
• R. Ellis, Catullus, p. viii«.
XXVI.] GESTA BERENGARII. ODO OF CLUNI. 485
treatise Dt Contemptu Canonum he introduces a quotation from
Horace with the words x—perlepide Fiaccus eantitat noster ; and he
declines to ordain any except those who give proof of proficiency
in literature \ Among his lost works may be noticed a Latin
Grammar, which recalls the usual penalty for boyish neglect of
grammatical rules by its quaint title of Sparadorsum*,
In the first quarter of the century (916-24) Verona was
apparently the home of the unknown grammarian,
who composed the epic poem called the Gesta or ^B^JSmrarS*
Panefyricus Berengarii^ in which he borrows from
Virgil and the Latin 'Homer', and Statius and Juvenal. Con-
siderable knowledge of the grammarians is displayed in a con-
temporary commentary intended to facilitate the study of this
poem in the grammar-schools of the day*.
Early in the same century, in France, the monastery of Cluni
was founded by William, duke of Aquitaine (910), to be ruled by
Bemo, its first abbot (d. 937), and reformed by his
successor, Odo (d. 942) ; and these reforms infused
new life into the schools connected with the Order at Metz and
Rheims, at Li^ge and Paris*. Odo, in the early days which he
had spent as a youth of high birth in the monastery of St Martin
at Tours, had taken delight in the study of Virgil, when he was
warned in a dream to abandon that perilous occupation. .In his
dream he saw a beautiful vase teeming with poisonous serpents ;
the beautiful vase (he felt assured) was the poet's verse, while the
serpents were his pagan sentiments'. He went to Paris and
attended the lectures on Logic and the liberal arts delivered by
Remi of Auxerre, but retained little of Remi's philosophic teaching.
He afterwards complained about 'the mere logicians who had
more belief in Boethius than in the Bible '*. His writings prove,
however, that he had studied Virgil and Priscian^ St Augustine's
Dialectic and Martianus Capella, besides showing some knowledge
1 Migne, cxxxvi 564; Ozanam, Z)^miw/»i// ItUdits^ 14; q>. A. Vogel,
Ratherius von Verona (1854) ; Ebert, iii 373 f, 383.
' Gidel, igSf ; Burelan, i 4a.
' Poitae Lot, Medii Atviy vt 354 f; Ugo Bftliaiii*t Chr&nUUrSf 119 f.
^ Heeren, i 101. * Migne, cxxxili 49 A.
• Per, Thesaur, in ii 144 (Cramer ii 41).
^ Migne, /. r. ' immensam Prifciani transiit transnatando pelagut *.
486 BRUNO. GUNZO. HROSWITHA. [CHAP.
of Greek ^ ; while his contemporary and namesake, Odo, archbishop
of Canterbury (d. 958), was taught Greek as well as Latin*. Both
of these languages were also known to Bruno, archbishop of
Cologne (d. 965), a younger brother of Otho the Great*. Bruno,
who had himself learnt Greek from certain eastern
Bruno
monks at the imperial court, called an Irish bishop
from Trier to teach Greek at Aachen, and also encouraged the
transcription of the works of Latin authors, which became models
of style to historians such as Widukind of Corvey (d. 1004), whose
Rei Gestae Saxonicae gives proof of his study of Sallust\ Greek
and Latin were also known to Sergius, bishop of Naples*. Another
Italian, Gunzo of Novara (d. 967), when accused by
the monks of St Gallen of using an accusative
instead of an ablative, justified himself in a long letter to the
monks of Reichenau, in the course of which he quotes a score of
Latin authors, his favourite poets being apparently Persius and
Juvenal*. The hundred mss, which he carried with him' into
Germany, included the De Interpretatione and the Topics of
Aristotle, and the Timaeus of Plato. He discussed the controversy
between the Platonists and the Aristotelians as to the nature of
' universals " ; and he is credited with combining the study of
Greek with an interest in science ; but, as he uses Latin characters
in quoting half a line of Homer (which he clearly borrows from
Servius)*, it is probable that the above texts were only Latin
translations*. In this century the catalogue of Lorsch displays a
goodly array of Latin classics.
In the same century the monastery of Gandersheim, founded
to the S. of Hanover in 856, was famous as the
retreat of the learned nun, Hroswitha** (yf. 984),
who celebrated in 'Leonine' hexameters (inspired by Virgil,
' Cp. Haur^au, Singularitis Historiques^ I39f; Ebert, iii 170 — 3.
' Cramer, ii 38 ; Tougard, 40.
' Cramer, ii 35 ; Tougard, 4a ; Bursian, i 41, 43 f; Norden, ICunstprosa^
7 1 1 n ; Poole's Medieval Thought, 86—8.
^ Ebert, iii 428 ; Bursian, i 44 f. ' Gidel, 196.
' Migne, cxxxvi 1383 (960 a.d.). ' Migne» /. c.
* Cramer, ii 41 f; Tougard, 41 f ; Ebert, iii 370 f; Bursian, i 4a f.
' Bursian, i 34.
^^ clamor validus is her own rendering of her name.
XXVI.] HEDWIG AND EKKEHARD 11. 487
Prudentius and Sedulius) the acts of Otho down to 968. Further,
with a view to providing the age with a purer literature than that
of Latin Comedy, she composed six moral and religious plays, in
which she imitates Boethius as well as Terence. But, as the
mediaeval copyists of Terence were unconscious that his plays
were written in verse, the plays of Hroswitha are written in actual
prose. They survive in a single ms at Munich, the discovery of
which was welcomed with enthusiasm by the early humanists in
Germany, the first to print them being Conrad Celtes (1501). It
is true that the scenes in these plays are apt to be indecorous, but
virtue always triumphs in the end, and the close of all the plays is
invariably beyond reproach. Whether they were meant to be
acted by the nuns or not, is a matter of dispute, and does not
appear to admit of decision. The writer's simplicity of character
is certainly extraordinary, and there is a charming candour in the
unaffected phrases of her preface : — si enim alicui placet tnea
devotio^ gaudebo. Si auttm vel pro mea abiectione vd pro viiiosi
sermonis rusticitate nulli placet^ memet ipsam iuvat quod feci. An
exceptional number of recent editions attests her enduring popu-
larity'.
Another learned lady of the tenth century is Hedwig, daughter
of Henry of Bavaria, the brother of Otho I. A
close parallel to the story of the daughter of Charles ^^Sl^^ii^
the Great, the princess who learned Greek in view
of her proposed marriage to Constantine VI *, may be found in
the story of the betrothal of the niece of Otho I to a * Byzantine
prince named Constantine '. Hedwig learnt Greek, but she broke
off the match, and was learning Latin, when she transferred her
affections from the Byzantine prince to a wealthy countryman of
her own. Soon afterwards, in the years of her widowhood in the
Black Forest, she devoted herself to the study of Virgil under the
guidance of Ekkehard II, a monk of the neighbouring monastery
of St Gallen ; and, from the school of that monastery, her tutor
once brought with him a promising pupil, who, on coming into
1 ed. Magnin (1843; 1857); Barack (1858); Bendixen (1869) ; Winterfeld
(1903). Cp. Milman, Lot. Christ, ix 181 f; R. Kopke (1869); Ebert, ill
314 f; Bursian, i 45 f.
' p* 461 supra.
488 WALTHER OF SPEIER. [CHAP.
her presence, modestly expressed his longing to learn Greek in
the Latin line : — esse velim Graecus^ cum sim vix, jDomna, Latinus,
Hedwig, in her delight, kissed the blushing boy, and placed him
on her foot-stool, where he went on confusedly improvising Latin
verses, while she taught him her own Greek rendering of the
antiphon Maria et Flumina : —
Thalassit ke potami^ eidogiton Kyricn,
YmnUe pigoiUon JCyrion, alUluja^,
She often sent for him afterwards and listened to his Latin verses
and taught him Greek ; and, when he finally left her, gave him a
copy of Horace and certain other books which were still preserved
in the library of St Gallen at the time of the writer of the
Chronicle, Ekkehard IV (d. c. 1060)'. The boy had in the
meantime risen to be abbot of the monastery (1001-22), while
the monk who read Virgil with Hedwig became provost of Mainz
(d. 990). His uncle, Ekkehard I, was the author of the great
epic on the exploits of Walter of Aquitaine, which includes many
reminiscences of Virgil and Prudentius*. Ekkehard I died in
973, and his poem was revised by the fourth of that name.
Ten years after the death of Ekkehard I, Walther, a school-
master of Speier (983), names (among the authorities
sJIieJ****'**' for Greek and Roman mythology etc.) Homer,
Terence, Virgil, Horace, Lucan, Persius, Juvenal,
Boethius and others. His chief model is Virgil, while he also
shows his acquaintance with Ovid, Statius, Sedulius, and Martianus
Capella, and with the translation of Porphyry by Boethius ^
While Walther is a scholar of purely local interest, France,
Germany and Italy alike claim a part in the career of one of the
^ i.e. daKa99ai nal wora/iol, c^Xoyetre r6p K6piop, i^M^ecre nfyol rir Kdpiov,
> Ekkehardi IV Casus S. Colli, c. 10 (Pcrtz, Mon, ii laa f, csp. las). Cp.
Scheflfers Ekkehard, 309 f. For the death of Ekkehard IV the date r. 1060
(instead of r. 1036) is proposed by DUmmler in Haupt's Ztitschiift, 1869, p. 3.
' Grimm u. Schmeller, Lat, Cedichte, x—xijahrh, (1838); also Peiper*s
Ekkehardi Primi IValtharius (1873); cp. Ebert, iii 265—76; and Grafs
Roma, ii 174; also Althofs IValtharii Poisis (1899), and Strecker's Ekk. u.
Vergil in Zeitschr, /. deutsches Alt, 1898, 339-<55. Winterfeld*s etl. in prepa-
ration.
* Cp. W. Harster (Bursian, i 52).
XXVI.] GERBERT (SILVESTER II). 489
most prominent personages of the century, Gerbert of Aurillac
in the Auvergne. Bom about 950, he became a
pupil of Odo of Cluni, and his studies carried him (snteTter ii)
even as far as Barcelona, near the Arab frontier of
Spain. He afterwards taught at Tours, Fleury, Sens and Rheims ;
was successively abbot of Bobbio and archbishop of Rheims,
withdrew from France to the court of the emperor in Germany,
and became archbishop of Ravenna, and finally pope of Rome
(as Silvester II) at the close of the century (d. 1003). In an age
described by himself as dira et miseranda tempora^^ he was deemed
a prodigy of science and learning, the range of his studies having
included mathematics, music and medicine, and having even in-
volved him in the imputation of being addicted to magic arts.
The papal legate, who protested against his appointment as arch-
bishop of Rheims, passionately declared that the Vicars of St
Peter (and his disciples) declined to have as their master a Plato, a
Terence, or oihtr pfcud^s philosophorum\ Gerbert probably owed
all his knowledge of Plato to the Latin translation of part of the
Timaeus^ though he quotes Greek words in his Geometry and
elsewhere'. His pupil and friend, the historian Richer of Rheims
(d. 1 010), describes him as expounding Porphyry's Introduction in
the translation of Victorinus and with the commentary of Boethius,
as well as the (Latin version of the) Categories and De Interpreta-
tione of Aristotle, together with Boethius on the Topics of Cicero^
Apparently, the old version of the Categories by Boethius, which
had been lost for a while, had now been recovered*. He also
asks a friend to send him an extract from Boethius, De Interprt-
tatione*. Among the authors which he expounded at Rheims
were Terence, Virgil, Horace, Lucan, Persius, Juvenal and Statius.
He is familiar with Sallust, Caesar, Suetonius, and (above all) with
Cicero. He urges one of his friends to collect mss on his behalf
in Italy, and to send him transcripts of Boethius and Victorinus,
* Ep. 130.
' Pertz, Mon, iii 687 ; Milman, Lai* Christ, \\\ 349.
* Tougftrd, 45.
< Migne, cxxxviii, Hist, iii c. 46 (Cramer, ii 51; Gklel, 90i); cp.
Mullinger*s Cambridge ^ i 44.
' Haur6au, {313.
* Ep. H3.
490 GERBERT. FULBERT. RICHER. [CHAP.
with the Ophthalmicus of Demosthenes^; and he advises another
to bring with him on his journey Cicero's Speeches and the Dt
Republican probably meaning by the latter the Somnium Scipionis^
the sole surviving portion of the Sixth Book'. He also writes for
a complete copy of Cicero pro rege Deiotaro*, It has even been
surmised that the preservation of Cicero's Speeches^ which he fre-
quently quotes, may have been largely due to Gerbert He is
eager to obtain mss of Caesar, Pliny, Suetonius, Symmachus and
the Achilieis of Statius. He tells a friend that he is forming a
library with the ^id of mss from Germany and Belgium, and from
Rome and other parts of Italy, and asks for transcripts from
France*. He quotes Terence, Virgil, the Odes as well as the
Epistles of Horace, the Letters of Seneca, and the Catilina of
Sallust*. Besides these, he mentions Eugraphius on Terence,
and Cassiodorus, but no Greek author whatsoever. He was once,
however, abbot of Bobbio, the library of which included, in the
tenth century, a Greek text of the Categories^ ^ and we have a short
treatise from his pen, in which he reconciles an apparent contra-
diction between the Categories and Porphyry's Introduction*, A
knowledge of Greek has been sometimes inferred from his corre-
spondence with Otho III, but it will be observed that the latter
(who inherited his Greek from his Byzantine mother) only asks
Gerbert to recommend him a manual of arithmetic*. Among
Gerbert's pupils was Fulbert, who included medicine
in the wide range of his studies, and became bishop
of Chartres and founder of its famous school (990, d. 1029). We
shall find pupils of Fulbert prominent as teachers in many parts
of France in the following century*. Another of
Gerbert's pupils, Richer (who has been already men-
tioned), was also a student at Chartres, which, at the end of this
^ £p. 130. Demosthenes Philalethes (who lived under Nero) was an
Alexandrian physician of the school of Herophilus.
' £/. 86 ; Norden, 706 n. * £p. 9.
* -&>. 44- • £/' i«3-
• Haureau, i a 1 7 n. ' «A a 1 3 f.
• * Deposcimus ut Graecorum vivax ingenium suscitetis, et nos arithmeticae
librum edoceatis' (with Gerbert's reply, £p. 187).
* Opffu in Migne, cxli; L^n Maltre, £coifs, loaf; Clerval, £c0/tt de
Chartrts (1895), 31 — 91; p. 497 infra.
XXVI.] LUITPRAND. 49 1
century, had a flourishing school of medicine, and, under Fulbert
and his successors, became an important school of learning.
Among the authors there studied by Richer (in and after 991)
were Hippocrates, Galen and Soranus, obviously in Latin trans-
lations and abridgements of the Greek text*.
The most original hellenist of this age is doubtless Luitprand
or Liudprand {c. 920-972), bishop of Cremona.
A Lombard by birth, he repeatedly represented
Berengar II and Otho I as envoy at Constantinople, where he
acquired a remarkably varied but far from accurate knowledge of
Greek, and where he apparently died in 972. His reports on his
missions of 950' and 968' supply us with a vivid description of
the many differences between Italy and the new Rome in manners
and opinions ^ They abound in Greek words, phrases and idioms,
and snatches of odd stories, which attain a new interest owing to
the fact that the author always takes pains to set down the Latin
pronunciation of the Greek, e^. oBtoi #cai ao-c/Sci^, athei ke asevis*.
In the MS all the Greek words are inserted by the author himself.
He quotes from the //tad and from Lucian's Somniumy and is
familiar with Plato's celebrated saying, a^ia ^Xo/icVov, 0co« aKai-
Tios'. He also cites Terence, Plautus, Virgil, Horace and Juvenal,
and even knows when they wrote'. The embassies of Luitprand
and others were concerned with certain proposals for a marriage
between Otho II and Theophano, daughter of Romanus II. They
were ultimately successful, and Theophano's knowledge of Greek
^ Cramer, ii 50 — 5 ; Gidel, 301. On Gerbert, wtt Opera in Migne, cxxxix,
and cp. Muratori, Antiq, iii 87a — 4 ; Maitland's Dark Ages, 55 n ; Ebert, iii
384—91 ; Werner, Gerbert von Aurilla€ (1878) ; Hock, Hist, du Pape Syhftstn
^f (1837); Poole's Medieval Thought, 88 f; Norden, 705—10; Epp, ed.
J. Havet (Paris, 1889). On Richer, cp. Ebert, iii 434 f.
• Antapodosisy vi 5 — 10.
' Relatio^ pp. 136 — 166 oi Liudprandi Opera^ ed. Diimmler, 1877*.
• Finlay*s Hist, of Greece, ii 339.
• Antap, ii 3.
• Pertz, Afon, iii 170.
' Rep. 617 R.
> On Luitprand, cp. Migne, cxxxvi ; Cramer, ii 47 f ; Gidel, 304 — 35 ;
Ebert, iii 414 — 17; and Preface to Dttmmler's ed.; also Balzani's Chrvnielerj,
113—141.
492 ABBO OF FLEURY. ' [CHAP.
descended to her son, Otho III, whose father owed his life to the
remarkable skill with which he personated the speech and action
of a Greek soldier, when he was defeated and captured in Calabria
in 982. Otho III was educated under Bern ward, who became
bishop of Hildesheim in 993, and lived to see its large library of
sacred and philosophical literature fall a prey to the flames in
1013*. Other German monasteries, at Corvey and Herford«
suffered a similar fate at the hands of the Hungarians'.
Meanwhile,' in England, in the second half of the tenth
century, Oswald, archbishop of York (d. 992), who
pieur/ **' ^^^ himself been educated at Fleury on the Loire»
invited Abbo of Fleury' (d. 1004) to become the
instructor of the monks of the abbey which the archbishop had
caused to be founded in 969 at Ramsey near Huntingdon.
Besides composing, with the aid of Dunstan, a Life of St
Edmund, king of the East Angles, Abbo wrote for his pupils at
Ramsey a scholarly work known as the Quaesiiones GrammaticaUs*
He here deals with their difficulties in matters of prosody and
pronunciation, showing in his treatment of the same an accurate
knowledge of Virgil and Horace, and even an interest in textual
criticism*. In the same age, the early Lives of Dunstan (d. 988),
and the Letters bearing on his times, are (like other writings of
the same period across the Channel) not unfrequently interspersed
with Greek words. These may have been derived from Greek
> Ann. Hild. in Pertz, Afon, iii 94, 'seil hoc ah ! ah ! nobis restat lugendum»
quia in eodein incendio...inexpIicabilis et inrecuperabilis copia periit libronim '•
* Roth of these were restored by bp Rotho {c, 1045), ^<^^ Afeinwerdt c. 49
§ 150 (Afon., Scr. xi 40).
' The Life by the monk Aimoin, in Migne, cxxxix 390, states that he
studied grammar, arithmetic and dialectic at Fleury (near Orleans), astronomy
at Paris and Rheims, and music on his return to Orleans, besides attending to
geometry, and to rhetoric (in the text-book of Victorinus). Cp. Hist. Liii, vii
and Cuissard-Gaucheron in xWm, Ue la Soc. archM,...de POrUanaiSt xiv (1875),
579—715-
* ed. Mai, C/. Auct. Vat. v (1833) 3*9— 49t csp. 334, 346 f; Migne, cxxxix
375 f; L<Jon Mattre, J&coies, 76 f; Ebert, iii 391—9. Cp. Haase, De Atedii
Aevi Stud. Philol. 17. The 600 Mss of Ramsey Abbey (at a later date)
included Terence, Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, Martial and three copies of Horace;
also the 'Sompnum Cypionis* (Macray's ed. of Chronicon, p. xliii, in Rolls
Striis); while the Graeco- Latin Psalter of prior Gregory (Jl, 1190) has been
found among the MSS at Corpus (M. R. James, Parker AfSS, p. 10).
XXVI.] iCLFRIC OF EYNSHAM. THE YEAR lOCX). 493
hymns or versicles, or from Greek glossaries'. In the same half-
century, iClfric {c. 955 — c, 1030), the abbot of
Eynsham in Oxfordshire, who must be distinguished
from both of his eminent namesakes, the archbishops of Canter-
bury (d. 1006) and York (d. 1051), was the chief helper of bishop
Ethelwold (d. 984) in making Winchester famous as a place of
education. It was there that he began, and it was at Eynsham
that he continued and completed, the preparation of those school-
books which did so much for the early study of the Latin language
in England. They included a Za/m Grammar^, with extracts
translated from Priscian, followed by a Glossary of some 3000
words in Latin and English, arranged (more or less) in order of
■
subjects. This Glossary is the oldest Latin-English Dictionary in
existence*. The third of these educational works was the Col-
loquium^ in which Latin, being still a living language, is taught in a
conversational manner; the Latin words of the dialogue are explained
by an interlinear translation ; the pupil is made to answer questions
as to his own occupations and those of his companions ; and the
use of the rod is not forgotten \ iElfric is still better known as
the author of three courses of Homilies (990-6) partly translated
from Augustine, Jerome, Gregory and Bede, the Saxon preface of
which includes an impressive reference to the expected end of the
world*. The same topic was the theme of a discourse described
in 990 as having been heard at Paris (long before) by Abbo» who
became abbot of Fleury after his return from England.
The approach of the year 1000 is said to have filled Christian
Europe with an awestruck apprehension that the
end of all things was at hand. It is sometimes ^^^ "^
supposed that the ensuing panic led to a general
pause in the pursuits of actual life, and that even the tranquil
' See end of Pref. and Index, ed. Stubbt in RMs Stria,
' FacsimiU from Cambridge Univ. MS, Hh. 1, 10, on p. 495 infra,
' Printed at Oxford (1659) ; ed. Zupitza (1880) ; both include the Grttmmar.
^ M. 'Vultis flagellari in discendo?' D. 'Carius est nobis flagellars pro
doctrina quam nescire'. Ed. Thorpe, Analttta AnglO'Sax^mica (1834) loi f ;
and Wright and Walker's VocabuioHa (1884) i* 79 f.
■ On iClfric, q). esp. Dietrich in Zeiisckr. f, hist. Tkecl, 1855— 4$; Ebert,
iii 509—16 ; J. E. B. Mayor in Joum. of CI* and S. Pkiloi. vw a — 5 ; and
Skeat, Introd. to jElfri^s Liva of Saints ^ i (1881).
494 THE YEAR I OCX). [CHAP. XXVL
routine of the cloister was paralysed by an imminent expectation
of the day of doom. It is further said that, at this crisis, the fear
of the future stimulated the generosity of many benefactors of the
Church ; but, if so, it must (no less inevitably) have arrested the
efforts of the student in the monastic school and the copyist in
the scriptorium. At such a time the latter might well ask himself
what avail was there in continuing to transcribe the classic page*
if the original and the copy were so soon to perish in the world-
wide conflagration of a Dies Irae^
' When, shriveling like a parched scroll,
The flaming heavens together roll*.
But, when the fatal hour was past, we are told that churches and
monasteries, which had been falling into decay, were rebuilt; a
great architectural movement was begun; and, in the monastic
schools, letters and arts were awakened to a new life'. It would
doubtless be an exaggeration to assume that this new life was
suddenly aroused by no other cause than the passing away of a
temporary tenror*. But, in any case, the millenary year marks the
transition from one of the darkest centuries of the Middle Ages to
one that was in the main a period of progress culminating in the
intellectual revival of the twelfth century.
^ Lten Mattre, £coltSt 96, and Olleris, Vis dt Gilbert^ 31 (quoted in
Mullinger*s Cambridge^ i 45 f ) ; also Milnian, Lot, Christ, iii 339, and Bartoli,
Prtcursori del Rinascimento^ 18 f. The approach of the end of the world had
been announced in 909, and at least eight deeds of gift between 944 and 1048
begin with the formula, appropinquatite mundi tertnitto (De Vic et Vaisette,
Hiit, di Languedoc^ i733i iii Preuves pp. 86 — 115); but a similar phrase is to
be found in the FomitUae collected in 660 by an aged monk of Paris named
Marculf (see quarto series oi Afon, Germ, Hist,, Legum Sectio v, 1886, p. 74).
Cp. Rodulfus Glaber, Hist, iv, Praef, and cc. 4 — 5.
' Eicken, in Forsehungen %ur Deutschen Gesch,, 1883; Jules Roy, VAn
Afille, 1885; Orsi, in Rivista Storica Italiana^ 1887, 1—56; also G. L. Burr
in Anier, Hist, Rev, vi no, 3 (April 1901); and Kashdall's Universities, i 31.
tnatiaptuni Uaftit»r. mm tmd jmcc^.ina t^^ f^loir.
mintr pmuir {uim.niCDmaficipto pLnoo domiir mtantn
y«lr tcximinuc 1ni|^nicmn niauopu ftcofb.ininnCpQiL
tc DtloMnr. 0mcu mdnatnutti lor umc. Cbla. pu nuniiml
(op tin. Sixnoo tnsnamo mulci bona acapi.epatnmitmbCfur
ic utiom p^ pcl^ ^'^^* '^^P^^ **)C2i mancfpia, dnrticmitiir
pcau&p epiao. mcDjc manopio)^ fomtf! tiiifi|ui [rmp tiMntut-
oKCpxir. mariiwmat>iir aiuido dcnanof tmnu ftdb mAOtiu
ic dtflc pmtpit*. meet mdtiapf a Arno. nntie jiorpon msntt
ic pp^^i^ dtnea mAnctuu. c{locr {iJeUT tnU ^ tntne pcD.
pan tSd (girpaipD.AtneffniAnapitr^Ttmifnmi. Pp^m
mmum pcDpum montram ictom muLcutno^. Stpopma.
ha^.cm>.ic.Tiiac& rwpmcmgptttUc'rctcLtiDf pe."I^^
j)u oner bpopon . dun) {tr . ppmnancopa^^ Ero^on
frf. upr m^jrpa . ni:5)£ |rm obeJioicUL. crndT'^opooiui
^ hvplnmtitrj? nnf finU tinmOro. qpiTtfPliiypum 1* pcmr.
trof frftoio. u|ir mxjioppa iclifue* to^ frib: ttiomajw
ipo^jito. (Sracnf (rnmiim. mfi: fann*.a|ir |pajTm-nmr
t)n1. ifpa pops ^Y^pt cm MninoMn. mat anciuA/,
(Jcticnf tirotn. m-iun crnifiliuia.uite |uia^.tifi omfilst-
upcr piww. -jjva pj* (tec ncmn ^^ntnf KtctfcKicc
iimf. aJxk ninr w.apcp LtiiM|p tiuum <w^ mi|*liptfD
nnrnf. -j^ pX drp. [lorpe'lypMcui ^cdimmy. C Jl
jtKi «S. flic tfcUec ttfifrfdioc imctD.ejpwr Lm^
tnann. Stx^l^lki^ iftajm. inirtfWaBtif. Iwtiu*
From Cambridge University ms (Cent, xi) op iELPiiic*8 Latin Grammae,
folio 33 (sp. 1 8 Zupita); wet p. 493 tu^rm.
Conspectus of History of Scholarship, &c.,
in the West, looo — laoo A.D.
lUOy
1000-
1005 b. Lanfranc
1033 b. Aniclm
r. 1050 yf. Salerno
X053 Papiat
1050 Aluelm of Bi*
sate
ioorj-j% Pcinu Da*
miani
107s yf. Leo Manl-
canut
ioso-80 Conatanli-
nus Afer
iosfr-8« Alfanutabp
oil SaTerno
1086-7 Victor 111
(DMiderius of
Mooie Cassino)
1100
nil William of
Apulia
1113 Imeriut of Bo-
logna
mod. Leo Marsi-
canus
1117 d. GroMolano
al^ of Milan
I ia8 jacobus de Ve<
nctia
1150 Alberico of Bo-
logna
1187 d. Gerard of
Cremona
1 190 Godfrey of Vi-
terbo
1 191 Henricus Septi-
melleniis
iiai Burgundio of
laooi
Spain
ioao-70 Avice-
bron
1138 d, Avem-
pace
1130-30 Ray-
mond abp of
Toledo: trans-
lation* from
Arabic by
Joannes His-
Stlcntis and
ondisalvi
1143 Robertus
Ketinentis
ii^S Gerard of
Cremona
1106-98 Aver-
roe*
1135-1004 Mai-
monidet
FftOICO
1004 d. Abbo of Flcury
1010 d. Richer of Rheinu
1009 d. Fulbert of Char-
tres
1034 f. Bee
1045-66 Lanfranc prior
of Bee
1050 d. Rodulfus Glaber
1066 Lanfranc abbot of
Caen
1066-78 Anielm prior of
Dec
1084 f. Carthusians
io88 d. Berengarius of
Tours
1078-93 Anselm abbot of
Bee
1098 f. Cistercians
106 d. Roscellinus
I IS d. Sigebert of Gem-
bloux
115 d. Ivo of Chartres
IIS Radulfus Tortarius
ISO Honorius of Autun
tai d. William of Cham*
pcaux
ia4 d. Guibert of No*
gent
119-S4 yf. Bernard of
Chartres
las d. Marbod of Rennes
134 d. Hildebert of
Tours
137 ScM. Med, Moot-
pcllier
140 Bernard of Quni
079-1149 Abelard
14a d. Hugoof St Victor
14a d. Ordericus Vi-
tal it
1407/. Petrus Helias
146 d. Macarius of
Fleury
153 d. Bernard of Clair-
vaux
145-53 y^' Bernard Sil-
vester of Tours
154 d. William of
Conche>
154 d. Gilbert de la
Porrtfe
156 d. Petrus Venera-
bilit
167 William of Gap
. 1160-70 Univ. Paris
173 d. Richard of St
Victor
174 Matthew of Ven-
aOme
184 lean de Haute\*ille
19a d. Adam of St Victor
Otfmaiiy
1004 d. Widukiad
of Corvey
1017 f. Bamberg
losad. NotkcrLabeo
loas d. Ilemwraid of
Hildesheim
1036 d. Meinwtrk of
Paderborn
10^ d. Hermannus
Contractus
io6od.EkkehardlV
1058-77 >f. Lambert
of HersfeM
1075 Adam of Bremen
im6 d. Immed of
Paderbom
I too Conrad of Hir-
schau
Metellus of Tegem-
sec
11^7-^8 Otto bp of
treihing
ii46;<8Wibaldabboc
of Corvey
1150-90 Emp. Fred-
eric Barbarossa
1185 Saxo Gram-
maticus
1187 Gunther's Li-
furtHUt
1165-93 Herrad of
Landsperg
BritldililM
r. 1030 d. ilClfrk of
£ynsha0
1070-89 Lanfranc
abp of Canlerbiiry
1073 b. OidofficM
VftaJU
"077-93 f- .,
rufjw at St All
under abbot Paul
1003-1100 Anselm
abp of Canterbory
1109 d. Anscelm
1118 d. FlorcBOa of
Worctscer
1 130 Adelard of Baih
114a d. WillUa of
Malmesbury
1147 b. Giraldus
Cambrensis
1134 d. Ge<^&«y of
Monmouth
IIS3 d. Henry of
Huntingdon
1160 SeiioGranuna-
ticus
1170 RobcrtofCridc'
lade
1110-80 John of
Salisbury
1173 Peter of Bids
settles in England
1173? b. Michael Scot
1 1^-83 Simon abbot
of^ St Albans
1154-89 Henry II
1196 Walter Map
archdeacon of Ox-
furd
1108 d. William of
Newburgh
Daniel de Morlai
isood. NigellusWi-
rccker
Contiwmtd /rpm >. 430.
CHAPTER XXVII.
THE ELEVENTH CENTURY.
In France the most notable teacher in the first quarter of the
eleventh century is Fulbert, bishop of Chartres
(d. 1029). One of his admirers describes the chiirh»«'
influence of his teaching as passing through
many channels:
' Gurges altus ut minores solvitur in alveos,...
Sic insignes propagasti per diversa plurimos,...
Quorum quisque prae se tulit quod te usus fuerit*'.
Among the many pupils, who were proud to acknowledge
their indebtedness to his teaching, were Lambert and Adelmann
at Li^ge, Berengarius at Tours, Olbert at Gembloux, Angelraim
at Saint-Riquier, Reginald at Angers, and Domnus at Montmajour-
lez-Arles*. In the middle of the century, Saint-^vroult, S. of
Lisieux in Normandy, was celebrated as a school #
of copyists, which sent skilful transcribers to give
instruction in the art to inmates of other monasteries in France*.
The Norman monastery of Bee flourished under
the rule of Lanfranc^ (io45) ^^^ Anselm (1066),
both of whom came from Northern Italy to Normandy, and were
thence called to England to become archbishops of Canterbury.
> Mabillon, AnaUcta, i 491 (L^n Mtttre, £€oUst 105) ; Clemd, £i9ks dt
Chartreiy 59 f.
* See Index to L^n Mattre; Clenral, 64 f, 79—91.
' Ordericus Vitalis, iii 483, v 589.
^ ib, ii 146.
s. 32
498 LAMBERT OF HERSFELD. ADAM OF BREMEN. [CHAP.
In England the incursions of the Danes, which ended in the
conquest of the island by Canute (1016), had left no leisure for
the pursuits of learning; and the influence of the Norman
Conquest of 1066-71 on the intellectual life of the country did
not take effect until after the close of this century. In the story
of the many ruthless devastations recorded in the Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle, books are mentioned only in connexion with the
plundering of Peterborough by Hereward in 1070 : —
* They took there so much gold and silver, and so many treasures in money
and in raiment, and in books, as no man may tell to another, saying they did
it from affection to the monastery*.
In Germany, the eleventh century saw the foundation of the
Schools of bishopric, library and school of Bamberg (1017),
Bamberg and and a revival of learning in the school of Paderbom.
This revival was due in part to the influence of
Meinwerk, bishop in 1009-36, and still more to that of his
nephew, Immed, bishop in 1052-76, in whose time the authors
studied included Sallust, Virgil, Horace and Statius'. I^tin verse
on historic and other themes was being written with some success ;
but, towards the end of the century, the interest in the Classics
began to abate. This was partly due to the influence of the
monks of Cluni, who insisted on a stricter monastic discipline and
a more complete subservience to the will of the Church, while, in
the absorbing struggle for supremacy between Hildebrand and
the German emperor, the claims of learning fell into abeyance'.
About the middle of the century, the styles of Sallust and Livy
were admirably combined in the Annals of Lambert
Hersfeid; of Hersfeld (d. 1077), who was familiar with
Bremen^ Tcrcncc, Virgil and Horace*, while Sallust and
Lucan were well known to Adam of Bremen, the
author of the Ecclesiastical History of Hamburg (r. 1075), which
is an important authority for the early history of Northern
Europe*.
' Vita Meinwerci in Mon, Germ, Hist, xi 140 (Bursian i 55; incompletely
quoted in Heeren, i 196).
• Bursian, i 58—61.
' f^* i 57 ; Norden, Kumtprosa^ 750 f.
* Bursian, I 58
XXVII.] NOTKER LABEO. HERMANNUS CONTRACTUS. 499
Early in the century we find a distinguished teacher at
St Gallen in the person of Notker Labeo (d. 1022), _
'^ \ /' Notker Labto
also known as Notker 'the German' from his having
translated (or taken part in translating) into that language not
only the Psalms of David but also the Andria of Terence, the
Eclogues of Virgil, and the Distichs of *Cato', together with
Martianus Capella, several treatises of Boethius, and the Latin
version of Aristotle's Categories and De Interpreiatione^, He writes
to the bishop of Sion, on the upper Rhone, to tell him that the
abbot of Reichenau has borrowed the bishop's copy of Cicero's
First Philippic and the commentary on the Topica^ depositing as
security for their return the /Rhetoric of Cicero and of Victorinus ;
and he adds that, if the bishop wants certain books, he must send
more parchment and money for the copyists'. In the same
century a monk of Reichenau, Hermannus 'Con-
tractus' (the 'cripple*, 10 13 — 1054), composed a • contricru"*
Chronicle founded on the Latin translation of
Eusebius and on Cassiodorus and Bede*. The tenth and eleventh
centuries, the golden age of St Gallen, were succeeded by an iron
age in the twelfth century.
Meanwhile, in Italy, where the study of ' grammar ' and poetry
seems never to have entirely died out, young nobles and students
preparing for the priesthood were not unfrequently learning Latin
literature together in private grammar-schools^ conducted either
by lay 'philosophers' or by like-minded clerics, who were regarded
with suspicion by their stricter brethren. One of these liberal
clerics, Anselm of Bisate {c. 1047-56), describes
the Saints and the Muses as struggling for his ^f Bil^te
possession, while he was utterly perplexed as to
which he should prefer : — 'so noble, so sweet, were both companies
> Jourdain, 385 f; Cramer, ii 43; Bursian, i 56. The timnsUtions of
Capelia. Boethius and Aristotle were publbhed by Graff in 1837, and also by
Hattemcr. Denkrn. d. Mittetalters^ iii 163—371 (Prantl, Logik, ii* 61 0-
« J. Grimm, kL ^chriften, v 190; P. Piper, Die Schriften Notkers u, seiner
Schitle^ i 861 (Nonlen, 708). "
' Bursian, i 56 f.
* Giesebrccht, De Litt. Studiis apud Italos^ p. 15 ( = 19 of Ilal. trans.);
Ozanam, Doatmenis In^dits (\%io)^ 1 — 79.
32—2
500 ANSELM OF BISATE. DESIDERIUS. ALFANUS. [CHAP.
that I could not choose either of them; so that, were it possible,
I had rather both than either '^ In the same century, Desiderius,
the abbot of Monte Cassino, who became Pope as
DesideriuB
Victor III (1086-7), was causing his monks to
make copies of Horace, and Ovid's Fasti^ as well as Seneca and
several treatises of Cicero'; Cicero, Sallust and Virgil were
familiar to Leo Marsicanus, the Chronicler of Monte Cassino*;
and the composition of Latin hexameters and elegiacs, and of
lyrics after the model of Horace and Boethius, was successfully
cultivated by Alfanus, a monk of the same monastery, who was
archbishop of Salerno from 1058 to Io85^ The strict disci-
plinarian, Petnis Damiani (d. 1072), protests in a narrow-minded
way against the 'grammatical' studies of the monks of his time,
who 'cared little for the Rule of Benedict in comparison with the
rules of Donatus'*; he admits, however, that 'to study poets and
philosophers with a view to making the wit more keen and better
fitted to penetrate the mysteries of the Divine Word, is to spoil
the Egyptians of their treasures in order to build the Tabernacle
of God". In sacred verse he is best represented by the hymn on
' the joys and the glory of Paradise ', beginning with the words : —
Adptrennis viiaefontem \
Most of our evidence as to the knowledge of Greek in this
century is derived from certain points of contact
centur/x? between the West and Constantinople. Early in
the century, Greek artists came to the Old Rome
from the New to cast the bronze doors of the ancient basilica of
' St Paul's outside the Walls', and Greek characters were used to
inscribe the names of the prophets adorning those doors*. Greek,
^ Rhetorimachia^ ii; Diimmler, Anselm der PeripaUtiker^ p. 39 (Poole's
Medieval Thought^ 81).
' ChroH, Cassin. iii c. 63 in Muratori iv 474 ; Giesebrechtt 34 (59 f Ital.
trans.) ; Balzani's Chroniclers^ 160 f.
* d. r. II 16; Pertz, Afon. vii ; Balzani, 164 — 173 (Leo OstUnsis).
^ Giesebrecht 54, 66—95 (in Ital. ed. only); Ozanam, /. r., 955 — 370;
Shipa, Alfano /, Arcivescovo di Salerno^ p. 45 (Salerno, 1880).
* Opusc» xiii c. II ; Migne, cxlv 306.
* Opusc. xxxii c. 9; Migne, cxlv 560.
' Trench, Sacred Latin Poetry, 315; J. M. Neale, Hymns (1865), a — 15.
' Gradenigo, Letteratura GrecO'Italiana (Brescia, 1759), p. 99.
XXVII.] P API AS. BENZO. SOI
as well as Latin, was in use in the services at St Peter's*. A
patriarch of Venice, Dominico Marengo, who was sent to Con-
stantinople to promote the reunion of the Churches, addressed
the bishop of Antioch in a Greek letter (1053), which is still
extant*. Thirteen years later, an Italian known as John Italus
was lecturing at Constantinople on Plato and Aristotle, and on
Proclus and Porphyry*. Meanwhile, in the literature of text-
books, we find Papias the Lombard {c. 1053)*
compiling a dictionary of Latin, in which he marks
the quantity and gives the gender and the inflexions of the words,
but draws no distinction between the ancient classical forms and
the barbarous forms in modem use, and cares little for matters of
etymology. But he invariably gives the Latin rendering of any
Greek word which he has occasion to quote; he even transcribes
five lines of Hesiod {Tkeo^, 907-11), and translates them into
Latin hexameters*. It has, however, been suspected that this is
an interpolation due to the editor of the Venice edition (1485)*.
The work includes definitions of legal terms, with excerpts from
earlier glossaries and from manuals of the liberal arts, including
the current text-books on logic ^ It was still in use in the six-
teenth century. About 106 1 Benzo, bishop of Alba, in his
panegyric on the emperor Henry IV, makes a
display of his Greek and Latin learning by naming
Pindar and Homer, as well as Terence, Virgil, Lucan, Statius,
Horace {Horaiius noster\ and Quintilian* ; but it is probable that
his acquaintance with Greek was solely due to his South-Italian
origin*. Evidence of Italian interest in Greek literature is traced
by the Laurentian librarian, Bandini, in the Greek MSB of the
tenth and eleventh centuries belonging to the library of the Bene-
dictine monks in Florence'*. Italy claims two students of Greek
1 Gradenigo, Letttrtktura Crtio- Italians (Bretcltt 1769)* P* 3i*
• ib. 40.
• p. 403 supra; Prantl's LogiJk, ii* 301.
• Tiraboschi, iii 339 f; HalUm, Lir I 74*; p. 639 in/nt.
• Gradenigo, 38.
• Haase, Di MidU Aevi Studiis PhiMogUit, 31 n.
^ Prantl. Logik, ii« 70. • Graf, Roma, H ip.
• Dresdner. Kultur- u, SiUmgisehiehii, 195.
>• Specimen litt. Ftonntinoi /. jrr, i (1748)1 p. xx^i*
502 LAN FRANC AND ANSELM. [CHAP.
in the persons of Lanfranc and Anselm, both of whom were
of Lombard race. Lanfranc of Pavia (b. c, 1005),
•iid*AnBciin ^^^ Studied the liberal arts and law in Italy, spent
many years at Bee in Normandy, and was abbot of
Caen (1066) and archbishop of Canterbury (1070-89). He is
said to have studied Greeks Bee was also (1060-93) the monastic
retreat of another future archbishop of Canterbury, Anselm of
Aosta (d. 1 109), who shows an interest in Greek by quoting the
opinions of the Greeks^ by inquiring for copies of their ivritings*,
and by selecting Greek names for the titles of two of his works^
monologion and prosiogion^. He recommends his pupils to study
Virgil and other profane authors with due reserve*.
Before turning to the history of Scholasticism in connexion
with the name of Anselm, we may briefly notice that, early in the
eleventh century, a Greek Lectionary was copied at Cologne for
the Abbey of St Denis (1021)'; also that, among the authorities
for Norman history, Dudo of St Quentin uses not a few Greek
words in the midst of the strange medley of prose and verse
in which he panegyrises the early dukes of Normandy, while a
more important writer, William of Poitiers, is familiar with Sallust
and Caesar^. In the same age, the monastery of Hildesheim rose
to distinction under Bernward, while that of Fulda was on the
decline in 1066. In the second half of the century, St Gallen and
Hirschau were continuing to flourish, Hirschau becoming specially
famous as a school of copyists'. ■ The latter part of the century
saw the foundation of two new religious Orders, or new branches
^ Migne, d 30 B; on Lanfranc*s studies, cp. Crozals (1877), c i, 1. His
influence may be traced in a * prickly ' style of writing probably derived from
the ' I^mbard ' hand which he apparently introduced at I^ and Caen, and
afterwards at Canterbury (M. K. James, Sandars Lecturt^ 19 May, 1903, and
Ancient Libraries of Canterbury ^ p. xxviii). See faaimile on p. 503.
* Migne, clviii 1144C
> ib. iisoC.
* Tougard, p. 55.
* Ep, i 55, exceptis his in quibus aliqua turpitudo sonat. Cp. Migne, clvi
851 f.
* Lectionary of Epistles and Gospels^ now in Paris Library (Omont, AtSS
Grecs Datis^ pi. xiv).
' Korting, Litt, /tai, mi 85-7.
' lieeren, i 134^
XXVII.] CARTHUSIANS AND CISTERCIANS. 503
of the great Benedictine Order, the Carthusians (1084) and the
Cistercians (1098). The Rule of the Carthusians enjoins the
duty of keeping useful books and diligently transcribing them.
Guigo (1133), the fifth abbot of the Grande
Chartreuse near Grenoble, who is described by .^d ciJttrcuTnt
Trithemius as a man of learning in secular as well
as sacred literature, insists on special diligence in the work of
a copyist ^ The Cistercians distinguished themselves in the
following century by their skill in calligraphy'; but neither of
these Orders made any provision for schools open to pupils
unconnected with their monasteries'.
' Heeren, i 154 ; q>. J. W. Clark, Care 0/ Books ^ 69.
* ib, 331 ; cp. Hist, Lift, dt la France^ vii 11; J. W. Clark, 70, 84-9.
* On education in cent, x— xi, cp. Schmidts Gtsch, dtr Ertuhung^ II i
133 — 58 (where i^Ifric is strangely omitted).
^.in^doTriiim dWim (m i^cet^jefn tkJt'Si^e^L ^ turner pt^f^t^ ccrUiif
tfWBWtyhMf Jfanwi^'Atytt.qwufMijf iiitii| tynimriiy pa|—i^<fif iiliiiitftr
11CI jjivufsmtncttpr imirn*iHapttn*^aBiiiMifln#fMnnR wtMiirMrfnranXvsJM
^^p*WH^rw^^^P^»^^P« ^^^^^^^vW w^^^w^mwW w^^^^w^^ "
cm4f . ottita^ MV^pTrNVi iprvplf
Specimehk or CffiiitT Church, Canterbury, hand {c 1070-84), from
the la»t few leaves of a beautifally written XI century MS of DurtiaU
(in a C.hritI Cliurch hand) and Canons (apparently in an lulian hand),
given l»y l^anfranc to Christ Charch, Canterbury, and by Whitgift to
IVinity 0>llegc, Cambridge ; Mt B 16. 44 (M. R. James, CataUgui of
Wetttrn MSS, \ 54of). Sifc nUher larger than \ of the originaL See
further in Uti 0/ Illmirati^ni,
CHAPTER XXVIII.
THE TWELFTH CENTURY. — THE SCHOOLMEN
AND THE CLASSICS.
While John the Scot was a precursor of Scholasticism, an
important place in the first period of its history
Schoolmen is occupicd by Anselm. It may therefore be con-
aMBicB venient, at this stage of our survey, to glance at
that history, so far as it has points of contact with
the study of Greek or Latin texts, and to endeavour to indicate,
in the case of the leading Schoolmen, the extent of their acquaint-
ance with the Classics ^
The term axoXaariKo^ is first found in a letter addressed by
Theophrastus to his pupil Phanias'; and the title of doctores
schoiastid was given to the teachers of theology and the liberal
arts, and particularly to the teachers of dialectic, in the Caroline
age. Scholasticism may be described as a reproduction of ancient
' Among the books consulted in this connexion are Ueberweg's Crundriss
der Gesch, der Philosophu (ed. 8 Heinze, 1894), E.T. 1875; Haur^au, La
Philosophie Scolastique^ ed. 1 (1871); PrantI, Gesch, der Logik im Abemilamde
(1855-70); Maurice, Mediaeval Philosophy (1857; new ed. 1870); Milman's
Lat, Christ^ ix 100 — 161; also Tables vi, vii in F. Schultze's Stammbaum der
Philosophie (1890), and Prof. Seth in Enc, Brit, xxi 417 — ^431 (where the
Histories by Kaulich and Stockl are quoted). Among the monographs 00
portions of the subject are Jourdain's Recherches (ed. 1843); Rousselot's J&tmks
(1840-1); Cousin's Introd. to AMard (1836), reprinted in Frag, Phil, ii;
Haur^au's Singidarites Hist, et Lilt, (1861); and R. L. Poole's Illustrations
of the History of Medirval Thought (1884); and, among more general works,
Erdmann's Grutuiriss der Cesch, der Philosophie, ed. 3. 1878, E.T. 1898", i
n 149 — 995 ; and Schmid's Cesch, der Emiehung^ 11 i 181 — 308.
* Diog. Laclrt. v 50.
CH. XXVIII.] THE SCHOLASTIC PROBLEM. 505
philosophy under the control of ecclesiastical doctrine \ Its
history (including that of its precursors) falls into two main
divisions, (i) the accommodation of Aristotelian logic and Neo-
Platonic philosophy to the doctrine of the Church, from the time
of Joannes Scotus (d. 875) to that of Amalrich (d. 1207) and his
followers, i.e. from century ix to the beginning of century xiii ;
(2) the accommodation of the Aristotelian philosophy, which had
now become fully knoum^ to the dogmas of the Church, from the
time of Alexander of Hales (d. 1245) to the end of the Middle
Ages.
John the Scot had affirmed the identity of true religion with
true philosophy', but he interpreted the teaching of the Church
in the light of 'Dionysius the Areopagite', whose doctrines he
wrongly supposed to be those of the early Christians, whereas
they were really those of the Neo-Platonists of the latter part of
the fifth century*. Believing that the 'general* existed before the
'particular', he practically held the Platonic doctrine of ideas in
the form afterwards expressed by the phrase, universalia ante rem.
On the other hand, those whom he describes as dialeciici held
that individual objects were substances in a primary sense, while
species and genera were substances only in a secondary way. This
doctrine was derived partly from the dialectical works of Aristotle,
and from Porphyry's Introduction^ as translated and expounded by
Boethius; and partly from works attributed to St Augustine.
Porphyry's Introduction^ as translated by Boethius, mentions the
fiv^ predicables, i.e. the notions of genus, species, difference,
property, and accident It also touches on the question whether
genera and species have a substantial existence, or whether they
exist merely as mental conceptions. This question, and others
arising out of it, had been suggested to Porphyry by the
• ' The scholastic philosophy was an attempt to codify all existing knowledge
under laws or formulae analogous to the general principles of jastice. It was
no attempt... to bind all knowledge with chains to the rock of S. Peter, or even
to the rock of Aristotle... Truth is one and indivisible, and the medieval
philosophy found its work in reconciling all existing knowledge logically with
the One Truth which it believed itself to postesa*. Stabbt, Lteturet #m
Medieval... History^ Lect. xi, «ii'.
• p. 475 '"/«»•
• p. 369 supra.
506 REALISM AND NOMINALISM. [CHAP.
Metaphysics of Aristotle, by the Pctrmenides of Plato, and by the
teaching of his own master, Plotinus. Porphyry, however, de-
clined to discuss them, but this passage of Porphyry, as translated
by Boethius^ gave the first impulse to the long controversy
between Realism and Nominalism, which continued until the
revival of learning. 'A single ray borrowed from the literature
of the ancient world called Scholasticism into being; the complete
revelation of that literature extinguished it".
Plato's doctrine (as stated by Aristotle) that 'universals' have
an independent existence and are 'before' individual objects
(whether in point of rank alone, or in point of time as well) is
extreme Realism. Its formula is univcrsalia sunt realia ante rem.
The Aristotelian view that ' universals ', while possessing a real
existence, exist only in individual objects, is moderate Realism.
Its formula is universalia sunt realia in re. Nominalism, on the
other hand, implies that individuals alone have a real existence,
that genera and species are only subjective combinations of similar
elements, united by the aid of the same concept, which we express
by one and the same word {yox or nomen). Nominalism has two
varieties, stress being laid in (i) on the subjective nature of the
concept, and in (2) on the identity of the word employed to
denote the objects comprehended under the concept, (i) is
Conceptualism, and (2) is extreme Nominalism; and the formula
of both is universalia sunt nomina post rem. All these views
appear in different degrees of development in the ninth and tenth
centuries.
The first period of Scholasticism began in Platonic Realism
and ended in Conceptualism ; while the second began in Aristo-
telian Realism and ended in Nominalism. Thus, in the first
period, the Realism of Joannes Scotus (d. 875), and tliat of
Anselm (d. 1109), which stands in contrast with the early
Nominalism of Roscellinus (d. 1106), are followed by the Realism
of William of Champ>eaux (d. 1121) and the Conceptualism of
Abelard (d. 1142). In the second, the Aristotelian Realism of
the Franciscans, Alexander of Hales (d. 1245) and Bonaventura
(d. 1274), and of the Dominicans, Albertus Magnus (d. 1280) and
' p. 139 supra.
' Couiin quoted on p. 419 (cp. Mullinger*s Canibridg§^ i 50).
XXVIII.] ARISTOTLE. 507
Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274), is criticised by Roger Bacon (d. 1294)
and Duns Scotus (d. 1308), who are succeeded by the great
Nominalist, William of Ockham (d. 1347).
Until the fourth decad of the twelfth century, the only logical
writings of the ancients known in the Middle Ages ^ .
. , . ^ , ^ , r ArUtoUt
were Aristotle s Categortes and De Interprttatwne
(in the translation of Boethius); Porphyry's Introduction to the
Categories^ as translated by Victorinus and Boethius ; the
Augustinian Principia Dialecticae^ and the Pseudo-Augustinian
Categoriae Decern \ Martianus Capella, and Cassiodorus On
Dialectic ; and the following works of Boethius : — his com-
mentaries on the above translations of Porphyry and on Aristotle
De Interpretatione and Cicero's Topica^ with certain minor works
on syllogisms etc. Besides these there was Isidore. Thus of the
five parts of Aristotle's Organon^ the Categories and De Inter-
pretatione alone were known, while the Analytia^ Topia and
Sophistici Elenchi remained (for the time being) unknown. The
Analytics and Topics (as translated by Boethius) were unknown to
Sigebert of Gembloux (d. ma)*; they came into notice after
1 1 28 (the date of the Venice transition by Jacobus Clericus)', the
Prior Analytics being discussed in 1132* by Adam du Petit-Pont
(afterwards bishop of St Asaph), and cited by Gilbert de la Porrie
(d. 1 154)*. The whole of the Organon was known to John of
Salisbury (in 1159), while the Physics and Metaphysics came into
notice about i20o'. Meanwhile, Plato was represented by the
Latin rendering of part of the Timaeus executed by Chalcidius
(cent, iv), which included some account of the theory of Ideas*;
by the statement of Plato's opinions in Aristotle; by the passages
quoted in Cicero, Augustine and Macrobius; and by the account
* Prantl, Logik^ ii* 77, aiif.
• P- 535 i^fra-
• Cousin, Frag, Phil, \\ 333 f; Prtntl, ii* 104.
♦ Prantl, ii* 105, 117 f.
* Amable Jourdain, Recherxha €riii^uis sur VAgi it F^rigine ies trtulucHtnt
latines (CAriUoU^ d sur Us commentairts gnes 9u arahts emphyh par la
docteurs scoiastiques (1817), eel. 1 (Charles Jourdain, 1843). Couiin, frag*
Phil, \\ 55 — 63 ; Haur^au, i 90 — \%\\ Prmntl, Ziyii, U c. 13 and 14 ; Sumnuiry
in Uchcrwcg, i 367 E.T.
* 18 A, 48 B (trans, ends with 53 c).
S08 LANFRANC. ANSELM. [CHAP.
of his tenets given by Apuleius De Dogmate Platanis. The
Fhaedo and the Meno had been translated about 1160', but were
little known.
Late in the tenth and early in the eleventh century, Logic was
eagerly studied at Fulda and Wiirzburg, and at St Gallen under
Notker Labeo^; also, in France, in the eleventh century, by
Gerbert and his pupil, Fulbert of Chartres (d. 1 029), and by the
latter's pupil, Berengarius of Tours (d. 1088). Berengarius cast
contempt on the traditional authority of Priscian,
i^ndYSnfranc* Donatus and Boethius", and preferred the study of
the arts of Grammar and Logic to that of the
ancient authors^ thus anticipating a conflict which will attract our
attention in the sequel \ He also anticipates one of the great
scholastic debates of the future in his attack on the doctrine
afterwards known as that of transubstantiation, which was defended
by Lanfranc (d. 1089). But, in this controversy, both the con-
tending parties (unlike the Schoolmen of the future) appealed to
authority, and not to reason*. Reason subordinated to authority
was the guiding principle of Lanfranc's great successor, Anselm
(d. 1109), the champion of Realism and also of
and*A?i«im* ^^ normal tenets of the Church against that early
Nominalist, Roscellinus (d. 1106)*, whose Nominal-
ism led him to tritheism. 'The Platonically conceived proof of
the being of God contained in the Mofioiogium shows that Anselm's
doctrine of the universals as substances in things {unhfersalia in
re) was closely connected in his mind with the thought of the
universalia ante rem^ the exemplars of perfect goodness and truth
and justice, by participation in which all earthly things are judged
to possess those qualities. In this way he rises like Plato to the
absolute Goodness, Justice and Truth, and then proceeds in
* By ' Euericus' Aristippui, archdeacon of Catania (RashdalPs UnwcrsUUs^
ii 744). The tram, of the Phatdo ii found in Paris catalo^ructi of 1350 and
M90 (V. I^ Clerc, UisL Litt, dc la Frame an 14' /., 415, cp. Cousin, /Vi^.
PAit, ii 466). The translator is identified by Koie {I/ermes, i, 1866, 373-89)
with Henricus Aristippus, possibly the ' learned Greek * with whom John of
Salisbury studied the Organon^ probably at Beneventum (p. 510 infra).
* p. 499 supra. ' Prantl, Logik^ ii' 73 n.
« End of c. xxxii. ' Cp. Poole's Medieval Thought, loa f.
* Prantl, Logih, ii* 78—96.
XXVIII.] ABELARD AND THE CLASSICS. 509
Neo-platonic fashion to a deduction of the Trinity as involved
in the idea of the Divine Word'*.
Nominalism made its first prominent appearance in the latter
part of the eleventh century', when certain Schoolmen ascribed to
Aristotle the doctrine that Logic was concerned only with the
right use of words and that genera and species were only subjective,
and disputed the real existence of 'universals'. These Schoolmen
were sometimes called the ^modern dialecticians', because they
opposed the traditional realistic interpretation of Aristotle. The
extreme Nominalism of Roscellinus and the Realism of William
of Champeaux (d. 1121)' were impartially opposed by a celebrated
pupil of both, Abelard (d. 1143), who maintained
the moderate form of Nominalism since known as
Conceptualisml Abelard went further than his predecessors in the
application of dialectic to theology. In dialectic he regards Aristotle
as the highest authority: — *if we suppose Aristotle, the leader of the
Peripatetics, to have been in fault, what other authority shall we
receive in matters of this kind?' The only thing that Abelard cannot
tolerate in Aristotle is his polemic against Plato. Abelard prefers,
by a favourable interpretation of Plato, to pronounce both to be
in the right'. His voluminous writings include glosses on
Porphyry's Introduction^ on Aristotle's Categories and De Inter-
pretatione^ and also on the Topica of Boethius*. He was
acquainted with no Greek works except in Latin translations,
but he advises the nuns of *the Paraclete' to study Greek and
Hebrew, as well as Latin, and points to the example set by their
mother superior, Heloissa'. Plato' he knew only through the
quotations in Aristotle, Cicero, Macrobius, Augustine and
Boethius. He states that he could not learn Plato's dialectic
from Plato's own writings, because the latter had not been
translated'. He certainly used the translation of the Timaeus
' Seth in Enc, Brit, xxi 493.
* On ' precursors of Nominalism ', cp. Poole, 336 f.
* Michaud (1867); Prantl, ii i3o*f.
* Poole, i4of.
* Dial, pp. 904-6 (Uebcrwcg, i 391 E.T.).
* Ueberweg, i 388. ^ Cousin, Rrag. Phil, ii 51.
* Inst, Theol, \ 17 ; ii 17 etc.
* Dial, 105 f; Cousin, FTag, Phil, ii 50—56.
510 ABELARD AND THE CLASSICS. [CHAP.
by Chalcidius'; he is familiar with the ' pattem-forms, which
Plato calls the ideas', and he knows that 'Plato conceived of
God as an artificer who planned and ordered everything before he
made it". He is also inclined to accept Plato's exclusion of
poets from his commonwealth, holding that their study, however
necessary, should not be too long continued*. He states that
Aristotle's Physics and Metaphysics had not been translated \
His knowledge of Aristotle was confined to the Categories and De
iHterpretatione^ and the Analytica Priora in some other translation
than that of Boethius^ Besides these, his text-books include
Porphyry's Introduction^ four treatises of Boethius*, and the
writings ascribed to 'Hermes Trismegistus '. But before com-
posing his Dialectica^ which is his most permanent contribution
to the advancement of learning (and must be earlier than 1132),
he certainly had an indirect knowledge of three of the logical
treatises of Aristotle, which gradually became known after 1128'.
The anonymous treatise De Intellectibus^ once ascribed to Abelard^
implies an acquaintance with a translation of the Analytica
Posteriora* different from that of Boethius. While his strictly
orthodox opponent, Bernard of Clairvaux, looked with suspicion
on all human learning, Abelard maintained the importance of
secular literature as an indispensable aid to sacred studies'.
When he foresaw the likelihood of his own condemnation for
heresy, he gave proof of his familiarity with the Latin Classics
by turning to Gilbert de la Porr^e (who apparently lay under
similar suspicions), and applying to Gilbert the line of Horace: —
'nam tua res agitur, paries cum proximus ardet'^*^.
Even so strong an opponent of secular learning as Peter the
> Intr. ad Tfuol. dxxviii 1007, 1013 Migne (Tim, 17c, 34 c).
• Intr. ad TheoL ii 109 (Poole, 171).
» Theol. Chr, ii 445 (Poole, 169).
^ DialecL p. loo Cousin.
' Prantl, ii^ loof.
* Dial, i4or, libros Divisionum cum Syllugismis tam categoricis quam
hypotheticis (Ueberweg, i 390).
^ p. 507 supra ; Prantl, ii' 101 f.
' Prantl, ii' 104 n. 19, and 106 f. Ueberweg, i 396.
' Poole, 169.
" i Ep. 18, 84; ib, 134.
XXVIII.] BERNARD OFCHARTRES. WILLIAM OF CONCHES. 5 1 1
Venerable, in breaking to Helo'issa the news of the death of
Abelard, charitably describes him as *ever to be named with
honour as the servant of Christ and verily Christ's philosopher '^
He has also left his mark on the history of European education.
The great popularity of the lectures given in Paris by this
eloquent, brilliant, vain, impulsive and self-confident disputant,
has led to his being regarded as the precursor of the time when
Paris became the School of Europe*.
Bernard of Chartres (d. c. 1126), William of Conches (d. 11 54)
and Adelard of Bath (/7. 11 30) held a Platonism
modified by Christianity, while they maintained the ^chartii'
authority of Aristotle with regard to our knowledge
of the world of sense. ' In comparison with the ancients, we stand
(says Bernard, of himself and his contemporaries) like dwarfs on
the shoulders of giants *•. Bernard, * the most perfect Platonist of
his age'*, was a believer in the essential harmony of Plato and
Aristotle. He looked on learning as the fruit of humble and
patient research, pursued through a tranquil life of poverty and
seclusion from public affairs'. The fame of his School of Classical
Scholarship, and the story of his method, still live in the pages
of John of Salisbury*. Next to Bernard of Chartres,
his pupil William of Conches (d. 1154), who ^<|l,"cheJ'
taught at Chartres and Paris, is regarded by John
of Salisbury as the most accomplished scholar of his time'. He
produced a commentary on the Titnaeus of Plato and on the
Consolaiio of Boethius, with a comprehensive but incomplete work
* Poole, 166.
* On Abelard, cp. (besides Haur^au and Ueberweg) R^masat (1845);
Prantl, ii* 161—105; Milman, Lat. Christ, Iv 316 — 368; Poole's Meduval
Thought, 136 — 176, and the literature there quoted (p. 137); also Compayr^
(1893), J. McCabe (1901), and Rashdall'i Universities, i 48 — 57.
* Quoted by John of Salisbury, Met, iii 4, and (without name) by Peter of
Blois, Ep. 91.
* Met. iv 35.
> ' mens humilis, studium quaerendi, vita quieta, | fcmtiniam taciturn,
paupertas, terra aliena, | haec reserare solent multis obacura legendo'; quoted
and expounded by John of Salisbury, FoHereUkut, vit 13, and by Hugo of
St Victor (d. 1141).
* Met, i 14; Qerval, Scales de Chartra^ 158 f, 180 f, 948 f ; in/rm p. 519.
^ ib. i 5, ' grammaticus opulentissimus '.
512 ADELARD. GILBERT. OTTO OF FREISING. [CHAP.
on Philosophy^ in which Galen is quoted, while words boirowed
from Greek are not rare*. This work was reduced to a more
orthodox form in his Dragmaticon^ where, in regard to his
relations towards Plato, he says of himself, 'Christianus sum,
non Academicus". In the same age the great
^flluf *"' traveller, Adelard of Bath (c. 1130), visited Spain,
Greece, Asia Minor and Egypt. He was the first
to translate Euclid from Arabic into Latin ; he also endeavoured
to reconcile the opinions of Plato and Aristotle on the question of
* universals '•. A contemporary pupil of Bernard, Gilbert de la
Porr^e (r. 1075 — 1 154), the foremost logician among
°"pSIii*c ** ^^^ Realists of this century, was the author of a
commentary on Boethius De Trinitate^ and of a
work on the last six of the Categories which was printed in the
earliest Latin editions of Aristotle. He was the first ivriter after
Boethius and Isidore, who was recognised in the Middle Ages
as an authority on Logic \ He cites the Analytics as already
generally knovm*. His pupil. Otto of Freising
PKUing (^- "5^)» w^ ^^^ o^ ^^^ ^^^ to introduce into
Germany the Topica^ Analytica and SophisHci
Elenchi^ possibly in the translation by Boethius'; but he is far
more famous as the faithful counsellor and as the sagacious
historian of the earlier exploits of his distinguished nephew,
Frederic Barbarossa'.
Bernard of Chartres, the chancellor of 11 19 to 11 36, was
succeeded by Gilbert de la Porr^e, who held that office from
about 1126 to 1141, and was afterwards bishop of Poitiers from
1 1 43 to his death in 1154. In the breadth of his intellectual
interests, and in his power of bringing all of them to bear on
any subject he had in hand, Gilbert was true to the traditions of
' Hist, Liu. de la France^ xii 466.
* vi 306; llaur^au, i 43of; Prantl, ii* 117 f; Poole, 124 — 131; Clerval,
181 r, 164 f.
* Dt Eodem et Diverse (c, 1 105-16); Haur^au, i 359 f; Wiistenfeld,
GottiMgen AbhandL 1877, pp. 10—13.
^ Poole, 131-5; 179—100; Berthaud (Poitiers, 1891); Clerval, 163 f, 161 f.
' Liber Sex Principiorum^ ed. 1551 (Jourdain, p. 19).
* Ragevinus, Gesta Frid. iv 11, Pertz, Mon, xx 451 (Prantl, ii' 105, 119).
' Balzani's Chroniders^ 149-56.
XXVIII.] THEODORIC OF CHARTRES. 513
Bernard'. His successor as chancellor was Bernard's younger
brother Theodoric, who was appointed in 1141 and
died c. 1 150-5. He is known as the author of the '^^z^^^^
following works: — (i) a philosophic treatise dt sex
durum operibus^ being an attempt to reconcile the Biblical account
of the Creation with the views of Plato in the Titnaem*\ (2) a
commentary on the Ad Herennium • ; (3) a survey of the Seven
Liberal Arts in two vast volumes filling in all 11 90 pages, which
he bequeathed to the Chapter of Chartres, where it is still to be
seen in the public library ^ In this work, probably written about
1 141, he deals (under the head of DiaUctu) with all the treatises
in the Organon except the Later Analytics^ and is among the first
of the mediaeval writers to attempt to popularise their contents*.
John of Salisbury, who tells us that he attended his lectures on
Rhetoric ' without much profit, describes him as artium studiosis"
simus investigator^. He has been identified as the keen disputant
mentioned in the Metamorphosis Goiiae (1141): — the 'doctor
Carnotensis, | cujus lingua vehemens truncat velut ensis". In
1 144 Rodolphus of Bruges, a pupil of Theodoric, and of Hermann
the Dalmatian (one of the early translators from Arabic into
Latin), sent him from Toulouse a rendering of Ptolemy's Plani-^
sphere with a flattering dedication'; and, between 1145 ^'^^ ii53»
Bernard Silvester of Tours dedicated his celebrated treatise De
Mundi Universitate to Theodoric in the following terms: —
* John of Salisbury, Hist, Ponti/iealis^ xii p. 536 (Poole, ui).
* Paris MS 3584; Haur^tt, Notices et Extraits, xxii {7) 167; Clerval,
£co/es He Chartres^ ^54~9*
' Wattcnbach in 5. Ber, Bayr, Akad. 187a, p. 581 ; P. Thomas in
MHanges Graux^ 41.
* Clerval, V Enseignement des Arts Libiraux it Chartres etit Paris,,, d^a^
rEptateuchon de Thierry (1893), and J&coUs (1895), a«o— a4a First identified
in t888 by the Abb^ Clerval, who showed me the MS at Chartres in April,
1903. It is written in double columns, in a bold and dear hand; but the
Greek words (borrowed from Priscian) are somewhat inaccurately spelt.
• Clerval, J^coles^ 944 f.
• Met, n 10. y Met, i 5.
' Metamorphosis Goiiae, 189 (p. 98 ed. Wright) ; Haar^tii, MAm, detAead.
des Inscr, xxviii (1), 1876, aa6.
• WUstcnfcld, Gottingen Adhandl, 1877, 53 ; Clerval, £coles, 171.
s- 33
514 BERNARD SILVESTER OF TOURS. [CHAP.
* Terrico, veris scientiarum dtulis Doctori famosissimo, Bemardus
Silvestris opus suum '. The perusal of the rest of the dedication^
is hardly needed to convince us that Bernard Silvester is not the
same as Bernard of Chartres, the brother of Theodortc. Theodoric
was succeeded as chancellor by a third Bernard, Bernard of
Mo^lan, who, like the brothers Bernard and Theodoric of
Chartres, was of Breton birth, and ended his days in his native
land as bishop of Quimper (1159 — 1167)'.
Bernard Silvester (or Silvestris) is definitely connected with
Tours in the following couplet written by his pupil Matthew
of Vend6me : —
Bernard
Silvester 'me docuit dictare dectis Turonense magistri
ofTourt Silvestris, studii gemma, scolani honor*';
and, in his PoUtria^ the same pupil quotes as in libra Cosmographiag
Ihronensis, a couplet which is found in the D^ Mundi Uni-
versitate of Bernard Silvester, the date of which is determined by
its reference to the pontificate of another Bernard, Eugenius III
(1145-53). Bernard Silvester is described as follows by Henri
d'Andely in the Bataiiie des Sept Arts (328 f) :—
' Dernardin li Sauvages,
Qui connoissoit toz les langages
Des esciences et des arts'.
1 Reprinted from Barach's text by Clerval, 110, who draws no inference
from the terms of the dedication. The tone is clearly not that of a brother.
* Bernard of Chartres was formerly identified with Bernard Silvester {Hisi,
LUL xii 161), and both of them with Bernard of Mo^lan, bishop of Quimper
(Haureau, Comptes Rtndus^ Accui. des Inscr, 1873, 75, and Poole, 114 f ). But
it has since been made clear by Clerval (Lettres ChrHUnnes^ v 393) and
admitted by Haureau (Mhn, Accui. Inscr, xxxi (1) 1884, 77—104), tliat there
were three different persons:— (i) Bernard of Chartres (d. c, 1116-30); (a) B.
Silvester of Tours (/. n 45-53); and (3) B. of Moclan, bp of Quimper
(d. 1167). C. V. Langlois, BibL de Vicole des charies, 1893, 137-50, still
identifies (i) and (1). Haur^au's date for the death of (i), 'soon after 1 141 ', iat
corrected by Clerval, ^coUs, 1895, 158 f.
* IIaur<fau, Alhn, 1884, 99. Bernard's Summa Diciaminum^ a manual of
instruction in writing Latin letters, was composed in verse, probably at Tours,
in or after 1153. It was abridged in prose by a canon of Meung (Langlois,
/. i-. «5-37)-
XXVIII.] BERNARD SILVESTER OF TOURS. 515
Bernard was a scholar of a musing, meditative type, who, in his
two short books On the Unwersi i(entitled the Mqpuosmus and the
Micro€9smus respectively)^ supplies us with a work on philosoj^cal
Mythology, mainly founded on the Jtmamsy and written in a
somewhat pagan spirit Like the Consdatio of Boethius, it
consists of prose varied with verse. The prose is concise and
obscure, white the verse is vigorous, and is suggestive of a wide
knowledge of the classical poets. Most of the nine poems are in
elegiacs, and only one in hexameters. Notwithstanding an able
writer's opinion that the model of the author of these poems was
Lucretius*, they supply no certain proof of any knowledge of
that poet ; the rhythm of the hexameters is clearly that of Lucan,
while the vocabulaiy is mainly that of Ovid*. The work was
ranked by Eberhard of Bethune^ next to the CansabUk of
Boethius and the Saiyriam of Martianus Capella. Its author is
characterised by Gervase of Tilbury as i^pnq^W, both as a 'versifier'
and as a 'philosopher'*. Bernard also wrote an allegorical com-
mentary on the first half of the Aineid^^ as well as an exposition
of the Edoguts of Theodulus, and a prose and verse rendering of
> Di Mundi UnivenUmU, ed. Buach and Wrobd (Imnbrack, 1876).
' Poole, 118, 919 n.
' My opinion is ooafinaned by that of Mr J. D. Dofi^ wlio, after eiamining
the whole work at my request, liat noted reminiieenees of Ovid, Md. i 85
(p. 55, 1. 3o)andi4iM. i5,aif(p.69,l.3); alioof Jnv«iial,iiit03f (p. 16,1.41)
and y 95 (p. 17, 1. 68). In the vrmr, be finds no certain tiaoe of Lacretfan,
but he notices an apparent pamllel to Lncr. iil igf fai the ibOowiag passage of
the/fw« (p. 36 f ) :— ' Anastros in eaelo rcgio est...hidefiKto ImnlBe, sacnitale
perpettia...Ea igitar...non densatar phivlis, noa pcoCellis Ineatltw aec nabilo
turbidatur '. Here, however, I have no doabc that, wliile Atmuhm oomes from
Mart. Capella, viii | 814, the rest is derived from Apnlehn, Dt Mtmd^ e. 33
(translated from the Pseodo-Aristotellan Dt ihmd»^ c vi p. 400) »— (^Xnprw)
'neque caliginem nnbittm recipit vel pralnas et nives sastiiiet; nee polsatw
ventis nee imbribos caeditnr '. Then folbws in Apnldos, as fai * Aristotle ', a
quoution of Homer, Od, vi 49-3, the original sonree of Lncr. Ui 19 £
* Lab, iii 85 p. 830 Leyser.
> Otia imp, in Leibnits, Scr, Rit. Bnmm. (1707) i 888, 975.
* Specimens of this, and the Mggmmmm and Mierwimmm in Consin,
Frag, Phil, \\ 365—991, cp. 134— 14s, ed. 1853 etc Cp. Haardmi, i 407 f;
Prantl, it ia6*. The Migaiaiwimt c iii IL 37—48, is ImiHUed fay amccf,
Cani, Taiis^ 4617.
33— a
Sl6 BERNARD SILVESTER OF TOURS. [CHAP. XXVIII.
an Arabic treatise on astrology, probably translated for him by
Hermann the Dalmatian ^ A treatise on the astrolabe in the
library at Chartres is dedicated by Hermann to one B., who is
probably Bernard Silvester*, sometimes erroneously identified with
his earlier contemporary Bernard of Chartres.
^ Exptrimtntarius Bernardi^ sive Bernardini^ SUv€stris\ Bodl. ifss, Digby
46 and Ashmole 304 (Langlois, /. c, 348 f ). On examining the Pepys MS 91 1,
Dt Virtute Planetarum^ in Magdalene Coll., Cambridge, I find that this is
another copy of the Experimetitariin,
* Clerval, Hertnann U Dalmate^ 1891, p. 11.
S^ouas atmo atfb ^qttaniittuflb t^
angUmtm Imirtoss intaSbatvaj^^
/nonn^aiaiiiimn ffXLJxmt^mvmtw
AXa otmnUj ^fidifacuUit aDi^(be& cms
^mi ants tmtnsnimtiiciacts^q^
modulo inj^mioatnactiticiq|^^Dab&/
/UatJaboieettttTSfa^nitid a»tfmmt>
l^.it^Mf il
From the ms ok John of Salisbury's Metalo<:icus etc.
in the Library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. This
copy once belonged to Becket, Saudi Thome architpiicopi
having been erased on the flyleaf (see M. K. James, quoted
on p. 518 n. 3 infraY In the above extract from Met. ii 10,
the Leo Justitiae is Henry I (d. 1 1 55), and the Peripateticus
Palatinus^ Abelard (b. at Palatium^ Le Pallet, near Nantes).
CHAPTER XXIX.
THE TWELFTH CENTURY CONTINUED.
The narrow scholastic study of Logic found an able critic in
John of Salisbury (i I lo-i 1 80). In 11 36 he went
to Paris, where he attended Abelard's lectures on s«u«bury
Logic, as well as those of the orthodox Realists,
Alberic of Rheims and Robert of Melun (afterwards bishop of
Hereford). Both of these last would, in his opinion, have dis-
tinguished themselves in physical studies, ' if they had relied on
the great foundation of literature and had followed the footsteps
of the ancients'*. After two years thus spent on Logic in Paris,
he studied 'Grammar' for three years at Chartres", under the
celebrated 'grammarian', William of Conches. At Chartres he
also studied the Quadrwium and (at a later date) Logic and
Theology under Gilbert de la Porr^e*. He subsequently returned
to Paris for a course on Theology, thus traversing the main
subjects of mediaeval study in a wide and comprehensive manner
very different to the mechanical routine prescribed in the following
century \ After spending ten or twelve years abroad, he returned
to England, became secretary to three successive archbishops of
Canterbury, Theobald, Thomas Becket and Richard, was often
sent to France and Italy on diplomatic missions, was for 30 years
the central figure of English learning', and, for the last four years
^ Met, ii 10 (cxcix 867 D, Migne). Sittfacsimiit on p. 51$.
' The place has been determined by Schmanchmldt, J§k. Sansdiriinsis,
p. 11.
' Among his other teachers he names Richard 'I'^v^ue', Hartwin the
German, Petnis Rlias and Theodoric
« Rashdall, i 64.
' Stubbs, Lectures, Lect. vii, 139^.
5l8 JOHN OF SALISBURY. [CHAP.
of his life, bishop of Chartres. His principal works are his
Entheticus^ in 1852 lines of elegiac verse; his Policraticus^ (with
an introduction in 306 elegiacs, called by the same name as his
earlier poem) ; his Metalogicus ; and his Letters*. The PoUcraiicus
and Metalogicus were dedicated to Becket*. Both of them were
finished in 11 59, while Henry II (attended by his chancellor,
Becket) was engaged in the siege of Toulouse. In the PolicraHcus^
which is 'to some extent an encyclopaedia of the cultivated
thought of the middle of the twelfth century '^ we have an in-
teresting chapter on Aristotle*, and a satirical account of the
scholastic controversies of the age. When the writer went to
Paris to study Canon law, he found the Schoolmen busy with
their wordy warfare, ever producing some new opinion on genera
and species^ unknown to Plato or Boethius, which they had been
fortunate enough to. extract from the mine of Aristotle^ The
scholastic treatment of Logic is also abundantly illustrated in his
Metalogicus^^ where he vindicates the claims of 'Grammar', or a
scholarly knowledge of ancient literature, while, in defending an
intelligent study of Logic, he insists that it is useless in itself,
being only important when associated with the other arts'. He
considers Aristotle more convincing in his arguments against the
opinions of others than in the proof of his own, and regards him
as far from infallible or sacrosanct us*. He meets the attacks of a
critic, whom he calls Cornificius^* (after the opponent of Virgil
mentioned by Donatus in his life of that poet), and, under the
' De nuf^s euriaiium (i — vi) et tie vestigiis philosophorum (vii, viii).
* The Historia Ponlificaiis (1161-3) was not printed until 18^ {Mon, xz
515-45), and not identified as his work until 1873.
* A copy of both, belonging to Becket, is among the Parker MSS at
Corpus Christi Coll., Cambridge (No. xlvi ; M. R. James, Akp Parket^i MSS,
PP* 5t ^3)' See p. 516.
* Poole, 318; Hardy's Descr, Cat, (in AW/x Series), ii xxxiii f.
* vii c. 6 ;' Schaarschmidt, p. i 76.
' vii 12; Migne, cxcix 664 C (Mullinger, i 56 f).
/.ii 9; iv 27.
' ii 10, sicut dialectica alias expedit disciplinas, sic si sola fuerit, jacet ex-
sanguis et sterilis ; cp. iv. 28, tunc demum eminet, cum adjunctarum virtute
splendescit.
* iii 8; iv 17.
^* Identified as Reginaldus by Prantl, ii* 333 — 4..
XXIX.] THE SCHOOL OF CHARTRES. 519
title of Carnificiani^ satirises the narrow-minded specialists in
Logic who despised literature, and describes by way of contrast
the system of literary instruction which prevailed in
the School of Chartres. Early in the eleventh of cJTamJr*
century the cathedral school of that city had been
famous under Fulbert (d. 1029), as a home of sacred learning;
and learning continued to be represented there in the person of
Lanfranc's pupil, the great lawyer, bishop Ivo (d. 11 15). Soon
after the death of Ivo the School rose once more into fame under
Bernard (11 19-26) and his brother Theodoric(ii4i f), canons
and chancellors of Chartres. In John of Salisbury's day (1138),
William of Conches and Richard I'l^v^que continued to perpetuate
the teaching of Bernard, and thus carried on a sound and
healthy tradition'. In that School the study of ' figures of speech '
was treated as merely introductory to that of the classical texts,
which were explained not only on grammatical but also on general
principles, the different excellences of prose and verse being
pointed out, and emphasis laid on the sense as well as the style
of the author studied. The pupils wrote daily exercises in prose
and verse, founded on the best models only", and corrected one
another's compositions, besides learning passages by heart and
holding discussions on a set subject The general method oC the
School was founded on the scheme of education laid down by
Quintilian*.
John of Salisbury, the ripest product of this School, stands
out as the most learned man of his time. He gives an analysis of
the whole series of Aristotle's treatises on Logic \ His Meta-
logicus (1159) is, in fact, the first work of the Middle Ages, in
which the whole of the Organon is turned to account', and
Aristotle's own criticisms on Plato's doctrine of Ideas applied to
* Bernard belongs to a former generation, hanng probably died before
1 1 30; Met, i 34, Sepifhahir banc morem Bemardus Camotensif...Ad hnjiit
magistri rormam praeceptores mei etc ; P0I. vii 13 anex Camotentia.
* Mft, i 14, ea Bufficere quae a daris auctoribni acripta rant.
» Met, /. c. ; cp. Schaanchmidt, 65 f, 73 f, 8a f; Nordcn, Kumtfrcsa^
715—9; roolc, 113— 194 ; Rashdall, i 65 f; Qenral, 993— 139.
* Met. \\\ — iv.
* The same ground is apparently traversed less completely in the RpimUtuk^n
of Theodoric (^. 1 141), where the Utitr AnalytiiS it omitted ; p. 513 tm^t^
520 JOHN OF SALISBURY. [CHAP.
the scholastic controversy on universals*. He is familiar not only
with the Boethian translations but also with certain new render-
ings'. He laments the obscurity of the translation of the Later
Anafytics*^ and the long neglect of the Topics^, He has studied
certain parts of the Organan with a learned Greek* (possibly
during his stay of three months with Hadrian IV at Beneventum*);
but he never professes to have read any Greek work without such
assistance; he derives Analytica from ova and Acfw'; and he
never quotes from any Greek author unless that author exists in a
Latin translation. In the Metalogicus he mentions Boethius as
often as Aristotle, and borrows from Boethius the explanations of
all the Greek terms of Grammar or Logic that he uses'. He
asks his former teacher, Richard M'^v^que', now archdeacon of
Coutances, for transcripts of any of Aristotle's works (to be
executed at his own expense), and for explanations of difficult
passages*; and his correspondence with John the Saracen shows
that he was ignorant of Greek '*. And yet, though he is opposed
to Plato's teaching, and is only acquainted with the incomplete
translation of the Timaeus by Chalcidius and a few traditional
passages from the Republic^ he is so conscious of Plato's greatness
as to declare that, on the day when Plato, the first of philosophers,
passed away, it seemed as though the sun itself had vanished
from the heavens *\ He repeatedly supports the Scriptures by
citations from Latin authors, but he warns us not to allow
authority (as represented by the Classics) to do prejudice to
reason (or the mental faculty enlightened by Christianity)". He
praises the method of instruction pursued (as we have seen) by
Bernard of Chartres, whom he describes as ' in modem times, the
^ Met. ii 20.
* Ep, 111 and Mtt. ii 10 (the nova iransiaiio has the more literal ticadationts
instead of monstra in the rendering of T€perlaftaTa in AnaJ. Past, i 31, 4). See
aUo Prantl, ii' 108 n. 34, and Rose in Hertms, i 383.
» Met. iv 6. * Met. iii 5 ; Prantl. ii« 106.
* Met, i 15 ; iii 5 ; p. 508 n. i supra. * /W. vi 14.
' Met. iv 2 ; Analetica in text, and Anaiectica in summary, of Corpus MS.
' Jourdain, Recherches^ ^54 f; cp. Schaarschmidt, 113.
* Ep* III (Schaarschmidt, 364).
>• Epp. 149, 169. H /^/. vii 6 (init.); Haur^u, i 540.
" Pol. vii 10 (Poole, 119).
XXIX.] HIS CLASSICAL LEARNING. $21
most abounding spring of letters in Gaul ^\ That method began
with Donatus and Priscian, and included Cicero and Quindlian,
and the poets and historians of Rome. He himself quotes, in
varying degrees of frequency, poets such as Terence, Virgil,
Horace, Ovid, Lucan, Statius, Persius, Martial, Juvenal and
Claudian, as well as the apocryphal play called the Qu€roius\
but he knows nothing of the genuine plays of Plautus, or of
Lucretius; and he cites Catullus only once'. He quotes the
historians Sallust, Suetonius, Justin and Valerius Maximus, but
he makes the strange mistake of implying that Suetonius and
Tranquillus were two different persons \ He has only one refer-
ence to Livy* ; Caesar and Tacitus he knows by name alone, but
he is familiar with Seneca and Petronius, Quintilian and the elder
Pliny, and he even quotes the younger Pliny's Panegyric*. He
owes much of his classical lore to Gellius and Macrobius and
the Latin Grammarians, and he has an extensive knowledge of
Apuleius. But his favourite Latin author is Cicero. Though he
only quotes the Speeches once^ he knows the Epistolae ad Fa-
miliareSy and is thoroughly acquainted with the philosophical
works. He is supposed to have possessed the De Republican ^ but
all his references to that lost work are to passages already quoted
by St Augustine. He says of Cicero: orbis nil hermit maius
Cicerone Latinus^^ and the purity of his own Latin prose has
justly been praised by modem critics". Among the mss that he
bequeathed to the Library at Chartres were the De Officiis and
De Oratore of Cicero, and the Quaestiones Naturales of Seneca".
The only Latin work known to him, which has since been lost,
is that of an interlocutor in Macrobius, — Virius Nicomachus
* Mel. \ 14.
' Probably written in Gaul in cent, iv— v; TeuRel,| 491*; Schaanchinidt,
101 ; Norden's Kunstprosa^ 630.
' xiv 9 in Met, i 34.
* PoL viii 18 ad fin.
* Pol. \\\ 10, scriptor belli Punici.
* PoL iii 1 4, ' Caectlius Balbiu '.
^ Pol. viii 7 [^ Ugario^ 11). • Heeren, i 951.
* Enth, 1115.
>^ Ap. Hatlam Lit, i 74^; cp. Poole, 113; Rashdall, i 67.
" Migne, cxcix coL xii.
522 PETER OF BLOIS. [CHAP.
Flavianus (d. 394), de vestigiis sive doginate phiiosophorum^ and
he borrows the first part of this description in the full title of his
PoHcratiais^ and the second in that of his Entheticus^, In all the
Latin literature that was accessible to him, he is obviously the
best-read scholar of his age\
Peter of Blois (c, 1 135-1204), who settled in England about
1 1 73 as secretary to the archbishop of Canterbury^
Biou*' ° ^^^ became archdeacon of Bath and London, and
secretary to Henry II, urges the importance of a
literary training for a future king and assures the archbishop of
Palermo that ' with the king of England there is school every day,
constant conversation of the best scholars ". In the 243 letters
written by him for Henry II, it is quite exceptional to find one
which contains no quotations from the Classics. Besides the
poets, he quotes Cicero (with the exception of the Speeches\
Sallust, Livy, Curtius, Seneca's Letters^ Quintilian, Tacitus and
Suetonius. His Latin prose is more ambitious than that of the
other writers of the twelfth century*.
His younger contemporary, the keen and active Norman-
Welshman, Giraldus Cambrensis (1147 — ^- 1222)^
Cambrensis ^^^^ ^^ Manorbecr Castle in Pembrokeshire,
studied from time to time in Paris until iiSo^
attended Prince John on his expedition to Ireland in 1 185, and
described its conquest by Henry II in a historical work, in which
he aims at a style that is simple and easy, and absolutely free from
all pedantry. ' Is it not better (as Seneca says) to be dumb than
to speak so as not to be understood?'* To the Irish chiefs
he here assigns Greek patronymics, and makes them deliver set
speeches garnished with quotations from Caesar and Ovid. He
^ Schaarschmidt, 103 — 7.
* Stubbs, Ltctures, Lect. vii, 155I. Cp., in general, Schaarschmidt in
Rkeinisches Afuseum xix (1859) ^^o ff, and e&p, Johannes SaresbenensiSf nack
Lebtn u. Siudien, Schriften u. Philosophie (1862) ; Jourdain, RechtrchiS 147 —
256; Prantl, Logik^ ii' 334 — 160; Haureau, i 533 f; R. L. Poole, Meditval
Thought^ io\ — 335; and the literature quoted in these works.
* Stubbs, Lectures^ 119^
^ Opera in Migne, ccvii ; cp. Norden, 717-91 and Clerval, J^coUt de
ChartreSy 193 f.
* Vol. V 108 (in Rolls Senes); H. Morley, English Writers, Ui 76.
XXIX.] GIRALDUS CAMBRENSIS. 523
also wrote works of the highest interest on the topography of
Ireland and Wales', reviving an ancient classical custom by
reciting the first of these during three memorable days of public
entertainment at Oxford (1187)*. ^^ ^^ ^^ ardent reformer of
ecclesiastical abuses in his native land, and his great disappoint-
ment in life was that he never became (like his uncle) bishop of
St David's. But his studies were never intermitted', and he
dwells with special interest on a description of his book-case ^
His later writings teem with classical quotations. In his work De
Prindpis /ns/ructione {hmshed about 121 7), with the exception of
Lucretius and Tacitus, there is hardly any notable author between
Terence and Boethius whom he does not cite. In the preface he
gives us extracts from Cicero and Pliny in praise of a quiet and
studious life* ; while, in the body of the book, he illustrates the
virtue of patience by nine quotations*, and the modesty of princes
by seventeen'. In the prologue to one of his latest works, the
Speculum EccUsiae {c, 1220), he speaks of the neglect of the Latin
poets and philosophers, which had led to barbarism of style and
to ignorance of prosody*. He also regrets the recent importation
from Toledo of certain logical and physical treatises attributed to
Aristotle, which he describes as having been lately prohibited in
France on the ground of their heretical tendency*. The anecdotes
in his Gemma Ecclesiastica illustrate the ignorance of Latin which
prevailed among the clergy in Wales**.
The Latin prose of the twelfth century is grammatically
correct, and, even in the next two centuries, it , . ,^-
has not ceased to be a living language. In fact,
during the Middle Ages in general, Latin prose never dies out".
Among natives of England alone, the writers of historical prose
include Florence of Worcester (d. 11 18), Ordericus Vitalis, bom
near Wroxeter to become at Saint-l^vroult the ecclesiastical
* Vol. V und vi. ' i 410. • iii 336.
* i 369. • viii p. Ixiii. • **. 17.
^ 1^. 47 f. ' !▼ 3t 7 f (note).
* iv 9 f. Sec p. 539 infra,
1* On Giraldus, cp. H. Morley, tii 64—89; Hardy, Deiar. Cat. (in
AW/r Serifs), II xxxit, and the Prefaces to his works by Brewer (vol. iv) and
G. F. Warner (vol. viii), in the same Sniit.
1* Stubbs, LectunSf Lect. vii, 15s— 5'; Norden, Kunstpfsa^ 748-^3* '
524 LATIN PROSE. [CHAP.
historian of England and Normandy, and to die in the same year
as William of Malmesbury (c, 1142); also Geoffrey of Monmouth
(d. 1 154), Henry of Huntingdon (d. c. 1 155), William of Newbuigh
(d. c. 1 198), Roger of Hoveden and Ralph de Diceto (d. c. 1201),
Gervase of Tilbury (y?. 121 1), Matthew Paris (d. 1259) and Ralph
Higden (d. 1364)'. An unnamed Englishman was probably the
first collector of the Gesfa Romanorum^ with its many citations
from Ovid, Seneca, Pliny, Valerius Maximus, Macrobius, Gellius
and Boethius; the earliest MS belongs to 1326'.
Meanwhile, in Italy, Latin verse had been successfully applied
to historic themes by William of Apulia, a native of
in cenruriei** France who imitated Virgil in composing (between
"^^*"*'' 1099 and 1 1 11) his epic poem on the Norman
William of conqucst of Southcm Italy and the victorious career
of Robert Guiscard (d. 1085)*; and by other poets
of Como, Bergamo, Pisa, Eboli and Parma between. 1088 and
{Quid '*47*- The Tale of Troy was the theme of Guido
delle Colonne of Messina (end of cent. xiii)'. The
moralising type of verse, which was so dear to the Middle Ages,
Henry of ^*^» ^^ ^^® meantime, been represented in Italy by
Septimeiio, Henricus Septimellensis {fl, 1191)1 who imitates
Boethius in his allegorical poem De divtrsitaie
Fortunae et Philosophiae consolatione*^ and by Henricus Medio-
lanensis who dedicates to Clement IV (1265-8) his Contraversia
Hominis et Fortunae'^,
In the twelfth century England claims at least seven Latin
poets. Serlo Grammaticus, canon of York and abbot of Fountains
{Jl. 1 160), wrote a poem in 70 accentual trochaic lines 'on the war
' H. Morley, iii, and the Prefaces to the editions in the RoUs Seria^ with
Sir Thomas Hardy's Descriptive Catalogue^ and Gardiner and MuUinger't
Introduction to Epigiish History, 139 — 173, 185. ■ H. Morley, tii 367 f.
' Text in Muratori, Scr, Rer, Ital, v 145 — 378 ; extracts in Gibbon c 56
(vi 176—108, 513 Bury).
* Wicse u. P^rcopo. //. Litt, (1899), 7 f'
* An epic in Latin prose, plagiarised from the French poem of Benott de
Sainte*More (1165). Cp. Bartoli, Fr§cursori del RinatcimeniOt 85. Chaucer's
*debt to Guido* has been discussed anew by Prof. G. L. Hamilton (1903).
* ed. Leyser, Hist, Poitarum Afedii Aein(iy^i), 453 f; Migne, cciv.
' ed. Popma (Cologne, 1570).
XXIX.] LATIN VERSE. $25
between the king of Scotland and the barons of England' (II38)^
Nigellus Wirecker of Canterbury (d. 1 200) is known
as the witty author of a long elegiac poem on the Nifeiius.
adventures of the donkey 'Bumellus', the typical H«utevme
monk, who spends some time at the university of
Paris'. Jean de Hauteville {fl. 1184), who was bom near Rouen
and passed part of his life in England, being sometimes called a
Norman monk of St Albans, wa^ the composer of a poem in nine
books on the miseries of humanity, 'a learned, ingenious and very
entertaining performance", describing modern students living a
hard life in Paris and ancient philosophers declaiming in distant
Thule against the vices of mankind! Far better known is Walter
Map, the versatile archdeacon of Oxford (in 1196),
the author of the Latin version of the legends of
Lancelot of the Lake, the Quest of the Holy Grail and the Death
of Arthur, and also of the celebrated satirical poems called the
Apocalypse and the Confession of bishop Golias*. The following
lines, naming several of the leading teachers of the age, may be
quoted as a specimen of his Latin rhymes : —
'Celebrem theologum vidimus Lambardum ;
Cum Ivone, Helyam Petnim, et Bemardum,
Quorum opobalsamum spirat os et nardum ;
Et professi plurimi sunt Abaielardum '*.
Walter Map's satirical poems are the comparatively innocent
counterpart of the Latin rhymes of the wandering students of
Western Europe known from 1227 onwards by the name of
^ Battle of the Standard ; MS in Library of C C C, Cambridge ; cp.
Leyser, 417 f ; ed. Twysden in De€€m Scripioru^ i 53t ; hii d^te is 1109-1107 ?.
' Anglo-LoHn Satirical Pods^ i 1 1— 145, ed. T. Wright (187a) ; cp. Chaucer,
Cant, Tales 153 18; and H. Morley, Engiisk IVriiers^ iii 175.
» Warton, Eng, Poet,, Diss. II cliv {1814).
* Johannis de AltaviUa Architrenius^ ed. T. Wright, /. r., i pp. xxvf,
140 — 39 J ; cp. Wright's Hist, of Caritahere^ 160.
■ ed. T. Wright (1841) ; Hardy, Deser. Cat. II xxxy\ H. Morley, iii
110—144, 166 — 174. The Apocalypu includes a curious passage on the Seven
Arts (1^. 168). It is first ascribed to Map in a Bodl. MS of cent. XI v, * Apoca-
lipsis Magistri Galteri Mahap'.
* p. 28 Wright, Metamorphosis Goliai; discussed in Mhn. Acad. Inser.
xxviii (1) by Haur6iu, who regards the authorship as doubtful ; the dramatic
date of the poem is 11 41.
526 JOSEPH OF EXETER. GEOFFREY DE VINSAUF. [CHAP.
Goliardi\ who sing of love and wine and the joys of springdme,
and indulge in profane parodies and in bitter satire of all classes
secular or sacred*. Joseph of Exeter (d. c. 1210), a
ExSer****^ brother of Theobald, archbishop of Canterbury, is
the only Latin epic poet claimed by England. He is
described as 'a miracle of this age in classical composition'*. He
produced (with the aid of Dares, and in the style of Ovid, Statius
and Claudian) a poem DeBello Trojano^ which is still extant, while
his Antiocheis on the exploits of Richard I is now represented by
a solitary fragment of twelve lines on Flos Regum Arthurus^. One
of the best known Latin poets of the time, Geoffrey
vinwur^*** de Vinsauf (Gal/ridus de Vino Salvo), educated at
St Frideswide's, Oxford, and in the universities of
France and Italy, dedicated' to Innocent III (d. 12 16) his Pottria
Notfa, an Art of Poetry in more than 2000 lines founded partially
on that of Horace and recommending the use of the ancient
metres instead of the modem 'Leonines' and rhyming verses,
with examples of various kinds of poetic composi-
NeckJm***' ^^^n'. Alexander Neckam (1157-1217), bom at
St Albans, distinguished himself in Paris in 1180
and was abbot of Circencester in 12 13-7*. He wrote in prose as
well as in verse. In the course of his amusing treatise J^e Naturis
Rcrum, with its many anecdotes of animals, he borrows much
from Aristotle, Pliny, Solinus and Cassiodoms, and also quotes
Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Lucan, Juvenal, Martial and Claudian. In
a long chapter on the Seven Arts he shows grave mistrust of
scholastic learning, and attacks the teaching of Logic in the
* Wright's Hist, of Caricature^ etc., 162 — 73; J. Grimm, Gedickie dtt Mii'
telahtrs (1844); Carmifta Burana (from Benedicibeuern, S. of Munich), (1847;
ed. 2, Schmeller, 1883); Hubatsch, VagatUetUieder (1870); translations in
J. A. Symonds, Wine^ IVof/itn ami Song (18S4),
' Burckhardt's Kmaissaucit Part ni c. 1, p. 173 f, Eng. ed. 1898, and
Bartoli's Precursori^ 35 — 72. Cp. Wattenbach, GeschichtsquelUn^ ii* 473-€.
* Warton, /. r., p. clxii.
^ Quoted in Camden's Britannia^ end of notes to Book iii ; cp. H. Morley,
iii 183.
* Leyser, 862 — 978; cp. Warton, /. r., p. clxxi ; Tyrwhitt on Chaucer,
Cant. Tales 15353; ^^' Morley, iii 189; K. Francke, Lai. Schulpoisie (MUnchen,
1879); Saintsbury, i 412 f.
' H. Morley, iii 196; cp. Warton,/. r., p. clx.
XXIX.] ALEXANDER NECKAM. $2/
university of Paris', which he describes as the home of Theology
and the Arts'. His vast elegiac poem JDi Laudihus Divrnmi
Sapieniiae traverses much of the same ground. It also describes
the chief seats of learning in his day, summing up in a single
couplet the four faculties, of Arts, Thedogy, Law and Medicine
recognised in the university . of Paris, the 'paradisus delid-
arum': —
'Uc flofent artet; ooeUttit pagina icgnat;
ttant leges; Inoet Jos; mcdidiM viget'*.
His Latin fables, which have been printed*, are praised for their
vigorous style*. His lexicographical works, entitled Voeabularmm
biblUum and Repertarium vocabuhrum^ remain unpublished. In
the De uiensiiibus (ed. Scheler, 1867) the Larin names of different
articles are taught by means of a connected narrative with inter-
linear glosses in French. The author's own name, which was
apparently pronounced like nequam^ was the theme of repeated
pleasantries. Once, when he played on the name of Phi-lippus
(abbot of Leicester), the latter retorted with the couplet :
' Es niger eC neqtumi dictut cognomine AkvkMit
Nigrior ene potci, neqnior CMe aeqiib**.
Joannes de Garlandia, who studied at Oscford and Paris (1204),
was an Englishman by birth, but regarded France
as the land of his adoption^ He was present at chwSSS^
the siege of Toulouse (laiS), where he saw the
catapult by which Simon de Montfort (the elder) was then dain*.
He also assisted at the founding of the univenity (1229). In the
> c. 173 p. 183, ed. T. Wright in R§iis Strm (1863).
■c. 174 p. 3"-
' P- 453* His elegiac poem De VUm Mmmckmmm k pijaled k snoClicr
vol. of the R^Us Sirks^^Angh-lMiim StUntmi/Uttf ii 17^— joo. AiiiloCk
there appears as a logidan alone (p. 193).
« DvL M6ni, /Wna /tOeUi dm Mgwt Agi {iB^
• Bemhardy, Jitm. Uit. 67s*.
• Leland*s Itimrmty (1744) vi 48 (»S4)f qootod by J* E. B. Mayor,
Joum. of CL ami S, Pkikt.^ hr 10.
7 Di Triumpkii BaUsme, p. 59 (ed. T. Wil^ Rosbofght Chdn 185^
Anglia cai mater Ibcnt, cd Galtta aatiis, Matii aatiicim prsefcio Mart*
meam*
• Gonv. and Caini MS 383 (fetf, UM^Dklkmmim^ 1 47 p. 146 V.
528 JOANNES DE GARLANDIA. [CHAP.
course of one of his two principal poems, De Mysteriis Ecdesiae^^
he commemorated the death of Alexander of Hales (1245); he
completed the other, De Triumphis EccUsiae (on the crusade
against the Albigenses), before 1252. The language of the latter
abounds in grammatical conceits and fantastic, devices of metre.
The metrical models here named are Virgil, Ovid, Statius, Lucan* ;
and the following is a favourable specimen of its style : —
* Est caeli sine nocte dies, plausus sine planctu,
Absque fame saties, absque labore quies.
Est ibi verus amor sine luxu, pax sine pugna,
£t sine sorde decor et sine lite favor *'.
He was also the author of an Ars Rhythmica^ in which whole
poems are given as examples of the rules of rhythm \ His prose
works included three Latin Dictionarii^ or rather vocabularies, ' one
of common and another of obscure words, and a third of things '•
The last of these was clearly written for use at the University
of Paris*. In another work' he gives a list of authors which the
student should read in Latin literature ^ Grammar', Dialectic *»
Rhetoric", Arithmetic, Geometry, Astronomy, Medicine, Law,
> Same MS, part 5 ; cp. Lcyser, 339.
' p. 125 Wright. • p. 119.
^ ed. G. Mari, / Trattati Medievali di Ritmica Laiina (1899), 35—80;
Saintsbury, i 408.
* Part 3 of above MS, f. 143 ; J. E. B. Mayor, /wm. 0/ CI, and S, Phil.
iv 7; and Haur^au, quoted on p. 529, n. i ; T. Wrig:ht*s V^abularUs (1857),
1 30 — 138 ; Scheler, LexicographU Laiint du xii et dti xiii s. (1867), 18 — 85.
' Part I of MS.
' Donatus, Cato, Theodulus, Statii Thehais^ Virgilii AeneiSt Juvenal,
Horace, Ovid (esp. Met, and De Reined, Am, and possibly the Fasti), Statii
Achilleis, Virgilii Bucol, and Georg, ; Sallust, Cic. De Or,, Tusc, Disp,, De Am.^
De Sen,, De Fato, Paradoxa, De Nat, Deor,{}), De Off,, parts of Martial and
Petronius, Symmachus, Solinus, Sidonius, Suetonius, Q. Curtius, Trogns
Pompeius, Hegesippus, Li vy, Seneca (^/^., Quaest,, Ben., 7yag,9Xi<iiDeclam.l)\
p. 47 f.
B Donatus, Priscian.
* Boethius, De Categ, Syllog,, Topica, De Divisione, Porphyrii eisag9ge^
Aristotelis Categ., De Interpr,, Soph. EL, Anal, Pr,, \Apodoxium {Ana/, P»st.);
Cicero, Topica; Apuleius, De Interpr,', Aristotle, Met,, De Gen, et Corr,^
De Anima \ p. 51 v.
^* Cic. De Inv., ad Herenn,, De Or,; Quintilian, * Causae* (i.e. Dee/,), and
De Or. Jnst,
t Probably a corruptioo of Apod*ix*9m,
XXIX] HILDEBERT OF TOURS. 529
Theology, adding the names of the appliances required by a
notarius and a librarius^, Roger Bacon' heard Joannes de
Garlandia discourse in Paris on the orthography of oHchakum^
and his Dictionarii were still in use during the boyhood of
Erasmus'.
Latin verse was well represented in France by Radulfus
Tortarius of Fleury (yf. 1 1 15), who versified Valerius
Maximus, and described his journey to Blois, Caen Tortmrius.
and Bayeux in the style of Horace* ; by Marbod, nndcbcrt
bishop of Rennes (d. 11 25), the author of the poem
De Gemmis* ; and by Hildebert, bishop of Mans and archbishop
of Tours (d. II34)*, the only modem author whom John of
Salisbury's friends were recommended to read^ Taking Virgil,
Horace, the elegiac poets and Martial as his models, he wrote no
less than 10,000 lines of verse, his principal poems being on the
Creation of the Worid^, the Fall of Troy^, and the Ruins of Rome.
The last of these, which is quoted in full by William of Malmes-
bury*°, was inspired by a visit to Rome in 1106. It is a striking
poem, beginning with the couplet: —
' par tibi, Roma, nihil, cum sis prope tota mina ;
quam magni fueras integra, fracta doces'.
^ The same MS includes an Acceniuarius^ a Compendium Grumm,, and a
MorcUe Sckolarium by the same author. He also wrote an Opus Synonymorum
(Lcyscr, 312 f; Migne, cl 1577) and Aeqmvocorum (Leyser, 338). Sec esp.
Haur^u in Notices et ExtraiiSy xxvii 1 (1879), i — 86, where 31 of his works are
discriminated.
* Op. Minus ^ c. 7.
' Mayor, /. ^., p. 6 note.
^ De Certain in Bibl. di VkoU des ehartes^ t. xvi ; L^on Maitre, £eolis^
loi f ; Barth, Adv, 1. Hi c. 7; Hist. Litt. x 88; Migne, dx.
* ed. Beckmann (1799); Migne, dxxi 1758.
* ed. Beaugendre (1708) ; Migne, clxxi ; Haur^u, in Notices et ExtraUs^
xxviii 1 (1887), 189 f; cp. Neckam, De Laudihus^ p. 454 Wright.
"^ IIildcl)crt, iE//. (Migne, clxxi 141—319), studied by Peter of Bloii,
Migne, ccvii 314; Kashdall, i 65 n.
* Leyser, 391 f.
» ib, 398 f.
^^ ii 403 Stubbs; Burman's Anth. Vei. Lot. Epigr, i 457; extract in Trench,
Sacred Latin Poetry^ 108, and in Norden, JCunstpresat 733.
s. 34
530 WRITERS OF CHURCH HYMNS. [CHAP.
As a writer of Sacred Verse he is more classical than Bernard
of Cluni (y7. 1140), the author of the famous poem
Church'hymns ^^ nearly 3000 Hnes Dt ConUmpiu Mundi\ or
Bernard of Clairvaux (d. 1153), with his strains
of deepest feeling, or other hymn-writers, for example Peter the
Venerable (d. 1156), Adam of St Victor (d. c. 1192), and, among
the Italians, Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274), and the authors of the
Dies Irae and the Stabat Mater respectively, — Thomas of Celano
(y?. 1226) and Jacobus de Benedictis (d. 1306)*. In the hymns of
authors such as these, the Latin Verse of the Middle Ages held its
own against the vernacular languages of Europe ; it was only when
it was consecrated to the service of the Church that that Verse
became immortal. The sacred lyrics of the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries attain a far higher level of literary interest than the
Aurora of Petrus de Riga, canon of Rheims
RigV."** *** (^- i209)*» whose vast poem of 15,050 lines supplies
Matthew of a paraphrase of a large part of the historical books
of the Bible*. The story of Tobit is the theme
of Matthew of Vendome, a pupil of Bernard Silvester and an
imitator of Tibullus and Propertius*. Epic poetry was meanwhile
represented by the Philippis of Guilielmus Brito of
Giulturde ^^ ^^^ ^^ L^on (1150 — 1226X chaplain to king
d'rTi^^'*" Philip Augustus, and an imitator of Ovid, Statius
and Virgil. The ten books of the Alexandreis^ of
Gautier de Chitillon or de Tlsle {Gualterus ab Insults^ d. 1201)
were founded on Curtius, and modelled on Lucan ; — iucet Aiex-
^ Latin Saiiricai Poets ^ ii 7—101 (Rolls Series); extracts in Trench, 504 f,
partly translated by J. M. Neale (1858 etc.); Hymns A, and iV., Nos.
3^5-8.
' Trench, /. <-.; Neale, E<cL Lai, Poetry in Enc. Metrop.t Roman Lit.
311-66 (1853*); Moorsom, Hist, Companion^ 117 — 149*; also Damel'i
Thesaurus t and Julian's Dictionary,
' Grasse, Hofullfuch, ii 306; in the prologue to his Aurora^ he says * Petrus
Riga vocor*.
* Leyser, 693 f.
* Wright and llalliwell, Reliquiae Antiquae, ii 357 f. PI. at Tours after
1 174. His poetic epistles in S. Bcr. Bayr, Akad, 1873, 561—631.
' ed. princeps Pynson; ed. Milldener (1863); cp. K. Peiper (Breslau,
1869).
XXIX.] GAUTIER AND ALAIN DE L'ISLE. 53 1
ander Lucani luce^. In ijjo* his epic poem was r^;arded as a
Classic in Flanders, the land of his birth, but all that is now
remembered is the single line : — incidis in Scyllam cupiens vitare
Chary bdim*. His prose work, the Moralium Dogma (which has
led to his being regarded as a precursor of the Renaissance), is a
purely pagan treatise founded mainly on Cicero and Seneca and
abounding in quotations from Terence, Sallust, Virgil, Horace,
Lucan, Statius, Persius and JuvenaP. The rising reputation of
his Alexandras was attacked by the poet's countryman, Alain de
risle {Alanus ab Insults)^ the ' Universal Doctor ', who died as a
monk at Clairvaux {c. 1 203). He is best known as the author of
the remarkable poem called the Anti-Claudianus*. Here', as in
Claudian's first poem In Rufinum^^ Alecto summons her infernal
crew to attack the hero of the epic, — RuAnus in the earlier poem,
and the newly-created Man in the later; but, while in Claudian
the attack is triumphant, in Alanus the Vices are vanquished by
the Virtues. In the Anti-Ciaudianus the Palace of Nature is
adorned with portraits of Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Virgil, Seneca
and Ptolemy", while Aristotle, Zeno, Porphyry and fioethius are
singled out in connexion with Dialectic*. The long and elaborate
descriptions of the Seven Liberal Arts that conspire in making the
several parts of the chariot of Wisdom'*, and also in bestowing
their varied gifts on the perfect Man", point to the influence of
Martianus Capella. That of Boethius is no less clearly marked in
the mingled prose and verse of the De Planctu Naturat^^ where
the character of * Genius' excommunicating all who abuse the
laws of Nature has found an imitator in the 'Roman de la Rose' of
* Eberhardt Labyrinthus^ iii 39; cp. K. Francke, Sckulpcisie (1879), P* 89f.
In the same work GeoRrey de Vinsauf, Eberhard, Henricus of Septimello and
of Milan, Bemhard of Gest (near Munster) and Nigellus are discossed.
* Warton, /. f., p. clxix. • ▼ 301 ; Migne, cdx 514.
* p. 33 ed. Sundby (1869); Bartoli*8 Precursari^ 17-9.
» Satirical Poets, ii 168—418 T. Wright, beginning Inci^ froiogus in
Anticlaudianum de Antinifim, Cp. O. Leist, Der Antielaudianus (Seehaasen,
1878 f).
* p. 404. ' 1. 15 f«
•p. i77f. 'p. 3i3f-
" pp. 304— 33«- " PP* 39^3-
** ed. Wright, ii 439 — 511.
34—2
532 ALAIN DE L'ISLE. EBERHARD. [CHAP.
Jean de Meung (c. 1270)^ while Chaucer' knows this poem as
well as the ' Anticlaudian ". In the latter, the allegory of the
journey of Wisdom to the throne of God may have had its influ-
ence on Dante ^ and the following lines seem not entirely unworthy
of comparison with part of Milton's sublime invocation of 'celes-
tial Light":—
'Tu mihi praeradia divina luce, meamque
Plenius irrorans divino nectare mentem
Complue, terge notas animi, tenebrasque recidens
Discute, meque tuae lucis splendore serena'*.
The poem includes a singularly elegant description of the
island-home of Fortune', besides repeated references to Plato's
theory of Ideas'; and its last two pages are remarkably fine. As
a poet, the author is even regarded by Joannes de Garlandia as
Virgi/io ntq/or, et Homero certior^. In his prose works he borrows
moral sentiments from Cicero'* and Seneca", besides showing
his familiarity with the Latin translation of the Timaeus^* and the
Neo-Platonic Liber de Causis. Eberhard of Bethune (yf. 12x2)
and Alexander of Ville-Dieu (d. 1240) write their
Grammars'' in Latin verse, but have no pretensions
to being poets. But the former is also the reputed author of the
Labyrtnthus^^y a poem on the miseries of teachers of rhetoric and
poetry, the third and last part of which supplies us with a critical
estimate of the poets in vogue, more than 30 in number. By the
* H. Morley, iv i5f.
■ ParUmetU of Fouies, 316, *AIayne, in the Plcynt of Kynde*.
' House ofFamtf ii 478. He also imitates in Cant. Tales ^ 16430 f, a couplet
from the Parabdaei — *Non teneas aunim totum quod splendet ut aurum, | Nee
pulchrum pomum quodlibet esse bonum * (Leyser, 1074).
* Ten Brink, and Rambeau (H. Morley, v 131).
» P. L. iii 51 f. • p. 356. ' p. 396-9.
' pp. 190, 372, 379, 449, 518 (all suggested by the Timaeus alone). Like
Abelard and Bernard Silvester, he personifies roOs as Noys.
* De Triumphis Ecclesiae, p. 74.
'* Migne, ccx, De arte praedicatoria, c. i , where nihil citius arescit laeryma^
quoted as from Lucretius, really comes from ad Ilerenn, ii 31 § 50, or Cic. di
Inv, i 56 § 109.
" ib. cc. 3, 21, 13-5, 19, 36 (Haur^au, i 513).
" Haur^au. i 528. w p. 640 infra,
1^ Leyser, 796—854. Eberhardus is named as the author in Part iii 689;
cp. Saintsbury, i 408 f.
XXIX.] GUNTHER. SAXO GRAMMATICUS, ETC. 533
side of Virgil and Ovid, Persius and Juvenal, Statius and Claudian,
we here find later poets such as Petrus de Riga and Alanus ab
Insulis, with the authors of the Architrmius^ the Alexandras^ the
Physiologus (Theobaldus*), and the Solimarius* (Gunther). The
writer of this last, a Cistercian monk, who was
probably of German origin and lived in the Vosges
until after 1 210, is far better known as the author of the Ugurinus
(1187), a famous epic in ten books on the exploits of Frederic
Barbarossa, where the facts are derived from Otto of Freising
and the style from Lucan'. Justin and Valerius Maximus, with
Martian us Capella, are the models followed in the blended prose
and verse of the Danish History of Saxo Grammaticus (ending
with ii85)\ ^^ ^^^ following century the only Latin poems of
note in Germany are the Ovidian Lippiflorium* of Justinus of
Lippstadt (before 1264) on the varied career of Bernard of Lippe
as knight, monk and bishop ; and the Herlingsberga* of Heinrich
Rosla of Nienburg (near Hanover) on certain heroic exploits of a
duke of Braunschweig-Liineberg in 1287. These exploits were
fortunate in being celebrated by a vates sacer^ but the vates himself
has attained little more than local fame. Late in century xii the
Jfortus Deliciarum gives proof of a prejudice against poetry, and
a preference for philosophy and the Liberal Arts (see plate on
P- 537).
Before turning to the second period in the history of Scholas-
ticism, we may here notice a few of the indications
of the study of Greek in the twelfth century. p'^clT
Guibert, abbot of Nogent (d. 11 24), notes the rise
in his own lifetime of a new interest in literary studies^ but he
^ His description of the Sirens was known to Chaucer, Con/. TaUs^ 15^77
Tyrwhitt.
* A poem of the Crusades; Warton, Eng, Po€t,^ Diss, II dxx; 440 lines
published by Wattenbach, 1881 (Bursian, CV. Pkilol,, i 73).
' M igne, ccxii 317 — 476 (with Prooemia 355 f and truditorum iisiimonia^
180 f); Pannenborg in Forsckungen ntr deutscken Gtuk,^ 1871'$; Norden,
Kumiprosa, 875-9; Bursian, i 79; and esp. Wattenbach, GackickisfmlUn^
ii* a 86 — 190.
^ Bursian, i 73 f. ' ed. Laubmann (187s).
* ed. Meibom, in Scr, Rer, Germ, i 775 (Bursian, i 85 f).
T Migne, dvi 844 (Rashdall's UnhforsUUs, i 34).
534 GREEK IN FRANCE, [CHAP.
supplies no proof of any interest in Greek. While Abelard knew
no Greek, the mystic Hugo of St Victor, who died in the same
year (1142), produced a new translation of 'Dionysius the
Areopagite'^ His pupil, Richard of St Victor (d. 1173), 'who
was in contemplation more than man", so far from studying
Greek, prompted men to leave in the plaftr Aristotle and Plato
and all the herd of philosophers, and to ascend the mount of
contemplation that looks down on all the sciences and on all
philosophy*. Macarius, abbot of Fleury (d. 1146), has the credit
of having compiled a Greek lexicon (printed in the fifth volume
of Stephens' Thesaurus^ but this Mexicon' is merely an abstract
from Sul'das, and is probably the work of a Byzantine monk*.
The Greek books which Guillaume de Gap, abbot of St Denis
from 1 1 72-3 to 1 1 86, brought to St Denis from Constantinople
in 1 167', included a panegyric on Dionysius by Michael,
'patriarch' of Jerusalem, which is still extant ^ and a life of the
philosopher Secundus, which Guillaume himself translated into
Latin, while the panegyric was translated by another Guillaume
of St Denis, the correspondent of another translator of Dionysius,
John the Saracen*. Pierre le Chantre, bishop of Paris (d. 1197), '
mentions, among Greek authorities, Aristippus, Aristotle, Demo-
sthenes, Diogenes, Epicurus, Josephus, Plato and Porphyry*, and
borrows a quotation from' the Phoenissae^^, About the same time
the sub'prior of Ste-Barbe^n-Auge reminds a monk at Caen that
'a cloister without books is like a castle without an armoury'".
But, in the catalogue of the neighbouring monastery at Bee
(r. 1 1 64), not a single Greek book is to be found*'. About the
year 1300, Hdinand, a monk of Froidmont, near Beauvais, writes
' Migne, clxxviii 1080 D, 1704B — c. ' Dante, Par, x 134.
' Migne, cxcvi 54; BeHJamin Miftor^ c. 75.
^ Tougard, 64.
' Macarii hieromonachi ecloge e lexico Suidoi (Krumbacher, p. 563-).
* p. 415 supra,
' Paris VWiizx^^ fonds grec^ no. 933.
* Delisle in Journal des Savants (1900), 735 — 739.
* Migne, ccv 19 (Tougard, 61).
'* ib, 30 D, borrowed from Seneca, Ep, 49.
" f^. 845 A (quoted on p. 419).
'* Migne, cl 769 — 793 ; MuUinger's Cambridge^ i 100 f.
XXIX.] GERMANY AND ITALY. 535
for yvoi^i atavTov nothtselitos and nothiselito^. It was only through
the Fathers that some of the Latin scholars of France caught a
far-off echo of Greek learning*. Meanwhile, in Germany, we find
David the 'Scot' writing at Wiirzburg on the De
Interpretatione (1137)*, Otto of Freising (d. 1158)
promoting the study of Aristotle*; and Wibold, abbot of Corvey
(d. 1 158), reading Greek and Latin poets, orators and philo-
sophers. When he borrows certain works of Cicero from the
library at Hildesheim, he deposits as pledge 'the commentaries
of Origen ' and a Greek book on Tactics*, The Italian hellenists
of this century include Grossolano, archbishop of
Milan (d. 1117), who was sent by Pascal II to
Constantinople, and whose Greek argument on the Procession of
the Holy Ghost is still extant*; Jacobus Clericus of Venice, who
translated and expounded the Topics^ Analytia and Sophistid
EUnchi of Aristotle (1128)'; Alberico of Bologna (r. 1150), who
translated the aphorisms of Hippocrates'; the Tuscan brothers,
Hugo and Leo (r. 1170-77), both of whom took part in Greek
discussions at Constantinople, and the latter of whom produced
a rendering of the Oneirocritici Graed* ', and Godfrey of Viterbo
(d. 1 1 90), who is said to have known Greek, Hebrew, Chaldee
and other languages". About the same date Pisa is represented
by Hugutio, bishop of Ferrara (1191 — 1212), who compiled from
Papias an etymological dictionary in which Greek words are
' Gidel, «74n.
' Philip de Harveng, abbot of Bonne- Esp^imnce (Migne, cciii 154), etsi
(lingua) Hebraea et Graeca eo datae rant ordine patribus ab antiquo, tamen
quia non usu sed fama sola ad ncs vmiuHi de longinquo, eisdem valefacto ad
Latinam praesentem noxter utcunque se applicat intellectus (Denifle, in AreAw
fur...MA, iv 595).
• Heeren, i 257 f.
^ Bursian, i 68, 75 f; p* 51^ supra,
• 'quern Graece stratagematon vocant, quod militare est*; Migne, clxxxix
1398 f (Tougard, 59).
• Gradenigo, 50 f.
' Rol)ertus de Monte, abbot of Mont S. Michel (Pert*, Mw, viii, Scr, ti,
489 n.); cp. Jourdain, 58; Pranti, ii 99*; Ueberweg, i 391*
' Gradenigo, 70.
• ib. 71-5.
»• ib. 76—83; depreciated by Muratori, in Prcf. to5fr. Remm ItoL^ i p. vii.
536 GREEK IN ENGLAND. [CHAP. XXIX.
quoted^; and by the famous jurist Joannes Burgundio (d. 1194)1
an envoy of Barbarossa in the East, who translated certain of the
works of 'Gregory of Nyssa' (i.e. Nemesius, On the Nature of
Many, Chrysostom, and John of Damascus {On the Orthodox
Faith), together with the Greek passages in the Pandects, the
rendering of which is ascribed to another by Accursius'. It was
Burgundio who pointed out to John of Salisbury the importance
of the Posterior Analytics\ The state of Greek learning in
England may be inferred from the fact that in
the catalogue of Chnst Church, Canterbury (end
of cent, xii), while there are i8 mss connected with Priscian,
the only Greek book is a grammar (Donatus Graece), and Aristotle
is represented solely by Latin renderings of the Tqpica and
Sophistici Elenchi and of Porphyry's Introduction, with the com-
mentaries by Boethius*. ' Master Thomas Brown ', who enjoyed
the confidence of king Roger of Sicily (d. 1154), is the first
Englishman whose name was written in Greek, Thomas Brounos
appearing among the attestations of the Greek charters of king
Roger*. The Greek studies of John of Salisbury (d. 1180) have
already been noticed^ Alexander Neckam of St Albans (d. 12 17)*,
who learnt and taught in Paris (1180), quotes the Analytica
Posteriora^, the Topica and De Anima^^, His younger fellow-
countryman, Alfred de Sereshel, in his work De Motu Cordis^
dedicated to Neckam, names nearly all the works of Aristotle
which had lately been translated from Arabic into Latin". He
has been identified with 'Alfred the Englishman', the translator
of the De Plantis, whom we shall shortly meet again among
the translators from the Arabic, who gave a new extension to
the knowledge of Aristotle in the West of Europe*'.
^ Du Cange, Praef. § 46; Gradenigo, 83 f.
' ed. C. J. Burkhard (Wien, 1901). ' Gradenigo, 86 — 94.
^ Met, iv 7 (Frantl, ii' 106); omitted in Theodoric's Ef^tUetuhon (1141),
Clerval, J^coUs de Chart res ^ 245.
' Mullinger, i 100 f; facsimile in M. K. James, Canterbury Libraries,
• Stubbs, Lectures^ '33*1 Freeman, Hist, Essays^ iii 473. Neither gives
the original text : Cusa, Diplomi^ Palermo, 1868, i 3131 /idS'po Bu/Aa toO fipo^ov,
^ p. 510. • p. 516 f.
' De Naturis Herum, pp. 57, 141, 391, 393, 399. Pie calls it Analectica.
>• Httur^u. II i 63. » ib. 65 f. » p. 547.
Philosophy and the LinuL Atn, vuum the Pona.
From the Heriut DtHHantm of Hemul Toa Lanilqwtf (d. 1199)1 ndand
rnm plate xl Mr of Situb *Bd Keltec*» Mb> ed. (Struibi^ tlw).
See p. J9) f ii;f^ ud IM ^ /IhalrmHmt.
History of Scholarship, &c., in the West, laoo — 1400 A.D.
lioo
Italy
mo f. FrancUcanf
itifl d. Hugutio bp of
Fcrrani
I ISO Frederic 1 1 crowned
•I Rome
iflti MIchMl Scoc at
Itologna
itfonr ig3a Frederic II
lendi trantUtioni of
ArUfotIt to Bologna
and ParU
ma f. Univ. Padua
lea^ f. Univ. Naples
laao l^homat of Celano
lajo Bonaccuraiiu
Spain
i80Qf-iai7
Michael
Scoiai
Toledo
1S49 d. Petrut de Vinea
laso 64^. ILirtholomew
of Messina
1260 d. Accursius
ia66 Henricus Mediob*
nensis
ia7i Gerard of Sabhio-
netta
iaai-74 Honavcntura
1 435-74 'l*hoina< Aquinas
(ii68-8i /f. William of
Mocrbekc)
ia8j-4 Siger of Hrabanl
d. at ihvieto
ia86 lUlU
I ig4 d. llrunctio I<atini
Guido delle Colonne
ia40& ia56
Hermann
the Ger-
man at
Toledo
ia4if.Univ.
Salamanca
ISOO
1877 d. Pe-
trut His-
panus
Marche»ini of Keggio
I >>6 d. Jacobuh de Bene*
diciis
I >>i) d. t.ovato
iji5«>-i3iS Peirus Apo*
ncnMS
tits ijji 1)anie
ijOi-ijjg Muxvkio
«.1W-*7.^ l^l Viricilio
ill .17 FeVr«io
1343 f. I'im. Pi»a
i34gf Univ. Flo>r«nce
iJ<H~74 Petrarch
iji|-;s Kvcacoo
iXfo- 14.A Coluccio Salu>
taio
I n6- 14C0 Otry valor as at !
r lorvnoe !
FranM
laoi d. Gautier de I'lsle
iao3 d. Alain de I'lsle
1135-1*04 Peter of Blois
1907 d. Amalrich
iao9 d. Petrus Riga
I a 10 Aristotle's rkyiic*
proscribed in Par»
laia Eberbard of Beth*
unt
iai5 Aristotle's Pkytia
and Aftia^yticM pro-
scribed
iai5 f. Dominicans
iai7 Dominicans in Paris
tas6 d. Guilielmus Brito
ia«8-48 yt. William of
Auvergne
I a^o Franciscans in Paris,
joined 1131 by Alex-
ander of Hnles(d. ia^5)
ia3i Aristotle's Pkyuct
conditionally allowed
1340 d. Alexander of
Villedieu
iao4-sa ft. Joannes de
Garland ia
xaS3 d. John of Rochelle
1355 Aristotle's PkyMtci
mnd Mfia/kys. studied
in Paris
laiSi The new Orders
rccognikod in Univ. of
ParU
1 364 d. Vincent of Beau-
vats
1379 Siger of Brabant
leaves Paris
ta83 Gilles de Paris, Dt
Rrgimi$i€ Primcij^um
ijii Council of Vicnne
1315 d. Raymond Lull
1394-1316 Uilla de Paris
liTK/fitf Jla R^mtm) bp
of Bourges
1313 Jean de Jandun
I^J7^ Ruridan, rector
Univ. Parik, d. 1350
1344 I^vi ben Gcrson
1348 NicoLud'Autrecour
Otrmmny
laioAlbrechtv.
Halberstadt
It 15 Frederic 1 1
crowned at
Aachen
1193-1380 Al-
bert us Magnus
ia8o Hugo von
Trimberg
ia8iCooraidvoa
Muf«
ia8i-3Nicolaus
dcBibeim
ia8^ H. Koa-
beinofLQbcck
I 1363 d. Pierre Bersuire
1366 Study of Aristotle {
rccogniiioi in Paris j
1383 d. Nicole Oresmc ,
1147-8 f. Univ.
Prague
i^<^ f. Univ.
VKona
1381 Deventer
school f. by
Gcrardus
Magnus, and
im6 riorcntius
RAdcvyas
1186 f. Univ.
Heidelberg
I3<A f. Univ.
Colocne
BrltiahUlM
laoo d. Nigdhtt Wi-
reckcr
leoo Geoffrey Vianuif
laoi d. R<»cr Hovcdett
xaoa d. Ralph de Dioeio
13 10 d. Joseph of Bxclcr
tail Gervase of Illbuiy
laiy d. Alexander Nedc-
am
I i47-iaeaGlrmlduiCe»-
b<«nsis
1334 1 d. Michael Scoc
1340 d. Kdmnad Rich
aop of Canterbufv
1345 d. Alexander nalet
(Paris)
1330-50 if. Baitbolo-
maeus Anglicus
ia49 f. Univ. CtoU. Os.
1353 d. John of Btaring*
stoke
1x75-1353 Groiaeteatc
1358 d. Adam MarJi
t3s9 d. Matthew Paris
1360 William Shyrwood
1360-9 f. Balliol CoU.
1364 f. Mertoo CoU
1315-70 ft. Alfred de
Sernhel
I3M d. Kilwa«dby abp
oTCanterbury
1384 f. Peierbouae,CBBili.
1314-94 Roger Baooa
1300 Geoffrey of Waiev
ford
130B d. Duna SoMUi
(Cologne)
1316 f. txeterCoU.
I3a6 f. Oriel and Oar*
1340 f. (>uecn's CoU. Ox.
1345 d. Richard of Bwy
1345? d. Walter Bwlejr
1346 d. John of Baooo-
iMTTwUliamofOck.
ham
1 347 f* Ptmhrake Coa
C^mb.
1348 f. Ckm vine Han
1349 d. ^
wardiac abp of CaB>
terbury
1350 f Trinity Hall
t3S3 f. Covp^ Cbr. GolL
Camb
1380 f N
i334-t4WyciiSe
1338-1400
iV^.'jMJhAi fr<tm /. 446.
CHAPTER XXX.
THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY. THE NEW ARISTOTLE.
Thb Schoolmen had apparently become acquainted with the
whole of Aristotle's Orgatum after iia8'y and there
IS definite proof of such acquaintance on the part of ArtetoST
John of Salisbury in 1 159'. Much of the mediaeval
knowledge of Greek literature in Western Europe came through
Latin translations of Arabic renderings of the original Greek.
Works of Hippocrates and Galen were translated from the ArabiCf
at Monte Cassino, by the monk Constandne (r. 1050-80), who
was bom in Northern Africa and who studied in distant Babylon';
and the first acquaintance of Western Europe with any of the
Aristotelian writings other than . the OrgaM^n was due to the
Arabs of Spain. In the middle of the twelfth century, and again,
during the first half of the thirteenth, the great centre of activity
in the production of Latin renderings from the Arabic was Toledo
on the Tagus, which had been under Arab rule from 714 to 1085,
when it was added by Alphonso the Brave to the dominion of
Castile. Before 11 50 Avicenna's commentary on the /^ Amima^
and other physical and metai^iysical writings of Arabian phtloao-
phers, were there translated from Arabic through
Castilian into Latin by Dominic Gondisalvi with
the aid of the Jewish interpreter, Joannes Avendeath (ben David),
' PP- 507. 53-^ ■ P- 5«9-
* JounUin, Rtcherthet^ 96. Cp. RafbdaU*! CMwraMtr, i 81 ; aad
Stdnichiieider in Virektm^s ArckiVt B. 97— $9i CmutmmHmm Afirkmmm u.
seifu aradiuken QtuUem; abo F. WOttenfeld fai GMi^m Akkmmtt, udl s,
1877 (Dit Uihirsetnmgm ArMukir WiHt$ im das ZmitinittJk, pp. I9|)«
10—40. 'Constantyn* it named with 'old Ypoots' and *GalitB* fai Ckaaeer'i
Prohgut, 433.
S40 GONDISALVI. GERARD OF CREMONA. [CHAP.
and by the command of Raymund, archbishop of Toledo {c, i I3o—
II5o)^ Gerard of Cremona, the elder (d. 1187),
Cremona **' ^^^ attracted to Toledo by his interest in Ptolemy's
Almagest^ which he translated in 11 75. Among
the more than 70 other works, which he rendered from Arabic
into Latin, were Aristotle's Analytica Posteriora^ Physics^ Dt
Caelo et Mundo^ De Generatione et Corruptione and MeteorologUa^
as well as the Pseudo- Aristotelian De Causis*.
The thirteenth century witnessed a still further and far more
important extension in the knowledge of the works of Aristotle.
For this extension the Schoolmen were indebted, on the one hand,
to the Arabs and Jews in the West, and on the other, either
directly or indirectly, to the Greeks in the East. Aristotle had
long been studied in Syria and Arabia'; and the knowledge of
his writings, which had passed from Constantinople to the East,
had subsequently followed the course of Arab conquest along the
Northern coast of Africa, till it reached the West in Spain, and
thence found its way into France; but the Arabic translations
executed at Bagdad in the first half of the ninth century did not
reach Paris in their Latin form until after the middle of the twelfth.
> Jourdain, 1 13 f. In the preface to the Latin version of Avicenna's Arabic
treatise Dt Aninui^ 'Joannes Avendehut' (\.t. Joannes liispaiensis), writing to
the abp of Toledo, describes it as * hunc librum vobis praecipientibus, et me
singula verba vulgariter proferente, et Dominico Archidiacono singula in
Latinum convertente, ex Arabico translatum *, ib, 449; cp. 151, 117.
Gondisalvi also translated the De Caelo ^ Physics and Metaphysics of Avicenna
(Brown, Michael Scot, pp. 336, 338), and the * Logic and Philosophy' of
Algazel (Ueberweg, i 407). Joannes Hispalensis was the translator of the D§
differentia spiritus et animae of Costa ben Luca, a Christian philosopher and
physician of Baalbek (864 — 933), who brought Greek MSS into Syria and
translated Greek works at Bagdad (Barach, BibL Fhilos. Med. Ait. ii 118).
Cp. WUstenfeld, Cottingen Abhandl. 35 — 39. The translation of the Koran
promoted by Peter the Venerable (d. 1156) was executed in Spain in I141-3
by Kobertus Ketinensis, an Englishman who ended his days as archdeacon of
Pampeluna. He was prol)ably aided by Hermann the Dalmatian and * Master
Peter of Toledo* (Brown, 1 19; cp. Migne, dxxxix 14, 659; Wilstenfeld, 44 — 50).
Rodolfus Brugensis, who translated Ptolemy's Planisphere at Toulouse in
1144, was a pupil of Hermann, and Kobertus Retinensis was a younger friend
of the latter (Wiistenfeld, 48—53).
' WUstenfeld, Cottingen Abhandl. 58, 66 f.
» p. 385 supra.
XXX.] AVEMPACE. AVERROES. S4I
The Arabian philosophy was a form of Aristotelianism blended
with Neo-Platonism. In the twelfth century its
principal representatives in Spain were Avempace
(d. 1 138) and Averroes (d. 1198). Avempace, who wrote a
number of logical treatises at Seville (c. 11 18), and afterwards
lived at Granada and in Africa, left behind him commentaries
on the Physics^ the Meteorolcgua and other physical works of
Aristotle. Averroes, who was bom at Cordova
(1126), became a judge at Seville and Cordova,
and (in 11 63) was recommended to the Calif as the fittest person
to expound the works of Aristotle and make them accessible to
alP. He was physician to the Calif and to his successor,
Almansur, by whom he was banished in 1195, the study of
Greek philosophy having already been forbidden in the Moorish
dominions in Spain. In 1198 he died, and, not long after, the
Moors were defeated on the uplands of Tolosa ( 1 2 1 3), subsequently
losing Cordova in 1336 and Seville in 1344. The Arabian
philosophy was soon extinguished in Spain and elsewhere, and
the interest in Aristotelianism transferred from the Moslems to
the Christians. Averroes, whose reverence for Aristotle even
exceeded that of his Eastern exponent, Avicenna, regarded the
Greek philosopher as 'the only man whom God had permitted to
attain the highest summit of perfection', and as 'the founder and
perfecter of scientific knowledge". His services to Aristotle
were threefold. He prepared (i) short paraphrases reproducing
Aristotle's own opinions in strictly systematic order; (2) inter-
mediate commentaries ; and (3) complete expositions (these last
being of later date than the others). All these three types are
extant in the case of the Anaiytica Posteriara^ the Physia^ the
De Coilo^ De Anima and Metaphysics \ (i) and (2) alone in that
of Porphyry's Introdudum^ the CoHgories^ De Interpreiatunu^
Anaiytica Priora^ Topica^ Sophistid Eienchi^ Rhetoric^ Poetic^ De
Generatione et Corruptione^ and Meteorolagica \ (i) alone in that
of the Parva Naturalia^ the De Partibus Animaiium and De
Generatione Animaiium ; while only (2) was ever written on the
Ethics, We have no comments of his on the Hist&ria Animaiium
> Abd -el- Wahid ap. Renan, Averrois^ 17I
' Renan, /.r., 54^ f.
542 AVICEBRON. MAIMON IDES. DANIEL DEMORLAI. [CHAP.
or the Politics, The former had already been abridged by
Avicenna, and it is doubtful whether the latter was ever translated
into Arabic at all. Averroes knew neither Greek nor Syriac, but
he studied Aristotle in Arabic translations of Syriac versions of
the original Greek, and the printed editions of his commentaries
reach us in a Latin rendering of a Hebrew version of his own
Arabic*. His later reputation was twofold. He was the great
Commentator^ who was imitated by Thomas Aquinas; and the
great heretic^ who was refuted by him*.
The Jewish philosophy of the Middle Ages included
Alexandrian and Neo-Platonic elements. Neo-Platonic as well
as Aristotelian influence is represented by the Spanish Jew,
Solomon Ibn Gebirol {c, 1020 — 1070), who wrote in Arabic and
has been identified as the philosopher known to
the Schoolmen as Avicebron. His arguments
assume the Neo-Platonic theory of the real existence of all that
is apprehended by means of universal concepts. He was not
acquainted with Plotinus, but probably derived his Neo-Platonic
views from Arabic translations of Proclus and of works erroneously
ascribed to Empedocles, Pythagoras and Aristotle. The recon-
ciliation of Aristotelian philosophy with Jewish theology was the
aim of Abraham ben David of Toledo (r. 1150), and of Moses
Maimonides of Cordova (i 135-1204), who assigns
to Aristotle an unlimited authority in all secular
knowledge. The commentaries on Porphyry's Introduction and
on Aristotle's Categories and De Interpretatione by Levi ben
Gerson (1288 — 1344) are printed in a Latin rendering in the
old Latin editions of Aristotle. Their author lived in the South
of France.
The Arabs and the Jews did great service by inspiring the
students of the West with a new enthusiasm for learning. It was
through learned Jews, acquainted with Latin as well as Arabic,
that Arabic renderings of Aristotle were translated into Latin
and thus came to the knowledge of the Schoolmen, and these
translations owed their popularity to the fact that they were not
only literal but were also accompanied by explanations of
obscurities in the original*.
^ Renan, /.r., 53*. ' See plate opp. p. 560. ' Jourdain, Richirctut^ 16.
XXX.] TRANSLATORS FROM THE ARABIC. 543
It will be remembered that the centre of attraction for all
translators from the Arabic in this age was Toledo \
Shortly before 1200, an Englishman named Daniel d/^Mori«i
de Morlai (of Morley, near Norwich), discontented
with the dull traditional teaching of the doctors of Paris
{c. 1 1 70 — 1190), went to study under the Arabs at Toledo and
came back to England 'with a number of precious mss",
being warmly welcomed on his return by John of Oxford,
bishop of Norwich, who was specially interested in astronomy.
He had at first hesitated to return on hearing that in England
'there was no liberal education, and that, to make way for Titius
and Seius, Aristotle and Plato were forgotten'; and he was afraid
lest he should be 'the only Greek among the Romans". His
only extant work is on the teaching of the Arabians as to the
earth and as to the orbs of heaven. Among the translators from
the Arabic in centuries xii and xiii were Gerard of ^
Translators
Cremona, Michael Scot, Hermann the German, from the
and Alfred the Englishman. The earliest of these, ** *
Gerard of Cremona\ translated the Almagest of Ptolemy', and
^ P> 539> ' cu"^ pretiosa multUudine librorum.
' Pref. to De Naturis Inferiorum et Sn^ericrMmt Arundel MS 377 f, printed
by Prof. Holland in Oxford Hist. Soc., Cc/Ziciattea, ii 171 f; cp. H. Mor1ey*s
Engiish fVn'ters, iii 187; Rashdall, i 333, ii 338; F. A. Gatqnet, />MAIrit ^or.,
1898. 359.
* Roger Bacon, C«m/. PAH, 471. Tiraboschi, iii 194, 38 1» and Bon-
compagni, Fifa di Ghtrardo Crtmomnse (1851), diitingnish between Gerard
the elder, who, according to the Chronicle of Francesco Pipino, died in 1 187,
and Gerard the younger (</i SaMiofietta, S.E. of Cremona), an older con-
temporary of Hermann the German (Hermann wu still alive in 1971). Gnido
Bonatti, cent, xiii (Boncompagni, p. 65), describes as his own contemporaries
Michael Scotus, and * Girardus de Sabloneto Cremonensis '. But the difficul-
ties as to the two Gerards are not yet entirely removed. In Boncompagni*s
work Gerard the elder is identified with the translator, and Gerard the younger
is an astronomer, whereas the latter alone (whom Roger Bacon describes as a
translator) could have been a contemporary of Hermann. Possibly there is a
mistake in Pipino*s date for the death of Gerard the elder, bat that date is
repeated in several MSS of his Zi/r and is consistent with the date of his
translation of the Almagtsi (1175). Accordingly, it appears more probable
that, in Compend, Phihs. c. 10, Roger Bacon confounded the ' older contem-
porary of Hermann * with the translator of cent. xii.
' Charles, Rogtr BaccH, 331.
544 MICHAEL SCOT. [CHAP.
certain works of Galen, Hippocrates and Avicenna'. His
«-. w . - translations were executed at Toledo*. The next,
Michael Scot ^
Michael Scot, is said to have studied at Oxford ,
and is traditionally associated with Bologna \ He was certainly
a student at Paris, and probably learned Arabic at Palermo
before 1209'. He there lived at the brilliant court of Frederic II,
the youthful King of Sicily, to whom he dedicated three of his
earliest works. On the marriage of Frederic to the elder daughter
of the King of Aragon (1209), he apparently left for Toledo
and there completed a rendering of two Arabic abstracts of
Aristotle's Historia Animalium^ (i) De Animalibus ad CaesafTm\
and (2) Abbreviatio Avicennae. The latter was dedicated to
Frederic as 'Emperor of the Romans and Lord of the World'.
As Frederic was not crowned Emperor at Aachen until 1215,
it is impossible to assign the second version to any earlier date'.
In 1 2 17 Michael produced a translation of Alpetraugi's Arabic
treatise on the Sphere^. Between that date and his return to
the imperial court in 1223, he translated the commentaries of
Averroes on the Dt Caelo and the De Anima of Aristotle. The
versions of the other commentaries of Averroes contained in the
same mss as the above were doubtless the work of the Toledo
School of translators, and the renderings of the commentaries on
the Physics and Metaphysics may well be assigned to Michael
> Dr J. F. Payne, in Rathdoll, ii 780-1. For his translations from Arabic
versions of Aristotle, see p. 540 supra,
• e.g. Vatican MS 1089, p. 307 v, incipit sextus de naturalibus auicenae
translatus a magistro Girardo cremonensi de arabico in latinum in toleto
(J. Wood Brown, Michael Scot, p. 338).
' Jourdain, Recherchts, 135.
^ Boccaccio, Dec, viii 9.
• J. Wood Brown, p. 34.
• Caius Coll. MS 109 (178) fol. 9-107. WUstenfeld, Cott. AbhatuU, io«-6,
holds that Michael Scot translated from a Hebrew rendering of Avicenna's
Arabic abstract of the Hist, An.
' Mr J. Wood Brown (p. 55) assigns it to 11 10, and so reads the colophon of
Vat. MS 4438, p. 158; but in his own facsimile (opposite p. 55) I notice a
straggling v above the end of M*'c°c<'x.
' Jourdain, 133; Renan, 308^; Brown, 99 — 105. The author flourished
r. 1190 and was a pupil of Abubacer. His name, which is ipelt in several
different ways, is really Ibn el-Bitraugi (from Petroches, N. of Cordova).
XXX.] FREDERIC THE SECOND. 54$
Scot, who is attacked by Albertus Magnus^ for a digression
on the part of Averroes stating the opinions of Nicholas the
Peripatetic*. Frederic II was crowned at Rome in 1220, and
Michael Scot was at Bologna on 21 Oct., 1221', and had
apparently returned to the imperial court at Palermo by 1223.
He was highly esteemed as an astrologer and a physician. He
was even recommended for ecclesiastical preferment in England
by Honorius III (1224*) and Gregory IX (i227'), the latter
attesting his proficiency in Arabic and Hebrew, but saying
nothing as to any knowledge of Greek. Roger Bacon who, on
the authority of Hermann the German, says that Scot was
ignorant of langtiages, and adds that he was largely aided by a
learned Jew, named Andreas', describes him as introducing to the
scholars of the West certain of the physical and mathematical (?)
works of Aristotle, with the commentators on the same. Trans-
lations from the Arabic are doubtless meant, and the date of
their introduction is 'after I230*^ In 1232 the emperor
granted special permission for the transcription of Michael Scot's
Abbreviatio Avicennae^ the second of the two works in which
Scot had dealt with Aristotle's Historia Animalium^, It was
* Op. ii 140.
* Haur^au, i 470; Renan, 109^; Brown, 117. The other commentaries of
Averroes in the Venice MS are those on the Mettor^of[ica^ Dt Gtn. tt Corr.^
Parva NainrcUia^ .^xA the apocryphal Di Causis; also the original work Di
Sttbstatttia Orbis (Jourdain, is8 — 130; Brown, 131). In the St Victor MS the
Parva Nat, is ascribed to Gerard of Cremona.
' Caius Coll. MS 109 (178) fol. 101^ hu a transcript of the translator's
note to the De Animalibns ad Coisanm : — * et iuro ego Michael Scotus qui
dedi hunc librum latinitati quod in anno M*cc*xx*l, xii Kal. Novembr. die
Mercurii accessit nobilior domina totius dvitatis hononiensis (sic)^ quae erat
hospita mea &c ' (a new and definite date in Scot's career, communicated by
Dr M. R. James).
* Charitd, Univ, Paris ^ i 105. • *5. 1 10.
* Comp. Phil, 471.
^ Op. Maj, 36 f, tempore Michaelis Scoti, qui annis 1 330 transactis apparuit
deferens librorum Aristotelis partes aliquas de naturalibos et mathematids cum
expositoribus sapientioribus, magnificata est Aristotelis philosophia apud
Latinos. Cp. Jourdain, 118 f. Bridges, iii 6^ has 'de Naturalibos et
Metaphysicis (Bodl. MS) cum expositionibus authentids *.
* Drown, 178.
s. 35
54^ HERMANN THE GERMAN. [CHAP.
apparently not long after 1232 that Frederic II sent to the
universities of Bologna and Paris the translations he had caused
to be made from the Greek and Arabic mss of the 'works of
Aristotle and other philosophers relating to Mathematics and
Logic,' which were contained in the imperial library^ Copies
of the emperor's letters addressed to Bologna' and Paris* have
come down to us, and it is possible that they were delivered by
Michael Scot himself, who may also have visited Oxford. He
died before 1235^ ^^^ tradition places his burial, as well as
his birtli, in the lowlands of Scotland. With his fame as an
alchemist, astrologer and necromancer we are not here concerned.
His reputed skill in magic has been celebrated by Dante*,
Boccaccio* and Walter Scott ^
Hermann the German completed at Toledo in 1240* his
translation of the intermediate commentary of
thtoStMM Averroes on the Ethics^ and, at some other date,
a translation of an Arabic abridgement of the
Ethics (possibly the work of Averroes). His work on the Rhetoric
consisted simply of the glosses of Alfarabi, while that on the
Poetic was merely the abridgement by Averroes*. It was only
in this form that Aristotle's treatise on Poetry was known to the
Middle Ages. These slight works on the Rhetoric and Poetic
bear the date of Toledo, 1256. Frederic II had died in 1250,
^ Jourdain, i54f, 163 f. Pranti {Logik^ iii 5) assigns this to laao. It is
contended that Frederic would more probably have communicated with Bo-
logna and Paris be/ore founding his own university at Naples (1114) than after.
' Petrus de Vineis, Epp, iii 67 (vol. i p. 43a ed. Iselius, 1740).
* Chartul. i 435 (in the name of Manfred) ; cp. Brown, 1 74.
^ Henri d'Avranches, quoted by Brown, p. 1 76. The date of the treatise
* written for Manfred in 1156 ' may be that of the Spanish era, corresponding
to 1 118, and may refer to a work written for Frederic II in laiS, and after-
wards copied for Manfred (Eng, Nisi, Rev.^ 1898, p. 349).
• /«/. XX 115-7.
• Dec, viii 9.
' Notes 1 c— E on The Lay,
^ MS Laur. Ixxix 18.
* Printed at Venice, 1481, and included in the Venice Aristotle of \*fi^
Cp. Roger Bacon, Op. AfaJ, 59, Comp. Phil. 473; Jourdain, 139 — 144;
Charles, Roger Bacan^ 111 note i, and 319; Wiistenfeld, Cottingen Abhandi.
91-6.
XXX.] ALFRED THE ENGLISHMAN. 547
and the date of 1256 is in agreement with the fact that Roger
Bacon, writing in 1267', describes Hermann as a translator in
the service of 'Manfred, recently conquered by king Charles* of
Anjou (1266)'. Some mss of the above-mentioned Letter to the
Universities bear the name of Manfred', who may have re-issued
his father's Letter, with presentation copies of the translations
made in his own time. A translation of the Magna Maralia was
dedicated to Manfred by Bartholomew of Messina^
The last of these translators from the Arabic is Alfred the
Englishman ijl, 1215-70), chaplain to Cardinal
Ottoboni in Rome and papal legate to England Bntiiilhml!ll
under Henry III*. He quotes Arabic writers and
apparently knew no Greek*. He produced a Latin translation
of the Arabic version of the Pseudo-Aristotelian De Plantis^^ with
a short supplementary comment on the same, in the course of
which he quotes the De generatione ei corruptioni^ the MeteorohgUa^
De Anima and Analytica Posieriora^. He also appears to have
revised the first translation of the Meteoroiogica and to have inter-
polated that translation with additions of his own. This is stated
by Roger Bacon*, who had a very low opinion of all these
translators from the Arabic, including 'William the Fleming',
to whom we shall return at a later point'*.
While the knowledge of Aristotle had thus been reaching the
scholars of the West through the circuitous route of translations
from the Arabic, the Latin conquest of Constantinople in 1204
had opened to those scholars the prospect of a direct access to
the stores of Greek learning. The conquerors themselves regarded
that learning with contempt, but the natural result of their con-
* Op, Tertium, p. 91. * Rcnan, Av, «ii-3*.
' Cp. Denifle on ChartuL Univ* Paris. ^ i 435 (Rashdall, i 359).
* Tiraboschi, iv 170.
" Bale, s.v. Alphrtdus AngiicuSt p. 329, ed. 1557; Moriey*s £ng IVriUrs^
iii 187.
' Introd, to Roger Bacon's Gk, Gr, (1902), p. li. n. 5.
'p. 536 supra \ quoted by Vincent of Beauvaii (1250), Spec* Nai, \x
pp. 91-1, ed. 1494 (WUttenfeld, /. r., 87 f.).
* Barach, Bihi, Philos, Meti, Art, ii 11—13, 113.
" ap. Charles, 371 f. The * first translation ' b presumably that of Gecmrd
of Cremona.
'* pp. h(>l^ 5^f-
35— 2
548 TRANSLATIONS FROM THE GREEK ARISTOTLE. [CHAP.
quest was the dispersion of Greek mss, some of which found their
way to the West. The only evidence as to any mss of Aristotle
having been brought from Constantinople refers to the Jl/if/a-
phy5ics\ but the Physics is probably meant. The Schoolmen, no
longer satisfied with renderings from the Arabic versions of
Aristotle, began to obtain translations taken directly from the
Greek. Thus the Di Anima was known to William of Auvergne
(who became bishop of Paris in 1228 and was still alive in
1248) in a translation from the Greek, before the Schools of Paris
had received Michael Scot's translation either of the Arabic text*
or the commentary by Averroes. The Rhetoric^ the Politics^ the
first four books of the Nicamachean EtAi'cs^ the Magna Moralia^
part at least of the Metaphysics^ and the Parva Naturalia^ were
known from the first in Latin translations from the original, but
the earliest complete versions of the Ethics and Metaphysics (with
those of the Physics^ Hist, Anima/ium, De Caelo and Meteorologica)
were from the Arabic*. The translations from the Arabic had
been often disfigured with Arabic words merely transliterated into
Latin, because their meaning was unknown. On the other hand,
those from the Greek were, indeed, slavishly literal and not always
accurate, but they had at least the advantage of bringing the
student one stage nearer to the original. The studies of the
Schoolmen were greatly extended and transformed by their wider
acquaintance with Aristotle, as well as with the partly Neo-
Platonic and partly Aristotelian writings of Arabian and Jewish
philosophers. The Neo-Platonic teaching of 'Dionysius the
Areopagite ', as represented in the pantheistic doctrine of Joannes
Scotus, was revived by Amalrich (of Bena, near Chartres, d. 1207),
and his most distinguished follower^, David of Dinant. This
revival of pantheism was probably stimulated in part by the
Aristotelian commentary of Alexander of Aphrodisias (translated
by Gerard of Cremona*), and by the pseudo-Aristotelian Liber de
Causis\ Amalrich was already in his grave when the pantheistic
* p. ^\6 supra. ' Jourdain, 170.
* Jourdain, 144, 177; cp. Rashdall, i 359 f.
^ See, however, Erdmann, i § 191.
* Jourdain, Recherchts^ 123 f, and C. Jourdain, Mim. de PAcad. d*/mir,
16 (1867). 493. 497.
' Haur^u, 1 1 i 103 f. '
XXX.] STUDY OF ARISTOTLE FORBIDDEN. 549
pww"^^^"
drift of his writings was discovered. As the result of a Council
held in Paris in 12 10, his doctrines were condemned, his bones
disinterred, and ten of his followers burnt alive*. At the same
time, it was ordered that 'neither the books of Aristotle on
natural philosophy, nor comments on the same, should be read,
either privately or publicly'*. It is uncertain whether the ' books
of Aristotle ' were his own Physics^ or one of the Arabic adapta-
tions of the same, e.g. that of Avicenna or Averroes', or some
Pseudo-Aristotelian work, such as the De Causis or the De
secretion Aegyptiorum do€trina\ Guillaume le Breton inaccurately
reports that it was the metaphysical (probably meaning the physical)
writings of Aristotle, recently brought from Constantinople and
translated from Greek into Latin, which were burnt and proscribed
in 1209 {sicy. In 12 15 the Statutes drawn up for the university
of Paris by the papal legate order the study of the Aristoteliaii
books on Dialectic, while they forbid the study of the Physics
and Metaphysics (the latter being now mentioned for the first
time in a public document)*. Roger Bacon states that the
opponents of the study of Aristotle brought against that philo-
sopher (in connexion with his belief in the eternity of the world)
a passage at the end of the De generatione et corrnptiane'* , The
' See the miniature in Lacroix, Vi€...Religieuse au Moytn Agtt p. 445.
^ Denifle and Chatelain, Ckartularium Univ. Paris, i 70, with Denifle's n.,
* Inter auctores ante concilium mortuos inveni dtatos libros De Metaphysica,..
Absque dubio erant etiam noti libri Phyncorum et forsan Z>r Caeloet Muntb\
See Giraldus Cambr. on p. 51a supra, Cp. Haur^iu, II i 101 ; Ueberweg, i
431; and literature in Rashdall, i 356 n.
' So Jourdain, Haur^au and Denifle. Ct qui rate ifutudiinAte (says Renan,
311'*), rVj/ que le concile de 1109 [\iio\ frappa PAristote artUe, traduit de
Parabe^ expliqni par Its Arabes,
* Cp. Charles, Roger Baton ^ p* 3I3<
* p. 416 supra, Cp. Launoy, De varia Aristotelis in aead^ Paris, fortuna
(1653), c. I ; Jourdain, 187.
* Chartul, i 78 f, * non legantur libri Aristotelis d€ methafisiea et de uatmrati
philosophia, nee summae de eisdem*. Cp. Roger Bacon, Opus Majus^ p. 14,
' temporibus nostrit Parisius diu fuit contradictum naturali philosophiae Aris-
totelis per Avicennae et Averrots expodtores, et ob densam ignoftntiam
fuerunt libri eorum excommunicati ' ; Op, Tert, p. a8, and Cemp, Tkeot,
(p. 570 infrc^,
^ ap. Charles, Roger Bacon^ 315, note I.
550. STUDY OF ARISTOTLE ALLOWED. [CHAP.
fact that this is one of Aristotle's works on 'natural philosophy'
may have led to all his works on that subject being condemned
at the same time as the Metaphysics^. In 1220 we vaguely hear
of a translation of Aristotle, partly from the Greek, partly from
the Arabic, by those who knew both*. From 1228 to 1231,
owing to a conflict between the university and the citizens of
Paris, the members of the former withdrew to other places. On
their return in 1231, Gregory IX directed that 'the libri naturaUs
...should not be used until they had been examined and revised'*.
This implied a considerable mitigation of the severe sentences
passed on the study of Aristotle in 12 10 and 1215. Between
1230 and 1240 his reputation was so much enhanced by the
introduction of his philosophical \2& contrasted with his dialectical)
works, that he was recognised as the 'prince of philosophers '\
All his works began to be expounded in Paris by the most
eminent doctors of the Church, such as Albertus Magnus (1245)
and Thomas Aquinas (1257) ; and, in 1255, even the Physics and
Metaphysics were included among the subjects prescribed in the
Faculty of Arts at the University of Paris'.
Meanwhile, the monks had long ceased to be the sole
educators of Europe, the line of great monastic teachers having
ended with the name of Anselm, who ceased to be abbot of
Bee in 1093. A generation later the monasteries began to close
their doors against secular students'. Even the revival of
monasticism and the reforms of the twelfth century were of no
permanent avail for the promotion of learning. The control of
education passed from the monks and the monastic schools to
the secular clergy and the cathedral schools' ; and the cathedral
* Charles, 315. The eternity of the world it also maintained in Physics^
• • •
VUl I.
* Jourdain, 7,
' Chartul, i 138, *(magistri artium) libris illis naturalibus qui in condlio
provinciali ex certa causa prohibiti fuere, Parisius non utantur, quousque
examinati fuerint et ab omni errorum suspitione purgati'; cp. Haur^u, II i
io8f.
* Jourdain, 18. " Chartid. i 178.
* Rashdall, i 41.
7 Cp. L^on MuMret Les £coUs £pisc0^Us ef Afofiasii^u€s{j6S--^iiSo)f iS66^
esp. p. 169.
XXX] ALEXANDER OF HALES. 55 1
school of Notre-Dame, which was already famous under William
of Champeaux {c, iioo), developed into the university of Paris
(c, 1 1 70)*. The Order of the Franciscans was founded at Assisi
in 1 2 10, and that of the Dominicans at Toulouse in 1215; and
both of these Orders, whose centre of activity was in the towns,
resolved on establishing themselves at the great seats of education.
The Dominicans, who were characterised by a strictly conservative
orthodoxy, fixed their head-quarters at Bologna and at Paris
(121 7), besides forming a settlement at Oxford (1221). The
Franciscans, who were generally less highly intellectual than the
Dominicans, and less strongly opposed to novel forms of opinion',
settled at Oxford and Cambridge in 1224, and at Paris in 1230'.
A long struggle between both of these Orders and the university
of Paris ended in their having certain restricted rights in connexion
with that university in I26I^ When once these Orders had been
founded, all the great Schoolmen were either Franciscans or
Dominicans'.
The first of the Schoolmen who was familiar with the whole
range of Aristotle's philosophy, and with his Arabic
commentators, and who employed the same in the oAuie" *'
service of theology, was Alexander of Hales, who
derived his name from a place in the N. of Gloucestershire, now
known as Hailes, near Winchcombe. He joined the Franciscan
Order in Paris in 1 231, on the return of the university from the
dispersion of 1229*, and, after a distinguished scholastic career,
died in I245^ He is a representative of Realism. His ponderous
Summa Theologiae^ left unfinished at his death, was completed by
* ib. p. 145 ; Compayr^, Ahtlardy 6 — 8 ; Rashdall, i 177 f.
' Renan, Averrois, p. 159s En g^n^ral, T^oU fmndscaine nous appanh
comme beaucoup moins orthodoxe que T^le dominicaine. Cp. V* Le Gere,
Hist. Lift, tie la Frame au 14' sikltt pp. 97 — 144, etp. p. 139 f.
' Rashdall, i 346 f. * ib. 369 — 39a.
* The great work on the writers of the Franciscan Order is Wadding,
AmuiUs Mimrum, 6 folio vols. (1635 f), ed. a in 95 vols. (1731-^1886). That
on the Dominicans b Qu^tif et Echard, Scriptures Ordinis I^raitUcaiemm^
1 folio vols. (i7i9f)*
* Bacon, Op, Minus ^ 316 Brewer, where his Sum/fia is Intterly attacked.
7 He is lamented by Joannes de Garlandia, De Mysi^ £V)r/., as the ' flea
philosophiae* etc
552 WILLIAM OF AUVERGNE. [CHAP.
others in 1252. It shows the influence of the Eastern Arabs
Avicenna and Algazel far more than that of the Western Arab
Averroes^ The commentary on the Metaphysics^ once ascribed
to him, is now recognised as the work of another Franciscan,
Alexander of Alexandria. In the University Library at Cam-
bridge', a MS of Alexander of Hales' exposition of the Apocalypse,
certainly belonging to his time and possibly written by his own
hand, includes a portrait of the author represented kneeling in
the habit of a Franciscan friar*.
Another Englishman, Edmund Rich, born in Berks, and
afterwards archbishop of Canterbury (1235-40),
canonised as St Edmund of Abingdon, was the
first to expound the Sophistici EUnchi at Oxford^. The ideology
and cosmology of Plato were taught in Paris by William of
Auvergne (d. 1249), who knew the Phaedo and
of^uveiirne '^^ Timacus alone, and wrote works De Univtrso
and De Anima largely founded on Aristotle,
quoting the Physics, Metaphysics, De Anima, Ethics etc. in Latin
translations, though he had little confidence in Aristotle's dicta^.
He denounces as heretical a number of propositions mainly taken
from the Pseudo-AristoteUan De Causis, and frequently attacks
Averroism under the name of Aristotle and his followers, but he
only mentions the name of Averroes once (when he calls him a
'most noble philosopher'*), while he has many quotations from
Aristotle himself. John of Kochelle, who, as the
of R^heUc P^P^^ ^^^ successor of Alexander of Hales, taught
at Paris from 1245 ^^ '^SSi shows his familiarity
with the De Anima of Aristotle, and its Greek and Arabic
expositors, in a treatise bearing the same name and exemplifying
a new interest in the study of psychology ^
Platonic and Aristotelian doctrines were combined by
the eminent Franciscan Robert Grosseteste
(c, 1 1 75 — 1253), bishop of Lincoln, and the
earliest recorded chancellor of Oxford, who was born at
* Renan, Averrois^ 114*. • Mm. v. 31.
* J. R. Green's Short History^ illustr. ed., p. 187. .* pp. 367, 570.
* Haur^u, 11 i 145. ' De Univ, i 851 ; Renon, Av., a35'7^.
' Jourdain, 31, 18S-99. ' Haur^au, II i 191.
XXX.] GROSSETESTE. 553
Stradbroke in Suffolk, and educated at Oxford and (possibly)
at Paris. About 1199 Giraldus Cambrensis^ commends him
as one whose education had been 'built on the foundation of the
liberal arts and on an abundant knowledge of literature*. He
was appointed lecturer to the Franciscans shortly after their
establishment in Oxford in 1224'. His contemporary, Matthew
Paris, writing at St Albans, then the centre of classical learning
in England, describes him as vir in Latino et Graeco /eritissimus\
and states that in his Greek studies he was assisted by a Greek
monk of St Albans named Nicholas*. His great admirer, Roger
Bacon, while he states much to his credit, assures us that, until
the latter part of his life', his knowledge of Greek was not
sufficient to enable him to translate from that language, and that
he could never translate from either Greek or Hebrew without
assistance*. He also tells us that Grosseteste entirely neglected
the works of Aristotle'; but the context seems to show that this
statement should be limited to the current translations of Arabic
versions of certain of the physical treatises alone*. It was
probably during his life at Oxford that he prepared his com-
mentaries on the Categories^ Analytics* and Sophistici Elenchi,
He had access to translations of the Posterior Analytics besides
that of Boethius, and he was also acquainted with the commentary
of Themistius'*. He drew up a summary of the Physics^ with a
commentary on the same*^ and a few notes on the Consolatio of
Boethius. Further, he supplied the Western Church with * trans-
lations* from 'Dionysius the Areopagite' and John of Damascus".
* i 149 Brewer. • Men, Franc, i 37.
* Hist. AngL ii 467 Madden.
* Chron, Maj, iv 133 Luard. • Of, Tiri, 91.
* Comp, Phil. 471. ' ib, 469.
* Cp. F. S. Stevenson's Robtrt GrossHtsttt p. 41.
" That on the Anal, PoU,^ which was tacitly atilised by Albertus Magnus
(Stevenson, p. 55), was printed six times between 1494 and 1551.
*^ i 10, littera aliamm translationum et sententia 7ilrmi//ii neutri praedict-
arum sententinrum videtur concordari (Prantl, L^[ik^ iii 85)*
" Printed at Venice, 1498.
^^ Bacon, Cotnp, Phil, 474. Grotseteste's eomminiary - <3ia Dionysius is
printed in the Opera Dion, Artcp, 164—171, Argent. 1503. His 'translation*
of John of Damascus is apparently * commentary on Burgundio's Tersion of
the De Fide Orthodoxa,
554 GROSSETESTE. [CHAP.
It was under his direction that in 1242 Nicholas of St Albans
translated the Testaments of the Tkvelve Patriarchs from a lis
lately brought from Athens by the bishop's own archdeacon, John
of Basingstoke ^ which has been identified with a MS of the tenth
century in the Cambridge University Library*. No less than
31 copies of the Latin version of this apocryphal work are
in existence, one of them transcribed for the abbey of St Albans
by Matthew Paris', who has further transcribed for us the Greek
numerals introduced by John of Basingstoke\ The name of Grosse-
teste has also been connected with the Greek romance of Asenath,
the patriarch Joseph's Egyptian wife, the Latin version of which
has been preserved by Vincent of Beauvais*. In the Compendium
Sdentiarum Grosseteste classified all the departments of knowledge
recognised in his day, and a ms of his Sumtna Phiiosophiae in
the Cambridge Library contains twenty chapters identical with
the encyclopaedia in question ^ All the above works probably
belong to the time between 1239 and 1244. At the latter date,
Grosseteste quotes from the Nicomachean Ethics^ ^ and not (as
before) from the Eudemian\ It is uncertain whether he actually
translated the former; a translation and exposition of the same,
ascribed to Grosseteste, was once in the Library of the Jacobins
in the Rue St Honor^, Paris'. M. Charles, however, refuses to
believe that the translation was executed by Grosseteste *^ But it
may be pointed out that he certainly caused a copy of the Ethics
(doubtless in the form of a Latin translation) to be transcribed
for him, and that he was asked to lend this copy to a Franciscan
in London in 1251"; also that Hermann the German, who
finished his translation of the Arabic commentary of Averroes
on the Ethics in 1240, states, in the preface to his rendering of
* p. 4 13 supra, * Ff. I. 24.
' British Museum, Royal mss 4 d vii ; facsimile in Hardy's Descriptive Cai,
iii, plate 9.
* Chron, AlaJ, v 185.
'^ Spec, Hist, i c. 118— 191; M. R. James, in Camb, Mod, Nisi, i 5S6.
* li. III. 19. ' Ep, 106.
' Epp, 94, loi. ' Jourdain, Recherthes^ 59.
*• Roger Bcuofh 3^8.
^* Adam Marsh's Ep, in Brewer's Afon, Franc, i 114, librum ethicomm
AriKtotelis quern scribi fecistis vestra gratia etc.
XXX.] GROSSETESTE. 55$
Alfarabi's comments on the Rheioric in 1256, that his work on the
Ethics had been rendered useless by Grosseteste's translations of
the latter from the original Greek\ It may therefore be inferred
that a Latin translation of the Greek text of the Ethics was known
under the name of Grosseteste, having probably been executed
under his direction between 1240 and 1244 by one of the Greeks
whom he had invited to England. A Latin rendering of the
important 'middle recension' of the Epistles of Ignatius, con-
jecturally attributed to Grosseteste by Ussher (1644), is definitely
assigned to him in a ms at Tours'. This translation betrays
some acquaintance with the Lexicon of Suldas*, renderings from
which are ascribed to Grosseteste by John Boston of Bury.
These renderings consisted of only a few of the biographical
articles, but even the fact that he possessed such a work is worthy
of notice. The translations drawn up for his use by others were
apparently extremely literal, while in those executed by himself
he was content to give the general sense of the original^. He
was not strong in verbal scholarship ; he had strange ideas on the
etymology of monachus and the meaning of Theraptutcu^ \ but, on
his death-bed, he showed that he held orthodox views on the
derivation of 'heresy', and, even in his last hours, he could
aptly apply to the Mendicant. Orders the line of Juvenal, cantabU
vaaius coram latranc viator^. In his Letters he frequently quotes
Horace ^ Ovid* and Seneca*. 'Probably no one' (in the language
of their editor, Dr Luard) 'has had a greater influence upon
English thought and English literature for the two centuries that
V Reverendas pater, magister Robertui, LincolnieniU epitcopuB, ex priroo
fonte unde emanavenit, Graeco videlicet, ipauin libniiii est oompletiut inter-
pretatus, et Graeconim commentis praecipaas aimexeni notulas comroentattit
(Jourdain, 140; cp. Renan, ^v., 3ia^).
' Lightfoot, ApostolU Fathirs^ II i 76*f.
> Val. Rose in Htrmes, v 155 ; Brit. Mtu. Royal 8 B i (M. R. JUtnet, Bibl.
BunensiSt p* 76).
• Ep. 57 (Stevenson, p. ««5).
■ Epp.ip. 173 Luard*
' Matth. Paris, Chron* Maj, y 400 £ • *
^ Sat. i 7, 3; Ep. % \t 6o\ A. P, 95.
• Ars Am, i 655 ; Rtm, Am. 91 ; Htr. ifjiEx Pmio ii 6, 38 (twice).
• Epp, 33, 35, 67 (all on p. «3).
5 $6 ADAM MARSH. [CHAP.
-^»>»— ■ m ■»■■ n m . I »^^— ^■^-^-"— ^"^^^^^-PT*?^ I. 11 111 ■■111. iifi— ' m ^ m "T^— ^T'^^^^^'^^^—^Wf" .
fpllowed his age'. Wycliffe actually ranks Democritus, Plato,
Augustine and Grosseteste above Aristotle^; and Gower calls him
'the grete clerc Grossteste". Apart from his important services
as a reformer aild a statesman, he fully deserves the credit of
having given 'a powerful impulse to almost every department of
intellectual activity, revived the study of neglected languages, and
grasped the central idea of the unity of knowledge'*. He also
deserves to be remembered as one of the earliest leaders of
thought at Oxford, as a promoter of Greek learning, and as an
interpreter of Aristotle, who went far beyond his master in the
experimenfa/ knoYfledge of physical science \ The mss which he
bequeathed to the Franciscans at Oxford have almost entirely
vanished, but his copy of St Augustine J?< Civitate Dei is still
carefully preserved in the Bodleian'.
When Walter de Merton, the founder of the College bearing
his name at Oxford (1264), applied to Grosseteste
for subdeacon's orders, he presented a letter of
introduction from Grosseteste's friend Adam de Marisco*, or
Adam Marsh (d. 1258), who entered the Franciscan order shortly
after 1226, and was unsuccessfully nominated bishop of Ely in
opposition to Hugh Balsham, the future founder of Peterhouse,
the earliest of the Colleges of Cambridge (1284). Adam Marsh
was the first Franciscan who lectured at Oxford. His Letters (in
the course of which he writes to Cambridge for parchment to
supply the needs of the Franciscans at Oxford^) contain only one
verbal reminiscence of the Classics', and his style is far less
classical than that of his friend Grosseteste. But the attainments
of both of these early Franciscans are warmly eulogised by a
* Trials iv c. 3 (Stevenson, p. 335).
* Cottf, Am. iv 134.
> Stevenson, p. 337.
^ Roger Bacon, Op. Tert. 469 (Rashdall, i 521). Cp. Mullinger, i 84 f,
153 f, and (in general) F. S. .Stevenson's Robert Qrouettsfe (1899), and the
literature there quoted.
» No. 198.
* Afon. Frofu. i, Ep. 14a.
' Jdon. Franc, i 391.
' lb, 974, propter causam vivendi, vivendi finem facere (Juv. viii 84).
XXX.] BONAVENTURA. VINCENT OF BEAUVAIS. 557
'■ ' , .. . . '
younger member of the same Order, their pupil Roger Bacon*.
Among their contemporaries abroad, the teaching
of Plato (as represented by the Neo-Platonists and
Augustine) was followed in preference to that of Aristotle by the
pupil of Alexander of Hales and the immediate successor (in
1253) of John of Rochelle, the mystical Franciscan, Bonaventura
(1221 — 1274).
In the Dominican Order the most learned scholar of this age
was Vincent of Beauvais (d. 1264), tutor to the
sons of Louis IX, who took pleasure in reading ^f BSSvit
Vincent's works and in collecting, in the Library
at the Sainte Chapelle, all the mss needed for their composition.
Vincent is best known in connexion with the Speculum Mundi^ a
vast encyclopaedia divided into four parts distinguished by the
epithets Naturaie, Doctrinale (c, 1250), HisioriaU (c, 1254) and
Morale (doubtless by a later writer, e. 1310-20) *. The spirit
in which he prepared his colossal work may be discerned in the
opening words of his preface:— =■
' Quoniam multitudo librorum et temporis brevitas, memoriae labilitas, non
patitur ctincta, quae scripta sunt, pariter animo comprehendu mihi, omnium
fratnim minimo, plurimoram libros assidue revolventi, ac longo tempore
studiose legenti, visum est tandem (accedente etiam majorum meomm cpnsilio)
quosdam Acres pro modulo ingenii mei electot, ex omnibus fere quos legere
potui, sive nostrorum, id est, Catholicorum Doctorum, sive gentilium, scilicet
Philosophorum et Poetarum et ex ntrimque Historiarum, in unum corpus
voluminis quodam compendio et ordine summatim redigere.'
In compiling the Speculum Naturale^ he had the assistance of
many members of his Order, who made the extracts required for
his purpose. In reference to his omnivorous reading he is justly
described as a librorum helluo. The number of authors cited by
him in the ^eculum Naturale alone is as many as 350, with
I03 more in the Speadum Doctrinale and HistoriaU\ but, his
knowledge of these authors being far from profound, he is
sometimes landed in curious mistakes. Thus he supposes that
* Op* Tert, 75, perfect! in sapientia divina et humana, and yo. Cp. (on
l)oth) rauli*s Ahkandltmg (Tubingen, 1864); also (on Marsh) Little's Gny
Friars at Oxford^ i.U-9f and Stevenson's Grosseteste^ 76 f.
' Printed at Strassburg, 1475- , Nttreml>erg, 1483-6, Venice, 1494^ also
at Douai, 1634. Separate ed. oi Sptc, HUi, Augsburg (and Paris), 1474.
S5^ ALBERTUS MAGNUS. [CHAP.
there were two authors bearing the name of Sophocles and only
one of the name of Seneca, while he actually describes Cicero as
a Roman generaP. He knew no Greek: he calls the emperor
Isaac Angelus Ctmrezach (ed. 1474) or Coresas (ed. 1624), obviously
a corruption of Kvp' 'lotiaic'. He supplies us, however, with
valuable evidence as to the successive stages which marked the
translation of the 'Aristotelian' writings into the Latin language.
Thus, for the Organon^ he uses the old rendering from the Greek,
by Boethius; that from the Arabic in the HUtoria Anhnalium^
De Plantis^ De Cado et Mundo^ and in all except Book IV of the
Meieoroiogica ; the recent rendering from the Greek in the Parva
Naturalia^ the Physics^ Metaphysics^ De Anima and EthUs^ while
he never quotes the Politics*, In the case of TibuUus, he derives
his quotations from certain excerpts earlier in date than any
complete MS of that author now in existence \
In this age the great exponents of Aristotle among the
Schoolmen were the two Dominicans, Albertus
Magllllt Magnus (11 93 — 1280) and his famous pupil
Thomas Aquinas (1225-7 — 1274). The former,
a Suabian by birth, was a student at Padua and Bologna, and
taught at Paris (near the narrow street still called the Rue de
Maitre'Albert\ and also at the great school of the German
Dominicans at Cologne. He was the first of his Order to teach
philosophy and the first of the Schoolmen to state the philosophy
of Aristotle in a systematic form, with constant reference to the
Arabic commentators. Without neglecting the Platonic and
* Graf, Koma^ ii 1 78 ; cp. Hist, Litt, tie la France, xviii 48a f, and Boitoli's
Precursori, 19 — 31.
' Spec, Hist, xxix 64; Gidel, 174. Cp. Hallam, Lit. i 117^; Boataric,
Vincent de B. et la counaissatice de Fantiquiti classique au xiii' s, (1875) '^^ ^^•
des quest, kist, xvii«
' Jounlain, 33, 360-71.
* O, Kichter, De Vincentii Bellovacemis excerptis Tibullianis (1865). On
the later literature, see Uursian's Jahresb, \\ 318. The influence of the
mediaeval encyclopaedias of Vincent de Beauvais, Uninelto Latini and
Bartholomaeus Anglicus on western literature, and especially on German
poetry in cent, xiv— xv, is indicated in Liliencron's Festrede (MUnchen,
1876). Cp. Hist, Litt, de la France, xviii 449 — 519, and F. C. Schlosser
(1819).
XXX.] ALBERTUS MAGNUS. 559
Neo-Platonic writings (so far as they were known to him), he
paid special attention to Aristotle, all of whose works were
accessible to him in Latin translations either from the Arabic or
the Greek or both. Thus, in the case of the De Anima and the
Physics^ he is able to quote a rendering from the Greek which is
purer in its Latinity than that of the Arabic-Latin version of the
fourth book De CaelOy where the Latin is largely interspersed with
transliterations from the Arabic. In interpreting the several
works of Aristotle, he mainly follows Avicenna, continuing
Avicenna's plan of freely paraphrasing the text*. These para-
phrases, in which he adapts the teaching of Aristotle to the
requirements of the Church, are invariably followed by a
'digression', in which he states and discusses the views of his
predecessors. The only case in which we find a regular
commentary, instead of a paraphrase, is that of the Politics^ which
probably belongs to the latter part of his life*. His works, as
printed at Lyons in 1651, fill 21 folio volumes, forming an
encyclopaedia of all the learning and the polemics of his time.
He is somewhat severely criticised by Prantl' as merely an
indefatigable compiler; but he may perhaps be regarded with
greater justice as a man of rich and varied endowments, who in
astronomy and chwnistry sought for truth in nature, and who
deserves full credit as the restorer of the study of Aristotle*.
As 'provincial* of his Order in Germany, he visited many
monasteries, and, whenever he heard of any ancient mss, he
either copied them himself or caused them to be copied by his
companions'. But the influence of that Order, during the first
century of its existence, was, in general, detrimental to classical
learning. The Dominicans studied the Classics not for their own
sake but for the purposes of preaching, and their own Latin
style, which was doubtless debased by the low standard of
1 Cp. Jourdain, 38; Renan, Av*^ 131, 936^; and Ibt in Banian, i 78 n.
* Charles, Hoger Bacon^ 316 note 9. He here follows the method of his
pupil Thomas Aquinas. But the authorship is disputed (Erdmann, i | soo, 8).
> Lo^k, iii 189. It is possibly Albertus who is atUcked by Roger Bacon
in Op. Ttrdum, p. 30 f and 0/. Minus, p. 3S7 f (Charles, pp. 108, 355,
' igtiorat lingtuu *) ; see, however, Brewer's Prrf, p. xxxiv.
4 Cp. T. Clifford AUbutt. Sciemi tmd MkUtval ThMMght, p. 74 note.
* Ilaur^au, II i si8.
S60 THOMAS AQUINAS. [CHAP.
I^tinity attained in the current translations and comments on
Aristotle, was apt to be exceedingly barbarous*.
The great pupil of Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, the
* son of a count of Aquino, was bom {c. 1225-7)
Aquinils ^^ ^ castle near the ancient Aquinum ; he received
his first education at the neighbouring monastery
of Monte Cassino, and continued his studies for six years at the
studium generaie lately founded by Frederic II at Naples, where
he entered the Dominican Order. He next studied at Cologne
under Albertus Magnus (who took his favourite pupil with him to
Paris and brought him back to Cologne), taught philosophy at
Cologne, Paris, Bologna, Naples and elsewhere; lived at the
papal court in Rome from 1260 to 1269, and was less than 50
years of age when he died in 1274, on his way to the Council of
Lyons. In his teaching he brought Scholasticism to its highest
development by harmonising Aristotelianism with the doctrines of
the Church. Certain dogmas were, however, excluded from
comparison by being regarded as mysteries to be received as
matters of faith alone. With Aquinas, the logical and meta-
physical basis is that of Aristotle, with elements derived from
Platonism and from Christian theology*. While Albertus had
composed paraphrases of Aristotle after the manner of his eastern
exponent Avicenna, Aquinas produced commentaries after that of
his western interpreter Averroes. He thus comments on the
De Interpreiatione^ Analytica Posteriora^ Physics^ Parva Naturalia^
Metaphysics^ De Anima^ Ethics^ Politics^ Meieorologica^ De Cado
et Mundo and De Generatione et Corruptione. These com-
mentaries were composed in Italy {c, 1260-9). His three
greatest works are his Exposition of the Sentences of Peter
Lx)mbard, his De Veritate Fidei Catholicae (126 1-4), and his
celebrated Summa Theologiae (which was left unfinished). In
this last his teaching on the subject of Angels is naturally
founded on 'Dionysius the Areopagite'; one of his favourite
phrases is ut docet Dionysius \ and he has no suspicion of the
true date of that author. In the domain of theology the Summa
^ Bursian, i 77. Cp. Hallam, Lit, i 77* note^.
' All these sources of illumination are indicated by the conveigept rays in
the upper five-eighths of Traini's celebrated picture.
.y iMkt St Mallhac SI Paul '^*^' '" ^'^ >!/«« St /oAn Si Aftrt
SI Tkames A^uhiiu
'^'^""' Jz^rrci, '^■>
Altak-i-ikck »y Traimi (i34b). '« Titt Ciiukui ok S. Catbkina, 1'isa,
Kedaced rrom Rouiii'i JHllira ItaHoHa, Imv. xk.
XXX.] THOMAS AQUINAS. 561
is an embodiment of the scientific spirit of the thirteenth century,
a spirit which, as represented by Alexander of Hales, Albertus
Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, stands in sharp contrast with the
literary and classical spirit of the twelfth century, as exemplified
in John of Salisbury and Peter of Blois*. As a commentator on
Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas does not indulge in 'digressions', like
those of Albertus Magnus, and in this respect he is followed by
his Dominican pupil Robert Kilwardby (archbishop of Canterbury,
d. 1279), who left behind him 39 treatises in philosophy alone*.
On the question of *universals' Thomas Aquinas is a Realist in
the moderate Aristotelian sense, while he opposes the Platonic
theory of ideas, as represented by Aristotle, though he accepts it,
so far as it is supported by St Augustine*. The question how
far he was familiar with Greek has been often discussed. He
has been described as ignorant of Greek by Oudin* and others*,
who are vaguely opposed by Gradenigo* on the ground of his
frequent citations from Aristotle and the Greek fathers, and the
wide prevalence of a study of Greek in the Dominican Order,
The dissertations by Bernardo de Rubeis (1750), reprinted in the
first volume of the papal edition of Thomas Aquinas (1S82), tend
to show that, though he was not a consummate hellenist, he was
not an entire stranger to the Greek language. He had doubtless
some original Greek texts at his disposal, and obtained fresh
versions taken directly from the Greek, as his biographer expressly
states \ In a single work, the Catena A urea, he cites the opinions
of 60 Greek writers; in his Summa^ he refers to a score of
^ F. A. Gasquet, in Dublin Review^ 1898, 373.
* Haur^au, ii ii 19.
' Ucbcrwcg, i 444 f.
* Comm, tie Scriptoribus Eccl, (1731)1 iii ^ffit 'nesciebftt...lingiias quas
appellant exoticas;...ut Graeca nee tantisper intelligeret *.
* Brucker, Hist, Crit, Phil, iii 803 f ; Gidel, p. 431. Erasmus on Ep,
Rom, \ described him as 'dignus plane cui linguanim quoque peritia...con-
tingeret '.
* Lett, GrecO'Italiana (1759), 6a.
' Tocco, in Acta Sanet,, Antwerp, i 665, 'icripsit etiam super philosophiam
naturalem et moralem, et super metaphysicam, quorum librorum procuravit
ut fieret nova tramUuic quae sententiae AristoCelis contineret darius veritatem '.
Cp. Jourdain, 40, 391.
s. 36
562 THOMAS AQUINAS. [CHAP.
ecclesiastical and about the same number of secular Greek authors
(including Heraclitus and Aristophanes), and Greek etymologies
present themselves on the opening pages of that work^ He
compares the Latin renderings of the Greek texts of the Ethics
and Politics^ and records variants which are copied from him by
his master Albert. In his Commentary on the Ethics^ (as
observed by Dr Jackson) 'the presentation of the right reading
misspelt, and of a ludicrous etymology side by side with one which
is very nearly right, seems to show that, whilst Aquinas had about
him people who knew Greek, he himself had no substantial
knowledge of it'*. His Commentary on the De IntcrpretaHone
offers some criticisms on the Greek text, and implies the use of
two Latin versions. He also refers to the Greek in commenting
on the Analyiica Posteriora. In the Physics (vii 2, 4) he explains
the Greek words sfiathesis and cercisis^ which are retained in the
Latin versions. In the De Caelo et Mundo he notices that the
words De Caelo alone represent the Greek titled and he also gives
the meaning of a number of Greek terms. The same is true of
the Meieorologica^ where he apparently used three versions, all
derived directly from the Greek*. In quoting Aristotle he uses
translations from the Greek alone and not from the Arabic*. It
was at his own instance that 'William of Brabant' is said to have
produced in 1273 (doubtless with the help of others) a literal
I^tin translation of the Greek text of 'all the works of Aristotle',
which superseded the old renderings from the Arabic^ ' William
* Tougard, 63 f.
' V I, (y6/A0t) 6kXMx^^^^^y^^^^ (p* 1139^ 15).
* Clifford Allbutt, Lc, p. 76 f.
^ apud Graecos intitulatur Dc Caelo,
* Jourdain, 396 — 400.
' ib, 40.
' 1373: Wilhelmus de BrabafUia^ ordinis Praedicatorum, transtulit omnet
libros Aristotelis de graeco in latinum, verbum ex verbo, qua translatione
scholares adhuc hodiema die utuntur in scholis, ad instantiam domini Tkamae
de Aquino (Slav. Chron. in Lindenbrog's Scriptorts rerum Germ, stpient,^ 1706,
p. ao6 ; cp. Jourdain, 67). ' Henri de Hervordia ' adds : nam temporibus
domini Alberti translatione veteri omnes communiter utebantur (<i^. 68). Cp.
Tocco on p. 561 ; also MS of De Caelo et Aluftdo in Trin. Coll. Library (no.
1498, late in c. xiii) *hec est noua trafiilacio*.
XXX.] WILLIAM OF MOERBEKE. 563
of Brabant', Roger Bacon's 'William the Fleming", is none other
than William of Moerbeke, or Meerbecke, a small town S. of
Ghent and on the borders of Flanders and Brabant
He was educated at Louvain and was probably of^oerbeke
one of the young Dominicans annually sent to
Greece to learn the language. After his return {c. 1268) he was
chaplain to Clement IV and Gregory X, and acted as Greek
secretary at the Council of Lyons (1274), where he was one of
those who chanted the Nicene Creed in Greek, thrice repeating
the words contested by the Greek Church'. Roger Bacon, who
does not mention him in 1267 Among the translators of Aristotle",
describes him as well known in i272\ Towards the close of his
life he became archbishop of Corinth (1277 — 1281) and continued
the work of executing (and possibly superintending) translations
from Greek into Latin. His translations included Simplicius on
Aristotle De Caelo et MundOy and probably Simplicius on the
Categories (1266) and Ammonius De Interpretatione^ possibly the
Orgation^ Physics and Historia Animalium^ certainly the 'Theo-
logical Elements' of Proclus (at Viterbo i268)', the Prognostics of
Hippocrates, and Galen De Alitnentis (1277), and (above all) the
Rhetoric (1281) and Politics of Aristotle*. The value of the last
> Comp, Phil., 471 ; infra pp. 569 f.
' Hist, Uti. de la France, xxi 145.
' Op. Tetiium, 91.
* Comp. Phil., 471.
* Specimen quoted by Cousin, ed. 1830-7 ; MS in Peterhouse Library,
after 1268, part 4 of no. isi in M. R. James' Catalogue*, p. 566 infra,
Thomas Aquinas (xxi 718, ed. 1866) notices that the Pseudo- Aristotelian Uber
De Causis is an Arabic abstract of the 'Theological Elements* of Prodns
(WUstenfeld, Gbtt. Ahhandl. iiof); the De Causis is ascribed to Al&rabius
(d. at Damascus, 950). The Decern Dubitati^nes, De Previdemiia and De
Mal(mtm SubsisUntia of Proclus were all translated by William at Corinth in
1180=1281 N.s. (Quetif, i 390).
* Jourdain, 67 f. The Rhetoric of Aristotle and of Cicero, and the Swnma
of Aquinas, are among the Mss received at Avignon by Adam bp of Hereford
in 1 3 19, for Laurence Bruton de Chepyn Norton, nephew of the abbot of
Ilayles (Gasquet, Essays, 37). William's transl. of the Polities was finished
before the death of Thomas Aquinas (1474), who quotes it twice in iht Summa
contra Gentiles, c. 1161 -5 (Rhein. Mus, xxxix 457). A Nova Trastsiatio of
the Ethics, bearing in the MS the date 1181 (probably by Henry Kosbein of
Brabant, printed in 1497)1 was used by Thomas before is6s (Quetif, m, s.).
36—2
564 SIGER OF BRABANT. [CHAP.
two translations has been fully appreciated by Spengel and
Susemihl respectively. Though this translator's knowledge of
Greek is iihperfect\ the very baldness and literalness of his
rendering, which has been denounced by Roger Bacon and by
Sepulveda*, add to its value as evidence of the text of the lost MS
from which it was translated, a ms better than the best of those
that have survived.
The Greek text of the Ethics is said to have been translated
by Henry Kosbein of Brabant, who may possibly be identified
with one of that name who was bishop of Liibeck from 1270 to
1284'. Another 'translator' of Aristotle, Thomas de Cantimpr^
{c, 1 271), has a vague existence in a notice by Trithemius^
Siger of Brabant is described by Dante as lecturing at Paris in
the Rue du Fouarre^; and it was once supposed that Dante might
have listened to his lectures in Paris. But it is now known that
Dante was only seven when Siger left Paris (1272) and under
eighteen when Siger died in prison at Orvieto, in 1283-4*. It is
therefore clear that he is introduced by Dante, not as the poet's
teacher, but as 'the typical representative of the faculty of Arts^
to balance the Theologians and the representatives of the other
Faculties', mentioned in the same canto. It has also been
ascertained that * Siger was an Averroist, i.e. a pure Aristotelian
who taught the doctrine of Aristotle as to the eternity of the
world, the unity of intellect, the mortality of the individual soul,
without the compromises, accommodations, and corrections
^ See Newman's PoUtics, vol. 1 1 p. xUvf, where examples of the translator's
ignorance are cited. Cp. Busse (1881) in Susemihl- Hicks, 71-3.
• Pol, trans. 1548.
' Hist. Liu, de la France^ xxi 141 ; Gidel, 364 f.
^ Jourdain, 64 f, who is wrong, however, in identifying him with the
Thomas (bp of St David's) mentioned by Roger Bacon, Op. Afaj. 48. Thonuis
Cantipratanus, an Augustinian Canon of Cantimpre near Cambrai, became a
Dominican in 1151, studied at Cologne and Paris, and was sub'prior of
Louvain where he died (either as early as 1165 or as late as 1380). The most
important of the works assigned to him in Zedler's Universal Lexikon (1745)
is De Naturis Rerum {c. 11 40 in so books), but no trans, of Aristotle is there
mentioned.
• Par, X 136.
• Maudonnet, .Si^i^r <i!r ^ra^/i/ (Fribourg, 1899).
XXX.] GILLES DE PARIS. 565
adopted by the orthodox Aristotelians like St Thomas '^ He
wrote several works on Logic, including a commentary on the
Prior Analytics*, He is further said to have expounded the
Politics in a revolutionary spirit, and the same is reported of
Nicolas d'Autrecour (c, 1348) and the Carmelite Pierre la Casa
and the Benedictine Gui de Strasbourg. Meanwhile, about the
date of Siger's death, Gilles de Paris, who was studying the
Politics for a very different purpose, had founded on that treatise
a work De Regimine Princifum^ written {c. 1283) for the benefit
of the future king, Philip le Bel*. About the same time, an Irish
Dominican, Geoffrey of Waterford (d. 1300), translated the
Physiognomical^ and, in the preface to his rendering of the
Pseudo-Aristotelian treatise De Regimine Princifum^ recorded
the legend that, at the death of Aristotle, his spirit passed into
the heavens in the semblance of flame*. The Saracenic in-
terest in Aristotle is embodied in the belief that the bones
of that philosopher were preserved in the principal Mosque of
Palermo*.
We have now seen that, in the course of about 130 years, i.e.
in the interval between the early translations at Toledo in 1150
and the death of William of Moerbeke in 1281, the knowledge
of Aristotle's philosophy had passed in Europe from a phase of
almost total darkness to one of nearly perfect light. The whole
of the Organon had become known. The Physics^ Metaphysics^
and Ethics had reached Europe through translations from the
> Rashdall on Maudonnet in Eng, Hist, Rev, 1903, 347 f.
« Cp. Hist, Liu, di la France, xxl 9(5— 1«7'
' Le Clcrc, Hist, Litt, 505. I1ie Augustinian monk Gilles de Paris is the
same as Egidio (Colonna) da Roma, who became bp of Bourges in 1494, and
died at Avignon in 1316 (Tiraboschi, iv 147-51; Lajard in Hist, LUi, de la
France^ xxx 431 — 566). He repeatedly quotes the Politics and Ethics in his
De Regimine Principum, which was printed 11 times in Latin (1473 — 161 7)
and translated into French soon aAer 1386 (ed. Molenaer, 1899). It is one of
the sources of Occleve's Gcvemail of Princes (H. Morlej, Eng, Writtrs^ vi
• Hist, Litt. de la France, xxi a 16; Gidel, 161,
• Gidel. 353.
• Baddcley's ChaHes III 0/ Naples, 143.
566 ARISTOTLE ALMOST FULLY KNOWN. [CHAP. XXX.
Arabic, and the I>e Anima, the Magna Moralia, Poiitia and
Rkttork through translations from the Greek'. The Jhittk had
already been translated into Arabic from a Syriac version founded
on a Greek hs far older than any text of the treatise now extant,
but this translation, which was probably little knovm, has
only recently been made avaikble for the purposes of textual
criticism*.
' Cp. p. 54S tupr».
* Margolioulh, Antcdoia OtieiiiaHa (1S87); Buicher't ed. 1, p. f. Cp.
Eesti, HUl. de la Criiiqut, SM-^S Immiich in PkHalAv (1896) 10— 3S;
J. Tkai in memer Studim, xxiv (1901) 70—98. The date of ibe AnUe
venion ii c. 93;.
■^\m'im<&'
^Asm*
Colophon ov tub 'Theological Elkhents' of- Pkoclus.
From a xiii cent, hs in the Library oi Peterhouie, Cannbridee,
copied from the tian<1aiion finished mt Viterbo bj WillUin
of Moerbekc, 18 May, 11G8 (p. iSliufira).
Part iv of MS I. 1. 6 (M. R. Jame*, CataUgm g/HtiiSSin Iki
Library sf Pcltrktuiiy Cambridge, no. iii, p. 141).
CHAPTER XXXI.
THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY AND AFTER,
f ROGER BACON (1214— 94) TO DANTE (1265 — 1321).
Among the keenest critics of the Schoolmen, and also of the
recent translators of Aristotle, was Roger Bacon
(r. 1214 — 1294). Bom near Ilchester and educated
at Oxford and Paris, he included among his teachers at Oxford
men such as Robert Grosseteste, Adam Marsh and Thomas
Wallensis (afterwards bishop of St David's). All of these are said
to have been pupils of Edmund Rich (archbishop of Canterbury,
1234 — 40), who, according to a biography ascribed to the
Dominican Robert Bacon, studied as though he were to live for
ever, and lived as though he were to die on the morrow'. It was
probably under the influence of Grosseteste, the first lecturer to
the Franciscans at Oxford*, that he entered the Franciscan Order.
After pursuing his studies in Paris, he returned to England about
1250. Some seven years later, he fell under the suspicions of
his Order, and, by the authority of its recently appointed general,
afterwards known as the 'seraphic' Bonaventura, was for ten
years (1257 — 67) kept in close confinement in Paris. He
probably owed his partial release to the goodwill of Clement
IV (d. 1268), for whom he now wrote, in the wonderfully brief
space of 15 months, his three great works, the Opus Majus^ the
Opus Minus and the Opus Tertium (1267). These were followed
' St John's CoU. MS, fol. iii ▼, col. 4, (ttudebat) ditcere, quasi semper
victunis ; vivere, qamsi crms moritanis (printed in L^e by W. Wallace, 1893).
* Grosseteste, Rpp, p. 179 Lnard.
568 ROGER BACON, [CHAP.
by his Compendium Studii Philosophiae (1271-2). He was once
more placed under restraint in 1278; but he had again been
released before writing his Compendium Studii Theoiogiae (i2^2\
and he probably died at Oxford in 1294. His earlier reputation
as an alchemist and a necromancer was greatly transformed by
the publication (by Dr Samuel Jebb) of his Opus Afajus (1733),
which has been recognised as at once the Encyclopaedia and
the Organon of the thirteenth century \ He here discusses the
hindrances to the progress of true science, and broadly sketches
the outlines of grammar, logic, mathematics, physics (especially
optics), experimental research and moral philosophy ; but in the
text, as first published, the part on grammar was imperfect and
that on moral philosophy' was wanting. Extracts from a MS ofr
the Opus Tcriium were published by Cousin in 1848'; fragments
of the Opus AfinuSy with the Opus Tertium and the Compendium
Studii Philosophiae^ were first edited by Professor J. S. Brewer in
the Opera Inedita of 1859; and an excellent monograph on their
author was produced by M. l^mile Charles in 186 1. The following
is the general purport of the passages in the above works of Roger
Bacon which bear on our present subject : —
' Ignorance of the truths set forth by the ancients is due to the little care
that is spent on the study of the ancient languages. It is vain to object that
some of the Fathers neglected that study and misunderstood its advantages.
Worthy as they are of respect in many ways, they cannot serve as our models
in everything. They knew and appreciated Plato, but were almost entirely
ignorant of Aristotle. The first to translate and explain the Caiigories was
Augustine, who praises Aristotle more for that one small work than we for all
{Opus Afajus, p. 18). The next to translate Aristotle was Boethius, who
rendered parts of the Logic and a few other works... The Fathers often follow
Aristotle's teaching on Grammar, Logic and Rhetoric, and the common axioms
of his Metaphysics', but they neglect the rest and even bid us neglect it (p. 19).
Philosophy is also neglected by modem doctors, who use inferior text*lxx>ks
(p. 11). It is impossible to obtain a perfect knowledge of the Scriptures,
without knowing Hebrew and Greek, or of philosophy without knowing
* Wheweirs PAiL of the Inductive Sciences, xii c. 7.
' Since published by J. K. Ingram (Dublin, 1858). Cp. E. Charles,
Roger Bacon, pp. 339 — 348. The Preface was first printed by F. A. Gasquet
in Eng. Hist. Rev, 1897 p. 516 f. The Op, Afajus has been edited by Bridges
(1897-1900).
* Journal des Savants (1848), Mars — Juin.
XXXI.] ROGER BACON. 569
Arabic as well (p. 44). A translator ought to b« thoroughly familiar with
the science of which he is treating, and with the language of his original and
that of his own rendering. Boethins alone has known the meaning of the
languages M Grosseteste alone, the meaning of the science. All the other
translators are ignorant of both. Their translations of Aristotle in particular
are impossible to understand (p. 45). The Latin translations of Josephus,
Dionysius, Basil, John of Damascus and others, are inferioi* to those executed
by Grosseteste ' (p. 46).
* There are not five men in Latin Christendom who are acquainted with the
Hebrew, Greek and Arabic Grammar... There are many among the Latins who
can speak Greek, Arabic, and Hebrew; very few, who understand i\it grammar
of these languages, or know how to teach them... So it is now with nearly all
the Jews, and even with the native Greeks... Even when they ^ understand
the languages, they know nothing of the sciences... We must have the original
texts of the separate parts of philosophy, that the falsities and defects in the
Latin copies may be discovered ' (O/mj Ttrtium^ p. 33). *The scientific works
of Aristotle, Avicenna, 5>eneca, Cicero, and other ancients, cannot be had
except at a great cost; their principal works have not been translated into
Latin... The admirable books of Cicero De Republica are not to be found
anywhere...! could never find the works of Seneca... although I made diligent
search for them during twenty years and more* (p. 55)'.
' Though we have numerous translations of all the sciences by Gerard of
Cremona, Michael Scot, Alfred the Englishman, Hermann the Gennan, and
William <the> Fleming, there is such an utter falsity in all their writings
that none can sufficiently wonder at it... Certainly none of the above-named
had any true knowledge of the tongues or the sciences, as is clear, not from
their translations only, but also from their condition of life. Alt were alive in my
time ; some, in their youth, contemporaries with Gerard of Cremona, who was
somewhat more advanced in years among them. Hermann the German, who
was very intimate with Gerard, is still alive (137^) and a bishop. When I
questioned him about certain books of Logic', which he had to translate from
the Arabic, he roundly told me he knew nothing of Logic, and therefore did
not dare to translate them... Nor did he understand Arabic, as he confessed;
in fact, he was rather an assistant in the translations, than the real translator.
For he kept Saracens about him in Spain, who had a principal hand in his
translations. In the same way Michael the Scot claimed the merit of numerous
translations. But it is certain that Andrew, a Jew, laboured at them more
than he did. And even Michael, as Hermann reported, did not understand
either the sciences or the tongues. And so of the rest; especially the notorious
* Cp. Op, Tert, 33; Gk, Gr, 19.
• Brewer's Preface^ pp. Ixi — Ixiii.
' The Rhet and /W. are meant; cp. Comp, Stud, Pkilos, p. 473.
Hermann the German (ap. Wiistenfeld, G9ii, AbkandL 93) himself describes
them as lof^ici ntgocii ArisMelU €9mpiemnUum, Cp. Charles, p. IS4 n. 1, and
Immisch, in PAiM. Iv 90; p. 546 supra.
570 ROGER BACON. [CHAP.
WillUlm <the> Fleming, who is now in such reputation (1374); whereas it
is well known to all men of letters in Paris, that he is ignorant of the sciences
in the original Greek, to which he makes such pretensions; and therefore he
translates falsely and corrupts the philosophy of the Latins' (CompemUum
Studii PhUosophtoit p. 471)'. ' If I had any authority over the translations of
Aristotle, I should have all of them burnt to save men from wasting tbdr
time in studying them and thus multiplying the sources of error and ignorance*
(p. 469).
'Slowly has any portion of the philosophy of Aristotle come into use
among the Latins. His Natural Philosophy^ and his Metaphysics^ with the
commentaries of Averroes and others, were translated in my time (timperibut
ftostris), and interdicted at Paris before the year a.d. 1237, because of the
eternity of the world and of time, and because of the book of the Divinaiimt
by Dreams^ which is the third book De Somno et Vigilia^ and because of many
passages erroneously translated. Even his Logic was slowly received and
lectured on. For St Edmund, the archbishop of Canterbury [Edmund Rich]»
was the first who in my time read the Elenchi* at Oxford. And I have seen
Master Hugo, who first read the book of Posterior (Analytics), and have also
seen his writing (verbum). So there have been few, considering the multitude of
the Latins, who are of any account in the philosophy of Aristotle; nay, very
few indeed, and scarcely any up to this year of grace 1994... The Ethics has
but slowly become known', having been only lately, and that seldom, ex-
pounded by our masters^... Thus far, there have only been three persons who
could form a true judgement of the snull portion of the whole of Aristotle that
has been translated **.
In the Opus Majus Roger Bacon protests against the inordinate
amount of time spent on the metaphysical controversy as to
Universals' (p. 28); notices the expansion in the knowledge of
* Brewer's Pre/ace, p. lix.
* l^ruHi EUnchorum (Univ. Coll. Oxf. MS, Rashdall ii 754); lihmm.
EUf^torum (Brit. Mus. MS Royal 7 F vii, folio 155).
* coitaia (commufucata ?) Brit. Mus. MS.
^ a magistris (1^.), not Parisiis (as printed by Charles).
* Compendium Studii Theologiae, p. Iv of Brewer's Pre/ace^ corrected and
supplemented from text in Charles, p. 413, and Rashdall, ii 754, and from MS
in Brit. Mus.
' His own position may be inferred from the fact that he criticises the
'Unity of Form' held by Thomas Aquinas, thus anticipating Scotus; while,
in his doctrine of Universals, he anticipates Ockham, but avoids the mbtake
of supposing that the particular alone is real Cp. Extracts in Charles, p. 383,
'Universale non est nisi convenientia plurium individuorum*...'Individuttm
est prius secundum naturam' etc.; also the full discussion, ib, pp. 164—9441
and the brief summary in Rashdall, ii 535.
XXXI.] ROGER BACON. 57 1
Aristotle's writings dating from the time of Michael Scot, i.e. from
after 1230 (p. 36); and denounces the inadequacy of the current
translations, and especially the ignorance which had led the
translators to leave foreign words standing in their text (p. 45).
Three times over he expresses his annoyance at the use of the
word beUnum in the Latin translation of the (Pseudo-Aristotelian)
De Pianiis. Once, while lecturing on Aristotle, he had hesitated
and stumbled over this unwonted word, whereupon his Spanish
pupils laughed outright and told him that it was only the Spanish
for 'henbane' {hyoscyamusy. Curiously enough, the late Greek
translator of this Spanish equivalent for the Arabic rendering of
the lost original of Nicolaus Damascenus, although he uses the
word voo-Kua/AOf elsewhere', has actually borrowed, from the
Spanish-Latin rendering, the word fttXivtov, which has no real
authority whatsoever.
In the fragmentary Opus Minus Roger Bacon points out
errors of translation in the Vulgate, as well as mistakes due to
modern correctors of the text : — * everyone presumes to change
anything he does not understand, — a thing he would not dare to
do for the books of the classical poets' (p. 330 f)'. Here and
elsewhere he lays the foundations for the textual criticism of the
Scriptures *. He also protests against the implicit trust placed in
the works of an earlier Franciscan, Alexander of Hales, even
suggesting that his ponderous Summa Theologiae ('plusquam
pondus unius equi ') was not composed by himself (p. 326). In
the Opus Tertium he boldly challenges a comparison of his own
work with that of Albertus Magnus and William Shirwood (p. 14),
^ Opus Majus, p. 45 ; Op, Teriium, p. 91 ; Comp, PkiL^ p. 467. Cp. De
Piantis i 7, a (p. 811 a 33»iv 38, 39 DidoC). The Latin translator of the
Arabic was ' Alfred the Englishman *. Bacon has the delicacy not to mention
this fact, but he ascertains the right rendering from * Hermann the German*
(p. 467).
' %2ob 5 [Ar, iv 17, 13 Didot).
' The unnamed scholar, who had spent 40 yean in cautiously correcting
and expounding the Vulgate, has been identified as the Oxford Franciscan,
William de Mara, or de la Mare. Cp. Denifle, Arthiv f, Uit. He, da MAs^
1888, 545. (See F. A. Gasquet in Dublin Rev,, 1898, p. si.)
* Charles, p. 363 ; cp. J. P. P. Martin, La Vulgmie UUine am xiii s, d* afrit
Roger Baton (1888), and esp. F. A. Gasquet on ' English Biblical Criticism in
the 13th cent. *, in Dublin Rev.^ Jan. 1898, i — ii.
572 ROGER BACON. [CHAP.
while he is never weary of extolling the merits of Grosseteste^ or
of descanting on the mistakes in the current renderings of
Aristotle*. He also discourses on textual corruptions, on accents,
on aspirates, and on punctuation and prosody (pp. 234 — 356f).
Lastly, in the Compendium Studii Philosophic^ he tells us that, in
many parts of Italy, the clergy and the people were Greek*, and
that teachers of that language, who had been brought from Italy
by Grosseteste, were still to be found in England (p. 434). In
urging the study of Greek as well as Hebrew, he adds : — ' we aze
the heirs of the scholars of the past, and (even in our own
interests) are bound to maintain the traditions of learning, on
pain of being charged with infinite folly ' (p. 435). He next gives
a long list of Latin words derived from Greek (p. 44i)\ attacks
the etymological works of Papias, Hugutio and Brito* (pp. 447 —
452); quotes with approval the criticism on auricaicum (a mistake
for orichalcum*) which he had himself heard from Joannes de
Garlandia in Paris (p. 453); and adds a number of common
errors in spelling, scansion and etymology (pp. 454 — 462). He
ui^es many further reasons for studying Greek (p. 464 f ), insists
that Aristotle should be read in the original (p. 469), and assures
us that he had seen the Greek text of the 50 books of Aristotle
on Natural History (p. 473), mentioned by Pliny (viii 17). Towards
the close, he sets forth the Greek alphabet, with the name and
sound and numerical value of each letter (p. 495 f)^ classifies all
the letters, and discourses at length on accentuation and prosody
(pp. 508—519).
The desirability of the study of Greek is sufficiently shown by
the copyist of the above treatise, who clumsily tries to represent
Greek words in Latin characters. On the other hand, the Greek
* PP- 33. 70i 75» 88» 9' ; cp- Op. AfaJ, 45, 64; Comp. Phil. 469, 471, 474;
Ck. Cr, 118.
' PP- 75» 77» '«4» cp. op, AfaJ, a6a, 410, 460.
' Cp. Op, Tiri, 33; and Gk, Gr, 31, in regno Siciliae (meamngS. Itafy)
multae ecclesiae Graecorum et populi multi sunt qui veri Graeci sunt «tc.
* Cp. GJk. Gr. 68 and /nirad, xxxv f.
* Cp. Gk. Gr. 37, 92, 98 ; Charles, pp. 330, 359, and in/ra, p. 639 f.
' Cp. p. 38(5, Op. Alin. c. 7, and Gk. Gr. p. 92
7 Faci. in Brewer's O^ra Itudita ad fin. Cp. frontispiece to Opus Mt^us^
vol. iii, ed. Bridges.
XXXI.] ROGER BACON. 573
is beautifully written in the MS of Roger Bacon's Greek Grammar
preserved in the Library of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, which
includes a short Greek Accidence and ends with the paradigm of
iwrw*. This Grammar has now been published, together with
a fragment, ascribed to the same work, in the Cambridge Library*.
The author holds that 'the Grammar of all languages is sub-
stantially the same, though there may be accidental variations
in each". Greek Grammars had already been collected for
Grosseteste in Greece itself^ and one of his friends had actually
brought such a work from Athens and had translated it into
Latin ^. Bacon's own knowledge of Greek was mainly derived
from the Greeks of his day, and it is their pronunciation that he
invariably adopts*. In his Grammar he naturally followed the
Byzantine tradition, which was also followed subsequently by
Constantine Lascaris and Chrysoloras^ He may have had some
direct knowledge of Theodosius"; but it seems more probable
that, like Theodorus Prodromus*, he used a Greek Catechism
resembling that preserved in the Wolfenbiittel Erotemata^*,
Besides the Grammar, there is a Greek lexicon which may be
attributed to Roger Bacon *^ But these are isolated works; in
the library of Christ Church, Canterbury {c, 1300), not a single
Greek text was to be found'".
In the Opus Afajus^* Roger Bacon refers to the translation of
Homer in a way which, at first sight, seems to imply a personal
familiarity with the charm of the original ; but this impression is
unhappily dispelled when we find two parallel passages, from both
' Brewer's Pref. to Op, Irudita^ p. Ixiv ; q>. Charies, 66.
' E. Nolan (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1901).
' p. 17. * Op, Teri, 91.
• p. 413 supra,
* Gk. Gr, p. XX of Inirod,^ and pp. 31, 48 and passim in the transliterations
there given.
^ Heiberg in Byt, Ziiischr, 1900, 471 f; and S. A. Hirsch in Inirod, to Gk,
Gr, p. Ix.
" P- 354 inpra, » p. 354 «//.
" S. A. Hirsch, u, j., p. Ixii.
" M. R. James in Camb, Mod, Hist, i 587.
" ib, 589 ; p. 536 supra,
*' p. 44, si cuiquam videatur linguae gratiam interpretatione non mutari,
Ilomerum exprimat in Latinum ad verbum.
574 ROGER BACON. [CHAP.
of which it is certain that he is here quoting Jerome ^ In the
preface to his Compendium Thtologiae he justifies certain quota-
tions from Cicero, Pliny and Seneca by adding: — 'etiam causa
specialis me monet ut excitem lectorem ad quaerendum lihros
auctorum dignos^ in quibus magna pulchritudo et dignitas
sapientiae reperitur, qui nunc temporis sicut a multitudine
studentium, sic a doctoribus eius penitus ignorantur". In
philosophy his greatest names are Aristotle' and his Arabian
exponents, Avicenna and Averroes. He refers to the Phaedo
and TYmaeus of Plato, which were probably known to him only
in Latin translations^ In Latin his favourite authors are Cicero,
whose appeal to Caesar he aptly applies to the pope: — fwH
nostra ptriculo esse sapiens^^ and Seneca', who helps him to
denounce the blind following of authority: — vhnmus adexempia^.
In history he knows Sallust, Livy and 'Trogus Pompeius'; he is
also familiar with Pliny and Solinus, and with Donatus, Servius,
Apuleius, GelHus, Censorinus, Boethius, Cassiodorus and Prisdan*.
He describes Bede as iiteratissimus in grammatical^ and even as
» Op, Tert, 90 ; Comp, Phil, 466.
' ap. Charles, p. 411*
' He knew the whole of the Organon^ the Physics^ De Caelo (of which he
had two translations, one of them taken from the Greek), De Ammo, Dt
Generatiotu ct Corruptione^ Parva Naturalia^ the * nineteen ' books of the
Hist, An., ten books of the Ahtaphysics (Comp, Phil, 475), and the Ethia (in
three translations). He had some slight knowledge of the Khet, and P^,
(Charles, p. 315), and the P^itks, but called it the * Book of Laws ' (/^. 397,
and Comp, Phil, 411 f). He also knew the Pseudo- Aristotelian Dt Ptaniis^
De Causis and Lider Secretorum, The Problems had only been partially and
inadequately translated (Charles, 376). Cp., in general, Charles, 315-7*
• Charles, 313.
• Pro Marc, if, (Op, Tert. p. 87). He also knew the Verriues, Phil,,
Paradaxa, De Part, Orat,, De Div,, De Am., De Sen,, De Nai, /?., De OJf,^
and the then * little known ' Tusc, Disp, He mentions * five ' lx>oks of the
Academica (Op, Tert, p. 50, and Brit. Mus. MS, Royal 7. F. vii, folio 154 V),
probably meaning the De. Finibus\ he cites fragments of the //orteHsius Ukd
Timaeus and searches in vain for the De Kepublica, Cp. Charles, 333.
• He knows the Letters, De Betuf.^ Ira, Clem,, and Quaest, Nat, (besides
certain apocryphal works). Charles, 313.
' Ep. 123 8 6 (ap. Op, Tert, 50).
• Charles, 330, 333 f.
• Op, Alin. 33 a.
XXXI.] ROGER BACON. 57$
antiquior Prisciano^ \ but he mainly relies on Priscian, without
slavishly following him*. In verse he quotes freely from Terence,
Virgil, Juvenal, Lucan, Statius and the later poets. He urges
that boys should not be taught the 'foolish fables' of poets such
as Ovid'; but, when he needs a new argument for the study of
Greek, he tacitly borrows a line from the Epistolae ex Ponto
(iii 5, i8): — 'gratius ex ipso fonte bibuntur aquae'^ He knew
Arabic and Hebrew, as well as Greek, and the same keenness of
spirit, that prompted him to insist on the importance of the study
of Greek, impelled him to extend the bounds of science. In
science he was at least a century in advance of his time, and, in
spite of the long and bitter persecutions that he endured, he was
full of hope for the future. The spirit in which he looked forward
to an age of wider knowledge was like that expressed in one of his
own citations from Seneca': — 'veniet tempus quo ista quae nunc
latent, in lucem dies extrahat et longioris aevi diligentia'*.
In Roger Bacon's day, notwithstanding his eagerness for
promoting the study of Aristotle in the original Greek, it was the
Latin Aristotle alone that was studied in the schools. In the
very year in which he was writing his three great works in Paris
(1267), Oxford was prescribing for the course in Arts the whole
of the Latin Organon^ and, as an alternative, the De Anima and
the Physics', The study of the Physics in England during this
century may be illustrated by the MS of the Latin translation of
that work, written in England and illuminated with a representation
of a mediaeval lecture-room, in which a closely packed group of
nine tonsured students, with their books resting on their knees, is
* Gk, Gr, 41.
« Op, Ten, ^45, and Gk, Gr, 131. » Op, Tert, 55.
^ Printed as prose in Comp, Phil, 465 (with duUHis).
* N, Q. vii 15, 4.
* Extr. in Charles, p. 393. See, in general, Hist, Litt, de la France^ vf\
138 — 41 ; E. Charles, Roger Bacon^ sa vie, us ct/vragu^ set dactrines (1861);
A. Parrot, R, B,^ sa personne, son ginie, ses etuvra et sa eentemportUns (1894);
Brewer's Pref. to Opera Inedita (1859); and Adamson in Diet, Nat, Bteigr.;
and cp. Mullinger, i 154-9; Rashdall, ii 531-5; Gasqnet in Dublin Review,
1898, I— ai; Clifford AUbutt, Scienee and Medieval Thought, pp. 71, 78 f;
and Hirsch in Jntrod, to The Greeh Grammar ef Roger Bacon (1903).
7 Rashdall, ii 455.
576 RAYMUNDUS LULLIUS. DUNS SCOTUS. [CHAP.
listening to a scholar, who is lecturing with uplifted hand, robed
in an academic gown and enthroned on a professorial chair'.
Roger Bacon's interest in Greek and Arabic was shared by a
slightly later Franciscan, the unwearied traveller,
LunJUH"***** Raymundus LuUius (1234 — 1315), who urged the
Pope and the authorities of the university of Paris
to establish a college in which Greek and Arabic and the language
of the Tartar races could be taught with a view to the refutation
of the doctrines of Mahomet and Averroes*.
While, among the Franciscans, the extreme Realist, Alexander
of Hales, and the mystic Bonaventura had, in their philosophic
opinions, agreed in adhering to the Augustinian tradition as to
the teaching of Plato, the Dominicans Albertus Magnus and
Thomas Aquinas had introduced Aristotelianism into theology.
The views of these Dominicans were opposed at Paris and Oxford
(1277), and this opposition was followed by further developments
of Franciscan philosophy*. A new form of Realism culminated
in the teaching of the Franciscan Joannes Duns
Scotus, who was possibly born at Dunstan (near
Dunstanburgh Castle) in Northumberland, and who opposed the
teaching of Thomas Aquinas at Oxford, Paris (1304) and Cologne,
where he died in I3o8^ While the system of Thomas Aquinas
implies the harmony of faith and reason. Duns Scotus has less
confidence in the power of reason and enlarges the number of the
doctrines already recognised as capable of being apprehended by
faith alone. He has also a less high regard than Thomas for
the teaching of Aristotle, and he adopts many Platonic and
Neo-PIatonic opinions. His works include Quacstiofus on Aristotle
Dc Anima and Meteorological and an exposition and summaries
and conclusions, as well as Quaesiiones^ on the Metaphysics, The
^ British Museum, Royal la. G. v. (reproduced in Social Engiatuit ill. ed.,
i 613). The double columns of the text of this MS have two narrow oolnmns
of glosses on each side.
' Renan, AverroiSt 355*f; Rashdall, ii 96; F. A. Gasquet in DatkHn
Review^ 1898, 365 ; Hist, Litt. de la France^ xxix i — 386 ; Erdmann, i | ao6.
' Rashdall, ii 537 f.
^ The tombstone in the AfinoritenkircheheaLn the inscription: — * Scotia
genuit, Anglia me suscepit, Gallia me docuit, Colonia me tenet '.
XXXI.] DUNS SCOTUS. 577
i
Qiiaestiones on the Physics are now acknowledged to be spurious.
In the domain of pure Scholarship he is represented by the
Grammatica Speculativa\ which is also described as a treatise
De Modis Significandt\ and is sometimes attributed to Albert
of Saxony', although Duns Scotus himself refers to it in his work
on Logic, which he wrote early in his career. In his Grammar,
he quotes Petrus Helias, as well as Donatus and Priscian.
Even in the ranks of the Realists, the extravagant Realism of
Duns Scotus was followed by a reaction led by Wycliflfe (1324-84),
who (for England at least) is at once 'the last of the Schoolmen '
and 'the first of the Reformers'. Humanists were agreed with
later Reformers, such as Tyndale (1530), in opposing the subtleties
of Scotus. In 1535 (a date which marks the close of the influence
of Scholasticism in England) the idol of the Schools was dragged
from his pedestal at Oxford and Cambridge ; and one of Thomas
Cromwell's commissioners at Oxford writes: — *We have set Dunce
in Bocardo^ and have utterly banished him Oxford for ever, with
all his blynd glosses . . . (At New College) wee fownd all the
great Quadrant Court full of the Leaves of Dunce, the wind
blowing them into every comer". But, a little more than a
century later, a magnificent edition of his works, excluding the
biblical commentaries, and including the philosophical and
dogmatic writings alone, was published in 13 folio volumes by the
Irish Franciscans at Lyons (1639). In the first volume of this
edition he is called 'amplissimae scholae nobilis antesignanus',
and is even described as 'ita Aristotelis discipulus, ut doceri ab eo
Aristoteles vellet, si viveret*. He also survives, as a typical
Schoolman, in Butler's Hudibras (1664), where the hero of the
poem is compared to Duns Scotus (as well as to Thomas Aquinas
and 'the irrefragable Doctor', Alexander of Hales): —
' In school-divinity as able
As he that hight Irrefragable;
A second Thomas, or, at once,
To name them all, another Dunce*.
By a strange caprice of fortune the name of one who was celebrated
1 i 39—76 (ed. 1639). CP* Bibler's Beiiragt (1885), 84-8.
' Title of Venice ed. of 15 19. Albert taught in Paris, r. i35»-6o.
' Layton in Strype*s EccL Menwruds^ i 394.
s. 37
578 WILLIAM OF OCKHAM. [CHAP.
as 'the subtle Doctor', and was regarded by Hooker as Uhe
wittiest of school divines *\ and by Coleridge as the only English-
man possessed of 'high metaphysical subtlety'*, has become
synonymous with stupidity'.
Duns Scotus is distinguished from all the other Schoolmen by
what Prantl^ has described as 'a peculiarly copious infusion of
Byzantine Logic'. The Synopsis of Aristotle's Logic compiled
by Psellus (d. 1078)* was translated by William Shirwood, who
was a prebendary of Lincoln Cathedral in 1245, and treasurer in
1258 and 1267'. Tt is in this treatise that the mnemonic verses
for the 'Moods of the Four Figures', Barbara^ ceiarent etc., are
found for the first time. The Synofsis of Psellus was afterwards
incorporated in the seventh section of the Summulae Logicales
of Petrus Hispanus of Lisbon, who died as Pope John XX
(XXI) in 1277, while the first six sections of Petrus Hispanus
contain the substance of the I^gic of Aristotle and Boethius^
The teaching of the Dominican Thomas Aquinas was opposed
not only by the Realist Duns Scotus, but also by
orockhI!Iii another Franciscan, the great Nominalist William
of Ockham (d. 1347). The date of his birth is
unknown, but, in his boyhood, he must often have gazed on the
seven lancet-windows of the thirteenth century, which make the
church of his birthplace in Surrey unique in the annals of
architecture. He studied at Oxford and graduated in Paris.
Realism, which had been shaken more than two centuries
before by Roscellinus, was to all appearance shattered by
William of Ockham, who is the last of the greater Schoolmen.
He opposes the real existence of universals, pointing out that,
if (with Plato) an independent existence is ascribed to the
universal, the latter practically becomes an individual object
He also regards Aristotle's doctrine of Categories as resting on
> EccL PoL I xi 5.
* Literary Remains^ iii i\,
' Trench. Study of Words, 83 f; early exx. (1577) in Murray, Oxf. Diet. ».v.
< Logik, iii ^03. • p. 403 supra,
• Confused by Leland with William of Durham, Diet, Nat, Biogr, Iii 146.
' Val. Ro$e and Thurot (as well as Mansel and Hamilton) held, however,
that the Greek Synopsis was translated from the Latin. Cp. Uel)erweg, i 404,
459 E. T.; and MuUinger, i 175 — 186.
XXXI.] WALTER BURLEY. 579
a division, not of things, but of words, and as primarily having
a grammatical reference ^ His chief service to philosophy is that
'he brought again to light ... the true value of the inductive
method, as auxiliary to the deductive, — the great truth which
Aristotle had indicated and the Schoolmen had shut out".
As an opponent of Ockham at Oxford we have Walter
Burley (1275 — '345 ?)> whose ignorance of Greek
did not debar him from writing commentaries on ^
the Ethics and Politics^ which he dedicated to Richard of Bury.
His liber de vita ac tnoribus phihsophorum^ extending from Thales
to Seneca (and not excluding poets), was the first attempt in
modern times at writing a history of ancient philosophy; but
it is marred by strange mistakes in matters of literary history,
the two Plinies and the two Senecas being treated as one,
Statius Caecilius confounded with Papinius Statius, and Livy
with Livius Andronicus'. The doctrines of Averroes were
accepted by Burley and by the 'prince of the Averroists*,
the English Carmelite, John of Baconthorpe (d. 1346), but the
influence of these two Englishmen was stronger in Italy than
in England ^
Though the pretensions of Scholasticism had been reduced
by William of Ockham, its methods survived in works such as
that of Thomas Bradwardine, who was archbishop of Canterbury
at his death in 1349. He is the author of a scholastic treatise
De Causa Dd, founded mainly on Augustine ; it is in company
with Augustine and Boethius that he is respectfully mentioned
by Chaucer^, and, in the view of his editor, Sir Henry Savile
(1618), 'solidam ex Aristotelis et Platonis fontibus hausit
philosophiam\ It is true that his pages abound in citations
from Seneca, Ptolemy, Boethius and Cassiodorus, as well as the
* Ueberweg, i 46a f and 154.
^ Mullinger, i 189; cp. Rashdall, ii 535 f; Clifford AUbutt, p. 89 f ;
H. Morlcy, Eng. iVriters, iii 3^6 f, v n — 14 ; and Haur^u, II ii 356—430.
* Ila.nse, De MuL Aevi stud. Pkiiol. 13 f. MS in Trinity Coll. Library,
O. 1. 50 (no. 1154 M. R. James), first ed. 1467; latest ed., Tiibingen, i836.
Burley is said to have written 130 treatises on Aristotle alone.
* Kenan, Av,, 318* f.
* Cant. Tales 15148.
37—2
58o RICHARD OF BURY. [CHAP.
Fathers and the Schoolmen, but we have reason to know that
all this erudition is derived from the library of his
?f Bu^ ^"e"<l Richard of Bury (i287-i345)>. Richard,
the son of Sir Richard Aungerville, was educated
at Oxford, and was appointed bishop of Durham in recognition
of his success as envoy (in 1330) to the pope at Avignon, where
he made the acquaintance of Petrarch. The latter describes
him as 'a man of ardent temperament, not ignorant of literature,
and with a strong natural curiosity for obscure and recondite
lore', but the Italian attempted in vain to enlist the Englishman's
aid in determining the topography of the ancient Thule*. As
the author of the Philobiblon^ Richard is more of a bibliophile
than a scholar, and the few Greek words that occur in its pages
do not warrant our inferring that he had any extensive knowledge
of the language. He is fully conscious of the great debt of
Latin literature to that of Greece'. He proposes to remedy the
prevailing ignorance by providing a Greek as well as a Hebrew
grammar for the use of students ^ whom he describes as at
present getting 'a smattering of the rules of Priscian and Donatus,
and as chattering childishly concerning the Categories and
PerihenneniaSy in the composition of which Aristotle spent his
whole soul". He agrees with Bradwardine and Holkot (who is
sometimes supposed to have been the real writer of the Philih
biblon*) in quoting 'Hermes Trismegistus' and 'Dionysius the
Areopagite'. His weakness for books is indicated by the fact
that Richard H, abbot of St Albans (1326-35), once bribed the
future bishop of Durham by presenting him with four volumes
from the monastic library, viz. Terence, Virgil, Quintilian, and
Hieronymus against Rufinus, besides selling him for ;£50
' Mullinger, i i98f ; H. Morley, iv 61-4.
^ De Rebus Fam. iii 1 p. 137 Fracassetti ; cp. Voigt, HumanUmus^
it 348' ; Mullinger, i aoi.
' c. X § i6a f.
* c. X § 167.
* c. ix § 154, in cuius scriptura...calamuin in corde tinxisse confingitur.
The phrase is found in Isidore Et. ii 37, and also earlier, in Cassiodorus, Dt
Dialictica (see supra^ p. 353).
* Holkot inttr alia 'moralised' the Metamorphoses} cp. Phiiobibhft^ c. 15
§ 1 78, ' Veritas indagatur sub eloquio typicae fictionis *.
XXXI.] BURIDAN. JEAN DE JANDUN. $81
thirty-two other volumes from the same collection, including a
large folio ms of the works of John of Salisbury*.
One of the best known of the supporters of the revived
Nominalism of William of Ockhani was Buridan,
rector of the university of Paris in 1327 (d. after
^35^)f who wrote Qucustiones on Aristotle's Physia^ De Anima^
Pama Naturaiia^ Ethics and Politics*. His text-book of Logic
taught the student how to find the middle term of a syllogism ;
and, as Aristotle' holds that the quick discovery of the middle
term shows acuteness of intellect, this aid towards enabling
dullards to gain credit for acumen became famous as a pons
asinorum, Buridan's proverbial ass, which stands unmoved
between two bundles of hay, because it is attracted equally in
both directions, has not been found in any of his works. In
his commentary on the Ethics^^ however, he declares it impossible
to decide whether the will, when under the influence of two
evenly-balanced motives, can with equal facility decide for or
against any given action; and the popular illustration of the
'ass' may have been suggested by a passage in Aristotle, De Caeio*,
Among the most active exponents of Aristotle was Jean de
Jandun, who nevertheless {c, 1322) showed himself
fully conscious of the futility of the contemporary jlSdun*
passion for argumentation which was only interested
in the process of discussion and indifferent to its result*.
Benedictines, Dominicans and Franciscans were at one in their
keenness for expounding Aristotle. The catalogues of the
Sorbonne for 1290 and 1338 show how vast a literature had
gathered round Aristotle in the form of translations and comments
by his Arabic and his Latin expositors.
^ Chrm, Mon, S, Alhani, ii 100 (quoted by E. C. Thomas, ed. PkiUH^hn,
p. xxxixf); cp. H. Morley's Eng, IVriiers, iv 38 — 61.
* The last two, printed in Paris in 1500, were reprinted at Oxford,
1637-40.
« Afta/. Post, i 34. * In Eth, Nic, iti. Qu, i.
' ii 13, rwr iitadlfMV xal worQ» tffWf ar^drrot {kqI 7&^ roirror ^p^fUuf
iLvayKoXov). Ueberweg, i 466 E. T.
* Le Clerc, Hist, Utt, dt la Frame am u'x.* i 501 f. This enthusiastic
admirer of Averroes wrote Qtuustiones in Ar. Hhw Pkys., Afitapk., De Anima^
De Caelo (printed in cent. XV, XVl). Cp. Renan, Av, 339'4«^«
582 BOLOGNA. [CHAP.
In the thirteenth century the extension of the knowledge of
Aristotle beyond the narrow limits of the Organon widened the
intellectual horizon by stimulating the study of Psychology and
Metaphysics. Aristotle was now recognised as the supreme and
infallible authority, not in I^rOgic alone, but also in Metaphysics,
in Morals, and (unhappily) in Physiology and Natural Science
in general. He was associated in Northern Europe with the
study of speculative philosophy and theology, and in Italy with
that of medicine, thus incidentally leading to an alliance between
the Faculties of Medicine and Arts in the Italian Universities'.
Under the wing of Aristotle, room was found even for Averroes.
About the middle of the fourteenth century the Inceptor in Arts
at the university of Paris was compelled to swear that he would
teach nothing that was inconsistent with 'Aristotle and his
commentator Averroes". But the mediaeval dependence on the
authority of Aristotle gradually gave way. The change was in
part occasioned by the recovery of some of the lost works of
ancient literature, and the transition from the Middle Ages to
the Renaissance was attended by a general widening of the range
of classical studies, and by a renewed interest in Plato.
Early in the twelfth century the study of Roman Law had
been revived at Bologna by Imerius (c. 1113), who,
besides expounding the Roman code in lectures,
introduced the custom of explaining verbal difficulties by means
of brief annotations known as 'glosses \ But Bologna was far
from being a School of Law alone. It was also famous as a
School of Rhetoric and the Liberal Arts, where composition in
prose and verse was practised under the name of Dictamen^
especially in the early part of the thirteenth century, when
Buoncompagno was the great master of Rhetoric and Compo-
sition'. In the same century the example of Imerius was
followed by Accursius of Florence, who also taught at Bologna
(d. 1260). Whenever in his public lectures he came upon a line
^ Rashdall, i 135.
* ChartuL ii 680 (Rashdall, i 368), wiih the important addition, nisi in
casibtu qui sunt contra fidem,
' Tiraboschi, iv 464 — 500; Rashdall, i iii. He produced a work in m
books on the art of writing letters (1115)*
XXXI.] ACCURSIUS OF FLORENCE. 583
of Homer quoted by Justinian, tradition describes him as saying:
Griucum est^ nee potest iegP, The phrase would naturally occur
in his oral teaching only, and its alternative form, fwn iegitur^
need mean nothing more than, 'This is Greek, and is not
lectured upon '. It has not been found in the published Glosses
of Accursius, who, in his translation of the Pandects, as was
shown by Albericus Gentilis' (d. 161 1), correctly explains the
large number of Greek words occurring in the text It has been
suggested, however, that if the phrase was used at all by Accursius,
it was not due to any ignorance of Greek on the part of this
learned lawyer, but to the fact that the public assumption of a
knowledge of that language would have laid him open to an
imputation of heresy which he deemed it prudent to avoid'.
In the first half of the sixteenth century, his 'barbarism' and
his ' ignorance ' are attacked by humanists such as Vives and
Brassicanus, Budaeus and Alciatus^ but none of these deal with
his knowledge of Greek.
Bologna's early fame as a school of Law was due (x) to the
study of the Digest, (2) to a closer and more technical study of
texts, and (3) to the fuller organisation of legal study. In the
interpretation of Civil Law, the work of that school has been
described as representing, in many respects, 'the most brilliant
achievement of the intellect of mediaeval Europe''. It certainly
promoted textual criticism in its own department of study. The
jurists of Bologna repeatedly made pilgrimages to Pisa to consult
the famous ms of the Pandects, which was removed to Florence
in 1406, and by the collation of this and other mss formed the
ordinary text of the Civil Law*.
^ \V. Burton, Gr. Ling. Hist. (1657)* 49* notuin est illud Franctsci Accarsi,
quotiens ad Homeri versus a Justiniano citatos penrenit, Gnucum 4st, inquit,
nee potest iegi, Cp. Tiraboschi, iv 356; Gidel, S36 f. On the omission of the
Greek Constitutions of Justinian in the Western MSS, cp. Windscheid» Ltkrhmk
des Pandektenrechts^ ed. 1900, i 5.
' Dial. (1711), 188; cp. E. Otto, Viia Papiniani (1743), 67.
' Gidcl, 336 f. * Rayle, s.v. Aceurse,
^ Rashdall, i issf; Gebhart, Lit Originu de la Renauumce tn liaiU
( > 879), 59 f, Li droit romaiti...est la grandi originaliti doctrinaU it fftalii an
mo)'en Age... A Parity on dispute tur Aristote dont le texte original mem^U4 ; i
Bologfie^ h Rome^ on commente Its monuments anthtniiqites dn droit ierit,
* Roshdall, i 154 f. Cp. Bartoli*s Preeursori, 96 f.
S84 BALBI OF GENOA. PETRUS OF PADUA. [CHAP.
While Accursius of Florence was lecturing at Bologna,
Bologna counted among her native scholars the Dominican
Bonaccursius, whose knowledge of Greek led to his being sent
to the East in 1230 to discuss the points at issue between the
Greek and Latin Churches*. In the same century Cremona
claims four hellenists*; while Genoa is the home of the learned
Dominican, Balbi (1286)', whose CathoHcon (a Latin
^OenM Grammar, followed by a Dictionary founded on
Papius and Hugutio) was placed, as a book of
reference, in the churches of France ^ was printed by Gutenberg
at Mainz in 1460^ and was translated into French and used in
the schools of Paris as late as 1759. France also adopted a Latin
Grammar of the thirteenth century compiled by a Lombard named
Caesar, in which the examples are selected from Sallust, Virgil,
Horace, Ovid, Lucan and Juvenal*. Pietro d'Abano
^^PiiS^a' (iV/r«f Aponensis^ c. 1250 — 1315) studied in Greece
and at Paris, where he began the translation of the
FrobUtns of Aristotle, which he completed at Padua^ He also
translated portions of the Greek text of Galen, and of the
problems ascribed to Alexander of Aphrodisias, having been
engaged on the latter during his stay in Constantinople*.
In 13 1 1 the Council of Vienne, in discussing the reunion of
the Churches, recommended the appointment of
Greek *"' **' two teachcrs of Greek in each of the principal cities
of Italy. Under Clement V (d. 13 14) a Greek
school was accordingly opened in Rome, and money collected for
^ Gradenigo, 99; Tiraboschi, iv 160; Krumbacher, p. 98*.
* Gradenigo, 102.
' ib, 103 f. The small extent of his knowledge of Greek is indicated in the
words: 'hoc difficile est scire, et maxime mihi non bene scienti Itnguam
Graecam*. Cp. Tiraboschi, iv 356, 481, 536.
* Le Clerc, Hist. Litt, 430*. The sacristan of Saint-Oyan had a CaiAMmm,
with an iron chain attached to it (inventory of 1483 in Bidi, d4 P^colt da
chartes^ 1 312). Cp. Ducange, § 47.
* Hallam, Lit, i W\ facsimile of colophon in Bouchot, Le Livn^ 33.
* ed. C. Fierville(i886).
' Jacobus Philippus Bergamas, Suppi, Chron,, p. 331 (Gradenigo, 107).
The translation and exposition of the Problems of Aristotle, and of Alexander
Aphrod., was printed at Venice in 1519. The latter are included in the Didot
Aristotle, iv 191-8.
' Tiraboschi, v 104.
XXXI.] TEACHING OF GREEK. STUDY OF ARISTOTLE. 58$
the founding of Greek and Hebrew professorships at Oxford*.
In 1325 there were lectures on Greek, as well as Arabic, Chaldee
and Hebrew, in the university of Paris, but the papal legate was
instructed to take care that these strange tongues were not made
the means of introducing outlandish doctrines. The suspicion of
heresy clung to the Greek language in particular, and bishops
gave up the traditional custom of signing their names in Greek.
There were hardly any hellenists except among the Dominicans,
who, as they had early secured complete control of the Inquisition,
could with perfect impunity learn as much Greek as they pleased*.
In the same age, a certain prejudice against the study of the
Aristotelian Logic is implied in the story that, about 1330, a
Bachelor of Arts of the university of Paris emerged from the
tomb, robed in a cloak of parchment black with Latin characters
scribbled over its folds, to warn his former instructor against the
vanities of the world and to tell him of the torments he was
enduring in consequence of his having studied Logic at Paris'.
After many decrees to the contrary, the study of Aristotle was
restored with hardly any restrictions by the Papal Legates of
1366. For the B.A. degree it was necessary to take up Grammar,
Logic and Psychology, the first of these including the 'Doctrinale'
of Alexander of Villedieu ; the second, the Orgatum of Aristotle
and the Topics of Boethius; and the third, the De Am'ma. For
the License in Arts, the subjects comprised the Physics and the
Parva Naturalia^ and, for the M.A. degree, the greater part of
the Ethics and at least three books of the Meteorological. But
Aristotle was not studied in the original. The vast number of
lucubrations on Aristotle included in the two oldest catalogues of
the library of the Sorbonne (1290 and 1338) supply no proof of
any direct acquaintance with the Greek text*.
The university of Paris was too closely bound up with the
^ Rashdall, ii 459. Cp. Barton, Ung, Gr. Hist.^ 54.
' Le Clerc, Hist, LUt, en 14' x. 433~(^; Hist. Utt, de la Frana^ xxi 145,
116; Gebhart, Origines de la /Renaissance, 136, {Les dominicaint) §nt MUl
beaucotip de livres, en qtusliti d'inpnsitenn, mats its en liseuent aussi heanamp,
* Lc Clerc, /.r., 501.
* De Launoy, De Var, Arist.ftrtuna, p. 50. Cp. Rashdall, i 436 f.
* Lc Clerc, /.f., 503.
5 86 EARLIER REVIVALS OF LEARNING. [CHAP.
Study of Aristotle and too strictly subservient to his supreme
Earlier authority, to be able to take the lead in that general
revivsisof revival of Classical interests which we associate
«•"> "K ^jjjj jj^g j^gg Qf jj^g Renaissance. Yet the Western
lands of Europe, France as well as England, had seen more than
one revival of learning in the course of the early Middle Ages.
The first two revivals are associated with the names of Aldhelm
and Bede, and of Alcuin and Charles the Great Among the
Latin versifiers of the Caroline age, the Englishman who assumes
the classic name of Naso writes Virgilian Eclogues in which he
borrows phrases from the poets of Rome to express his conscious-
ness that he is himself living in the age of a renascence : —
'rursus in antiques mutataque saecula mores;
aurea Roma iterum renovata rettascitur orbi'^.
Even under the successors of Charles the Great, Latin verse lived
on in the lines of Ermoldus Nigellus and of Abbo Cemuus, while
Greek prose found an interpreter in the person of Joannes Scotus.
In the tenth century Gerbert had been conspicuous in the study
of Cicero; in the twelfth, Cicero and Seneca had inspired the
moral teaching of Gautier de Chitillon'; and, in the thirteenth,
the composition of works in Latin prose had flourished in England
under Henry II, while in France a wide acquaintance with Latin
literature had been displayed in the vast encyclopaedia of Vincent
of Beauvais'. In the province of education, the changes which
began to pass over the schools of France in the eleventh century
had culminated in a great intellectual renaissance in the early part
of the twelfth, during the age of Abelard\ Throughout the
Middle Ages the region of France which lay North of the Loire
had taken the lead in the education of Europe, but that region
had been too completely permeated and possessed by the
> £cL i 8 in Po^i(u Lat, Aevi Car. i 385 DUmmler; Ovid, A. A. iii 113,
'aurea Roma '; Calpurnius, Eci, i 42, 'aurea secura cum pace renascitur orbi';
cp. Korting's LiU, //. iii 83.
' p. 531 supra. ' Cp. Bartoli*s Precursori^ 10 — 31.
^ Rashdall, i 30—71. John of Salisbury, Met. \ 5, tells us that, under the
influence of amatorts litterarum (such as Abelard, William of Conches and
Theodoric of Chartres), redUrunt artes //, quasi jure postUininiU hcn^rtm
pristinum nactat sunl, ft post exsi/ium gratititu et gloriam ampUor§m*
XXXI.] CAUSES OF THE RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 587
mediaeval spirit to become the native land of the Renaissance ^
That honour was reserved for the classic soil of ^ -,.
Causes of the
Italy, where the Renaissance was slowly called into RenaiMance
life by a variety of causes', by the prevailing spirit " * ^
of intellectual freedom, by the social and political condition of
the country, by the continuous tradition of the Latin language, by
the constant witness to the existence of Greek in the region once
known as Magna Graecia, by the survival of the remains of antique
sculpture, such as the marble reliefs which inspired the art of
Niccola Pisano*, and by the abiding presence of the ruins of
ancient Rome, which aroused the enthusiasm, not only of
unnamed pilgrims of the tenth and twelfth centuries, but also
of men of mark such as Giovanni Villani^ and Rienzi^ and
Petrarch, in the first third of the fourteenth*. 'During the
gloomy and disastrous centuries which followed the downfall of
the Roman Empire, Italy had preserved, in a far greater d^ee
than any other part of Western Europe, the traces of ancient
civilisation. The night which descended upon her was the night
of an Arctic summer. The dawn began to reappear before the
last reflection of the preceding sunset had faded from the horizon '^
But, although the night was luminous, the sun was absent, and
Petrarch was the morning-star of a new day; yet there were other
stars in the sky before the star of Petrarch.
The Renaissance generally associated in its early stages with
the name of Petrarch, was a gradual and protracted process, and
not a single and sudden event with a fixed and definite date.
One of the prominent characteristics of that Renaissance was
' Korting, Liit, It, iii 93.
' Cp. Gebhart^s Orijfines de la RefuUssana en JtalU (1879), esp. pp. 51 —
146. Sicily and Apulia had already xeen a temporary revival of learning
under Frederic II (pp. 544-6 /M/m).
' Vasari, Vita^ init.
^ 1300; Cron. viti 6; Balzani's CkronuUrs, 331.
* Voigt, Hnmanismust i 53*.
* Petrarch, De Rebus Fam. vi 9 p. 314 Fracassetti.
^ Macaulay, Machiavelli (1837), p. 30 of Essays (1861). Oianam, Doc,
Ituktits (1850), p. 38, has similarly described 'the night which intervened
between the intellectual daylight of antiquity and the dawn ofihe Renaissance'
as une de ces nuits lumineuses oh Us demihra elartis du soir si ^roiongent
Jusqit'aujc premieres blanchettrs du matin.
S88 LOVATO AND MUSSATO. [CHAP.
Petrarch's enthusiasm for Cicero. But the Umbrian poet
Jacopone da Todi, who died in 1306, two years after the birth
of Petrarch, mentions the ' melody ' of Cicero's writings on the
laws of Rome as one of the vanities that he abandoned when he
renounced the worlds
Among the immediate precursors of the Renaissance in Italy
we may here mention two prominent representatives
STRSIiu-**' of I^tin poetry at Padua. One of these, the
**d*^M ^^^^^ eloquent and learned I^vato (d. 1309), was the
first to recognise the rules of metre followed by
Seneca*. The other, his younger contemporary and the inheritor
of his literary interests, was the eminent statesman, historian and
poet, Albertino Mussato (1261 — 1329). Mussato was the author
of poems abounding in reminiscences of Virgil, Ovid and Lucan,
and of works in prose recalling Livy's eulogies of the old Roman
heroes, Camillus and Scipio Africanus. Seneca is his model in
the diction, and, to some extent, in the general framework of his
celebrated tragedy, the Eccerinis^ a work founded on the career of
the brutal tyrant, Ezzelino, who became lord of Padua in 1237.
In a literary controversy with a Dominican monk of Mantua,
Mussato strangely contends that poetry is a branch of theology;
and, although he imitates ancient models in all his works, whether
in verse or prose, he has only a dim apprehension of the beauty
of the old classical literature. He thus belongs to the early
twilight rather than the actual dawn of the Renaissance'.
A smoother and more flowing style in Latin prose was attained
by the two historians, Giovanni da Cermenate of Milan (13 12),
who successfully imitated Livy and Sallust^ and FerrSto of
^ Li potsU spiHtucUi (1617) p. 5, Rinuntia del Mondo^ Ur, 10, lasstivi k
serittun antiehe^ \ che mi eran eotanto amiche, \ d U TuUiam ruhrichi^ \ (ke mi
fean t<U melodia\ Gebhart, 157; Norden, 758.
* Cp. Muratori, Script, Rer, ItaL x 1, *habutt... Padua civttas Lovatum,
Bonatinum et Mussatum, qui delectarentur metris et amice venibus con-
certarent'; Korting, ZiV/. //. iii (1884) 355 f; Wiese u. Pircopo, //. LUi.
1 90; Novati, quoted in Wicksteed and Gardner's Dantt and GiovanHi dd
VirgiliOf 36.
' Korting, iii 301-55; Voigt, HHtntummus^ i 16 — 18*; Baliaiii's Ckr^mi"
clers, 375-91, esp. 187 f; Cloetta, Beitrdge^ it (189a) 5 — 76; Wicktteed and
Gardner, i — 58.
^ Tirabotchi, v 451 ; Voigt, i 19'.
XXXI.] CERMENATE. FERRETO. DEL VIRGILIO. 589
Vicenza (d. 1337)9 who made Virgil, Lucan, Statius and Claudian
his models in an epic in honour of Can Grande of ^
Verona \ It was the Latin epic on a modem Pemto.
heroic theme that Giovanni del Virgilio of Bologna ^
suggested to Dante, when he had the audacity to send him (early
in 1 3 19) a set of Latin hexameters, criticising with a somewhat
pedantic and superior air the poet's preference of Italian to Latin
as the language of the Divina Commedia. Del Virgilio's claim to
be regarded as a precursor of the Renaissance rests mainly on his
admiration for Virgil, whose name was either assumed by himself
or won from others by his success as an exponent or an imitator
of the Roman poet*. He has no claim on the ground of any
revival of the Virgilian Eclogue, for the credit of that rather
unhappy innovation is clearly due to Mussato' and Dante. The
only direct reminiscence of Virgil in Dante's first Eclogue is caught
up by Del Virgilio, who adds seven more in his reply ^; but, in a poem
of 1327, six years after Dante's death, Virgilio himself describes
the pastoral flute of Virgil as first breathed upon by Dante : —
'fistula non posthac nostris inflaU poetis
donee ea mecum certaret Titynis olim,
Lydius Adriaco qui nunc in litore dormit*'.
Since the time of Virgil, Eclogues had been written by Calpurnius
under Nero and by Alcuin under Charles the Great, and
Benedictine Bucolics on sacred themes had been attempted from
the ninth to the twelfth centuries*, but their revival is here
ascribed to Dante. In the year of that poet's death (1321),
Del Virgilio was the only professor of poetry, the only interpreter
of Virgil, Lucan, Statius and the author of the Metamorphoses^
left in Bologna^ He had repeatedly sent his poetic greetings to
the exile at Ravenna, and he now wrote a brief poem in his
memory'. Six years later he sent a Virgilian Eclogue to one who
in his day was at least as famous a poet as Dante, Mussato, then
' Korting, iii 358. Cp. Balzani's Chroniclers^ 171-4.
* Wicksteed and Gardner, 111. ' Korting, iii 314, 365.
^ Wicksteed and Gardner, 107 f. * ib, 176.
* ib. 330 f; e.g. the 'egloga* ascribed to Paschasius Radbertus (d. af^er
856), in Poet, Lat, Aevi Car, iii 45.
f ib. 133. • ib. 174.
590 BRUNETTO LATINI. [CHAP.
in exile at Chioggia. Viigilio was also the author of a treatise on
the Metamorphoses^^ which proves that the mediaeval passion for
'moralising' and allegorizing mythology was as strong as ever
towards the close of the Middle Ages.
A still earlier precursor of the Renaissance may be justly
recognised in the person of the eminent notary of
^LatiST Florence, Brunetto Latini (d. 1290), who, during
his exile in France (1260-7), wrote his Tesaniia
and his Tesaro in Italian verse and French prose respectively.
The former is a didactic poem in an allegorical form ; the latter,
an encyclopaedia of learning ranging over History, Astronomy,
Geography, Zoology, Ethics, Rhetoric and Politics. In treating
of Rhetoric, the author gives us a French translation of Caesar's
and Cato's speeches in the Catiline of Sallust. Italian translations
of the first seventeen chapters of the De Inventione^ and of Cicero's
speeches in defence of Ligarius, Marcellus and Deiotarus, were
also executed by Brunetto; but the renderings of Cicero's
' Catilinarians ' and of the speeches in Livy, which have been
ascribed to him, probably belong to the times of the Renaissance.
The general cast of both of his best-known works is mainly
media.eval, but he obviously takes a keen delight in quoting the
Classics in his Tesoro^ the work in which h6 ' still lives '. Such is
the language which he is made to apply to his masterpiece in that
Canto in which Dante mysteriously confesses that he had learned
from its author 'how man becomes eternal".
Dante (1265— 1321) is a precursor of the Renaissance in a
limited sense alone, — in his breaking loose from
the mediaeval tradition by writing his great poem
not in the Latin but in the Tuscan tongue; in his delight in
minutely realistic descriptions, whether of the tortures of Hell or
of the course of his travels through all the three realms of the
spirit-world ; in his proud self-consciousness as a poet ; and in his
personal longing for immortal fame. His individualism is also
apparent in the autobiographical facts imbedded in the mediaeval
mysticism of the Vita Nuava, The Convito^ begun as a com-
mentary on that work, is written in a comparatively modem spirit.
^ Wicksteed and Gardner, 110, 314-91.
• Inf, XV ; Korting, iii 370 — 401.
XXXI.] DANTE. 591
The De Monarchia^ again, combines the political principles of the
Middle Ages with a new enthusiasm for the traditions of the old
Roman Empire; while the De Vulgari Eloquio discriminates
between different varieties of Latin prose, and recognises the
claim of a modem language to a strictly scientific investigation.
It is a new thing to find such wide learning outside the clerical
order. Dante is true to the strictest theology of the Middle Ages,
but at the same time he is as learned a layman as any that we
shall meet in the coming age of the Renaissance \
The speculative basis of Dante's great poem is furnished
by the scholastic combination of Christian theology with the
Aristotelian philosophy. For Aristotle himself he has the highest
regard. In the Limbo of the unbaptized, in a green meadow
surrounded by the sevenfold walls of a noble castle, the poet sees
'the Master of them that know', with Plato and Socrates hard by;
and, amongst others, TuUy and Livy and the 'moralist Seneca',
with Avicenna, and Averroes 'who the great Comment made".
In his works in general he frequently refers to the Latin Classics.
He *was born a student' (says Professor Norton), 'as he was
born a poet, and had he never written a single poem, he would still
have been famous as the most profound scholar of his times".
His references to ancient literature have been collected and
classified, and the following list shows approximately the number
of times he quotes each of the works mentioned: — the Vulgate
(500 +)» Aristotle (300 + )*, Virgil (r. 200), Ovid {f, 100), Cicero
(c, 50)', Statius and Boethius (30 — 40), Horace. (;)•, Livy and
Orosius (10—20); the Timaan of Plato in the translation by
Chalcidius, with Homer, Juvenal, Seneca, Ptolemy, Aesop, Valerius
Maximus and St Augustine (less than 10 each) I The above list
does not include the references to the Schoolmen, such as Peter
1 Korting, iii 401-15; Gebhart, 982—308. Cp. Villani, Cron. ix 136,
(Dante) Tu grande letterato quasi in ogni tcienza, tutto fosse laico'. See also
Burckhartlt, Renaissanct, Part II c. 3, and Voigt, I 11— 15'.
* Inf. iv 130 — 144.
' Norton's New Life of Dante, p. 101.
* Mainly the Ethics, Physies^ MetapkysUs and Di Anima.
" De Off., Sen., Am.\ also De Finihui,
* Six from Ars PoetUa, and one from Ep. i 14, 43.
7 E. Moore, Studies, i 4 f.
592 DANTE. [CHAP.
Lombard, Bonaventura, Hugh and Richard of St Victor and
(above all) Albertus Magnus, and Thomas Aquinas, whose greatest
disciple is Dante'. Sometimes, when he appears to be quoting
Aristotle, his real authority is Albertus Magnus. Thus, in the
Convito (ii 15), where he discusses the theories on the Origin
of the Milky Way, his statement of the opinions of Anaxagoras
and Democritus is derived, not from Aristotle's MeteorohgUa (i 8),
but from the corresponding work of Albertus Magnus, who knew
the Meteorologica in an Arabic translation alone. Dante here
compares the Old translation with the New, meaning by the 'Old'
one of the renderings from the Arabic, and by the 'New' one of
those from the Greeks Again, in the Convito (iii 9), where he
discusses the nature of vision, and refers to Aristotle, di Setuo
e SematOy his statement as to Aristotle's views apparently comes
from the treatise by Albertus Magnus, which bears the correspond-
ing title'. Dante's eight references to Pythagoras are, directly
or indirectly, due in four cases to Aristotle, in one to Diogenes
Laertius, and in the rest to Cicero or St Augustine\ He follows
Albertus and the Arabs in treating the De Partibus as a portion
of the His tor ia Animalium^, Like Apollinaris Sidonius and
Vincent of Beauvais, he apparently regards Seneca the moralist
as different from the poet, and he wrongly describes the De
Quatuor Virtutibus as the work of Seneca*. On the death of
Beatrice, he finds consolation in Cicero's Laelius and in Boethius^
On her first appearance in the Purgatorio he indulges his frequent
fancy for interweaving the sacred and the secular by describing
her as welcomed in the words of the Vulgate and of Virgil alike,
benedictin qui venis being immediately followed by manibus 0 doit
lilia plenis^. His five great pagan poets are Homer, Virgil,
Horace, Ovid, Lucan^ Statius is not found in the Inferno^ his
^ ContrapcLsso {Inf. xxviii 14a), Aristotle's dyrireroy^df, comes from
Aquinas, Summa^ ii'-' qu. 61, art. 4. Cp., in general, Ozanam, Dantt d
ia Philosophie CathoUque au xiii s, (1839), ^^^ Hettinger, on Aquinas and
Dante (Die Theologie der Cbttlichen Komodit^ 1879), ^^^ other works cited in
Uel)erweg, ii § 33, p. 290*, e!>p. Berthier's Comm, (Turin, 1893 f).
- Paget Toynbce, Dante Studies, 42 f; cp. Moore, i 305-18.
' id. 53. * id, 87—96. * id. 247 f.
* De A/on. ii 5; Toynbee, 155 f. ^ Conv. ii 13, 14; Moore, i 281.
• Ptir^. XXX 19; Moore, i 26f. • /«/. iv 88.
XXXI.] DANTE. 593
place, as a 'Christian', converted by Virgil's Fourth Eclogue^ being
in the Purgatoric^, Elsewhere, Dante names Virgil, Ovid, Lucan
and Statius alone as the 'regular' Latin poets*, his omission of
Horace being possibly due to a mere accident', especially as he
has previously quoted the Ars Poiiica with respect, as the work of
magister nosier Horatius\ His standard authors in Latin prose
are Cicero, Livy, Pliny, Frontinus and Orosius*.
His knowledge of Greek appears to have been practically nil\
The only four references to Homer are borrowed from others'.
It is true that he quotes the Greek word hormen} and carefully
explains filosofo as amaiore di sapUn%a^\ but, on the other hand,
he blindly follows Hugutio in deriving autore from auttniin
(av^cVriTv)'*, 'worthy of trust and obedience', adding on his own
account that Aristotle is most 'worthy of such 'trust', and that
his teaching is of the 'highest authority'". But Dante's Aristotle
was only the Latin Aristotle, and of the treatise on Poetry he
unfortunately knew nothing. Like the mediaeval scholars in
general, he lay in bondage to the I^tin versions of the Timaeus
and of Aristotle, and it was high time for a revival of learning to
restore a knowledge of the Greek texts, and to extend the range
of study, and inspire it with a new interest, even in the case of
Latin literature.
^ xxi f. Cp. Verrmll in IndependitU Rtvkw^ No?. 1903.
' Di Vulgari Eloquio^ ii 6.
' HoToiium might easily have fallen out before SxoHum,
* De Vuig. EL, ii 4. * «*• ii 6.
* Manetti (d. 1459). ^^taecii KyVki, 'graecanim litteramm cognitione Dantes
omnino caniit * ; Gradenigo, i la
^ Moore, i 341; Toynbee, 904 f. In Ccmv, i 7 ir//., * Homer cannot be
rendered into Latin'...
' Conv, iv 91. * ik, iii it.
>* Priscian, v lo, 'atui^, quando «iMtfm|r significat, oommnne est; qnando
od^ffT^t auctrix facit femininum '. Eberhard, CroMsmus^ c xi, distingutshes
auctor * ab augendo \ from mu/^ ' ab authentin, quod Grecum est '.
" Cffptv. iv 6. Dante*8 relation to Greek is discussed by Gradenigo, Lm,
Greco- Haliana, iiof, and Celestino Cavedone (Modeaa, i860); cp. Moore's
Stuiiies^ i 164 n; and, on Dante*s Classical studies In general, Schttck in Neui
Jahrb, (1865), ii 153—181.
s. 38
CHAPTER XXXII.
THE SURVIVAL OF THE LATIN CLASSICS.
While the Greek Classics owed their safe preservation to the
libraries of Constantinople and to the monasteries of the Elast,
it is primarily to the monasteries of the West that we are indebted
for the survival of the Latin Classics. A certain prejudice against
Pr iudice pagan learning, and especially against pagan poetry,
againat the had doubtless been traditional in the Christian
community. TertuUian* asked, what had Athens
to do with Jerusalem, or the Academy with the Church; and
Jerome', what concern had Horace with the Psalter, Virgil with
the Gospel, and Cicero with the Apostles ? But Jerome* agreed
with Origen^ in holding that it was as lawful for Christians, as for
Jews, to 'spoil the Egyptians', and (after due precautions) to
appropriate any prize they had captured from the hands of the
enemy'. The prejudice, however, lived on among Churchmen
such as Gregory the Great, Alcuin of Tours and Odo of Cluni*.
In a similar spirit, Honorius of Autun, in the preface to the
Gemma Animae (c, 1120), asks 'how is the soul profited by the
strife of Hector, the arguments of Plato, the poems of Virgil, or
* De Fraescr, 7 (Migne ii 10),
' Ep. 72 § 19 (Migne, xxii 416) ; cp. St Augustine, DtDoctrina Christiana^
ii 40 (60), Migne, xxxiv 63 ; Maitland's Dark Ages, 173'.
* Ep, 70 (Migne, xxii 665).
* Migne, xi 87, xii 490. Cp. Norden's Kunstprosa, 675-80.
* Deut. xxi 10.
* pp. 43a, 459 f, 485 supra, and Norden, 531 ; also (on Alcuin and Virgil)
Schmid, Gesch, der Ertiihungy II i 177.
CHAP. XXXII.] PREJUDICE AGAINST THE CLASSICS. 59$
the elegies of Ovid, who, with others like them, are now gnashing
their teeth in the prison of the infernal Babylon, under the cruel
tyranny of Pluto' ?* Even Abelard (who quotes Jerome's opinion)
inquires *why the bishops and doctors of the Christian religion do
not expel from the City of God those poets whom Plato forbade
to enter into his city of the world'*; while Nicholas, the secretary
of Bernard of Clairvaux, (writing after 1153,) sighs over the charm
he had once found in Cicero and the poets, and in the golden
sayings of the philosophers and the 'songs of the Sirens". The
Benedictine chronicler, Rodulfus Glaber (d. 1050), tells the
story of one Vilgardus, a student of 'grammar' in the neighbour-
hood of Ravenna, who, in a dream, saw three demons who had
assumed the forms of Virgil, Horace and Juvenal, the study of
whose texts betrayed him into heretical opinions, for which he
was condemned by Peter, archbishop of Ravenna (in or before
97I)^ Herbert de Losinga, the first bishop of Norwich (d. 11 19),
had a dream that compelled him to renounce the reading and the
imitation of Virgil and Ovid*. Poets (unless their writings were
of highly moral purport, or capable of being 'moralised' by means
of allegorical interpretation) were in fact regarded with far less
favour than philosophers. One of the celebrated illustrations in
the Hortus Deliciarum^ the pictorial encyclopaedia composed, or
compiled, by the abbess Herrad of Landsperg for the nuns of
Mont St Odile in Alsace (1167-95), represents two large con-
centric circles filled with the following figures. In the upper half
of the inner circle, Philosophy, a queenly form whose crown is
parted into the semblance of three human heads identified as
'Ethics', 'Logic' and 'Physics', may be seen enthroned in majesty,
while, in the lower half of the same circle, we have Socrates and
Plato seated at desks with books open before them. The outer
circle is filled with a series of, seven arches, and, under each of
^ Migne, clxxii 543; Maitland, 185*.
' ThioL Christ, ii, Migne, clxxxTiii 1910D; Maitland, 186*.
* ' Petri Damiani ' Sermo 61, p. 396 B Caetani (Migne, cxliv 851 D).
« Hist. U c. 19 (Migne, cxUi); Tirabcwchi, ui 199; Gietdnedit, Di HU.
studiis (Ital. trans, p. 94).
' Epp, p. 53-7, qx pp. 63. 93. Nererthdesi he tells his pupils to take
Ovid as their model in Latin verse (p. 75), and himself quotes Tritiia^ i 9^
5—6 (Goulbum and Symonds, L^t and Ltiiert tfH.diL^^i t49).
38—2
Sg6 PREJUDICE AGAINST THE CLASSICS [CUAP.
these, we have a personification of one of the Seven Liberal Arts,
with her emblems in her hands, Grammar with a book and a
birch, Rhetoric with a tablet and stylus, and similarly with the
rest Below and outside this outer circle are four 'poets or
magicians', each of them writing at a desk, with an evil spirit
prompting him, in the form of a raven hovering near his ear.
The whole design is further embellished with many mottoes in
appropriate places*.
The philosophical works of Cicero had supplied a model for
the Latin prose of the Fathers and of their successors in the
Middle Ages; but even Cicero, it was sometimes felt, might be
studied with an undue devotion. In 1150 we find the prior
of Hildesheim writing to the abbot of Corvey in the following
terms : —
'Though you desire to have the books of TuUy, I know that you are a
Christian and not a Ciceronian'. You go over to the camp of the enemy, nd
as a deserter, but as a spy. I should therefore have sent you the books of
Tully which we have, — De Re Agraria^ Philippics and EpistUt^ but that it is
not our custom that any books should be lent to any i)erson without good
pledges. Send us therefore the Noctti Atticae of Aulus Gellius and Origen On
tk$ Canticles '. The abbot replies in the same strain, assuring the prior chat
Cicero is not the main staple of his repast, but only serves as dessert, and
sending him Origen and (in the absence of Gellius) a book on Tactics*.
Lastly, the abbot of Cluni, Peter the Venerable (d. 11 56),
writing to Master Peter of Poitiers, thus urges the uselessness of
the study of the ancients : —
' See now, without the study of Plato, without the disputations of the
Academy, without the subtleties of Aristotle, without the teaching of philo-
sophers, the place and the way of happiness are discovered... Why, vainly
studious, are you reciting with the comedians, lamenting with the tragedians,
trifling with the metricians, deceiving with the poets, and deceived with the
philosophers? '^
^ The MS perished in the flames during the bombardment of Strassburg
in 1870. The illustrations have since been reproduced (from earlier copies)
in Straub and Keller's magnificent folio (1879—99); see Plate, p. 537 supra,
Cp. Engelhardt (i8i8j 31 f (with plate); Bursian, i 74; and Graf, /?tf mo, ii 193 £
' p. 220 supra,
* Maitland, 175* f. Text in Jaffe, BibL Rer. Germ, \ 316.
^ Migne, clxxxix 77 D; Maitland, 445'. Cp., in general, Specht, Gtsekm
des Unterricktswesens, 40—57 ; and Wattenbach, CesckichtsqiulieH^ i* 334--6*
XXXII.] COUNTERACTED. $97
A more generous spirit had animated Casstodorus when he
exhorted his monks to study the liberal arts and to follow the
example of Moses, who was 'learned in all the wisdom of the
Egyptians', and also that of the learned Fathers of the Church';
and the example of the Fathers is pleaded by the Norman poet,
^tienne de Rouen (end of cent, xii), in the abstract of Quintilian,
which he prepared for his pupils at Bee*. Doubtless many of
those who entered the monastery were drawn to it as a place
of peace and quietness, a home of learning and leisure, where
they could live apart from the 'strife of tongues' and the tumult
of war. The influence of such studious votaries of the 'religious'
life must have done much to counteract the traditional prejudice
against the pagan Classics'; and intelligent learners of Latin
could hardly fail to be attracted by the perfection of form attained
by many of the old authors whose works they studied with a view
to mastering the language that had long been traditional in the
teaching and in the services of the Church, and remained (for
the present) the only medium of literary expression in Western
Europe. Thus an interest in the Latin Classics had succeeded in
surviving all the fulminations of the Fathers and the censures of
the Church. But, in the centuries with which we are now con-
cerned, the study of the Classics, wherever it actually prevailed,
was regarded not as an end in itself, but as a means towards the
better understanding of the Bible, and this is the main difference
in the attitude assumed towards that study in the Middle Ages
and the Renaissance.
While the reading of pagan authors was discouraged by writers
such as Isidore of Seville, and by the founders of the monastic
Orders, no restriction was placed on the copying of mss. Jerome
had recommended that form of industry as one of the most
suitable occupations of the monastic life^; and Ephraem the
Syrian (d. 378) had mentioned the transcription of books, as
well as the dyeing of parchments, among the manual labours of
* Div. Lett, c. 18.
* Comparetti, VirgilU nei Medip Evo^ i ii9, note 1 ; Lfon Mattre, icpta^
159; Fierville, Introd* to Quintil. I, p. xxviiif.
' Cp. Clifford Allbutt, Sciitui and Midieval Tlm^^ 79; Patnam, i 199.
* Ep, 115, scribantur libri.
598 THE MONASTIC ORDERS AND THE CLASSICS. [CHAP.
monks'. The copying of mss was in fact the only manual
occupation recognised in the monasteries founded by St Martin
of TourSy where it was confined to younger members of the
house*. The Benedictine Rule is vague, but it assumes the
existence of a monastic library', naturally consisting of ecclesi-
astical books, while the work of the monastic schools would no
less naturally involve the acquisition of a number of classical
texts. Thus the celebrated mss known as the Vatican Viigil
(cent II or iii) and the Carolingian Terence (cent, ix) once
belonged to the Benedictine abbey of St Denis, near Paris. The
devotion of the Benedictine Order to the cause of classical and
general literature has been fully and elaborately justified and
exemplified in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by
Mabillon^ and Ziegelbauer', and has since been more succinctly
set forth by M ontalembert * and Dantier^. The Rule of the
Cluniacs appoints a special officer to take chaise of the books,
and provides for an annual audit of the volumes assigned to the
several monks, and a similar provision is to be found in the
statutes of Oriel College, Oxford (1329)*. The Carthusian Rule
assumes that very few of the monks are incapable of being copyists
and punishes any monk who refuses to copy when he is able to
do so^ The Carthusian abbot Guigo (d. 1 137) regards the labour
of the copyist as an 'immortal work"^ But the members of
this Order apparently confined their attention to ecclesiastical
literature. The Frisian brothers, Emo and Addo, were wider in
^ Wattenbach, Schriftwestn im MA^ 35 1'; Lecoy de la Marche, Lu
MSS, 89.
' Sulp. Severus, Vita Afariini^ c. 7.
» c. 48.
* Traiti des ittides monastiques (1691), and Rfflexiotis (1693).
' Observationes Literariae O. S, B. four folio volumes (Augsburg, 1784).
Cp. C. Acheri's (i.e. Father Cahier's) la Essais in Annales de phUosophu
chritiennt, xvii — xviii, Oct. 1838-9, esp. Essais 3-7 bibliothiqtust 8 calligraphit^
9 — 10 miniatures, 11 — 11 luxe bibliographiqtu au moyen-Age,
• Monks of the West^ Bk xviii c. 41.
' Les monasthres bitUdictitis d^Itaiie, 2 vols. (1866), on Monte Cassino,
Bobbio, etc.
• J. W. Clark, Care 0/ Books, 67, 133. Cp. Gasquet*s Essays, ao, «8.
* Lecoy de la Marche, 90.
i<» Migne, cliii 883.
XXXII.] THE MONASTIC SCRIPTORIUM. 599
their interests. As students at Paris, Orleans and Oxford, they
divided the night between them, and spent it in copying all the
texts they could find, with the explanations given them by their
lecturers ; and, as head of the Premonstratensian abbey of
Wittewienim in Groningen (d. 1237), Emo afterwards instructed
nuns as well as monks in the art of transcribing mss*. At Cluni
all the requirements of the copyist were provided by the artnarius
or librarian ', and the rule of silence was strictly enjoined. If the
copyist wanted a book, he had to stretch out his hands and make
a movement as of turning over leaves. To distinguish different
kinds of books, various further signs were in use. If he required
a Psalter, he placed his hands over his head, in allusion to the
royal crown of David ; if a pagan book, he scratched his ear after
the manner of a dog". Sometimes, for lack of parchment, a
copyist effaces a pagan text to make room for a Christian work ;
but the converse occasionally happens, and a case is known in
which the Epistles of St Paul have been superseded by the books
of the /Had*, Occasionally, the copyist protests against or even
alters a text which, on moral grounds, he disapproves"; and the
heathen incantations, copied in a ms of Apuleius de herbis in a
hand of the ninth century, are marked for omission in a hand of
the fifteenth*.
The scene of the copyist's industry was the scriptorium*.
This might either be a large room where twelve
copyists could be at work at once, or a small cell tcriptorium
for a single transcriber. In the old plan of the
monastery at St Gallen, the scriptorium is beside the church and
below the library*. Under Alcuin, St Martin's at Tours became
* Wattenbach, /.r., 374'; q>* Montalembert, v 136 f (1896).
* ib. 371'.
> Mart^ne, De Antiq. Mcnach, Ritikus^ lib. ▼, c. 18 § 4, pro ngno libri
saecularis, praemisso generali tigno libri, adde at aurem tangat com digito,
sicut canis cum pede pmriens solet.
^ Comparetti, VirgUio^x 114.
* Comparetti, i 115; Friedlander's Martial^ \ p. 73 f.
* Haase, De Med, Aevi Stud. Pkiloi. 19.
7 Ducange, s.v. Scriptoresi Hardy, Diseripiive CaUdogue^ Pref. to vol. iii
{Rolls Scries) ; cp. Gasquet*t Sisays, 41 f.
* N. of the chancel ; Pertx, M^m. ii 95 ; Wattenbach, 370^.
600 TOURS. AACHEN. FULDA. [CHAP.
famous for a time as a school of copyists *, and one of hia epigiams
had the striptorium for its theme, an epigram borrowed in part by
British Museum, Coltoii MS, Claudioi %\.
(From J, W. Clark, Cart cf Beekt, 193.}
' P- 457 "'fii'it- Alcuin's direct share in the fonnalion of the script, which
became characteristic of Tours, has, however, been disputed by Pnrf. K.
Menul or Bonn in hia contribution to the fine folio vokme entitled AEr
Trierer Ada-Maadichri/l (I^jpiig, 1889), 3 — 5. Prof. Meniel therr aaigiu
llie credit to AlcuJn's successors, (1) Fridugii of York (804-34), **>^
(1) Adelard (834-45), under the fomicr of whom Adalbaldus wu active aa a
skilful copyist (Wattenbach, Geuhkhlsqudlm, i' 160). He alto poind tnt
that the semi-unciftl variety of that script {faaintUi in E, M, ThompMm'a
Palaeigraphy, 134) hardly survived the year 900, while the Caroline minuacolea
lived on {ib. 335). The 'Ada ms' (a celebnted taOtx aurtui at the Latin
Gospels, prepared by cummand of Charles the Great, and presented to tho
abbey of St Maximin, nt Trier, by the emperor't sister Ada, d. 817? or 8*3?)
is wiilleii in exceedingly beautiful minuscules by Iwo scribes, (A) t. 790-9> and
(B) c. 8oo~io, The external and Internal splendour of the MS taggeats that it
was probably prepared in the imperial city of Aachen itself; and the date of
its completion is presumably after the death of Alcuin (804). On the other
hund, the ordinary script of Alcuin's own time at Tour3 may be Ksarded U
well represented by a mixed ms of certain works of Alcuin and Bede, now at
Cologne (no. cvi ; /atiimilt in Arndt's Schriftlttfii$t, 37—40).
XXXII.] ST ALBANS. GLOUCESTER. DURHAM. 6oi
Alcuin's pupily Rabanus Maurus, for the scriptorium at Fulda^
In the Benedictine monasteries in general, it became customary
to institute, first the library, then the scriptorium, and finally the
school. At St Albans, the scriptorium founded by abbot Paul
(1077-93) ^^ above the chapter-house, while the mss collected a
century later by abbot Simon (1167-83) were kept 'in the painted
aumbry in the church". In many cases the scriptorium was
considerately placed in the immediate neighbourhood of the
calefactory. Instead of a large room, there might be a number
of small scriptoria ranged round a cloister, each of them opening
on to the cloister-walk and lighted by a single window on the
opposite side, like the 'carrels' of St Peter's abbey, now forming
part of Gloucester cathedral. 'Over against the carrells' (in the
great Benedictine House at Durham) 'did stande certaine great
almeries of waynscott all full of bookes, wherein did lye as well
the old auncyent written Doctors of the Church as other prophane
authors with dy verse other holie men's wourks". Nicholas, the
secretary of Bernard of Clairvaux, describes his scriptoriolum (with
its door open to the apartment of the novices, and with the cloister
to the right and the infirmary and place of exercise to the left) as
'a place to be desired, and pleasant to look upon'; as 'comfortable
for retirement', and 'fitted with choice and divine books'*. The
task of the copyist was often carried on in the open cloister*.
No MS was copied in the monk's own cell, and, for fear of
accidents, candle-light was (in general) not allowed; but we know
of one at least who (in his own pathetic words) 'Dum scripsit,
friguit, et quod cum lumine solis Scribere non potuit, perfecit
lumine noctis'^ The scribe was expected to copy exactly what
he saw before him, even when it was clearly wrong : and his work
was afterwards revised by the corrector*.
The extreme elaboration with which the copyists of Cluni
* Browenis, AnHquiiatts Fntdenses (1619). p. 4(^ and p. 466 supra,
* Gata Abbaium, i 184, 191 (Gaaqiiet*s Esst^s, 6).
' Kites cf Durham p. 70 (J. W. Qark, Cart of Bocks, 90).
I ^ Ep. 35, Migne, cxcW 1616 f; Maitland, 404' f.
■ Gasquet, 43 f; J. W. Clark, 80 fl
* Pez, Thiseutrus, i p. xx.
' Wattenbach, 359'f (cp. Banian, i 31 0*
602 SURVIVAL OF THE LATIN CLASSICS [CHAP,
executed their work was criticised by the Cistercians, who, how-
ever, ended by following their example, even exempting their
copyists from all labour in the fields except at the time of harvest \
Among the most famous schools of copyists were those of TourSy
Orleans, Metz, Rheims, Prum and St Gallen. But in 1297 at
St Gallen, and in 1291 at Murbach in the upper Vosges, few
(if any) of the monks were competent copyists, and similarly at
Corbie (near Amiens) the monks ceased to act as copyists them-
selves at the end of the thirteenth century*. The Lucretius,
which was there c. 1200, has since been lost. Many of the other
Mss have, however, survived, notably a ms of Pliny the elder
(cent ix) and two of the Thebah of Statius (cent ix, x)'; and
(although the copyist seldom signed his work) the names of
27 librarians, copyists or correctors of mss at Corbie are still
known \ At Cluni, the mss included Livy, Sallust, Suetonius,
Trogus Pompeius (i.e. Justin), Seneca, 'Aristotle', Cicero, Ovid,
Virgil, Horace, Juvenal, Statius, Lucan, Terence, Claudian, Aesop,
Pliny the elder, Festus, Priscian (besides the chief mediaeval
authors), the catalogues of centuries xii and xiii containing near-
ly TOGO volumes ^ The monks of centuries x, xi and xii are
credited with having been keener copyists than their successors ;
but the love of learning, which had received its first impulse from
Cassiodorus, never entirely died out It left its results in the mss
of Monte Cassino and Bobbio ; of Corbie and Cluni ; of Moissac
on the upper Garonne, and Tours' and Fleury on the Loire';
. * Wattenbach, 371*.
* ib, 377*; cp. Gasquet's Essays ^ 51.
' FacsiniiUs in Chatclain, Pal, des CI, Lat,^ PI. 140 f, 161.
* Delisle, Bibi, de Corbie (i860), Mim, de tAcad. des Inscr, xxiv 966 — 341
— BihL de Vkole des chartes^ xxxi 393 — 439, 498—515; Cabinet des MSS^
ii 417.
* Found by Mabillon and Mart^ne; Delisle, Cabinet des AfSS, ii 458 — 87;
Invcntaire (1884), 337-79; Lecoy de la Marche, 9a ; cp. £. Sackur, Die
Cluniacenser (Halle, 1892-4).
' e.g. the Berne Virgil, and the Leyden Nonius Marcellus.
^ e.g. the Berne Horace and Statius, the Paris Lucan, the Vatican Feuii of
Ovid. Cp. also Traube, S, Ber, Bayr. Akad. 1891, 400-3 ; Delisle, Cab. des
MSS, ii 364-6, and Notices et Extraits, xxxi (i) 357 — 439; Cuissard-Gaucheron,
MSS...d'OrUans, Fonds de Fleury (Orleans, 1855).
XXXII.] PARTLY DUE TO LOCAL CAUSES. 603
of St Gallen and Reichenau ; of Lorsch, Hersfeld* and Fulda*.
The work accomplished at Monte Casstno under Desiderius has
been already mentioned'. Among other Italian libraries were
those at Novalesa, near Mont Cenis, which contained more than
6000 volumes in 906, when the monks removed them to Turin
for fear of the Saracens^; and at Pomposa, near Ravenna, including
copies of Seneca and Pliny*. In France the monastery of Moissac
alone preserved a copy of 'Lactantius' De Moriibus Pers€cutorum^\
that of Murbach, the only MS of Velleius Paterculus; that of
Fleury, near Orleans, the longer version of the Commentary on
Virgil by Servius'; Bobbio once possessed the only MS of
Terentianus Maurus ; and similarly in many other cases*. Thus
it is that the monasteries of the Middle Ages may justly be
regarded not only as 'repositories of the learning that then was',
but also as 'well-springs of the learning which was to be'*. While
the records of other literatures have perished, we are indebted to
the monks for the fact that
'Classic lore glides on,
By these Religious saved for all posterity"*.
The survival of certain of the Latin Classics was due to their
local interest Catullus survived in his birthplace, Verona (possibly
owing to Pacificus, the archdeacon of that city, who, before 846,
presented 218 mss to the local College of Canons**); Caesar's
^ Cp. Holder-Egger's Lambert (1894)1 p. xiif.
' J. Gcgenbaur (Fulda, 187 1-4, 1878). On all the monasteries in this
line, see Index to Wattenbach, GtsthUhtsquelUn^ and to Specht, UnterrichiS'
wesen,
• p. 500 supra,
^ Muratori, Script, Rer. Ital, II ii 731; Tiraboschi. iii 194; Balzani's
Chroniclers^ iS^fx CipoUa, Afon, NovaitHnuia (Rome, 1898).
• Montfaucon, Diar, Ital, c. 6.
• Now Par. Colbert. H97.
' Now Par. 7919.
• Cp. Vadianus ap. Ziegelbauer, Ob$. Lit, 0,S,B,^ ii 59a For Rutilias
Nnmatinnus we depend entirely on a Vienna transcript of a unique MS formeriy
at Bobbio.
• Maitland's Dark Ages, Pref.
" Wordsworth, Rtcl. Sonmett^ xxv.
>i Muratori, Ant, Ital, iii 838; Tirabotchi, iii 164.
604 THE CLASSICS IN FRANCE, GERMANY, ITALY, [CHAP.
Gallic fVar, in France; the Germania and the early books of
the Annals of Tacitus, with all that remains of Ammianus
Marcellinus\ in Germany; and Frontinus, On Aqueducts^ at
Monte Cassino, S.E. of the Roman Campagna, where this unique
MS is still preserved. The interests of education prompted the
preservation of authors on Grammar, with Terence and Virgil^
and (in a less degree) Lucan and Statius, Persius and JuvenaL
Sallust, Livy and Suetonius were retained as models for historical,
Cicero's Speeches for rhetorical, and Ovid for poetical composition.
The ethical interest prolonged the existence of the philosophical
writings of Cicero and Seneca, and of the historical anecdotes
of Valerius Maximus^ Germany seems to have been mainly
interested in subject-matter; France, in style and form. Catullus
was preserved in France, as well as in Italy; Horace, chiefly
in France; Propertius, probably in France alone, being first
mentioned by Richard de Fournival, chancellor of Amiens (xiii)';
the two earliest notices of Tibullus come from France^, and his
allusions to the local rivers may have added to his popularity in
that country*. The Cynegetica of Nemesianus is mentioned by
Hincmar of Rheims alone, as a book which he had studied as a
boy (d. 882). Cicero's Speeches survived at Cluni, Langres and
Li^ge, and the Ciceronian mss at Hirschau were brought from
France ^ The first to translate any of the Speeches was an Italian,
Brunetto Latini (d. 1294); the Brutus survived solely in Italy;
the De Oratore and Orator^ in Italy and France. As an authority
on matters of diction, the grammarian Festus was known in
France, and was also preserved in Italy^ Paulus Diaconus,
generally recognised as the author of the extant abridgement,
having lived in both of these lands. The historians (with the
' Codex Fuldensis (cent, x) now in Vatican.
' On Valerius cp. Wibald of Corvey (r. 1150) in BibL Rer, Germ, i 480
Jaffc.
> Propercii Aurelii Nautae monobiblos (cp. Teuffel, § 446, i), Manitius ia
Rhein, Afus, xlvii, Suppl. p. 31. List of Richard's books in Delisle, Cak, dts
AfSS, ii 514.
• Norden, Kunstprosat 718 n. 3.
• i 7, I— 13.
• BibL Rer, Gtrm, \ 337.
' Cp. Manitius, in Philol, xlix 3S4.
XXXII.] ENGLAND. RICHARD OF BURY. 605
exception of the author of the Gallic IVar) were diligently read
and copied in Germany*; and the elder Pliny in Germany and
England.
Richard of Bury looks back with' regret on the ages when the
monks used to copy mss 'between the hours of prayer', giving all
the time they could to the making of books, and contrasts the
industry of the past with the idleness of his own day (1345)'.
He also presents us with a vivid picture of his own eagerness in
collecting mss with the aid of the stationarii and librarii of
France, Germany and Italy. For some of his books he sends
to Rome; he also dwells with rapture on his visits to Paris,
'the paradise of the world', with its delightful libraries, its mss
of Aristotle and Plotinus, St Paul and Dionysius, and 'all the
works in which the Latin Muse reproduces the lore of Greece'*.
He adds that, in his own manors in England, he always employed
a large number of copyists ^ scribes and correctors, besides
binders and illuminators'; and he pays an eloquent and well-
known tribute to his beloved books*. All the rooms in his house
are said to have been crowded with them. They are even said to
have encroached on his bedroom in such numbers that he could
not get to bed without stepping over them. His library has
unfortunately been lost, and even its catalogue has vanished^
From the Monasteries the copying of mss passed to the
Universities. During the 70 years preceding the
^J D i vent w9S
date of the Philobihlon^ authorised copyists for
the production of text-books were licensed and controlled by the
university of Paris (1275), numbering 24 in 1292 and 29 in 1323*.
The library of the Sorbonne was instituted in 1289; its catalogue
(which is still extant) numbers 1017 titles, and by the statutes
* Manitius in Rkein, Mus. Lc, with tammary in Norden, 691 f.
> Philobibhfi c. 5.
• c. 8.§§m6-8.
^ antiquarii (( i^i^trameripicrts vtiirmm, 1 107).
• S 143- • c. I B 46—39.
'11. Morley's £9$^. fVriiirt, iv 56; Pnlnam, 1 168; p* 580 XM/nk
* Paul Lacroix, qaoCed by Lecoy de Im Marche, p. 1 10 f. On * Books in
the early Univenities', lee Schmid, Getck, d, ErwUkmng^ 11 i 490-51 tnd
Putnam, i 178—194.
6o6 RISE OF MEDIAEVAL UNIVERSITIES. [CHAP.
of 132 1 one copy of every work in its best form was added to the
collection \ But, at least half a century before Paris became
famous as the home of Scholasticism (r. 11 00) or Bologna as a
school of I^w {c, 1 1 13), and more than a century before Oxford
began to flourish, possibly owing to the withdrawal of certain
English students from Paris (1167), Salerno had been known
throughout Europe as a school of Medicine {c. 1050), and Latin
translations of Arabic renderings of the great Greek physicians
began to be in use in that 'city of Hippocrates' before the end of
the eleventh century'. Montpellier is first noticed as a school
of Medicine in 1137, and the text-books there used are chiefly
those of the Greek Galen, as translated from Arabic into Latin in
the twelfth century, mainly by Gerard of Cremona*. We hear of
students migrating from Oxford to Cambridge in 1209, and from
Bologna to Padua in 1222, and we find Salamanca and Toulouse
coming into being about the same date, while the only important
universities founded between that time and the middle of the
fourteenth century are those of Pisa (1343), Florence (1349)9 and
Prague (1347-8), this last being the earliest of German universities.
The traditions of study, which had been in a measure maintained
by the Monasteries down to about the end of the twelfth century^
passed in part to the Dominican and Franciscan Orders in the
thirteenth, while, before the close of the Middle Ages, they also
found a home in Universities such as those which have here been
briefly mentioned.
A few of the indications of the relative importance attached to
the principal Latin authors in the Middle Ages may here be
noticed^, with some mention of the leading mediaeval mss still
extant, and of the mediaeval libraries where they were formerly
^ A. Franklin, L€S Anciennes BibL de Paris (1867), La Sorbonntt 93 1 — 318;
cp. Putnam, i 166.
* Kashdali, \^^U ' /^. ii ii5i 780.
^ Cp. Manitius in Philologus^ xlvii — lii, and Suppl. vii, 1899 (f^'' medieval
quotations), and Rhein, Mus, xlvii, Suppl. pp. 153 (for evidence from
mediaeval catalogues), with literature in Hiibner, Bibliographies §§ 34, 38 ; alio
A. Graf, Jiotna rulla Memoria...del Medio Evo (1883), ii 153 — 367; and the
very brief sketches in G. Meier's Sieben Freien KUttste (Einstedeln, i886)t
i 17— a If and Bursian*s CL PhiloL in Deutschtandt i 17 f.
XXXII.] PLAUTUS. TERENCE. 607
preserved \ It will thus be seen how large a portion of the Latin
Classics owes its present existence to the industry of copyists
prior to the age of the Renaissance. Plautus was little read';
he is only quoted second-hand by Rabanus Maurus,
who clearly derives his knowledge from Priscian jertnc*
and Isidore; but many isolated lines are cited in
the Glossarium Osbemi^ a work of English origin. In the
mediaeval catalogues, he is found at Bury' and at Bamberg' only,
but he is mentioned by Ratherius, bishop of Verona (965 )^ and
Philip de Harveng (cent xii)', both of whom once belonged to
the diocese of Cambrai. The text of Plautus now depends (i) on
the Ambrosian palimpsest in Milan (cent, iv — v), containing the
Trinummus and Miles Gloriosus and about half of twelve other
plays, which almost certainly came from Bobbio*, and (2) on five
MSB of the 'Palatine' recension, viz. one at Heidelberg*, two in
the Vatican, one in the British Museum (xi), and a second
Ambrosian MS (xii). Until 1428, only the first eight of the
twenty extant plays were really known. Terence was far more
familiar. A line from his plays was even quoted in St Peter's by
Liberius, bishop of Rome (352-66), in an exhortation addressed to
the sister of Ambrose on her reception as a nun in the presence
of her brother '^ He was closely imitated by Hroswitha, and not
^ Nearly all the MSS here mentioned are included in Chatelain's PaUographu
des Classiqua Latins^ containing more than 300 fmesimiiu^ with descriptive
letterpress (1884 — 1900). Further details as to the 'class-marks' etc of liss
in modem libraries may be found in Teuflel or Schans, and the current
critical editions.
' Peiper, Archiv f. Lit. Gesck. v 495; Khein, Mus, xxxti 516; Manitiui,
Phiiol. Suppl. vii 758 f.
> A column and a half of references in Index to Mai, Aucttrat vtii. The
work was ascribed by Leland to Osbem, a monk of Gloucester (r. 1150);
Rhein, Mus, xxix (1874) 179 f.
^ M. R. James, BibL BurieusiSt p. 17.
* Nfanitius, Rhein. Mus, xlviii lOf .
* Migne, cxxxvi 751, Catullum nunqnam antea tectum, Plantum iam olim
lego [nec]lectum.
' Migne, cciii 871 (Capiivi), 1008 (Asmaria),
* p. 44 1 supra,
> Complete/iriiiwtZr (Leyden, 1900).
'* Hautontim, 373; Ambrose in Migne, XTi 9350.
6o8 CATULLUS. [CHAP.
unfrequently cited by others'; but, altliough his metres had been
expounded by Priscian, he was regarded as a prose-author not
only by the learned abbess of Gandersheim, but also by the well-
informed schoolmaster of Bamberg, Hugo of Trimbeig*. The
text depends on the Bembine MS in the Vatican (iv — v), so called
because it belonged to Cardinal Bembo's father, who describes it
as a codex mihi carior auro*. The later MSS (ix) belong to the
inferior recension by Calliopius (in — iv).
Verona's poet Catullus, who had been imitated in the Roman
Age\ and partially known to Ausonius, Paulinus
and Apollinaris Sidonius in Gaul, and to Corippus
in Africa", is quoted by Isidore of Seville in the seventh century^
but is not even named again until the time of Ratherius, bishop
of Verona (965)^ The ms at Verona, lost for a time but recovered
shortly before 1323, was known to Petrarch (1347) and Coluccio
Salutato (1374), but had vanished again before Traversari's visit
(July 1433)^ It is (directly or indirectly) the source of all the
extant mss", the best of them being the Paris ms from Saint-
Germain-des-Pr^s, copied at Verona in 1375*, the Oxford ms from
the collection of the Venetian Jesuit Canonici (18 17), copied
about 1400, and the codex Da/anus in Berlin (1463). The
Epithaiamium alone is included in a Paris Anthology of
century ix.
Lucretius, who, in the Roman Age, had been familiar to
^ Manitius, Philol. Hi 546-53 ; Cloetta, Beitragie^ i ; JContodU u, Tragddie
im MAf 1 f (Ilaile, 1890) ; Magnin, Bibl. di NcoU dts ckarUs, i 534-31.
John of Salisbury, Pol. vii 9, calls him Comicus qui prae ceteris placet \ but the
only plays he quotes are the Andria and Eunuchus.
' Registrum Alultorum Auctorum (1180), ed. HUmer, Ei$t Quelletthtck nur
Lat, Literaturgeschichte des MAs^ Vienna Akad. Sitiungsber, 1888, (SftUusty
Cicero, Terence) ' non in numero ponuntur metricorum ' (1. 383).
' Com^Xtit facsimile (Leyden, 1903).
* Bursian'sya/iATj^. li 239.
' Philol, xlviii 760; cp. Bahrens, ii 65.
• p. 607 supra^ n. 6; R. Ellis, Prol, viif.
' Hodoeporicoftt p. 34 ; Voigt, IlumanismuSt i 107, 439, ii 384* ; Biihrens,
i pp. V — xi ; R. Ellis, ProL x — xii.
> Disputed by L. Schwabe (1886) and B. Schmidt (1887).
' Com\\eit facsimile (Paris, Leroux, 1890).
XXXII.] LUCRETIUS. 609
Arnobius, Lactantius* and Jerome*, and had been occasionally
imitated by Commodianus and frequently quoted
by Isidore, was little read in the Middle Ages*.
But he is mentioned by Ratherius, and, through the medium of
the grammarians, he became known to Bede, one of whose
quotations enabled Lachmann to emend the poet's text (vi 868).
A few consecutive lines are quoted by Ermenrich of EUwangen^.
Some at least of the quotations in Rabanus Maurus are un-
doubtedly derived (as in the case of Plautus) from Priscian and
Isidore. If any of them are first-hand, they may have been taken
from the ninth century ms now at Leyden (A), which was formerly
in the library of St Martin's church at Mainz, the see of Rabanus.
The tenth century ms at Leyden (B) was once in the abbey of
St Bertin, near St Omer and not far from Corbie, and mediaeval
catalogues show that Lucretius was not unknown at Corbie itself,
as well as at Murbach and Bobbio. Our present authorities,
A and B, are derived from a lost original of century iv — v, con-
sisting of 302 pages written in thin capitals, which was formerly in
some part of Frankland*. Marbod, bishop of Rennes (d. 11 23),
who opposed the Epicureanism of his day, has an obvious echo of
Lucretius in the lines,
' Hanc {sc. mortem) indoctus homo tammum patmt esse malonmi.
Omnia cum vita toUentar commoda yitae*'.
A single line of Lucretius^ is inaccurately quoted in works bearing
the names of Wilhelm of Hirschau* (d. 1091) and Honorius of
Autun' (c, 1 1 20), both of which are now generally ascribed to William
> Philippe, /^ev. d* FHisi, da Migwtu, 1896. 16—36.
' Adv, Ruf, iii c 19.
' Manitius, in PkiM. Iii 536-8. Joardain, Rickenhis^ 31, seems haidly
justified in saying that it toutts Us ipfua du m^ym igi 0Hm iu,.M pohni di
Lucrke,
^ ed. DUmmler, p. 10 (Locr. i 150-8).
' Lachmann, C^mm* init.
* Lihar deetm Capiiuhrum^ ix; Lucr. iii 898 — 901, and iii s, 'oommoda
vitac *.
^ ii 888, ex insenstlibus ne credas scnsile gigni.
> Philosophieat InsHiuH^na^ \ p. 14.
' Dt Phiios, Mundi^ i c. si, Migne, clxxli 54.
s. 39
6lO LUCRETIUS. [CHAP.
of Conches^ The same line is quoted by Giraldus Cambrensis*
(d. 1222); but, with William and Giraldus alike, the ultimate
authority is Priscian (iv 27), as is proved by their agreeing with
Priscian in making the last word of the line fiasci instead oigigmK
Giraldus actually quotes it as a line of Plautus, thus revealing bis
ignorance of the text of Plautus and Lucretius, and of the metres
of both. Richard of Bury^ mentions Lucretius (with Homer and
Theocritus) as a poet imitated by Virgil. This remark is described
by Manitius' as a proof of very wide reading, but Richard may
easily have found his authority (for Virgil's debt to Lucretius) in
one of his favourite authors, Gellius*; or (for the poet's debt to
Homer and Theocritus, as well as Lucretius) in Macrobius^ whom
he mentions in the very next section ^
Of all the poets by far the most popular in the Middle Ages
VI irii ^^^ Virgil. The allegorical interpretation of the
Acneidf as an image of human life, as a story of
the triumph of wisdom and virtue over folly and passion, first put
forward by Fulgentius', was accepted by Bernard Silvester and his
contemporary John of Salisbury '^ as well as by Dante, and by scholars
in the Renaissance, such as Alberti and Landini. Virgil was of
course the constant model of the mediaeval epics. His general
popularity in the Christian community was partly due to his
Fourth Eclogue^ which had been regarded by Lactantius, Eusebius,
St Augustine and Prudentius as a prophecy of the coming of
Christ". Vincent of Beauvais" ascribed the conversion of three
^ Poole's Medieval Tficughi, 339-46. • vol. iv i.
* The Vatican Ghssarium Osbtrni (xil) in Mai, Auctons^ viii 515, also
quotes the line with nasci,
* Phihbiblon, § 162. • PhiloL lii 538.
* i «i, 7-
' (Theocr., Homer, v 2, 4 — 6); (Lucr.) vi i — 6.
" See, in general, Manitius, /. c.\ Jessen in PhiloL xxx 336-8; J. Philippe,
in Rev, de VHist, des Religions^ xxxii (1895) 384 — 302, xxxiii (1896) 19 — 36,
125—162. Cp. Lambinus, Lucr, ed. 1583, p. vii; Barth on Statius Sihf, ii 7,
76 (1664); and Munro, Lucr,, notes i p. i ; also Voigt, i* 241 n. a.
" Virgiliana continmtia (c, 520 A.D.), cd. Helm, 1898.
'^ Schaarschmidt, 97 f.
" Comparetii, Virgilio, i 132-5. Jerome, Ep, 53 (Migne, xxii 545),
describes such views as puerilia,
" Spec, Hist, xi 50.
XXXII.] VIRGIL. 6ll
I)agans to the perusal of that poem. In the mystery-plays of the
Middle Ages, Virgil, with the Sibyl and the Prophets, appeared as
witnesses to the Incarnation. In a play of the eleventh century
the Praecentor^ addressing the poet, says : —
'Vatei Maro gentilium,
Da Chritto testimoniam';
and the poet replies : —
'Ecce polo demissa solo nova progenies est*'.
It was also a pious belief in Italy that St Paul had visited the
poet's tomb when he passed through Naples, and had shed tears
of regret at the thought that the poet had not lived at a time when
he might have been converted by the Apostle. A hymn in honour
of St Paul, which continued to be sung at Mantua down to the
fifteenth century, included the following stanza : —
'Ad Maronis mausoleum
Ductus fudit super eum
Piae rorem lacrymae;
Quern te, inquit, reddidissem,
Si te yivum invenissem,
Poetarum maxime!'*
To Dante (as is well known) Virgil is *the glory of the Latin
race", 'the honour of all science and all wit'*, 'the sea of all
wisdom'', 'the gentile sage, who all things knew'*, the poet who,
as the symbol of human wisdom and philosophy, is his Meader,
lord and master'^ in his journey through the Itrftmo and the
greater part of the Purgat0rio\ The text of Virgil rests mainly
* Du Meril, Origines Latina du ihedtre tnodirfu, p. 184 (Grafts A'^wtf,
ii 106).
* Daniel, Thesaurus^ ▼ 166 (Comparetti, Virgiiio, i 131).
« Purg, vii 16. * /«/ iv 73.
* ////. viii 7. • /«/. tU 3.
^ Inf. ii 140. De Monarchia^ ii 3, divinns po^ noster Virgilins.
" Virgil leaves Dante in Purg, xxx 49 f. — A long list of reminiscences of
Virgil in the Latin poeU of cent. v~xil is collected in Zappert, Virgils
Fortlebtn im MA (Vienna Akad,, 1851); see also Ribbeck*s Index. The
subject in general is fully treated in Comparetti*s VirgilM tui MdU £v0,
2 vols. (1873), and Graf*s I^cma, ii 196—958; cp. Tunison*s MatUr Virgil^
ed. 1 (1890), and C G. Leland, Un^lishid Ugmds of Virgil (1899), also
Du M^ril in MHangti arclUol H lU, (1850), ^^"1^' On Virgil in mediaeval
schools, cp. Specht, Unttrrichtnotsm^ 97 f. See also Schans, il i* | S49.
39—2
6l2 VIRGIL. [CHAP.
on the Mediceofi ms (v), once at Bobbio; the Palatine (v?X
formerly at Heidelberg; and the Vatican ms (3867), with 16 illus-
trations (vi?), from St Denis. Hardly a quarter of the text is
preserved in an older Vatican ms (iv?) including 50 pictures of
Virgilian scenes ^ There are seven leaves, from a St Denis ms
(11 or III?), now in the Vatican and in Berlin, and fragments (iv?)
at St Gallen*; also a Paris palimpsest from Corbie, and a Verona
palimpsest with scholia (both of cent, iv ?). Lastly, we have two
important mss from Tours and Fleury (ix), now in Berne' and
Paris respectively ; and, among the Paris mss (ix — xii), one from
the abbey of St Martial at Limoges.
The study of Horace in the Caroline age is represented mainly
by Alcuin, who assumes the name of Flaccus, and
displays a knowledge of the Odes and Efodes as
well as the Satires and Epistles^ which may also be traced in the
poems of Theodulfus, bishop of Orleans (d. 821). The oldest
extant ms of Horace, the codex Bemensis^ came from the neigh-
bourhood of Orleans. The famous description of Death (Odes^
i 4, 13 0 is cited as follows by Notker Balbulus of St Gallen
(cent, ix): —
*ut cecinit versu venix Honitius iste,
caetera vitandus lubricus atque vagus:
pallida Mors aequo pulsat pede sive tabernas
aut regum turres, vivite, erit, venio*.
In the Montpellier ms (cent, x) the Ode to Phyllis (iv 11) is set
to the music of the lines ascribed to Paulus Diaconus, which
supplied Guido of Arezzo with the names of the notes, »/« /r,
w/, fay soly lay si: —
*M/ queant laxis r^sonare fibrb
mira gestorum fam\x\\ tuorum,
io/ve poUuti lahW reatum,
5ancte /ohannes'^.
' Photographed in Fragnienta et pichirae Verg, cod. Fai, 3335 (Rome,
1899); partly reproduced in G. F. HiU's lUustraiions of School Classics^
No. 331 f (1903).
' Facsimile on p. 185 supra,
' P- 459 f «'/^'
^ DUmmler, Poitae Lai, Aevi Car.^ Appendix Carminum DubioruMy i S3;
Orelli's Horace^ Appendix to vol. ii ed. 3.
XXXII.] HORACE. 613
The Satires and Epistles supply, in 250 lines, an eighth part of
the Epics of the 'Calf and Wolf*, and rtie *Fox and Lion', known
as the Ecbasis Gi//m (shortly after 936)". The poet is called
noster Horatius by Benzo, the bishop of Alba (yf. 1061), who, in
the Panegyric dedicated to the emperor Henry IV, also names
Virgil, Lucan, Statius, 'Homer', and Quintilian* The Odes and
Epodes (as well as Virgil's Eclogues) are imitated by Metellus of
Tegemsee (first half of cent xii) in the poems written in many
metres in honour of St Quirinus'. Horace is named by Abelard
among the 'pagan philosophers' cited by the doctors of the
Church. In 1 280 his hexameter poems are regarded by Hugo of
Trimberg^ as more important than the lyrics: the former are the
libri principales, the latter are minus usuales. Thus the moral
precepts embodied in his rather carelessly written hexameters
were apparently recognised as possessing a permanent value,
while his elaborate and almost inimitable lyrics were regarded
as only the occasional poetry of a by-gone age, and were probably
all the less likely to be appreciated, or imitated, owing to the
perplexing variety of the metres employed. The distinction
drawn by Hugo is fully confirmed by statistics. Out of 1289
scattered quotations from Horace in the Middle Ages, exactly
250 (or less than \) are from the lyrics and as many as 1039
from the hexameters'. The total number of quotations from the
lyrics in Italy is only 19, distributed over several centuries, and
gradually diminishing till they reach the age of Dante, when they
entirely disappear. Horace was, in fact, little known in Italy
before the Renaissance, while he was far more familiar in France
and Germany. Germany in century xiii claims the only two
mediaeval quotations from the Carmen Saeculart, It was in the
lands watered by the Rhine, the Mosel and the Meuse (within
the limits corresponding to the mediaeval Lotharingia), that
' ed. Voigt (1875); Banian, i 49 f, and in 5. Ber. Btiyr. Akad. 1873, 4^f»
Ebcrt, iii 376, 185—336; and Testimonia in Kellcr-Holder't Hih^e, ii (1869).
' Graf, Roma^ ii 171.
* Canisius, UcL Ani, i, appendix, p. 35 f. Cp. Bunian, i 71; 5. Ber.
Bayr, Akad, 1873, Aufsatx 3; uiAJakresb. i 9.
* Regisirum, 68 f.
* See tabular conspectus in Moore's Simdief in DtuUe^ i sof •
6 14 HORACE. [CHAP.
Horace was best appreciated j and the same is true of other
Latin poets. Thus it was apparently in the region immediately
surrounding the ancient court of Aachen, that the influence of
the revival of learning under Charles the Great lasted longest'.
Most of the 250 extant mss come from France. The oldest, now
known as the codex Bernensis^ which belongs to the Mavortian
recension (527) and is written in an Irish hand (ix), came from
Fleury on the Loire. It has Celtic glosses here and there in the
margin, and is one of a group of mss now ascribed to Irish
contemporaries of SeduUus of Li^ge*. Among other mss, which
are interesting by reason of the places of their origin or their
preservation, we have the Leidensis (ix) from Beauvais, the
BrttxelUnsis (xi) probably from Gembloux, Paris mss (x) from
Rheims and Autun, a Vatican ms (x) from Weissenburg in
Alsace, and others at Einsiedeln (x) and St Gallen (xi). The
ancient codex Biandinius perished in the fire which destroyed
in 1566 the Benedictine monastery near Ghent, from which it
had been borrowed by Cruquius'. A similar fate befell a MS of
century ix — x during the siege of Strassbuig in 1870.
A popularity intermediate between that of Virgil and Horace
was attained by Ovid, especially in his M^a-
tnorphoses^ his Fastiy his Ars Amatoria and his
Remedia Amoris*, He is named by Isidore of Seville in his
treatise De Summo Bono as the particular pagan writer who is
most to be avoided, but this does not debar the bishop from
quoting about 20 passages from the poet. It is fair, however,
to add that he only once quotes the Ars Amatoria (ii 24), and
even this quotation (harmless in itself) may be regarded as
neutralised by a reminiscence of the Remedia Amoris (140).
' The AnaUcta ad carminum Horatiatiorum hisioriam, carried by
M. Hertz (1876 f) down to Venantius Fortunatus, have been continued to 1300
in the Analektni of Manitius (1893). Further reminiscences of Horace are
quoted by Torraca, Nuovt Rasse^it ((894), pp. 491-9; cp. also QnX*% Romm^
\\ 193-6 ; and Schanz, ii i' 9 965 a.
' Traube, AbhandL Bayr, Akad, 1893, p. 348 f. Complete facsimiU
(Leyden, 1897), pp. 333-7«.
' p. 184 i supra.
^ Manitius in Philol. Suppl. vii 731-58. Cp. Specht, (/nterrickiswesiHt 99.
and Wattenbach, Geschichtsquellntt i' 335*
XXXII.] OVID. 6is
Ovid was imitated by the scholars at the court of Charles the
Great, one of whom assumed the name of Naso, while another,
Theodulfus, believed that profound truths were contained in
his poems, if properly (Le. allegorically) understood*. The
Metamorphoses was translated into German by Albrecht von
Halberstadt (1210), and parts of that work, and the Heroides^ were
borrowed in the vast poem of Conrad of Wiirzburg on the Trojan
War*. The Tristia inspired the laments of Ermoldus Nigellus
(d. 834) in the days of his exile*. Ancient and mediaeval poems,
which Ovid never wrote, were ascribed to his pen, and, in
England, the spurious De Vehda was strangely accepted as
genuine by Walter Burley, Richard of Bury and Thomas
Bradwardine. All his genuine works were known and quoted,
and most of them imitated and translated, during the Middle
Ages^. He is often cited by the Troubadours and the
Minnesingers. In the twelfth century we find the monks of
Canterbury using his poems as a treasury of stock quotations*;
and even the Art of Love was allegorised for the benefit of nuns*.
It is only the first book of the Amores that is much quoted in the
Middle Ages. There is no poet who is cited oftener by Vincent
of Beauvais (d. 1264). In the middle of the same century all
the works, except the spurious Haiieutkaj are named by Richard
de Fournival of Amiens, while Conrad von Mure of Ziirich
(d. 1 281) quotes from all, except the Medicamina Faciei, Philip
de Vitri translated and 'moralised' the Mdamorphoses in French
^ p. 462 n. 4 supra,
* Bartsch, AU^rtcht ..«. Ovid im MA (1861).
' Migne, cv 551—640; DUmmler*s PMtoi Lai, Attn Car, H 1—93 (where
Virgil is, however, imitated more than Oirid). On the THiHa, q>. Ehwald
(Gotha, 1889).
* Gaston Paris, in //ist, JUtt, di la Pranu^ xdx (1885) 455—5^5 1 ^'*
Fr. au Moytn Age (1888) S 49 (a poem of €, 70,000 venet by the Ftandican
Ch. Legouais, cent, xiv) ; and La FoisU iu Moytm Agt, wh- f (1895) ; alto
£. Stengel, in RihrnanisikM PkM, xlvii (1886). On the French fanitatioBs and
translations of the Mit, cp. L. Sndre (1893). More than Moo lines fai the
Roman (fe la Rom are inspired by Oirid. See also Schant, II i* | 313.
* Stubbs, E^, Cantmarimses (1187-99) in RoOt Serin; and Ltehtres^
119^ The monks quote Ex P^nto \ 10, 36; ii 6, 38; iv 16, 5s; Amort i 15,
39; Ari Am, t 444; Rem, Am, 46s.
< Wattenbach, Sittungsh, Bayr, Akad, 1873, 695.
6l6 OVID. [CHAP.
verse, at the request of Jean de Bourgogne, wife of Philip V
(d. 1322)^ Dante regards the Metamorphoses as a model of
style', and as a work requiring allegorical interpretation*, in which
sense it was fully expounded by his younger contemporary
Giovanni del Virgilio^ Chaucer's Legefid of Good Wotncn proves
his familiarity with the Metamorphoses and Heroides \ and there is
no Latin poet that he cites more frequently*. The interest which
he excited is proved by the mediaeval story of the two students
who visited the tomb of Ovid, eo quod sapiens fuerat. One of
them asked the poet which was (morally) the best line that he
had ever written; a voice replied: — virtus est licitis adstinuisse
banis^. The other inquired which was the worst; the voice
replied: — omne juvans statuit Jupiter esse bonwti^. Thereupon
both the students proposed to pray for the repose of the poet's
soul, but the voice ungratefully sent them on their way with the
words : — nolo Pater Noster; carpe^ viator^ iter\
The earliest extant mss of any part of Ovid, those in Paris,
Oxford and Vienna, belong to century ix. The Oxford ms, which
includes (besides three other works) the first book of the Ars
Amatoria with Latin and Celtic glosses, is written in a Welsh
hand*. It was once in the possession of Dunstan, abbot of
Glastonbury from 943, who has drawn a portrait of himself on its
opening page**; and there is a certain piquancy at finding such a
MS in the hands of one who, after falling in love with a lady
of the court, was ultimately among the strictest of monastic
disciplinarians. One of the best of all classical mss is the codex
' Le Clerc, Hist, Litt.^ 406, 498.
« De Vuig, EL ii 6.
* Conv, ii i; iv 25, 37, 38; cp. Szombathely, Dante id Ovidio (Trieste,
1888).
^ Wicksteed and Gardner, Dante atid Giovanni del Virgilio^ 314 f*
^ See Index to Skeat's Chaucer,
* Her, xvii 98, est virtus,
' A paraphrase of Her, iv 133, Ju^piter esse pium statuit quodeutuque
juvaret,
• T. Wright, LaHn Stories from MSS of XIII— XIV cent, (184a), c. 45.
On Ovid in MA, cp.» in general, Graf, Ronia ii 396 — 315, and Manittns In
Philol, Suppl. vii, 723-58.
• R. Ellis, Hermes^ 1880, 415 f, and XII Facs, 1885, pi. 1.
'^ Illustr. ed. of Green's History^ p. 105.
XXXII.] LUCAN. 617
Ptiteaneus of the Heroides (xi) in the Paris Library*. The MS of
the Fasti now in the Vatican (x) has been identified with one
formerly at Fleury. The best MS of the Metamorphoses (x — xi)
was once in the monastery of San Marco at Florence. A
palimpsest of two leaves from the Epistolae ex Ponto^ now at
VVolfenbiittel, belongs to the sixth century.
Lucan was one of the best known of the Classical poets. He
owed his popularity largely to his learned allusions
to matters of geography, mythology and natural
history, as well as to his rhetorical style and his pointed sa3rings.
The anonymous author of a Life of archbishop Oswald (d. 992) in
I^tin verse (c. xiii?) names, as the three typical epic poets, Homer,
Walter of Chdtillon, and Lucan*. He was also regarded as a
historical authority, being the main source of the mediaeval
romances on Julius Caesar. He is quoted by Geoffrey of
Monmouth and John of Salisbury, and is the principal model
of Gunther's Ligurinus (1187). ^^^ poem was translated into
Italian in 1310. He is mentioned by Dante as the last of the
four great Latin poets in the fourth canto of the Inferno ; and is
placed by Chaucer on the summit of an iron column in the
House of Fame ;
* And by him stoden aU these derkes.
That write of Romes mighty werkes*'.
On certain other columns in the same building the poet places
Homer, Virgil, Ovid and Statius*.
The Mss of Lucan belong to two recensions. (\\ that of
Paulus Constantinopolitanus, identified with the Papulus Const*
Theyderich of a Paris ms of 674, is well represented by one of
the two MSS at Montpellier (ix — x), which was formerly at Autun :
(2) is best represented by a ms at Leyden written in a German
hand (x). Of two Paris mss of century ix, one came from
Eptemach and is possibly the source of the MS at Berne; while
another (xi) came from Fleury. There are also two sets of
' Foes, in Palmer's eel.
• Warton's Engiisk Poetry^ Diss. 3, i ^31 (Hazlitt).
' iii 407-16.
^ Cp., in general, Graf, Roma^ ii 515-8, and Manithtt in Pkihi. li 704-19.
6l8 ST ATI us. [CHAP.
fragmentary palimpsests, (i) at Rome, and (2) at Naples and
Vienna; the latter once belonged to Bobbio.
Statius was no less famous than Lucan. The Thebais was
imitated by Chaucer in his Troilus and Crtseide and
Statius
elsewhere; and the Achiiicis by Joseph of Exeter,
and by Conrad of Wiirzburg. Both of his great epic poems are
often quoted \ while his Silvae^ imitated only once in the Caroline
age by Paulus Diaconus^ remained practically unknown* till its
discovery by Poggio at St Gallen (14 16). In an ancient Norman
poem he is called Estace ie Grand^ though Virgil (in the same
line) has no epithet whatsoever ^ He was expounded by Gerbeit
(x), closely imitated in the same century in the Fan^gyricms
Berengarii {c, 920), and much quoted in the Glossarium Osdermi
(xii) as well as by Vincent of Beauvais and Conrad von Mure (xiii).
Dante attributes the 'conversion' of Statius to the perusal of
Virgil's Fourth Eclogue^, It has been suggested that Statius was
possibly credited with an aversion to idolatry, owing to the lines
in the Thebaid:—
* nulla autem effigies, nuUi commissa metaUo
forma dei, itientes habitare et pectora gaudet'^
Among the more than 70 mss of the Thebais^ the earliest are the
three at Paris, viz. two from Corbie, i.e. the codex Puteaneus (ix)
and another (x), and one from Eptemach (x); also mss at
Bamberg (x), Berne (xi) formerly at Fleury, and Leyden (xi)
once at Wiirzburg. The MS belonging to St John's Collie,
Cambridge (x), once the property of the poet Crashaw, is possibly
identical with the codex Angiicanus of N. Heinsius^ The fieur fewer
MSB of the AchilUis include the above-mentioned codex Puteaneus
(ix), and those at Eton (xi), Paris (xii) and Wolfenbiittel (xiv).
' Manitius in PhiloL lii 538-45. Cp. Schanz, II ii* § 419.
' Carmen 35, Curre per Ausoniae non sepiis epistola campos {Sihf. iv 4);
Manitius in Phitol* Suppl. vii 763.
> O. MUller, KhHn. Afus. xviii 189.
* Cp. Graf, /^OMa ii 318-11, and Joly, Bmoft de Sainte- Afore^ ii 517 f.
* Furg. xxii 66 — 73.
* Theb, xii 493, v./. * deae '.
' A conjecture due to Mr H. W. Garrod, C.C.C, Oxford, who collated it
in 190a.
XXXIT.] MARTIAL. JUVENAL. 619
The quotations from Martial preserved by the grammarians
from the time of Victorinus, Charisius and Servius,
to that of Priscian and Isidore, prove that he was
well known from the fourth to the sixth centuries. There are
many reminiscences of his epigrams in Ausonius and in
Apollinaris Sidonius; but it is the variety of his metres, rather
than his vocabulary, that finds an imitator in Luxorius (cent, vi) '.
The epitaph of a bishop of Seville, who died in 641, ends with a
line from Martial (vii 76, 4): — 'non timet hostiles iam lapis iste
minas'. The curious name of Coquus is given him in certain
ancient Glossaries*; also sometimes in John of Salisbury', Walter
Map, and Conrad von Mure, and always in Vincent of Beauvais,
who reserves the name of Martial for Gargilius Martialis. The
MSB of Martial fall into three families. The first includes mss
(ix — x) at Leyden, Paris (no. 8071) and Vienna, the last of
which was brought from France into Italy by Sannazaro (early in
xvi). These mss were copied from a lost ms of century viii — ix.
The second, including a Lucca ms now in Berlin (xii), and a
Heidelberg ms now in the Vatican (xv), also an Arundel ms in
the British Museum, formerly in the possession of Pyrkheimer
and Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk (xv), and a MS in
Florence (xv, Laur. 35, 39)*, represents the recension made by
Torquatus Gennadius (401). The third (inferior to the first and
second), including a MS in the Advocates' Library at Edinburgh
(x) and a codex Puteaneus in Paris (x), is derived from a MS in
Lombard minuscules of century viii or ix. The Exarpia
Frisingensia^ now in Munich, belong to century xi*.
The moral earnestness of Juvenal led to his being highly
esteemed in the Middle Ages. According to the
monastic catalogues, his Satires were preserved in
three copies at Bobbio, St Bertin and Rouen, and in two at
Corbie, Bamberg and Durham. Abbot Marlebeige (12 18)
* Friedlander*8 Martial^ p. 68 f. * id, on Hi 77.
' iv 118, 130, 187 Giles; q>. Mmnitius, In PkiM, xUx 560-4, es|x note
on 561. ' Marcialis coquus * is the old title of a MS in CC.C. Cambfidge.
« W. M. Lindsay, C/. Jiev, 1901, 413 f; 1901, 315 f.
* See Friedlander*s ed. pp. 67 — to8; also W. M. Lindsay's Ancieni
editions of Martial (1901). and text 1901. The * Lnoca MS * formerly belonged
to the monastery of S. Maria Cofte-Oilmndini (in Lnoca).
620 JUVENAL. PERSIUS. [CHAP.
brought to the monastic library at Evesham a Juvenal, as well as
a Lucan and a Cicero \ He is often quoted by Geoffrey of
Monmouth, John of Salisbury, Vincent of Bcauvais, and others*.
The composers of the semi-pagan student-songs of the twelfth
and thirteenth centuries magis crtdunt Juvenali^ quam docMnae
prophetali\ His popularity is still further attested by the fact
that (apart from scholia of the fourth century) he is the theme of
mediaeval scholia bearing the name of Comutus. A reminiscence
of the Tenth Satire may be noticed in Chaucer's TroUus and
Creseide (iv 197): —
*0 Juvenal lord, true is thy sentence,
That little wenen folk what is to yerne*.
The best ms, that at Montpellier (cent, ix), which includes
Persius, formerly belonged to the abbey of Lorsch, and may once
have been in that of St Gallen, which still possesses an important
MS of the early scholia (ix), almost identical with those in the
margin of the Montpellier ms. There are also early mss of
Juvenal in the British Museum (ix)^ two in the library of
Trinity College, Cambridge (x) from St Augustine's, Canterbury,
besides those at St Gallen and Einsiedeln, Vienna, Leyden and
Paris (x), the last of which once belonged to the abbey of
St Furcy at Lagny-sur-Marne. Another Paris MS (xi) was
formerly in the abbey of St Martial at Limoges. Two mss of
century xi at Leyden and Florence end with a subscription
referring to a recension by Nicaeus, a pupil of Servius*. Either
Nicaeus or some other grammarian composed the commentary
from which our earlier scholia are derived; and a further recension
connected with the name of Epicarpius (v?) is attested in a Paris
MS (xi). From a copy of this recension, in which the last sheet
was missing, came the revision connected with the later scholia
bearing the name of *Cornutus', and this in turn was the origin of
the recension by Eric of Auxerre^ which is the source of all our
* Chron. Abb. dt Evesham^ p. 167 Macray.
' Manitius in PhiloL 1 354-68. Cp. Schanz, II ii' § 410a.
' Anz,f. Kunde d, deutschtn Vorteit^ 1871, 333.
* Add. 15,600 (one of 59 mss); Winstedt, CL Rev, xvi 40.
' Legi ego Niceus Roniae apttd Servium magistrum et emendavi*
' HeirUus magis ter is quoted on ix 37.
XXXIL] PROPERTIUS. TIBULLUS. VALERIUS. PHAEDRUS. 621
existing mss, except the Oxford ms (xi), which has supplied us
with additions to the Sixth Satire (1899)*.
The popularity of Persius is attested by many quotations,
especially in Rabanus Maurus, Ratherius of Verona,
Gunzo of Novara, and John of Salisbury*. His
name appears often in mediaeval catalogues of centuries ix — xii.
Among the three best mss are two at Montpellier (ix and ix — x),
the latter of which, like the ms in the library of the Canons of St
Peter's at Rome (ix), belongs to a recension of 402 a.d. There
are also good mss in Paris (x and xi), and Leyden (x — xi), with
two closely connected mss, both written in England, one in
Trinity College, Cambridge (x), and the other in the Bodleian
(xi), which was given to the cathedral library of Exeter by
bishop Leofric (1050-72).
The only complete ms of Propertius earlier than century xv
is that at Wolfenbiittel (xii), formerly at Naples,
a MS known to Petrarch and Politian. Little p**^^,
more than the first book is contained in a Leyden TibuUat,
MS (xiv). The earliest evidence for the text of Ph«edm*"**
TibuUus is contained in certain Excerpta Parisina
(ix — x) known to Vincent of Beauvais (p. 558); later than these
are the Excerpta Frisingensia (xi) now at Munich; the earliest
complete ms, that at Milan (xiv), was once in the possession of
Coluccio Salutato. The text of Valerius Flaccus rests on the
Vatican MS (ix— x) and the ms found by Poggio at St Gallen
(141 6) and now known only through copies, especially Poggio's
copy in Madrid and an independent copy at Queen's College,
Oxford'. The only complete ms of Phaedrus is the codtx
Pithoeanus^ now at Du Mesnil near Mantes (ix — x). We have
to be content with secondary evidence of the text of its twin-
brother, the MS formerly at Rheims, which perished by fire in 1774.
The fame of Boethius, the 'last of the Romans', was per-
petuated throughout the whole of the Middle ^^
Ages. He was known not only as the first inspirer
of the great scholastic problem and the translator of certain of
' S. G. Owen, C/. Rn* xi 401 ; Winstedt, ih, xiii 301.
' Manitius In PkiM, xlvii 710-ia
' A. C. Clark, C/. Rev. xiii 119 — 134. * Manitius' samilmrly 'surriYcd' at
Gembloux and elsewhere (x — xii), awaiting the Renalwance.
622 BOETHIUS. THE POPULAR POETS. [CHAP.
the logical treatises of Aristotle \ but also as the author of
the Consolatio^ which is preserved in many mss (ix — x), and was
specially familiar to Dante and to Chaucer. The blended prose
and poetry of that work found frequent imitators, as in the case
of Bernard Silvester and Alain de Tlsle*. Its author is named
with Terence, Sallust, Cicero, Virgil and Statius, as well as
Arator, Prudentius, Sedulius and Juvencus, in a poem combining
wide reading with much ignorance of grammar, composed by
Winric, master of the cathedral school of Trier in the twelfth
century*.
The principal ancient and * modem' poets are briefly reviewed
as models of style in the third part of Eberhard of Bethune*s
Labyrinthus (1212)^ where Horace is strangely omitted. A
typical list of the authors studied in the schools of the Middle
Ages may be found in the rhyming lines of Hugo of Trimberg's
Regis trum (1280)*, while, in a satire by a monk of Erfurt
(i 281-3)*, we have a shorter list, including the grammarians
Donatus and Priscian, and the poets Ovid, Juvenal, Terence,
Horace, Persius, Plautus, Virgil, Lucan, Maximianus and
Boethius^ The library of the abbey of St Edmund at Bury
included Plautus, Terence, Horace, Juvenal, Persius, Virgil and
Statius*. A MS of Silius Italicus is entered in a catalogue of St
Gallen in the ninth century, but otherwise he has left no trace of
his existence from the time of Apollinaris Sidonius' to that of
Poggio (141 6). In the absence of all knowledge of the Greek
Homer, who *apud Graecos remanens nondum est translatus"*,
mediaeval students read of the Trojan War in the poem of
* p. 339 nipra,
' This kind of composition was called prosimetrum in cent. XII — Xiii
(Norden, 756).
3 ed. Kraus (Bursian i 70). On Boethius, cp. Graf, ii 311—367.
* P- 53* supra,
' ed. HUmer; cp. Bursian, i 81.
* Nicolai <JU Bibera Occulti Erfordensis carmen satin'cwn^ ed. T. Fischer
(1870).
^ Bursian, i 83; Gottlieb, Mitt. Bibliotheken^ 446. Cp. Joannes de
Garlandia's list on p. 518 n. 7.
* M. R. James, Bibl. BuriensiSy 103.
* Cami, ix 160. ^^ Hugo's Jiegistrum^ 161.
XXXII.] CICERO. 623
*Pindanis Thebanus'* and the prose narratives of Dictys and
Dares'; and the Tale of Troy was the theme of many Latin
and vernacular poems in the Middle Ages*.
Turning from verse to prose, we find Cicero revered through-
out the Middle Ages as the great representative of
the 'liberal art' of Rhetoric His famous sayings
were collected by Bede; his De Invtntione was the source of a
short treatise on rhetoric by Alcuin; the Tusculan Disputatums
were quoted, and the pro Milom^ the first Caiilinarian and the
second Verriru imitated, by Einhard; while the text of his
Epistles^ which was not unknown to the Irish monk, Sedulius^
was carefully studied by Servatus Lupus*. He is 'the king of
eloquence' to Paschasius Radbertus in the ninth century, and to
William of Malmesbury in the twelfth. In the former century
Almannus* declares that to celebrate St Helena adequately
would call for an eloquence greater even than that of Cicero.
The knowledge of Cicero exhibited by all the above writers, and
by Rabanus Maurus and Joannes Scotus^ is far exceeded by that
shown by the presbyter Hadoardus, the custos of an unidentified
library in Western Frankland, whose excerpts in a Vatican MS of
century ix include many passages from the De Oratart^ and
more than 600 from the philosophical works*. In the tenth
century Gerbert is specially interested not only in the rhetorical
and philosophical works but also in the speeches, and the
preservation of these last in France is possibly due to his
influence*. In the same century the Letters existed in the library
* Quoted by Ennenrich (850) and in the Gesta Berettgnrii (9^), and often
in later works (Manititu in Phihl, 1 368-71). Cp. Teaffel, | 3So, 7.
' ib. M 4«3. 47 »•
* A. Joly, Binctt d$ SaintfMart H U Rtnan di Trm, &u Us imiUumrpkasa
dHomh-e di tipoph Grico-Latim au Mp/m Agt {MHm. dt la mc, da Ant. de
Norm, xxvii; also printed separately, 1870-1). Benott was plagiarised by
Guido delle Colonne (p. 5 14 m/m), and either or both may have been the
source of Chaacer's TM/us, Cp. also Danger (Dresden, 1869), Koiting
(Halle, 1874), Gorra fTurin, 1887), H. Morley, EmgUsh IVritin, iii S07-31;
and Morf in Romania^ 1891.
* Momm^en, HtrnuSy xiii 198. * p. 470 supra.
' Acta SS. Boliand.^ August iii 581 a.
7 P. Schwenke, PhM. Suppl. ▼ (1889) 4^'i^
* Schwenke, ib. 397—588. • p. 490 supra.
624 . CICERO. [chap.
at I^rsch, and they were known to Luitprand^ Honorius of
Autun (d. 1 1 36), in his treatise De Animae Exsilio\ says that
those who dwell in the 'City of Rhetoric' are taught by Tully to
speak with grace, and are trained by him in the virtues of
prudence, fortitude, justice and temperance. In the same
century Abelard cites only four of his works, the De Inveniione
and Topica^ and the De Officiis and Paradoxa. Abelard's pupil,
John of Salisbury, knew many more, and (besides being acquainted
with the Letters^) was specially familiar with the philosophical
treatises, which are also quoted by his friend, Peter of Blois
(d. 1204). Vincent of Beauvais (d. 1264) and Walter Hurley
(d. 1345?) give long lists of his works, but there is nothing to
show that the former really knew the Letters included in his list
The latter does not even name them\ Meanwhile, in Germany,
Lambert of Hersfeld* (y7. 1058-77) is familiar with the
Catilinarians\ Conrad of Hirschau (r. iioo), who knew the
Laelius and Cato alone, is eloquent in praise of their author*;
and Wibald, abbot of Corvey (1146), whose Letters show an
extensive knowledge of Latin literature, is eager to make a
collection of all the works of Cicero in a single volume'. Herbord
of Michelsberg, near Bamberg (d. 1168), quotes whole chapters
of the De Officiis\ and Ethelred of Rievaulx (d. 11 66) wrote a
^ Cic. Epp, ed. Mendelssohn, p. vi f.
* c. 3, Migne clxxii 1144. ' Mendelssohn, p. ix.
* Orelli*s Cicero^ iii' x — xi. The Letters are there described as unknown
in cent. X — middle of cent, xiv; but we shaU see shortly that there were 3 MSS
at Cluni in cent. xil.
' ed. Holder- Egger (Norden, Kunstprosa^ 708).
' Dial, sup, auctorest 51 (ed. Shepps), TuUius nobilissimus auctor iste
libros plurimos philosophicos studiosis philosophiae pemecessarios edidit et vix
similem in prosa vel praecedectem vel subsequentem habuit (Norden, /.r.).
' Jaflf<6, Bibl, Rer. Gerni, i 316 (after asking the abbot of Hildesheim for
Tullii libros he adds) 'nee pati possumus, quod illud nobile ingenium, ilia
splendida inventa, ilia tanta rerum et verlx>rum ornamenta oblivione et
negligentia depereant; set ipsius opera universa, quantacimque inveniri
poterunt, in unum volumen confici volumus*; and he receives from
Hildesheim the Philippics^ the De Lege Agraria and the Letters (Norden,
709 ; Bursian, i 75).
"^ ii 15, 16, in Vita Ottonis Episcopi Babenbergensis {Mon, Hist. Germ, xx
706-7).
XXXII.] CICERO. 625
Ciceronian dialogue on Christian friendship. In century xii the
library of Cluni possessed three mss of the Letters and of the
Speechesy five of the philosophical and seven of the rhetorical
works. Of the mss of the Speeches one has been identified with a
ninth century ms containing the greater part of the Catilinarian
Speeches^ and of the pro rege Deiotaro^ with a portion of the pro
Ligario and Second Verrine, now in Lord Leicester's collection at
Holkham*. The library of the Sorbonne (1338) had 24 mss of
the rhetorical and philosophical works, as well as the Letters.
The Speeches best known in the Middle Ages were those against
Verres, Catiline and Antonius. The rhetoric of attack was
apparently more popular than that of defence. But the latter
was also appreciated. Philip Harcourt, bishop of Bayeux,
bequeathed to Corbie a collection of books including the pro
Ligarioy Marcello and DeiotarOy the Z^ Dtoinationey Natura
Deorunty Legibus and FatOy the Tkscutan Disputations and *ad
Hortensium liber r\ probably meaning thereby not the lost
Hortemius but the second book of the Prior Academiay described
by Vincent of Beauvais' as the Diahgus ad Hortensium. It may
be remembered that the three speeches above mentioned were
translated by Brunetto Latini (d. I294)^ Dante's references to
Cicero are primarily to the I>e Officiis and CatOy secondarily to
the Ladius and De FinibuSy with one or two notices of the Z^
Inventione and Paradoxa. The Laeiius is one of the two books
in which he finds consolation on the death of Beatrice*.
Among the earlier mss of Cicero, the most important of the
codices mutiii of the De Oratare and Orator is the MS now at
Avranches (ix) formerly in the abbey of Mont-St-MicheL The
codex mutiius of the De Oratort in the British Museum (ix)
came from the abbey of Cormery, S.E. of Tours; and the
corresponding ms at Erlangen (x) was copied for Gerbert at
^ W. Peterson, Anted, Oxon. ix; CL Rev. t90i» 313, 401; doubted by
R. Ellis, ib, 460.
* Ravaisson, La BM. di FOuaty p. xi.
' Sf^€€, Doctr. V II (Kajser's Cie. xi 56).
* p. 590 supra.
* £. Moore, Studies in DasUiy \ 158 — 973. Cp^ in generml, P. Detduunps,
Essai Bibliograpkiqut sur Cicirm (1863); ^^^ RemMy U 159 — 167; Norden,
708-10 n.
s. 40
626 CICERO. [CHAP.
Aurillac The complete text of the above works, and of the
Brutus^ was unknown until 1422. The Topica is included in
Mss at Einsiedeln (ix) and St Gallen (x). There are important
Mss of certain of the Speeches in Rome (viii), Milan (ix^ Paris
(ix), and Munich, viz. two from Tegemsee (x, xi) and one from
St Peter's, Salzburg (xi); also a MS from Reichenau at Ziirich (xi),
and a ms, probably from Cluni, at Holkham Hall, Norfolk (ix)'.
The fragmentary palimpsests in Turin (111? and iv?), Milan and
Rome (v?) once belonged to Bobbio; another in the Vatican
(iv?) was for a short time at S. Andrea della Valle, near Pompey*s
theatre*. The fragments of the pro Fonteio and in Fisonem^
included in a ms at Cues, have been traced to Sedulius of lifege'.
The Brussels ms of the pro Archia (xi) came from the abbey of
Gembloux. For the Epp, ad Atticum we have no longer to rely
entirely on the transcript in Florence (JLaur, 49, 18) made at
Milan in 1393, possibly from the ms found by Petrarch at Verona
in 1345; there is independent evidence in a few leaves dL a
MS at Wiirzburg (xi); also in six Italian mss and two in Paris
(xiv — xv)*. For the Epp, ad Familiares our main authority is
another ms (ix — x) in Florence {Laur, 49, 9), which was taken
from Vercelli to Milan, where it was first heard of in 1389; but
there is an independent transcript of the two halves of the same
original in the British Museum (xii, Harl. 3773; and xi, Hari.
3683 ; the latter from Cologne'). The first half alone is preserved
in a Paris ms (xii), formerly in the library of Notre-Dame. The
two MSS of the first half had a common origin. The Harleian lis
of the second half (xi), together with an Erfurt MS (xii — xiiiX and
a Palatine ms in the Vatican, formerly at Heidelberg (xv — ^xvi),
form an independent German group, the last at least of the three
^ p. 635 supra,
' This palimpsest (of the Verrims) possibly came from Bobbio, but it has
not been traced to any earlier owner than Pius II (d. 1464), on the later
fortunes of whose Mss cp. £. Piccolomini in BolUtino Sioricc Sintu^ i899»
fasc. iii. Text first published by Mai (1818), CL Auetores^ ii 390 fi in yerrem.
* Traube, Abhandt, Bayr, Akad, 1891, p. 367 f.
* C. A. Lehroann (Weidmann, 1891); cp. S. B. Platner, In A, J. P. 1899,
190 f; 1900, 410 f; and A. C. Clark, in Philol, 1901, 195 f.
' The same MS is specially important for the Speeches /rvA/i/^nr, Man^U^
Ligario and Regt Diiotaro (ed. A. C. Clark, 1900).
XXXII.] VARRO. CATO. SENECA. 627
having probably been copied c, 1500 from a lost ms from Lorsch*.
There is also a leaf of a palimpsest from Bobbio, now in Turin (v).
Among the numerous mss of the philosophical works are those in
Florence (ix?), Rome (ix, x), Vienna (ix), Leyden (ix — ^xi) and
Paris (ix — xii). The Paris MS of the Dt AmicUia (xi) came from
the abbey of St Martial at Limoges. There are also mss of the
De Officiis at Berne (ix), and in the British Museum (x), and
a MS of the De Senectute at Ziirich (xii); the latter once belonged
to Reichenau, but there are earlier mss in Paris (ix) and Leyden
(ix and x). One of the former (ix) came from Tours; one of the
latter, from Fleury. Considerable portions of the De Refiubiiea
were published by Mai from a Vatican palimpsest formerly at
Bobbio (v)'. The best ms of Varro, De lingua LoHna^ is in
Florence (xi), but an extract from that work is included in a
much earlier miscellaneous ms, now in Paris, which was copied
at Monte Cassino about 800 a.d. The text of Varro De re rustica
(like that of the corresponding work by Cato) depends on a long-
lost MS formerly in the library of San Marco, Florence.
Cato the elder enjoyed the reputation of being the writer of
the widely popular Distichs\ which, with the fables
of ' Aesop ' and Avianus, were studied by beginners 8«bcc«
in the mediaeval schoob. Seneca was fiunous as
the author of the Naiurales QuaesHona^ and still more as a
moralist. He is called Seneea morale by Dante^ and is quoted
by writers such as Otto of Freising, Giraldus Cambrensis and
Roger Bacon, oftener than either Cicero or 'Cato'. He was
believed to be a Christian, his 'correspondence with St Paul'*
being first mentioned by Jerome, who accepts it as genuine and
includes its supposed author among his scrifiares eedesiasHd.
Jerome's opinion was followed by John of Salisbury, Vincent
of Beauvais and many others*. The 'Palatine' ms of Seneca
^ Mendelssohn, ed. 1893, pp. vi, %xif\ cp. Garlitt (1896).
* For further details as to the MSS of the lereral speeches and philoaophical
works, see Teuflfel, M t79f 183-5, and the current critical editions.
> Manitius in Pkihl. !i 164-71; Graf, ATmpmi. ii 368-78.
« In/, iv 141. * Haase's Semem, iii 476—481.
' Graf, ii 178 — 193. Bernard of Clairvanx (E^ 956) borrows a spirited
sentence from Seneca (Ep, 10, 7) in urging the reluctant pope, Eugeniss III,
to proclaim a new Crusade (i 146).
628 PLINY THE ELDER. [CHAP.
De Benefidis and De dementia (ix) came from Lorsch. Of
the Mss of the Letters^ that at Bambeig (ix) is now the sole
authority for Letters 89-124. The earliest of the mss of the
Letters in Paris (ix, x, xi) probably came from Corbie; there are
also MSS in Florence, Leyden and Oxford (x). The MS of the
Dialogues in Milan (xi) was probably copied at Monte Cassino.
The Naturales Quaestiones are preserved in mss at Bamberg;
Leyden and Geneva (xii) and at Montpellier (xiii). The MS of
the Tragedies (xi) in the Laurentian Library came from the
Convent of San Marco. The principal mss of the elder Seneca
are those of century x in the Vatican, and at Antwerp and
Brussels, with the excerpts at Montpellier, the last of which
belonged in century xiv to the Benedictine abbey of St Thierry
near Rheims. The best ms of the unabridged text, that in
Brussels, formerly belonged to Nicolas Cusanus, and may have
had a common origin with the MS of the poems of Sedulius; it
has hence been inferred that the preservation of the elder
Seneca's Greek quotations, however inaccurately they have been
transcribed, is probably due to the influence of the Irish monk
of Li^ge*.
Pliny the elder, whose * Natural History' exactly suited the
encyclopaedic tastes of the Middle Ages, was
5ife"eWer widely read in the original, and also in the
excerpts of Solinus. In the mediaeval catalogues
he is named nine times in France and in Germany, and only
twice in Italy and England. But this gives a very imperfect
impression of the care with which he was studied in England.
A more convincing proof of the thoroughness of that study
may be found in the Northumbrian excerpts now in Berne (viii)\
and in the fact that Robert of Cricklade, prior of St Frideswide
at Oxford, dedicated to Henry II (1154-89) a Deftoratio
consisting of nine books of selections taken from one of the
older class of mss, which has been recently recognised as
sometimes supplying us with the only evidence for the true
^ Traube, Abhandi, Bayr, Akad. 1891, p. 356.
* K. Ruck, ^fMx/V;^ (Munchen, 1888); Welzhofer on Bede's quoUtions, in
Christ' AbhandL 1891, 15 — 41. King John lent a MS of Pliny to the abbot of
Reading (Pauli, Gesch, v. Engi, iii 486).
XXXII.] PLINY THE YOUNGER. 629
text*. The more important of the 200 mss of Pliny are divided
into the incomplete vetustiores and the more complete rteentiares.
The best of the former is a MS of books xxxii-vii, now at
Bamberg (x). Further, there is a palimpsest of parts of books
xi — XV, formerly at Reichenau, and now in the Benedictine
abbey of St Paul in the £. of Carinthia; a ms of books ii — vi in
Leyden (ix) and two in Paris (ix — x). One of the latter (G),
and the Vatican ms (D), and a Leyden ms (V), are separate parts
of a single ms formerly at Corbie. Even before the Corbie ms
had been revised and corrected, it was copied early in century x
in another of the mss now at Leyden (F)l
The younger Pliny was little known, being mentioned only
twice in the mediaeval catalogues of Germany,
and only thrice in those of France, but his Litters Sfi^yoanftr
are quoted once by Ratherius of Verona*, and his
Panegyric by John of Salisbury*, while Walter Map even knows
of Pliny's wife, Calpumia*. For the Letters we have to depend
mainly on the Medicean ms (ix) consisting of the first 17 quires
of the sole ms of the early books of Tacitus' Annals. This ms
of the Letters was transcribed (probably before it left Germany) in
a MS now at Prague (xiv). The Vatican MS of books i — iv (x)
was copied from the same original as the Medicean. For the
latter part of book ix we depend partly on a Dresden ms (xv),
one of a class containing eight books in all, but omitting book viii;
the date of the oldest of this class, now at Monte Cassino, is 1429.
There is also a third class of mss including only too Letters.
This is represented by Florence mss from the Riccardi palace
(ix — x) and from San Marco (x — xi). It was mss of this class
^ K. Riick in S, Ber. Bayr, Akad, 3 Mai 1901, p. I95f. On qaotations
from Pliny, see Manititu in PkUd. xlix 380-4; on those from Solinos*
ib, xlvii 561-5. Cp. Detlefeen, U. xxiriii 996 f, and Rlick, S. Ber. Ba^.
Akad, 1898, io3-»3i8. Robert of Cricklade became prior in 1130 or 1141,
and visited Italy and Sicily in 1158-9. In his dedicatioa lie addreaet
Henry II in the words: «x in lihermti ieUmiim ttmdi$imt.
* FiusimiUs of G, V, F in Chatelain, /W. pi. 140-1.
* Migne, cxxxYi 391 (Ep. i 5, 16); Manitint, PkiUL xlvii ffiSi.
^ Schaarschmidt, 95.
* p. 18 1. 183 Wright. ' Plininm Calpamke mccendit
>
630 QUINTILIAN. [CHAP.
alone that were known to Vincent of Beauvais^ and to Coluccio
Salutato, the first Italian who mentions the Letters^. For most of
the Correspondence with Trajan we have no mss. The Panegyricus
is preserved only in mss of the 'Panegyrici' copied from a lost MS
formerly at Mainz (xv), and in three leaves of a palimpsest from
Bobbio (vii — viii).
The Declamations (or Causae) ascribed to Quintilian are alone
mentioned by Trebellius PoUio and by Lactantius.
There is evidence of a recension c, 500 a«d. They
were abridged by Adelard of Bath (1130)*, and their study lasted
through the Middle Ages down to the time of Petrarch (I35o)^
His genuine Institutio Oratoria is described by Jerome as the
model followed by Hilary of Poitiers (d. 367), and it was also
studied by Rufinus and Cassiodorus, by Julius Victor and Isidore
of Seville. It was known to Lupus of Ferribres and Wibald of
Corvey*; to Bernard of Chartres, to John of Salisbury and to
Peter of Blois (xii), and, in the next century, to Vincent of
Beauvais'. Meanwhile, among the books bequeathed to the
abbey of Bee by Philip Harcourt, bishop of Bayeux (1164), there
was a MS of the Institutio Oratoria, This MS was copied in the
same century by the poet ^tienne de Rouen in an abstract ex-
tending to about a third of the ten books therein condensed. This
abstract passed from Bee to the abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Pr^
and, under the name of the codex Pratensis (xii), it is now in the
Paris Library^ Harcourt's MS, which is now lost, was also copied
in the codex Puteanus (xiii) in the same collection. The principal
MSS fall into three classes: — (i) represented only by the First
Ambrosian at Milan (x — xi), consisting of three-fourths of a
* transcript of a complete ms which has disappeared; (2) the MS at
Berne, formerly at Fleury, which has been copied in the Second
^ Spec, Hist, X c. 67. The MS frum the Riccardi palace was formerly in
the chapter library at Beauvais.
' Plin. £pp,i ed. Keil, p. xvi.
* CataJ, BibL Leiden (1716), p. 383.
* Ep, Fam. xxiv 7.
• Ep. 167 Jaff(6, Mon, Corh,
• Orelli-Baiter. Cic, in' viiif; Quintil. i, ed. Fierville (1890) xiv— xvi.
^ Fierville, xxviii f, 9Xi<d, facsimile ad fin.
XXXII.] QUINTILIAN. 63 1
AmbrosiaHy and an independent Paris MS of the same class,
formerly in Notre-Dame\ all three belonging to century x, and
all marked by many laoinoi small or great; (3) the mixed mss,
primarily represented by that at Bamberg, which consists of two
parts, the first (x) having been copied from the defective ms at
Berne, and the second from a complete MS of class (i) now lost
Early in century xi, while this second part was being added to the
Bamberg ms, the latter was itself copied in an exceptionally
important ms, which was taken to Cologne' and afterwards to
Diisseldorf, and is now in the British Museum {HarL 2664)*. Of
this Harleian ms there are two transcripts of special interest, both
belonging to century xi. The earlier of these is now at Florence,
the later at Zurich. The former owner of the first, Werner
(lVerinharius\ bishop of Strassburg (1001-29), attended the
Council of Frankfort in 1006 and interested himself in the
erection of the cathedral at Bamberg \ He may thus have been
led to acquire a transcript of the Cologne copy of the Bamberg
MS. He certainly gave to the library of Strassbuig Cathedral in
or before 1029 a MS of Quintilian, which has been identified as a
transcript of the Cologne ms. In 137a this copy was one of the
chained books in the monastic dormitory at Strassburg; afterwards
(with a Strassburg ms of Cicero's philosophical works*) it found its
way into the Medicean Library in Florence, where it is still to be
seen*. It was supposed by Raphael Regius (1491)' to be the
MS found by Poggio at St Gallen (1416). But, although Poggio
made a hasty copy of the ms at Constance*, there is nothing to
prove that he did not return the original to St Gallen*. That
1 Akin to this is a MS in the library of St John's ColL Camb. (xill).
Petrarch's copy (xiv), now in Paris (77^)1 is a direct or indirect transcript of
the
oJ, Bemensis.
A. C. Clark, in Ntue ffiideib. JtUkrh. 1891, p. ssSf.
L. C. Purser in Hermaihtna^ 1886, p. 39: Peterson, on QnintiL X,
p. Ixiv, with faisimite,
Gallia Ckristiana^ v 791-41 ed. 1731.
San Marco 157 (in Laur.).
Laur, 46, 7 (examined at Florence). FacsimiU on p. S03.
ap. Bandini, Cat, ii 38s.
Poggio to Gnarino, 16 Dec 1416, haec mea manii traascripri.
Cp. Reiflerscheid, RJUin. Mm. 1868, 145.
632 NEPOS. CAESAR. [CHAP.
original is probably the slightly later copy of the Cologne
manuscript, a copy which was certainly once at St Gallen and
has been at Ziirich since the early part of cent, xviii*. Some of
the quires show Italian memoranda giving the number of lines
(rige) contained in the page*.
Cornelius Nepos, Caesar, Sallust, Livy, Suetonius, Justin and
Florus were much studied in the Middle Ages,
corneiluli*' ^^ ^ Special popularity attended the historical
Nepos. anecdotes of Valerius Maximus. The history of
Caesar
the text of Cornelius Nepos goes back to the time
of Theodosius II (d. 450)'. One of the best mss, the iiber
Danielis (now lost), came from a library at or near Orleans. The
extant mss include ^^ codex Gudianus {xii — xiii)at Wolfenbiittel,
and the sole survivor of a better class of mss, the ms at
Louvain (xv), formerly in the neighbouring Premonstratensian
abbey of Parc^. Caesar is often quoted in the Gesta Treverorumn
In the mediaeval catalogues (except in those of France) he is one
of the rarer authors ^ Among the best mss now extant are an
Amsterdam ms (ix — x); two Paris mss, from Fleury (ix — x) and
Moissac (xi — xii), which are better than the interpolated codex
Thuaneus (xi — xii); and a Vatican ms (x) corresponding to that
from Fleury. Besides these there are mss in the British Museum
and at Leyden (xi), the latter from Beauvais, which is probably
the former home of one of the two Florence mss (xi); there are
also MSS in the Vatican and in Vienna (xii). The writer of a
Pelagian letter (r. 410-30) protests against the study of Virgil,
Sallust, Terence and Cicero, et caeteros stultitiae et perditumis
^ It was regarded by Mabillon (1673), //. Gertn, 56, as the MS found by
Poggio. Sabbadini, Riv, di FHoL xx, 1891, 307 f, cites a letter of Guarino
to Poggio (early in 14 18) mentioning a stcond complete MS as in Poggio**
possession, which Sabbadini regards as identical with the Florence MS
fonnerly at Strassburg, while he does not admit that the first MS found by
Poggio is that at Ziirich. The controversy might be settled by examining
codex Urbinas 577, which purports to be a copy of Poggio's transcript of the
original.
' Letter-press to Chatelain's pi. 178. See, in general, Peterson's Iwirod^
to Quint. X, pp. Iviii— Ixxv, and lit. there quoted.
^ Traube, .S". Her, Bayr, Akad, 1891, 409-15.
* On mediaeval quotations, see Manitius, PhiloL xlvii 567 f.
* Manitius, Rhein. Mus. xlviii ; PkihL xlviii 567 f.
xxxil] sallust. 633
atutores*; and a school-book belonging to the Utter put of the
previous century contains quotation* from each of dteae foui
irriters in the above-mentioned order*. Sallust vas
imitated by Sulpicius Sevenis, and (together tvith
Viigil and Cicero) by Ambrose; and the Bellum Catiliruu* was
even quoted by Leo the Great*. The last to study the HisterUi
at first-hand was Augustine (d. 435)*; later writers borrowed their
quotations from Priscian and Isidore; but a new interest in
Sallust was awakened in century vtii*. In the latter half of
century x his phraseology is reproduced by Richer of Rheims;
and afterwards by Ragevinus, in his continuation (1160) of Otto
of Freising's history of Barbarossa'. Among the many uss of the
Btlla are three in Paris (two of cent ix, and one of xi). A
laatna in these has to be supplied from later Mss, including
several at Munich (xt etc), and a Paris MS (xt) from Eptemach.
There is also a ms at St Gallen (xi), and one in Brussels (xi)
from the church at Egmont. The Speeches in the Bella and in
the Historitt are contained in the Vatican excerpts from Corbie
(x), and fragments of the Historia* in four leaves of a us divided
between the Vatican, Berlin and Orleans (iv — v), which probably
came from Reury. The great work of Livy was
originally in 141 books, of which only 35 (vit i^^«
books I — 10 and 21 — 45) have survived. A
summary of the contents of the lost books is preserved in the
Periochat, best represented by a ms at Heidelberg (ix), and we
have direct quotations from or vague references to the lost books
in Asconius, Tacitus, Frontinus, in Plutarch and Dion Cassius;
in Servius and Censorinus; and in Priscian and Cassiodorus;
also in the Bernese scholia on Lucan. Thus the whole of Livy
appears to have survived to the end of the Roman Age, bat
' Cuparl, Britfitlt. (1890). p. 17-
■ Keil. Gr, Lai. vil 449.
' 37. ii sicut in lenliium confluienat.
* Strpu, ivi 4 (Weymui, id PhiU. It 471-j).
* Stlluat wu ■ ravourite model wilh African writen of cent, it — V (Hoacein,
Lti A/riiaint, 1894. »<S— 90).
■ Vogcl, Qu«al. Sail. ErUngen, 1S81, pp. 416-31.
' Buniui, i 76. He it mlio imitated tiy Widokiitd and Adam of Bremen.
■ Haaler, in U^mir Shtdun, 18S7, ijf; cd. Haarenbrcdicr, 1891-3.
634 LIVY. SUETONIUS. [CHAP.
the books known to the Middle Ages* were the same as those
known to ourselves, and the rumours of the survival of a
complete Livy at some place in the diocese of Liibeck, which
were rife in the times of the Renaissance", remained uncon-
firmed. The style of Livy was imitated by Einhard, and, with
greater freedom, by Lambert of Hersfeld*. His work was first
translated into French by the Dominican Pierre Ber^uire at
the request of king John III (d. I34I)^ For books of the
first decade the earliest authority, and the only representative of
the earlier of the two recensions, is the Verona palimpsest of
books 3 — 6 (v). All the ten books were included in the later
recension by Victorianus, and books 3 — 8 were further revised
by one or other of the two Nicomachi*, both of whom held
office at Rome in 431. This recension is best represented by
the Medicean MS (x — xi)', next to which comes a ms from the
Colbert collection in Paris (x), besides one from Fleury (ix — Tf\
and others at Einsiedeln, and in the British Museum and the
Vatican (xX and also in Florence and Leyden (XI)^ Similarly we
have two recensions of the third decade^ one of which is best
represented by the Paris ms, codex Puteanus (v) from Corbie, aiid
its Vatican copy, codex jReginensis (ix, c. 804-34) from Tours *,
and by a Florence ms (x); the other, by a Turin palimpsest (v)
and by mss nearly related to the lost MS of Speier. The text
of the fourth decade depends on a Bamberg MS (xi) and on the
recorded readings of the lost MS of Mainz; and that of the first
five books of the fifth decade^ on a Vienna MS (v) from Lorschi
which in century viii belonged to the bishop of a place near
Utrecht. The epitome of Livy by Florus is preserved in an
uninterpolated form in a ms at Bamberg (ix). Suetonius
was successfully imitated by Einhard (830), who was educated
^ Manitius, Philol, xlviii 570-1.
* Voigl, Humanismus^ i 147* f.
' Ann, p> 71 fi cp. Liv. ii 6.
* Le Clerc, Hist, Litt, 431, 499.
• p. 215 ntpra, • FacsimiU on p. 336.
' On the Medicean MS, and the Leyden MS L, see Froc. Camb. PkiloL Sae,
30 Oct. 1901.
• Chatelain, in Rev, de Philol, xiv (1890) 78 f; Paliograpkii^ pi. cxirif;
Traube, S, Ber, Bayr, AkaJ, 1891, 44 5 f.
XXXII.] VAL, MAXIM US. VEGETIUS. JUSTIN. 635
at Fulda. Servatus Lupus, who could find no ms of Sue-
tonius in France, borrowed the Fulda ms (c, 850),
and at the close of the sanle century a ms of ?"!*^*"!-
Suetonius was copied at Tours, which still exists vcrctius.
in Paris under the name of the €odex Afemmianus gl^curtius
(ix), the best that has come down to us. While
Eric of Auxerre made extracts from Suetonius and Valerius
Maximus at the suggestion of Servatus Lupus, Sedulius of Li^ge
had already been culling excerpts from Valerius and Vegetius\
Valerius is represented by mss at Berne (ix) and Florence (x), the
former from Fleury, the latter from the abbey of Malm^dy-
Stavelot near Li^ge'; also by the Vatican ms (ix) of the abridge-
ment by Julius Paris (late iv). This ms of the abridgement,
which came from Fleury, and the Berne MS of the original belong
to a Ravenna recension by Domnulus (v)*. V^etius, De Re
Militari^ was much studied during the wars of the ninth century.
An abridged excerpt of part of the work was made by Rabanus
Maurus, and a set of elegiacs was written by Sedulius to
accompany the gift of a ms from bishop Hartgarius to
£berhardus\ The extant mss fall into two claries, best
represented by a MS in Paris and a Palatine ms in the Vatican
(x), the former belonging to the recension of Eutropius (450).
The MSS of Justin, who was a favourite model for historical
composition*, similarly fall into two groups, the first represented
only by a ms in Florence (xi), the second including a ms at
St Gallen (ix — x), a St Denis MS in Paris (ix), and a Fleury MS
at Leyden (ix — x). Quintus Curtius, the imitator of Livy and
Seneca, was studied by Einhard and Servatus Lupus and others
in the Middle Ages^ The earlier mss (ix — xi) include those
in Leyden (ix, x), Paris and Berne (ix) and fragments at
Einsiedeln (x).
^ MS C 14 at Cues on the Mosel (including fragments of Ck. in Pitttum
and pro Fonteio), Cp. Traube, AhKandl, B€^, Ahmd. 1894, 366-7*.
* Cp. Wibald (of Stavelot and Correy), c 11 50, in Bibl, Rtr. Gtrm. i 180.
> Brandes, Witmr Shuiitn^ 1890, 997 f; Tranbe, S. Btr, A^. AIM.
1891, 387—400.
^ Poitae Lot. Atvi Car, iii ai9 Tnnhe.
• F. RUhl, Die Verhreiiumf dis JusHns im MA (1871).
' Dosson, £ttidet 360.
636 TACITUS. [CHAP.
In the mediaeval catalogues there is no certain trace of Tacitus.
Reminiscences of the Gtrmania and the Histories
have been detected in Einhard, and of the Annais
in a single passage of Rudolfs annals of Fulda (852)', while the
Germania is the source of the same writer's description of the
Saxons', and of the epigram in Guibert of Nogent (d. 1124): —
modernum hoc satculum corrumpitur et corrumpit^. William of
Malmesbury supplies a remarkably close parallel to a passage in
the Histories^^ and Peter of Blois professes to have frequently
referred to that work*. Books i — vi of the Annais have survived
only in the Medicean ms (ix), found in 1509* and supposed to
have come from one of the monasteries of Northern Germany,
either Corvey' or Fulda', or possibly Liibeck*; Annais xi — xvi
and Histories i — v, solely in another Medicean MS (xi), 'found' in
14 J7, which is written in * Lombard' characters and was possibly
copied at Monte Casino^'. The extant mss of the Diaiogms^
* Tertz, «IA;m. i 368, super amnem quern Cornelius Tacitus [Avm, ii 9 — 17]
scriptor reruin a Romanis in ea gente gestarum Visurgim, modemi tcio
Wisahara vocant.
* J/tNt. ii 671; f [tr/rw. 4, 5, 10, 1 1].
' Migne* clvi 858 (G. Meier's SieUti Frtien Kumste^ i 19); Tac. Ctrm^ i^
neo corrumpere et corrunipi sacculuni vocatur.
* ii 73. vix creilibile niemoratu est quantum... ailoleverit; cp. Gcsta R^gmm
.-iux'' c. 08, increiUbile quantum bre\-i anloleverit (Manitius, Pkibl, zlvii 566).
A|\Art. however, from aJ.\*ttrrit, both historians may have been imiutia^
Sallust. Co/. 7, increviibiie niemoratu est. ..quantum brevi creTerit; and ev^
.^•^1 AjWtc'ti may have l>een suggesteil to the English historian by SaUott.
who has }-'r:» .uL'.rr i: 'vnjt*^. 1 1 ami 63.
* Ckjir:ui. I'mst. rjrtj., i 37f. Cp-. in general, E. Cornelias, Qiuwmif
riuiSus.^AH t.*4vmtt"« ■«/«.vrT«i vtrsjius siJ us^ru ai' renaueuUs litUras (|8S8)«
^heiv WuIukiiHi aiul the author of the Life of Henrv IV are credited with m
kno^!tfvi|;e of Tacitus; also Manicius, Pkuj^. x\\\\ 565 f.
* Sx-viciini £*/.. quoted by I'rlichs, ^.v, i 344.
' iV. lx%u .V. I Dec. 1517: Tac, ed. Scxius Rkgnanms 1533; PUisL
\ '. V ; • > - So : H ■.iffei . .^'.-^-tnrr ScuJun , 1 898, 1 4 .
* Fac. tfvi. R:::er. i\ wwuf ; refuted by L'rlichs, f.v, i 243 f, ii 214 t
* Voij;:. .V- ^vj'i.vi.v. i 553*: ccmected in -V/n/ yxtrj, iSSi, 413.
• ^ J
'• c't".'*. K^yy ::: ?; ; fV*i:bIy co^'ied .-. 1053-87 in the time of
The MS «k.u proSibly Lr.own :o Boccaccio li. 1375), cp^ HitiM, J/ki. lAfS^
:4*. ar.^: Vc^. : 55c*: c\:;v.j.''s:e j-^.vjv^iJV cf bc<h yss, Leydcn, 190X.
XXXII.] PETRONIUS. 637
Germania^ and Agricola are all of century xv, with the exception
of a MS of the Agricola and Gtrmania recently discovered in a
private library at Jesi near Ancona, which belongs to century xii\
The poem on the Civil War contained in the
Satires of Petronius (§§ 119—124) was known to
Eric of Auxerrel It is possibly Eric's MS of excerpts from the
Satires that was once at Auxerre' and is now at Berne (ix — x).
Two leaves at Leyden belong to the same ms. There are also
two mss in Paris (xii, xv), the second of which (the only authority
for the Cena Trimaichionis) was found at Trau in Dalmatia.
Fuller excerpts than those in the Berne ms were copied by
Scaliger, Tornaesius and Pithoeus from mss which have since
vanished.
A favourable impression of the extent to which the ancient
historians were sometimes studied is supplied by Radulfus de
Diceto, dean of St PauFs (d. 1202)^ who gives a dated list of the
historical authorities followed in his Abbreviationes Chranicorum,
beginning with 'Trogus Pompeius' and Valerius Maximus, while
he quotes, in his own work, authors such as Caesar, Suetonius,
Solinus, Florus, Apuleius, Virgil, Lucan, Martial, Statius, Claudian
and Vegetius*. But, in the Middle Ages as a whole, we find an
ignorance of ancient history in general, and even of the history of
philosophy and literature. Historical studies were entangled with
strange versions of the tale of Troy and fabulous stories of
Alexander the Great', while the wildest legends gathered round
the names of Aristotle' and Virgil*. The fables of mythology,
again, were either denounced as diabolical inventions or forced
to minister to edification with the aid of allegory. The direct
1 Wochensckr, f, kl PkiUi. 1903, 83, 163.
* Vita S, Germanit i 109— 1 13, ▼ «o7t 9^9 ; cp. Traube's P9tUuLaiim^ iii 414.
* Usener, in RhHn, Mm. xxii (1867) 413 f; not in Eric's band, tayt Traube,
iii 813.
« ed. Stubbs (1876).
* Gottlieb, Mitt, Bibl,^ p. 447 f.
* P. Meyer, Bibl, franf, du Mcyen Agt^ t. W— v; Gaston Paris, Utt, fr.
au Moyen Age, § 44 ; H. Morley, EngUsk Writers, iii 186—303.
"^ Gidel, Nimvaies £ttida^ 331—384; Herts, AbkatuU. Be^, Akad, 189a,
I — 104.
* Comparetti, VirgUio ii.
638 MEDIAEVAL ENCYCLOPAEDIAS. [CHAP.
Study of classical authors was largely superseded by the use of
encyclopaedic compilations*, such as those of Isidore and
Rabanus, of William de Conches and Honorius d'Autun, the
Floridum of Lambert (r. 11 20), the Itnago Mundi of Omons
(1245)', the Specula of Vincent of Beauvais (d. 1264), and the
nineteen books De proprieiatibus rerum of the English Franciscan,
Bartholomew {fl. 1230-50), whose knowledge of Geography is
derived solely from the Bible and from Pliny, Orosius and
Isidore, with the commentaries on the same. His quotations
from Aristotle are always taken from the Latin translations of the
Arabic versions'. The Reductorium Morale of Pierre Ber^uire
(d. 1362) was of the same encyclopaedic type as the above
productions \
The classical learning of the Middle Ages was largely derived
second-hand, not only from comprehensive en-
cyclopaedias, but also from books of elegant
extracts or florilegia ; and, even if the student never attained to
the reading of the authors themselves, he at least went through a
protracted course of Latin Gr^mar. Early in the Middle Ages
the vast compilation of Priscian was succeeded by the minor
manuals of Cassiodorus and Isidore, of Aldhelm and Bede. All
of these treated Grammar in a sober and serious spirit; it was
reserved for the eccentric sciolist, who called himself 'Viigilius
Maro' (cent, vi — vii), to invent new words at his own caprice'^
and to justify their existence by fabricating quotations which
imposed upon his successors. After the eighth century the
history of Grammar falls into two periods, (i) from the age of
Alcuin to that of Abelard (centuries ix — xi), and (2) from the
age of Abelard to the Renaissance (centuries xii — xiv). In the
first period the authorities mainly followed are Donatus and
Prisciaa The few examples of texts quoted in illustration of
^ Ilaase, De Medii Aevi Studiis Philoi,^ pp. 4 — 6; Uliencron's Faindi
( 1 876) ; and Norden, 740 note i .
* In French verse, Notices et Extraiis, v 243-^.
' Hist, An,, Meteor,, De Caelo et Mundo\ Jourdain, 359. The original
Latin of Bartholomew was printed in 1470-9, and Trevisa's English Tenioa
(of 1398) in 1495 etc. Extracts are ^ven in Steele's Afediatval Lore (1893)-
^ Hallam, Lit, \ \\i-^^\ Bibl, de Ckole da thartest xxxii 345 f; liaun&uia
Mhn, de CAcad, des Inscr, xxx (2) 45 — 55. • Cp. p. 438 supra.
XXXII.] GRAMMAR IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 639
grammatical rules are all borrowed from earlier grammars. Little
of Greek is known except the letters; but, in the mss of writers
on grammar, while the orthography of Greek words is in general
correct (the words being written in capitals, and without accents),
there is no knowledge of Greek Accidence. Donatus has in the
meantime been converted into a catechism {Donatus minor), and
the most popular text-book is the commentary on that catechism
by Remigius of Auxerre (d. 908)*. A superstitious respect for a
standard grammatical text, an ignorance of Greek and of classical
antiquity in general, a disposition to reason adouf grammatical
facts instead of studying the facts themselves, a preference for
ecclesiastical as compared with classical usage, are among the
main characteristics of the first period All these reappear in an
exaggerated form in the second; but, in the latter, we find Logic
intruding into the sphere of Grammar, asserting itself first in the
early part of the twelfth century and still more strongly in the
thirteenth*. While the study of Logic is diffused over all Europe,
the general trend of grammatical studies in Italy and in France,
South of the Loire, is different from that North of that river
and in lands under the educational influence of Northern France,
such as England, Flanders and Germany. In Italy and in
Southern France the study of Logic, combined with that of
Grammar, is subordinate to that of Law; and Grammar is
cultivated solely for the practical purpose of enabling the student
to speak and write Latin with correctness. The most popular
lexicons of the Middle Ages were produced by Italians. Papias*
> p. 478 n. 4 supra.
' 'Cupio per aoxiliom dialectics gnunmaticam adiuvare*, the ttudent*!
reply to Booncompagno's warning against the neglect of Grammar (cent, xii),
cp. Thurot, Notices ti Exinsiis^ xxii 90. The following comparison is ascribed
to Albertus Magnus (cent, xiil) : ' sictit se habet stultns ad sapientem, sic se
habet grammaticui ignorans logicaro ad peritnm in logica*. The gUsa noiMiis
on Alexander of Villedien by Gerhard of Zutphen (Cologne, 1488) applies all
the precision of Scholasticism to points of Syntax (Alexander, ed. Reichling,
pp. xii, Ixivf).
* p. 501 supra ; Littr^ on Glcssairts in Hisi. Liit, de la Firam$^ xxii (185s)
5—8; Rhiin. Mus, xxiv (1869) 378, 390; TeuflTel, | 41, 6—9, and | 471, 7.
The principal source of Papias b the anonymous Uber giossarmm (cent, viii —
IX), partly derived from Plaeidns (cent v 7),
640 MEDIAEVAL GRAMMARIANS. [CHAP.
(1053) is a Lombard; Hugutio' (^. 1192, d. 1212) and Balbi'
(1286) are of Pisa and Genoa respectively. The biblical glossary
called the Mammotrectus (jAOfifAoOpiwroi) is ascribed to Marchesini
of Reggio {c. 1300).
In the second period the chief authorities on Grammar are
men of Northern Europe who have studied in Paris. Petrus
Helias, the author of a commentary on Priscian, is a Frenchman
who taught in Paris (c. 1142). Alexander of Villedieu, the
composer of a hexameter poem, in 2645 lines, on (i) Accidence^
(2) Syntax, and (3) Prosody, Accentuation and Figures of Speech,
compiled from Priscian, Donatus, Petrus Riga, and possibly also
from unknown grammarians of the twelfth century, is a native of
Normandy (1200)'. Flanders is the native land of his con-
temporary, Eberhard of Bethune (12 12), the author of a poem on
Grammar, written in hexameters interspersed with elegiacs, which
owes its name of Graedsnius to the fact that it includes a chapter
on derivations from the Greek*. Flanders also claims Michael
^ Of Papias and Hugutio Roger Bacon said, nesciverunt Graicum\
P- 535 9 Ducange, Prarf, §§ 44, 46; Haase, De MetUi Aevi StudUs Pkiiokigicis^
31-3 ; Charles, Hoger Bacon^ 530, 359. Cp. A. Scheler, Lexicogr. Lai, (1867) ;
S. Berger, De gl0ssariis.,.medii aevi (Paris, 1879); Salvioli in Rivisia Eurtpea^
xiv (1880) 745 f ; G. Meier, Dit Siebeti Freien KiinsU, i 17 ; and Eckstdn, LuL
u. Gr. UfUerricht (1887) 53 f. Hugutio, s.v. cera^ after showing that the
second syllable of sinctrus is long, severely adds that, if in any vene that
syllable is made short, abradatur cum suo auctore d$ libro viioi ei eum/uttis
rum scridaiun For sinchis, cp. Charisius in Keil's Gr. Lat, i 8ii tiS;
Hagen, Anted, Heh, ccl; and Eberhard, Graecismus (c xiii), 71 — 4.
' On Balbi {Joannes Januensis)^ see p. 584 supra\ Ducange, | 47; and
Haose, 34 f. He explains hicus 'i.e. popularis^ et dicitur a Ami, quod est
populust vel potius a laos, quod est lapis \ inde laicus est lapideus^ quia diuiu
et extraneus est a scientia literarum'. Hugutio and Balbi are among the
sources of the Promptorium Parvulorum (1440), ascribed to the Dominican
Geoffrey of Lynn.
* ed. Keichling in Mon, Germ. Paed. XII (1893), date, p. xxxvif; authorities,
pp. Ixxvi-ix; 150 MSS (1159 — 1516), and c, 300 printed editions (1470 — 1588).
Cp. Haase, 171 45 (where the clearness of his Sjmtax is commended); Biiblert
Beitrage %u einer Gesch. d, Lat, Gr, im MA^ ii6f; and Neudedcer, Da*
Doctrinale (Pima, 1885). Alexander b mentioned in the Bpp* Odscurmitm
Virorum, i Epp, 7, 25, ii Ep. 35.
^ ed. Wrobel (1887); cp. Bilbler, 95 f; Norden, Xunsipn^sa^ 741 n. Hit
date (nil Leyser, Ducange, Keichling) rests on the somewhat ambli
XXXII.] MEDIAEVAL GRAMMARIANS. 64I
'Modista' of Marbais (cent, xiii), the writer of a treatise De Modis
Significandiy who actually invokes the authority of Aristotle for the
simple statement that one cannot give to another that which one
has not got oneself*. Lastly, we find two Englishmen, the first
of whom is Joannes de Garlandia {fl. 1204-52), who was known
to Roger Bacon', and left behind him about fourteen works on
Latin Grammar and cognate subjects*. The second is Robert
Kilwardby, archbishop of Canterbury (1272-9), who was a Master
of Arts of Paris and famous as a commentator on Priscian^ In
the thirteenth century Priscian was compelled to share the place
of honour with his commentators Helias and Kilwardby, while
in the fourteenth he was practically superseded by the modem
compilations of Alexander of Villedieu and Eberhard of Bethune*.
These last owed much of their popularity to the fact that they
were written in Latin verse. Verse was also the medium used
by a Canon of Hildesheim, Ludolf of Luchow, for his treatise on
Syntax known as Florista^ beginning with 'Flores grammaticae
propono scribere', which was widely used in Germany, Flanders
and France*. Even in the prose grammars of the previous
century the principal rules had always been given in verse, as
an aid to the memory. In this second period any Greek words
that occur in the mss of the grammarians are mechanically copied,
and are often wrongly read and erroneously explained. Latin
Grammar ceases to be cultivated as the art of speaking and
writing Latin with correctness. It has now become a purely
speculative science.
lines: *anno milleno centeno bis duodeno | condidit Ebrmrdns Graedsmum
Bethuniensis *. Haase (45) incorrectly interpreted this as 1114. On his
ignorance of Greek, cp. ib, 15. He fiUs 60 folios of the 'Canterbury lesioo-
book* (r. 1480) described in Gasqnet's Essays^ 179. Conrad Ton More
produced a Nevus GrtucUmus at Ziirich (1181), cp. Burstan, \%^i»
^ Thurot, 118 n. 9. ' Cmpi/. Phii, 453; p. 57* tu^ra.
* p. 519 n. 1 supra \ and Bilbler, 174, 175-8.
^ Comm. on Books \—xy in Camb. Univ. Library, MS Kk. 3. 90.
* Chartui, Univ, Paris, ^ iii 145.
* Florista, Papias, Hugutto, Michael Modista, and Joannes de Garlandia
are all satirised by Erasmus in his ConJIutus TkaiioMt Act. ii Opera i 891;
cp. Rabelais i 14 (Joum, tf CL and S. Pkii. iv 6 note) ; also Erasoras, Epp,
^f 79* 5o7f 810, and 394 (Gudanus to Battus), ed. Leyden.
s. 41
642 MEDIAEVAL LATIN. [CHAP.
Modem Syntax owes much to the grammarians of the Middle
Ages. In the thirteenth century a complete system of philo-
sophical grammar was composed, which was destined to hold its
ground in the schools for two centuries. The work in which
this philosophy of grammar was first laid down was entitled
De Modis Significandi^ and its teachers were called Modisiae^
It has been variously attributed to Thomas Aquinas or Thomas
of Erfurt or Duns Scotus in century xiii\ and even to Albert
me Saxon in the following century. It was the theme of
several commentaries, and of manuals such as that of Michael
de Marbais already mentioned. These manuals were denounced
by the early humanists because of the barbarous character of
their Latinity, the inordinate number of their definitions, and
the extreme subtlety of their distinctions'; but much that was
useful in them was incorporated in the new text-books'.
The grammarians of the Middle Ages dealt with Latin as
the living language of the Church and the Schools, and it was
precisely because it was a living language that it departed
further and further from the classical standard. Founded on
the Vulgate and the Fathers, it enlarged its vocabulary by
incorporating names of things unknown to the ancients, tc^ther
with technical terms of the Schools, whether invented by the
Schoolmen or the Grammarians. We owe 'instance' to the
former, and 'substantive' (in the ordinary sense, different from
that of Priscian) to the latter^ It is open to Seneca* to complain
that he cannot translate to Sv except by guod est^ but Thomas
Aquinas and Duns Scotus would have felt no such difficulty^
and Quintilian* would not have condemned them for using ens
or essentia, * If fear ' (says Priscian') ' had prevented authors from
using any new words, which were necessarily demanded either by
* p. 577 supra.
' e.g. Erasmus, in liis AtUidarbarm^ calls Michael an atUar intuisissimtu,
* llaase, 38—41, 44 f; Kcichling's ed. of Alexander, pp. cvi — ex.
* insianiia used fur iforaff it in Buridan, in Mttaph, ArisL QwusHmus
(Prantl, iv 35); in the secondary sense of 'example', not found in £ngliah
earlier than 1586. verbum (not nometi) substantivum is normal in Prisdan.
* ^/. 58 § 7. • viii 3, 33.
' viii 93; cp. Paulsen, Gesch. da geUkrten Unterrichis^ 47; Reichling, /.«•
iv — vL
XXXII.] THE ARTS AND THE AUTHORS. 643
the nature of things or by the desire of expressing a certain
meaning, ptrpetuis Latinitas angustiis damnata tnamiss€t\ Among
changes of Syntax, the commonest are the use of quod or quia^
instead of the Accusative with the Infinitive ; fore^ for esse^ with
the Future Participle ; the Accusative for the Ablative Absolute ;
and quatenus in the ' final ' sense of ut. Even Grammarians
gravely endeavour to maintain the legitimacy of the constructions
Ugitur Virgilium} zxxdi sillogitanUm ponendum est terminos*. The
scholastic Latin of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries degenerates
in the fourteenth ; and this degeneracy was doubtless accelerated
by the uncouth style of the renderings of Aristotle which began
to be common in the thirteenth century*.
Grammar was the portal of all the Liberal Arts; the latter
could only be approached through the study of
the * parts of speech ' : — qui nescit paries^ in vanum bet^cn the
Undit ad artes*. But it waS only one of the Seven Art* and the
Arts constituting the normal course of mediaeval
study. Combined with Logic and Rhetoric, it formed the
trivium^ with which ordinary students were generally content.
In the case of the more advanced, the study of these three Arts
was followed by that of the quadrivium^ consisting of Music^
Arithmetic, Geometry and Astronomy*. The late Latin couplet
* ' Thcrc-is-a-rcading-of Virgil *. Thurot, 30a f. • ib, 307 f.
' Cp. C. Thurot, Doctrines GrammatuaUs au Moyen Agi^ in Notices ei
ExtraiiSy xxti i (1868) pp. 591, esp. 60 — i9i«.500-6; and V. Le Clerc, Hist,
Lift, tie la France au 14* s. (1865), 410 ft 416 f; also F. Haase, De Medii Aevi
Studiis Philologicis (Breslau, 1856), and Vorlesungm (1874)1 1 i^ — ^^\
Specht, Gesch, ties Unterrichtswesens (1885), 86 — 96; Eckstein, LeU. h, Gr,
Unterricht (1887), 54 f; Schmid, Gesck, der Ertieksmg^ 11 i (1891) 199, 439;
and Salvioli, in Rivisia Europea^ xiv 731 f. The study and use of Latin in
Germany is treated by Jakob Burckhard, De linguete iatinae in Girmaniei.,/atis
(7 vols, 1 7 13, Suppl. 17S1). On mediaeval Grammar, cp. B&bler's Beitr&ge
(1885).
* 'Metrista* (Haase, 44); Buoncompagno (ap. Thurot, 90), qui partes
ignorat, se ad artes transferre non debet A woodcut in Reisch, Margarita
Philosophica (1504), copied in Reicke, Der GeUkrte (1900), Abb. 43, exhibits
Gmmmar opening the gate of a tower with representatives of the Arts looking
out of the windows in the successive storeys, and with that of Theology on the
summit.
* See esp. G. Meier, Die SiAen FHim KUmU im MA^ Einsiedeln,
1886-7 > <^^ Schmid, /. c, II i 439 — 448 ; and Specht, /. e, 81 — 139.
41—2
644 THE ARTS AND THE AUTHORS. [CHAP.
summing up the Seven Arts in two memorial lines oonesponding
to these divisions is well known to many who may not have
heard the name of its author, or rather its earliest recorder' : —
* Gram loquitur ; Dia vera dooet ; Rhit verba coUmU ;
Mus canit; Aa numerat; Ge ponderat; AsT colit astrm*.
The Middle Ages were the battle-ground of a struggle between
the study of the Liberal Arts, as represented in meagre manuals
like that of Martianus Capella, and the study of the daancal
authors themselves. The study of the Arts was regarded as
subservient not only to the study of the Scriptures', but also to
that of theoretic Theology ; and, in a work of art belonging to the
close of the Middle Ages, a fresco of the Spanish Chapel in
Florence {c. 1355), we may see Thomas Aquinas enthroned
among the Prophets and Evangelists, while, in a lower row, a
subordinate position is assigned to the personifications and the
representatives of the Liberal Arts. But the study of the Ait%
though subordinate to that of the Scriptures, was deemed far more
important than that of the Authors. In comparison with the
latter, the text-books of the Arts in general, and of Logic in
particular, were considered safer reading : a syllogism might
possibly involve a fallacy, but it was at any rate free from the
taint of paganism'. From the first part of the eleventh century,
the influence of the Schoolmen made the schools of Paris the
stronghold of the study of Logic ; and, at the beginning of the
thirteenth, we find the earliest statute of the university of Paris
insisting on the study of Plato and Aristotle alone, to the neglect
of a general classical education \ Meanwhile, in the twelfth, the
interest in the Classics still survived at Chartres during the
three years (1137-40) in which John of Salisbury was studying
there, under one of Bernard's pupils, William of Conches^ and
Richard T^veque. Bernard had been succeeded as chancellor
* The Franciscan Scotist, Nicolaus de Orbellis (Dorbeiius)^ d. 1455 1 bom
and died at Angers; lived chiefly at Poitiers. Logica^ f. 3; Prantl, W 175.
* Alcuin, ci 853 Migne ; Abelard, ii 67 Cousin; John of Salisbary, EmSk.
373 f| 44i~5i etc* (Norden, Kunstprosa^ 680-4).
' Cp. Rashdall, i 36. The mystic Hugo of St Victor (d. 1141) r^gaids the
Authors as a mere ' appendix ' to the Arts^ describing the former as btHam^
and the latter as seria^ Migne clxicvi 768 (Norden, 688 f).
* ib, i 71 f.
XXXII.]
THE SCHOOL OF CHARTRE&
645
by Gilbert de la Poirfc (1116) and ultimately by Bernard's
brother Theodoric (1141 — t. 1 150-5), who composed {f. 1141) a
great work on the Seven Libenl Arts, treating each of them in
connexion with ancient or modem text-books. For Grammar
he quotes Donatus and Priscian; for
Dialectic, Aristotle and Boethiua; for
Rhetoric, Cicero ; for Music and Arith-
metic, Boi>thius ; for Geometry, Adelard
of Bath (the translator of Euclid), with
Frontinus and Isidore; for Astronomy,
Hyginus and Ptolemy'. In this con-
nexion it is interesting to point out
that it was between 1134 and 1150',
at a time when the influence of Bernard
was still strong in Chartres, when his
immediate pupils were actually teaching
in its famous school, and while his
brother I'heodoric was successively
'master of the school' and 'chancellor',
that the right-hand door-way of the
West Front of the cathedral was
adorned with figures of the Seven Arts,
each of them associated with an an-
cient personage, Grammar with Priscian,
Dialectic wiih Aristotle, Rhetoric with
Cicero, Music with Pythagoras, Arith-
metic with Nicomachus, Geometry with
Euclid, and Astronomy with Ptolemy'.
We may here notice a certain
preference for Greek authorities, even
in cases where the text-books in current
use were Latin ; and it will be ob-
served that Boethius, who fills a large part of the Eptateucbtm,
> AbM Clervkl, La £c»ltt 4* CM^ttttt n Mtrm-Agi (1S95), p. »« f
(synopiii of the Epialnttk»ti\, Cp. p. jij ■>. 4.
■ The d>iea ^nva bf AbM Clorral. (hoA Chartrmin, 7 f.
■ Cuts in VIoUet-le-Dne, Dki. ArchH. •.«. Arti LMmmx, and E. MUe,
L'Arl Xiligicmx Ju xHf 1. (1898), 117. Tbe idea «
Grauha« and FaticiAN
(Viollel-le-Dnc, £>ia.
ArtMU. ii 9.)
646 THE SCHOOL OF CHARTRES. [CHAP.
is absent from the sculptures. These are approximately assigned
to 1 145*; it may therefore be conjectured that the absence of
any public recognition of Boethius among the external sculptures
of the cathedral may have been possibly due to the suspicions
of heresy, which in 1 146-8' gathered round the name of Gilbert
de la Porr^e, chancellor of Chartres, in connexion with his com-
mentary on the four books On the Trinity^ ascribed to Boethius.
But the names of the above representatives of the Arts, though
probably correct, are only conjectural ; and, after all, it is from
Boethius that the designations of the Greek authorities on Music,
Arithmetic and Geometry are derived. Apart from the cathedral
of Clermont, that of Chartres stands alone in according, among
its works of art, a place of honour to representatives of the old
classical world*; and this is true not only of the sculptures of the
West Front (1145), but also of those of the North Porch (1275),
where Medicine is represented by Hippocrates, Geometry by
Archimedes, Painting by Apelles, and Philosophy by Aristotle ^
To the school of Chartres (as we have already seen)' John of
Salisbury owes his excellent Latin style and his general interest
in Classics. He regretfully remarks that, since the days that he
spent under the pupils of Bernard, Mess time and less care
have been bestowed on grammar^ and persons who profess all
arts, liberal and mechanical, are ignorant of the primary ari^
without which a man proceeds in vain to the restj for, albeit
the other studies assist literature, yet this has the sole privilege
Martianus Capella (p. 330 supra). Among other cathedrals, where the
Liberal Arts were represented (at a later date than at Chartres, and unaooom-
panied l)y classical jiersonages) are those of Laon and Sens (xn), Auxerre (end
of XI 11), Rouen and Soissons. At Clermont Aristotle, Cicero and I'yihagQnif.
are represented with the attributes of the corres]x>ndiug Arts, but the Arts
themselves arc absent. The statues of Philosophy at l^on and at Sens are
modelled on the description in Boethius, Com. i i (Mdle, pp. m-5, and, in
general, loa-iii). For the representations of the Seven Arts in the Hmrhu
Deiiciantfttf see plate on p. 537 supra.
* W. Voge, Die Anfdngt des monumenialen Stils im MA (1894), pp. ill
i^3» 156; ^- Mdle, 119.
* Poole, 179 — 191. • M&le, lai, ^i6t
* Cuts in VioUet-le-Duc, ii 8 — 9.
* pp. 5i7— 5«»-
XXXII.] THE SCHOOL OF CHARTRES. 647
of making one lettered '^ The results of the classical education
initiated by Bernard are also clearly seen in Peter of Blois
(^. 1 1 35 — 1304), who passed his youth at Chartres and had the
highest admiration for John of Salisbury. In one of his letters
he expresses his doubts about a pupil who, neglecting a know-
ledge of Grammar and classical authors, has betaken himself to
the subtleties of Logic, ' which supply no proper foundation for
literary learning ". Similarly, Giraldus Cambrensis, writing in his
old age {c, 1220), requires of all who desire to speak, not only
redey but also lepide and ornate^ an education, not in the trivium
alone, but also in the authors*.
From the twelfth century onwards, a marked improvement
in Latin versification is manifest in France. A careful study
of models such as Statius, Lucan and Ovid, as well as Tibullus
and Propertius, may be noted in the poems of Matthew of
Venddme\ Virgil, Horace, the elegiac poets and Martial are
imitated by the best of the mediaeval Latin poets, Hildebert,
archbishop of Tours*.
In the history of classical studies in the Middle Ages an
important place must be assigned to the struggle
between the schools of Paris and Orleans*. The
latter had been founded in the age of Charles the Great by the
bishop of Orleans, Theodulfus, whose familiarity with classical
literature is proved by his poem ie libris quos iegert soiebam'.
The classical tradition was maintained at Orleans, and was
» Met. \ 37 (Poole, mf).
' Chartularium Univ, Parii,^ i 47 f, grammaticae et aoctomm tcientia
praetermissa volavit ad vertattas Iogiconim...iion est in talihos fundamentiim
scientiae litteralis, multisque pemiciosa est ista subtilitas. Cp. p. 511
supra.
' Proof m. of Speculum EccL, presenred by Ant Wood» quoted in Brewer's
cd., iv 7. Cp. p. 533 supra,
* P- 530 «</«»•
* p. 519 supra. His MoralU Pkilos^pkim (dxxi Migne) abouiids in quota-
tions from the Classics.
* DcHsle in Annuairt Bullelin tie laS0e.de VHUtmr* di f^rami, Tii (1869),
139—154; Mile A. de Fottlques de Villaret, Mim. de la Soe. arcki$l,..de
VOrUanais, xiv (1875) 399—440; Nofden, i%^i\ Rashdali, ii 136-8.
' i 543 DUmmler.
648 THE SCHOOL OF ORLEANS. [CHAP.
further strengthened by the proximity of the schools of Fleury'
and Chartres. The school of Orleans sent forth a series of
men of learning in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. During
the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in particular, the art of
letter-writing flourished at Orleans and in its immediate neigh-
bourhood. That art became, indeed, so widely popular in the
thirteenth century, that it even ceased to retain the distinction,
which it had won in the hands of men of mark in the previous
century*. The success with which classical composition was
cultivated at Orleans is proved by the fact that the three papal
secretaries of 11 59 to 1185 (besides several Latin poets, and
commentators on Ovid and Lucan') were produced by that
school. A Latin versifier, who wrote in England about the year
1200, places Orleans as a school of Literature (literally ' Authors ')
on a level with Salerno, Bologna and Paris as schools of Medicine^
Law and Logic respectively \ While the school of Orleans was
attacked by Alexander of Villedieu*, the Latin poets produced by
that school were lauded by two poets of English birth, Alexander
Neckam' and Joannes de Garlandia'. Even when the school of
Chartres, overshadowed by Paris, began to decline, the classical
tradition lived on at Orleans till at least the middle of the
thirteenth century*. In that century the school acquired a new
interest through its struggle with the Sorbonne. Orleans had
^ Cuissard-Gaucheron in J/Zr/i. de la Soc, arcfM* de VOrUanais^ xiv (1875)
551 — 715. Tlie great abl)cy church of St lienott-sur-I^iro is all that now
survives of the buildings of the famous school of Fleury. Its MSS were
dispersed in 156a.
' N. Valois, De Arte Scribendi Epistolas apud Gallicoi Medii Aem
Scnptores (r88o), 14, 18 f, 39 f, 43. On Bernard Silvester's Summa Die*
taminum (c. 1 153) see p* 514 supra,
' In one of the models of the art of letter-writing the student asks for
commentaries on Virgil and Lucan. There were glosses on Ovid by Amoul
le Roux of Orleans (c. xii).
^ Galfridus de Vino Salvo, Poitria Nova^ 1009 ^> ^'^^ other passages quoted
by Delisle, Keichling (Mon, Germ, Paed, Xll p. xxxvii f), and Norden, 797 f.
Cp. p. 536 supra.
* EcclesiaU^ prolog.
• De Naturis Rerum^ p. 454 "Wright.
' Ars Lectoria (1334), Delisle l,c, p. 145.
8 Rashdall, ii 138.
XXXII.] ORLEANS VERSUS PARIS. 649
neglected the study of philosophy and had insisted solely on the
attainment of purity of style through the direct study of classical
authors, especially Virgil and Lucan. The Authors were supreme
at Orleans, the Arts in Paris'. This contrast is clearly shown in
certain Latin p)oems of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries*. It is
still more vividly represented in the contemporary p)oem of Henri
d'Andely on the Battle of the Seven Arts^ which belongs to the latter
part of c. XIII '. The conflict between the study of philosophy in
Paris and the cultivation of literature, especially poetic literature,
at Orleans, is here represented as a battle between the forces of
Logic and of Grammar. The piece is not without interest as a
precursor of a far better known production. Swift's Battle of
the Books (1697). The following may serve as a brief summary : —
Grammar unfurls her banner before the walls of Orleans, and summons all
her forces to the fray. Around that banner gather * Homer ' and Claudian,
Persius, Donatus and Priscian, with many another knight and squire. They
are soon reinforced by the chieftains of Orleans itself, when they all combine in
a march on Paris. Logic trembles at their approach ; she summons aid from
Toumai and elsewhere, and places in a chariot three of her champions who
are skilled in all the Liberal Arts. Rhetoric has meanwhile taken up her
stand with the Lomliard knights^ at a fort six leagues distant firom Paris',
where her forces are joined by those of certain other Arts : — Ph3rsic, Surgery,
Music, Astronomy, Arithmetic and Geometry, while Theology remains apart
in Paris. Among the champions of that city are Plato and Aristotle. Donatus
begins the battle by attacking Plato; Aristotle meanwhile attacks Priscian,
but is thrown from his steed and continues to fight on foot against Grammar,
i.e. Priscian (who is aided by his modem 'nephews', Alexander and Eberhard),
when he is himself attacked, not by Priscian only, but by Viigil and Horace,
Lucan and Statius, Persius and Juvenal, Propertius, Sedulius, Arator, Terence
and * Homer * ; and would certainly have surrendered, but for the aid of Logic
and the several impersonations of the Organon^ Physics and Eikks, with
Porphyry, Macrubius and Boethius. Dan Barbarime, though a vassal of
Grammar, takes up arms against her, because he also holds lands in the
domain of Logic. While the battle goes on raging, the Authors find it hard
^ The Statute of 1154 prescribes certain parts of Aristotle, with Donatus,
Boethius and Priscian, but none of the Latin Classics.
' Quoted by Delisle, Lc, ; others add a passage from the diaoourse delivered
at Toulouse by the learned monk, H^linand, in 1SS9: * ecoe quaemnt clerid
Paritih artes HbtraUs^ Aurdianis auct^res^ Bononiae codices, Solemi pyxkles,
Toleti daeroones, et nusquam mores' {Sermc 1, In Asc, D^mini^.
' The author was a Canon of Rouen about is 70.
* See n. 3, p. 650 infra, * Mont-1'H^ri.
6SO THE BATTLE OF THE SEVEN ARTS. [CHAP. XXXIL
to hold their own, although Ovid and Seneca hasten to their aid, together with
certain modem poets, including Jean de Hauteville and Alain de I'lsle'.
Logic, however, is obliged to withdraw to the fort held by Rhetoric and
Astronomy, and is there beleaguered by the forces of Grammar, till she sends
down an envoy who unfortunately knows so little of the rules of speech that
he cannot even deliver his message clearly and is accordingly compelled to
return without result. Meanwhile Astronomy flings her lightning on her foes,
burns their tents and scatters their forces; and, since that day, the Muse of
Poetry has buried herself out of sight, somewhere between Orleans and Blobt
never daring to show herself in the land where her rival, Ixigic, is holding
sway. But she is honoured still by the Britons and the Germans', although
the Lombards hate her'. *This will last' (adds the poet) 'for thirty years;
but the next generation will once more give heed to Grammar. Meanwhile,
I declare that any scholar who cannot construe his text is a contemptible
person, since, in every science, whoever is not perfect in his parts of speech,
must be deemed the merest boy'l
Before the year 1300 the literary school of Orleans had been
thrown into the shade by the schools of the Seven Arts in Paris,
and the study of Law alone survived'. But the fourteenth century
saw the fulfilment of the poet's prophecy of a revival of learning,
which began, not in France or Germany or England, but in
Northern Italy, where, in the early years of that century, the
morning-star of the Renaissance arose in the person of Petrarch.
^ Only indicated by the names of their poems, Architrenius and Aitii»
claudianus respectively (pp. 525, 531 stt^a). Similarly, Gautier de Chitillon
is clearly meant by ' geta ducis Macidum ', which the editor of the text hat
twice refrained from correcting into Gesia ducis Macedum^ the first words of
the AUxandreis (p. 530 supra),
* Li Breton et It AUmant, ' Les Anglais ', says d'Aussy in his |)araphraie,
implying that Bretons are not meant. In 1. 404 the poet uses the unambiguous
VEnglois in allusion to Adam du Petit-Pont.
' A reference to the Lombard usurers in France, who are represented at
hating the Muse of Poetry, only because they dun poets for their dues.
* Quar en toute Science est gars^
Afestres^ qui n^entent bien ses pars.
Text in Api)emlix to Jubinars ed. of Kutel)euf ii (1H39) 415^435 and in
iii (1875) 3^5~347t abstract by Legrand d'Aussy in Notices et ExiraUs^
V (1800) 496 — 51a, and in Norden, 738-31.
* V. Le Clerc, Hist, Litt, a78«; Rashdall, ii 138 f.
INDEX.
Aachen, 456, 463, 484, 486, 600, 614
Abbo, (i) *Cernuus\ 481, 586; (9) of
Fleury, 49a
Abelard (/tiati/ttrdas, 535)1 509 f; 506,
517. 533» 586, 595*613,694
Accents, 116
Accius, 171
Accursius, 536, 583
Accusative Absolute, 434, 643 •
Acominatus, (i) Michael, 411 f; (3)
Nicetas, 411, 414
Aero, 300
Acropolites, 415
Ada MS, 600 n.
Adam, (1) of Bremen, 408; (a) bp
of Hereford, 563 n. 6 ; (3) du Petit-
Pont, 507 ; (4) of St Victor, 530
'Adamantius Martyrius*, 35a, 354
(TeufTel, § 47a, 6)
Adelard of Bath, 5 1 1 f, 630, 645
iClfric of Eynsham, 493, 495
Aelian, 3a9
Aemilianus Macer, a5i
Aemilius Paullus, L., 169 f
Aeneas, f6a ; (a) Neo-Platonist, 365
Aeschines and Homer, 33
Aeschylus, a4, 53-4, 65; 131, 141;
^84. 394. 430
Aetius, 364
Africanus, (1) Julias, 343, 390; (3)
Constantinus, 539
Agapetus, (i) pope, 349; (3) deacon,
388
A^thias, 380 f
Acius of Corvey, 480 n. 3
Alain de I'lsle (Alanns ab /mstt/is),
53»f; ^30i 633, 650
Albans, St, 535, 5*3 f, 580, 600 f
Alberico of (i) Monte Ctisino, 648
n. a ; (1) Bologna, 535
Albert of Saxony, 577
Albertiu Magnus, 558 f; 506, 550,
57 If 59«
Albinus on Plato, 331
Albrecht von Halberetadt, 615
Alcaeus, 44. 370, 380, 345
Alciphron, 310
Alcman, 33, 47
Alcuin, 455 f; 3ai, 354, 359. 466,
589,600, 6 1 3, 033. Cp. Haur^ia,
i' I33f; Wattenbach G. Q. i* 15&-
163; Hauck, AtfxAengitscAickie, ii
116-145; on his Grammar, Frey,
1886; and on his influence, Mon-
nier, 364-8*
Aldhelm, 450 f (portrait in Socio/
EngiamI, '\\ 307)
Alexander the Great, 34, 46, 101 f ;
in MA, 637
Alexander, (i) Aetolus, i3i, 163;
(3) of Aphrodisias, 333 ; 548, 584 ;
13) of Cotyaeum, 30K ; (4) son of
Numenius, 311 ; (5) Polyhistor,
I59t 3^5 ; (6) of Hales, K51 f ; 506,
538, 561, 571, 576; (7) of Alex-
andria, 553 ; (8) of Viiledicu, 533,
585, 640 f, 648 f
Alexandria, 101 ; School of, 105-43,
160; Museum, 105 f; Libraries,
107 f, 1 10-114, 409; Librarians,
114; Serapeum, 113, 341, 355;
Alexandria and Pergamon, iii,
159-63 ; Alexandria in c. vi, 374
Alexandrian age, io3-4S^; dates of,
104; phases of tcholantiip in, i5of;
seats of learning in, 1 60^-4 ; Alex-
andrian canon, 119 f; literature, 115
Alfanus, 500
Alfarmbi, 387, 555, 563 n. 5
Alfred the Great, 481 f ; 343 ; (3)
'Alfred the Englishman', 536, 547,
569
652
INDEX.
Algazel, 387, 559. Alkendi, 386
Allegoriau interpretation of the Bible,
335. 344. 43* ; Homer, 19, 1^7,
154. 337. 409; Virgil, 610; Ovid,
615 f; m3rths and mythology, 147,
463. 590. <537
Alpetraugi, 544
Alphabet, Greek, 88 f, 375, 57a
Ambrose, St, 134; to6, 333, 607
Amiatinus^ eodex^ 151
Ammianus Marcellinus, 106, 604
Ammonius of Alexandria, (i) pupil
of Aristarchus, 136; (1) lather of
Tryphon, 14a; (3) Saccas (c. 111),
334 ; (4) author of work on Syno-
nyms (c. IV), 14a, 355, 370; (5) son
of Hermeias (c. vi), 367, 563
Anacreon, 44, 117, 345
Analogy and Anomaly, 118, 131, 143,
148. «54ft «6i, 175-7
Anastasius I (emp. 491 A.D.), 358 ; (1)
of Antioch (c. vi), 38a ; (3) Sinaites
(c. VI 1), 385 ; (4) papal librarian
(c. IX), 474
Anaxagoras, 30
Anaximenes, 109
Andreas, (i) of Crete, 384 ; (1) Lopa-
diotes, 406 ; (3) Andreas (Andrew),
and Michael Scot, 545, 569
Androclus and the Lion, 100, 189
Andronicus, Livius, 167, 199 ; (1)
Andr. Rhodius, 164
Anselm (St) of Aosta, prior and abbot
of Dec, and abp of Canterbury,
497. 50^1 50<5. 50«. 550; (a) of
Bisate, 499 ; (3) of Laon, 468
Anthologia Palatina^ 397 f ; Planudea^
418
Antidonis of Cumae, 7
Antigonus of Carystos, 149, 161
Antimachus, 34, 38
Antioch, 163, 344, 347, 374
Antipater of Sidon, 168
Antiphanes,on Alexandrian critics, 398
Antisthenes, 9a, 109
Aphthonius, 373; 108, 311, 410
Apion, 188
Apollinaris of Laodicea, 3^3
ApoUinaris Sidonius, 330 f ; ao8 ; (a)
Sulpicius A., 198
ApoUodorus, (i) of Athens (chrono-
loger), 1^5 f, 15 F ; (a) of Pergamon
(rhetorician), 158
Apollonius, (i) Rhodius, 11 4, 116,
I a a, 369, 370; (a) Dyscolus, 31a f;
»58. 303 i (3) of P«rga. '49 5 (4)
son of Archibius, 389
Apsines, 330 f
Apuleiua, 310$ a 16 n. «» 574;
DpgmaU PlaiOHis^ 310^ 500;
Herhis^ 599; Ik Muni9^ 51 1» 515
n. a
Apulia, William of, 514
Aquinas, (St) Thomas, 560 f; 506^
550» 570; his interest in Greek,
561 f ; his commentaries on Aris-
totle, 560, 56a; his relatioii to
Averroes, 54a, 560 and pi. WkSkd^
560 ; his Latin hymns, 530; his in*
fluence on Dante, 59a
Arabic, study of, 575 f, 585; Latin
translations of Arabic rendcffings of
(ij Aristotle, 539 f, 544, 548, 55^
565; (a) Hippocrates and Gslen«
539. 544; (3) Euclid, 51s; U>
Ptolemy, 540, 54J
Arabs, study of Anstotle among the*
(f) in the East, 385 f; (a) in the
West, 540-a
Arator, 436. Aratus, 116, 169
Arcadius, Pseudo-, ia6 n. i, 355
Archilochus, aa, 50; 199, 131; 9701
a83, 361
Arethas, 395 ; 376, 435
AristarcJius, 130-5; 114, 140, 161
Aristides, Aelius, 305 f, 348^ 395;
(a) author of Apohgy^ 383 ; (3) Ar.
Quintilianus, 335, 337
Aristippus of Catania, 508 n. 1, 5S0
n. 5
Aristobulus, 3a 5
Aristonicus, 140, 141
Aristophanes, 3a, 43 ; in Plato's ^pm^
posinm, 61; the Froigs^ 53 f, 60;
in Alexandrian age, Aristoph. of
Byzantium on, ia8; Aristaichns,
131; Callistratus, 135; Crates, 154;
Didymus, 141 ; in Roman sge,
Plutarch, a98; Symmachus, 3a i ;
Byz. scAoiia, 409, 4ao
Aristotle, on Homer, |3, 35 f; dra-
matic criticism in, 6a f ; nis rfMw^
ca/iof, 64 f ; his criticism of poetiy,
70-a ; outline of his TVmtiu ms
Poetry^ 7^ f ; and of the third
Book of his Rhetoric^ 79 f ; bb re*
lations to Isocrates and Demos-
thenes, 81 f; his quotations from
Plato, 83 ; Grammar in Ar.| 97 s
the fortunes of his MSS, 85 f ; An-
dronicus of Rhodes, 164 ; Arabic
list of his worlcs, 30A
The Caiegoriis studied bj St Angus-
tine, aa3, 478 ; expositions olAr.
INDEX.
653
by Alexander of Aphrodisias,
333t Themistius, 345, Syrianus,
365, Ammonias, ^67, David the
Annenian, 365, Philoponoi, 367,
and Simplicius, 368
Roman study of, 177, 165 f; Vet-
tius Agorias and the Afrnfy/ics,
934 ; translations from the Or*
gufum by Boethius, 339, 941,
489, 558 (and by others, 5 10, 553);
abstract by Cassiodonis, 353
In Byi. age, 383; 383, 380. 403,
418, 431 ; among the Syriani
and Arabians, 385 f; Saracenic
interest in Ar., 565
In MA in the West; (i) *Logica
Veins'; Inierpr. and Caitg,
studied by Joannes Scotus, 476,
Eric of Auxerre, 478, and Jean
de Vandi^res, 484 ; InUrpr, and
Top. introduced into Germany
by Gunzo, 480 ; Inttrpr, and
Categ. expounded by Gerbert,
489, and translated into German
by Notker Labeo, 490
(3) 'Logica Nova'; Anal,^ Top.y
and Soph. EL translated (1138)
by Jacobus Clericus de Venetia,
507, 535, and introduced into
Germany by Otto of Freising,
513 ; AntU, Pr. known to Adam
du Petit- Pont, 507, and Abelard,
510; and Anal. Post, to author
of De JnieliictibuSj 510; the
Organon in Theodoric's Efiaiiu-
chon^ 513, and in John of Salis-
bury's Metaiogicust 519 ^ Anal,
Post, etc., known to Neckam,
536, translated from Arabic by
Gerard of Cremona, 540 ; Stph,
El. expounded at Oxford by
Edmund Rich, Anal, Post, bV
'Master Hugo', 570, and both
by Grosseteste, 553 ; Inttrpr, and
AfMl. etc., criticbed by Thomas
Aquinas, 563 ; Anal, Pr, ex-
pounded by Siger, 565 ; William
ofOckhamonCa/<f.,578; Richard
of Bury on Inttrpr,^ 580 n« 5
(3) The new Aristotle, 530 f, 565 f ;
Latin translations from the Arabic,
540. 547. 548. 558 f. 5<^5. ^38 ;
from the Greek, 530, 548, 558 f,
563, 566; criticised by Roger
Bacon, 569-573; their Latinity,
560, 643 ; Ar. expounded by Avi-
cenna, 387, Averroes, 541, Alber-
tns Magnus, «58f, and Th3mas
Aquinas, 560! ; studv of Physics
and Mil, previonsly forbidden in
Paris, 549, *7o; allowed, 550;
supreme authority of Ar., 583,
593 (DanteJ; legends of, 565,
637; prejudice against study of
his logic, 585 ; Physics, 367, 507,
5«o. 540. 553. 559» SH 575;
^''- 365. 4'0. 507. 5«o. 548 f;
Meteor, 540, 547, 563 ; De Caelo^
540, 559i 5^^ ; ^ Anifna, 536,
539> 548* 55«> 559 : ^ ^^»- ^
Corr, 540 ; De Somno et Vigilia^
570; Hist, An, 544 f; Rhit, 35,
79^1 «74. 546, 548, 555. 583.
Magna Moralia, 547; Pol. 543,
548, 558* 5<^«t 563* 565; [De
Regimine i*rincipum], 56% ; Cmi-
stitHtion of Athens ^ 86, 403;
\Physi^;n\ 565; \Problems'\y 36,
584 ; \De Causis\ 533, 540. 548 f,
55)» 5<^3 n- 5 » [^ Mundo^ 311,
515 n. ; (ZV Planiis\ 536, 547
Aristoxenus, 99
Arno of SaUburg, 459
Arhobius, 305, (x>9
Arrian, 303
Arruntius Celsus, 198
Arsinoe II, 106, 133, 143
Artemidorus of Ephesus, 304
Artemon of Pergamon, 158
Arthurian legends, Latin version, 535 f
Arts, the Seven Liberal, 174, 333,
ai8-30, 353, 408, 458, 463, 513,
515 n. 5* 5^6, 531, 533, 506, 643 f;
in HortHs Deiiciarum, pi. 537 ; in
fresco of ' S[)anish Chapel , Florence,
359, 644; in mediaeval tcnlptiire,
645 f
Arts versus Authors, 508, 644, 649 f
Asclepiades of Myrleia, 158
AsdeiNus, 357
Asconitis, 191; 443
Asper, Aenulios, 197, 3ii
Asser, 483 ; 454
Asterius (cons. 494 A. D.), 3311
Ateius Praetextatus, L., 5, 183
Athanasitts, 307, 543
Athenaeus, 330
Athenodoras of Tarsus, 159
Athens, and the Athenian age, 1 7-103 ;
dates, 18; in the Alexandrian age,
163 ; Schoob of, 343, 345, 347, 351 ,
6S4
INDEX.
f.'
364-B ; description of surroundings
by Psellus, 402; Athens in c. xii,
411 ; Athens and England, 413
Attains 1, 149, 161; II, 135, 151, 157;
III. 15a
Attic Comedy, Eratosthenes on, 135;
literary criticism in, 53-57
Attidsts, Greek, 3f6f; 3081; Roman,
165
Atticus, the friend of Cicero, 181;
330?; (a) commentator on Plato,
331
Atutor and Autor^ 593 n.
Augustine (St), (1) bp of Hippo, Con-
Jessians etc., 123-4; {Categories],
4781 505i 507 » Dialectic^ 334, 485,
)07 ; Soiihquies, 483 ; Orosius and
^elagius, 364; (3) abp of Canter-
bury, 449
Aurelius, M ., 303 f
Ausonius, 309 f
Authority and reason, 476, 508, 530
Autun, 333 n. 3, 614, 617
Auvergne, William of, 548, 553
Auxerre, Eric of, 479, 637 ; cathedral,
646 n.
Avempace, 541
Avendeath (Avendehut), 539 f
Averrocs, 541 f, 544 f, 553, 560, 570,
57^1 579» 58* n. 6, 583, 501 ; on Ar.
De CaelOt De Anima^ Physics and
^ff' 544i 545 n.; on Eihics, 546;
refuted by Thomas Aquinas, 543,
cp. pi. facing 560
Avianus, 637
Avicebrun, 543
Avicenna, 387, 553, 559, 560; on Ar.
De Anima, 539; Abi*reviatio Avi-
cennae, 544 f
Avitus, Alcimus, 334 (TeuiTel, § 474, 5)
Bacchylides. 47, 141, 385, 353
Bacon. Roger, iS^-^f^l 507. 539,543
(Gerard of Cremona), 545 (Michael
Scot). 547, 549, 553, 554. 557
(Adam Marsh and Grosseteste), 563
Baconthorpe, 579
Bagdad, 386 f, 389, 540
Balbi of Genoa, Catholicon of, 584,
640
Balsham, Hugh, 556
Bambere, 498; Mss, 607, 618, 619,
628, 63 1 , 634
Barlaam, 433; (3) Barlaam and/osa'
phot, 383
Bartholomew, (i) of Messina, 547;
(3) De Propr, Rerum, 638
Basil (St), 343; Basilian monks, 447
Basil I. 388. 393
Basingstoke, John of, 413, 554
Beauvais, 614, 633; tee Vinumi
Bee, 497, 503 f, 534, 597, 650
Becket, 516-^
Bede [Bae<UU 451 U 48a. 574» fio»i
633, 638
BeUnum {Mi^)t 'henbane', 571
Benedict, St, 350 f; Rule of, 355, 957^
500, «98; Order of, 358, 598; tke
Benedictine age, 461 ; 'Benedictiiie
Bucolics', 589; (3) Benedict Biioop,
453; (3) Benedict III, 470
Beneventum, 479, 530
Benott de Sainte-More, 534 n. 5, 6«3
n. 3
Benott-sur- Loire, St, 648 n. i
Bentley's Leiter io MiU, 383
Benzo, 501, 613 (Wattenbach, G. Q,
ii* 338)
Berfuire (Bersuire, Bercheure), 6341
638
Berengarii^ GesiOf 485, 618
Berengarius of Tours, 508
Bernard, (i) of Chartres, 511 f, 590 (
644, 646 ; (3) of Ckiirvaux, 510, 5301
637 n. 6; (3) of Cluni, 1J30; (4) of
Mo^lan, 5 14; (5) B. Silvester of
Tours, 513, 5I^h5, 530, 610, 6«b
Berne, MS of Virgil, 459, 613 ; Hoimcei
614; Lucan, 017
Bemward of Hildesheim, 493, 509
Bertin, abbey of St, 609, 619
Berytus, 374
Bessarion, 433
Bible, allegorical interpretationof,335.
344 > 433 » MS of, in Caroline minus-
cules, 471 ; see also VulgaU
Bion, 115
Blemmydes, 415
Bobbio, 440-3, 490, 603 f, 607, 600.
613, 6i8f,636f
Boccaccio, 636 n. 10
Boethius, 337 f, 359 ( 631 f; his
translations and expositions of Aris-
totle's OrganoH, 339, 470, 478, 489^
499. 507» 509» 5««f 5»o, 568; non-
Boethian transl*., 510, 55^; trsnsl.
of Porphyry's ItUrodttch^n^ «39,
488, 505 f ; the Scholastic Problem,
>39 ft 505 f ; tkHosopkiae C0tu^
latio, 341, 483, 487, 511, 5<5f 93i»
633; De Triniiate, 2f ii Si«i 646}
treatises on Arithmetic, Geom^rj
and Music, 339, 646
Bologna, 606; Imerius» Baonooa-
INDEX.
655
pagno and Accunius, 581 ; Michael
Scot, ^44 f; Frederic II, 546; Del
Virgilio, 589
Bonaccursius, 584
Bonaventura, 506, J57, 567
Boniface, St (IVinfrid)^ 453 f
Brabant, William of, 561 f
Bradwardine, abp, 579 f, 61^
Britain and Ireland, Greek in, 448
Brito, (1) author of Pkilippis^ 530;
(1) author of Voeabularium^ 571
Brown, Master Thomas, 536
Browning, Robert, 1, 59; Elizabeth
Barrett. 196, 363
Brunetto Latini, 590, 604, 615
Bruno, abp of Cologne, 484, 486
Bryennius, Nicephonis, 407, 409
Buoncompagno, 581, 639 n. 1, 643 d. 4
Burana^ Carmina^ 516 n. f
Burpundio of Pisa, 536, 553 n. 13
Bundan, 581
Burley, Walter, 579, 615, 614
Bury, 607, 6aa; Richard of, 580, 615
Byzantine age, 376-^18; dates, 377,
400; 'dark age* ol Byz. literature,
379' 383-5* 4»<5; study of the
Classics. 394, 416; Grammars, 435 f;
MSS, 395, 415, 437; Byz. Scholar-
ship, 434-6; debt of Scholarship
to the Byz. age, 437 f. See also
Constantinople
Caecilius, 169; (3)of Calacte, 139, 381
Caen, 503 f, 534
Caesar, on Analogy, 176; 369, 470,
503, 603 f, 633 ; (3) Caesar the
Lombard, Grammar of, 584
Caesarea, school of, 374
Caesellius Vindex, 197
Callimachus, i3i f; 114, 116, 139
Callinus, 13, 130
Calliopius, 608
Callisthenes, Pseudo-, 415
Callistratus, (i) Aristophaneiis, 135;
(3) author of Eikona^ 339
Camariotes, Matthaeus, 433
Cambridge (in i309),6g6; Franciscans
in (1334), 551; Peterhouse (1384),
556 ; dates of other eariy Colleges,
538; MSS^ fiusimiits from, 495, 503,
516^566; other Mss, 319, 391,
445. 450. 49^ n- 4» 5'^ n- «» 5«8
n- 3. 5^7 f. 544 "• <^t 545 n. 3, 553,
554» 563 n. 7, 563 n. 5, 567 n., 573,
579 n. 3, 618, 630 f, 631 n. 1,641 n. 4
Cancellarim^ 348
Canon, Alexandrian, 119 f; Attic
Orators, 139, 381; Latin Comic
Poets, 178
Canopus, aecree of, 116
Cantacuzenus, emp., 433
Canterbury, Christ Church, specimens
of hand, 503 f ; catalogue, 536, 573;
St Augustine's (Juvenal), 630; the
monks and Ovid, 615
Cantimpr^, Thomas de, 564
Caper, Flavius, 107
Caroline minuscules, 457, 471, 600 n.
Carrels, 601
Carthusians, 503 f; Carthusian Rule,
598
Cases, names of, Greek, 138, 145;
Latin, 183
Cassianus, 307, 355, 364
Cassiodorus, 344-56; 337, 341, 360,
433i 444» 466, 490. 499, 597, 6o3,
638
Castor of Rhodes, 163, 343
Cathedrals of France, the Liberal
Arts at Chartres and other, 645 f
Cato the elder, 363 f; 351, 637
Catonis Disticha^ 499, 637
Catullus, 368, 484, 603 f, 608
Cedrenus, 407 ; 341
Censorinus, 301 1
Cermenate, 588
Chalcidius, 367, 507, 510, 530
Chalcondjrles, Demetrius and Laoni-
cus, 433
Chamaeleon, 90
Champeaux, William of, 506, 509, 551
Charax, Joannes, 370
Charisius, 306, 318, 453
Charles the Bald, 465, 468, 473, 476,
481
Charles the Great, revival of learning
under, 455-464, 614; his tomb at
Aachen, 484 ; * Po^ta Saxo ' on, 480
Chartres, the School of, under Fulbert,
490t 497; Bernard and his succes-
sors, 5 > 1-514* 5«7* 5i9» ^44; John
of Salisbury, 5171, 530 f ; the Seven
Liberal Arts, in the Eptatmehon
oi Theodoric, 510, and on the West
Front of the Cathedral, 645 f
Chaucer, i, 343, 515 n. 5, 534 n.
53«» 533 n- i» 53S
617, 618, 630,633
t BU B- 5f
. 579» ^"^
Chilperic, 434 (Schmkl, G4uA, d,
Ernehnng^ II i 333)
ChoeriluS, 39
Choeroboscas, 313, 381
Choridus, 374
Christodonis, 357
656
INDEX.
Christophorus of Mytilene, 406
Chrisius Paiims (cento), 344, 406
Chrodegang of Metz, 446
Chronicon PaschaU^ 383
Chrysippus, 147 f
Chryji^Ioras (X/MwoXwpdt), 431, 03
Chrysostom (St), 344, 348; (a) see
Dion
Chumnus, Nicephorus, 418 f
Cicero, an analc^st, 1 76 ; I«atin philo-
logy in, 180; litcrarv criticism in,
178-180; his Greek authorities,
365-7 ; De Oraiore^ 470, 604, 623 ;
Orator^ 15, 99, 180, 467 n. 3, 604;
Tojnca^ 339; Speeches, 490, 590,
604, 635; scholia on, 191, 441;
Letters^ 470, 633 f, 636 ; Philoso-
phical IVorhs, 365-7, 633, 635 ;
* Academical 574 n. 5; ad Horten-
siutHf 635 ; De Kef, 569, 57^ n. 5 ;
Somnium Sci^ioms, 337, 360, 490,
493 n. 4; Cicero in MA, 633-6;
499*546; Gregory I, 433; Einhard.
464; Servatus Lupus, 470; Gerbert,
489; John of Salisbury, 531; Roger
Bacon, 574 ; Jacopone da Todi and
Petrarch, 588
Cinna, 368
Cistercians, 503 f
Cilhara, 43
Claromontanus^ Codex (c. VI, in
Paris Library), 445
Classics, prejudice against the, 594-6;
433. 459 h 485; counteracted. 597;
their survival in France, Germany,
Italy and England, 603-5
classiats, 300
Claudian, 306, 531, 589
Claudius Marius Victor, 334
claustrum sine armaria etc.^ 439, 534
Cleanthes, 147
Cleisthenes, Psellus on, 403
Clement of Alexandria, 333-6; 395
Clement, Irish monk, 463, 465; (3)
* Clement III', letter to Lanfranc,
503; (3) Clement IV, 567; (4) V,
Clermont, 331, 646 n
Climax, Joannes, 39^.
Clitomachus, 164, 304
Cluni, 485 ; 498, 596, 598 f ; MSS, 603,
604, 635 f
CoUQthus, 357
Cologne, 560, 576; (Quintilian Ms),
631
Coluccio Salutato (d. 1406), 608, 631,
630
Columban, St, 439 f
Columella, 351, 4O7
Cometas, 393
Comnena, Anna, 407, 409
CoDceptualism, 506, 509
Conches, William of; 511, 517, 519,
609 f
Conrad of Hinchau, 634; (3) C. von
Mure, 615, 618 f; (3) C. of Wttn-
burg, 615, 618
Consentius, 33^, 468
Constantine ¥1,461,487; VII (Por*
phyro^enitus), 396, 436
Constaotme Cephalas, 397; Pldaeo-
kappa, 399; Manasses, 414; Her-
moniacus, 433; Constantinat Afri-
caims, 539
Constantinople, 379 \ the Qanies
studied there in c iv, 346; Santa
Sophia, 375, 380, 393 ; the libfmriei»
374. 387 ; '*»« university, 356, 374 ;
the monastery of Studion, 384; C.
and the West, A15; the Latin ooa-
quest, 415, 436, 547; the Turiculi
conquest, 436-^ See ByaatUitu
CopyisU, 307, 330, 353, 354, 599, 6o«.
Corbie, 473, 480^ 603 ; MSS, 609, 618,
635, 638 f, 633 f
Corippus, 436
Cormery, MS of De OraUn from,
63^
Cornilicius, -ficiani, 518 f
Comutus, 390, 630
Corvey (New Corbie), ^7, 473. 486.
493, 596 ; (Tacitus), 636
Crantor, 164, 367
Craterus, 163
Crates of Mallos, 154-8, i7of; School
of. 158
Cricklade, Robert of, 638
criticuSf 11
Critobulus of Imbros, 433
Cos, 118
Cosmas, (i) Italian monk, 383; (9) C.
of Jerusalem, 384
Cousm, Victor, 439, 466, 506, 568
Co well, E. li., 311
Criticism, (i) dramatic, 53 f, 61-4;
(3) literary, ii, i9f, 35, 53-7; 61-
4; 67-75; 80, 83; 99; 109; i«9f;
156; 177-180; 183; 191; 194-6;
199; 335 f; 373-86; 393-5; «97f;
3"; 33« f; 346; 3^f; 390O 4«o;
5^8; 533; 5^; 59>; ^^^\ (3)
textual. 33, 57; U8-43; 155, 158.
160; 315 1 330, 335, 350, 344, 361,
INDEX.
657
57'i 583; (4) verbal, ja, no, u8,
160 f; 173, 187, 303, 219, 153,
»87-9o. 317
Cues, 036, 035 n. I ; Nicolas Cusanos,
618
Curtius, Q., 655; (1) Curtios Vale-
rianus, 35a
Cyclic poets, 34 f, 373
Cyprian (St), 305; (3) of Toulon, 334
Damascius, 367
Damascus, John of, 383 f, 395, 536,
553
Damasus, library of pope, 330
Damiani, Petrus, 500
Dante, 590 f ; 343 ; his precursors, the
Visions of Wettin, 467, and Ami-
Clawiianiu^ 533; statistics of his
references to Latin literature and
Latin translations, 591 ; Dante and
Cicero, 635; Virgil, 610 f; Horace,
613; Ovid, 616; Lucan, 61 jr; Sta-
tius, 593 f, 618; 'Dionysius the
Areopagite*, 369; Aristotle, Avi-
cenna and Averroes, 591 ; Thomas
Aquinas and Albertus Magnus, 593 ;
Siger, 564; Brunetto Latini, 590;
Del Vireilio, 589 ; Dante as a pre-
cursor of the Renaissance, 500
• Dark Ages \ the, 483 ; 594--0 n.
David the Armenian, 338, 365 n. 4,
475 n. 4
David the 'Scot ', 535
De Catisis, De Mundo^ Dt Pltt$UU\
see * Aristotie* ad fin.
De Moiiis Signi/Uandi^ 641 f
Deinarchus, 378
Demetrius Cydones, 473; (3) De-
metrius of Phaleron, loi, 106;
(3) of Scepsis, 153, 161; (4) De-
metrius ircp< ipfiriPtias, 313
Democritus, 36, 67, 93
Demosthenes, MSS, 310; Ltpf., 393,
305 » 353' Oi., Dt Chers.y De Cor.^
353; FcUs, Leg,^ 394; Dem. and
Ar. Rhei,^ 8f, 374; Dion. Hal.
374-7; 'Longinus* (Dem. and
Cicero etc.), ^83-5« Aristides, 306;
Libanius, 348 ; Julian, 353 ; Isidore
of Pelusinm, 363; Choricius, 375;
'Lantern of*, 413; (3) I>eino8-
thenes Philalethes, 460 n. i
Denis, St, abbey of, 415, 471, 474,
48i» 50^. 534. 598.613, 635
Desiderius, (1) of Vienne, 433; (3) of
Monte Cassino, 500, 636 n. 10
Dexippus, 344
S.
Diagoras of Rhodes, 46
Dialectic, course of reading in, 538
n. 9 ; Alcuin on, 458
Dicaearchus, 100
Diceto, Radulfos de, 637 ; 534
Dietamen^ ^83, 648 n. 3
Dictionarit^ 538, 539 f
Dictys and Dares, 033
Dicuil, 4^9
DidaseatteUf 64 f
Didymus, i39f; 1^9,373
Diocles of Magnesia, 333
Diodonit, (1) Siculas, 117, 373; (3)
son of Val. PoUio, 317
Diogenes Laifrtius, 333
Diogentanus, 388, 370
Diomedet, 306, 3 18, 4^3, 467 n. 3
Dion Cassius, 407, 436
Dion Chrysostom, 391 f; 3x8, 360, 363
Dionysius, Aelius, 316; (3) 'Diony
sios, the Areopagite', 369, 415,
474. 505. 53f. 5481 553f 560; (3)
Dionysius Exignus, 350; (4) Diony-
sius of Halicamassus, 373 f; 150;
(5) Dionysius Thrax, 7f, 43» ^ZlU
35$
Dommicans, Order of, 551; their
Latin style, 559; their study of
Greek, 5^ if 585 ; William of Moer-
beke, 503 ; Geoflrey of Waterfbrd^
56«; Vincent of Beauvais, 557, and
Albertus Magnus, 5i|8, ignorant of
Greek; Thomas Aquinas, mterestcd
in Greek, 561 f
Dominico Marenffo, 501
Domnulus, 330, 035
Donatua, Aelius, 184, 318, 319; on
Terence, 470; Grammar of^ 453.
458. 463, 468, 500, 574, 638, 649 ;
Remi<gins) on, 478, 039 : Greek
version of, 417, 536; (3) Tib.
Claudius Donatus, 184; (3) Irish
monk, 463
Dositheos (c iv A.D.), author of a
Greek version of a Latin Grammar,
nsed at St Gallen and Bobbb, 138,
479 (Teullcl, f 431, 7)
Doxopatres, John, 407
Drama, Greek; early study of, 59 f;
criticism of, 53 f, 61-4; 'caoon' of,
130
Ducas, 433
Daris, 43, and frootbpiece
Dudo of St Quentin (r. loso)* 50s
Dungal, 440 n. 4, 46k n. 3, 479
Duns SootQs, 576 f, 043
Donstaa (St), 485, 493, 616
42
658
INDEX.
Durham, * carrels ', 601 ; Juvenal, 610
' DwaHs on the shoulders of giants ,
Eberhard of Bethune, Craecismus,
640 f; quoted, 593 n. 10; Labyrin'
ihuSf 53a, 63a, on Bernard Sil-
vester, 515
Ecbasis CapHvi, 613
Eclogues, 589
Edessa, 374. 385 f .
Edmund (St), of Abingdon, 551, 567,
570
Education of Europe, 550; free ed.,
461
Egidio (Colonna) da Roma, 565 n. 3
Einhard (£^nAani), 463 f, 468 f,
471 f, 480, 613, 634-6
Einsiedeln, Mss, 614, 6ao, 6a6, 634 f;
monk or pilgrim of, 349, 480
Eirene, empress (797-802), 383, 461
Ekkehard I (d. 973), H^altharius of,
488; II (d. 900), Palaiinus,4%Ti\
IV (d. c, 1060), Chronicler, 488
Elegiac poetry, Greek, 48-50
EUmicifratrcs of St Gallen, 479
Encyclopaedias, Byzantine, 396; me-
diaeval, 558 n. 4 ; 638
England, Greek in, 536, 553 f, 573,
580; Latin Verse in, 451 f, 454 f,
524 f; Latin Prose in, 45ii5^3f5
study of the Elder Pliny, 6a8
Ennius, 168, 171, 199
Ennodius, 134, 137
ens and essentia, 64a
Epaphroditus, 390
Ephraem the Syrian, 597
Epic Cycle, 34 f, 373; Epic poetry,
early study of, 19-40; 'canon* of,
130
Epicarpius, 630
Epicteius, Simplicius on, 368
Epiphanius, 343
Epsilon^ 00, 385
Eptemach, 617 f, 633
Eratosthenes, 133 f; 5, 114, 136, 160
Erfurt, monk of; Nicolaus tie Bidera,
633
Eric (Heiricus) of Auxerre, 473, 478,
630, 635, 637
Erigena, 473 n.; j^^ Joannes Scotus
Krmenrich of Ellwangen, 468, 609
Ermoldus Nigellus, 465, 586, 615
Erotianus, 390
Eihelred of Rievaulx, 6ia
Etienne de Rouen, 597, 630
Etymologicum, Fioreniinum, 381, 391 ;
Csnuimum, 391 ; Gmdiamtum^ 404 f |
Magnum^ 405, 4 10; Fianmm^ 391;
Ei. in iambic verse, 404
Etymology, 93, 146 f, 404
Euclid, 1 10; MS, 396 ; transl., 51 a. 645
Eudocia, 356, 370; Vivarium of
Pseudo-Eudocia, 399
Eugenius III, (1) bp of Toledo, 445 1
(3) pope. 514
Eugraphms on Terence, 490
Eumenes I, in, 149, 161; Up iii,
'49 '^ «57. (co«n) '<^4
Eupborion, i6\, 371; Cantons Ru»
phorionis, 308
Euripides and the Epic Cyde, 45;
Bacchat (in Clement), 335^ (in
' Christus Patiens '), 344, 406 ;
Electra, 53, 59; Aiedea, 57, 89,
371; Phom.t 534; Thetems^ 89;
earlv quotations from, 58, and
study of, 59 ; Aristophanes on, 53-
55* 57> ^i Aristotle on, 63; Alex-
ander Aetolus on, isi; Grantor,
164; Lucretius, 368; 'Longinua',
384 f; Julian, 353; select plajfs of
Byzantine age, 394
Eusebius, 343; 330, 333; 395
Eusiathius, ^lof
Eustratius ol Nicaea, 403
Eutropius, ed. of Vegetius, 330, 635
Eutyches, 353, 359
Evesham, Marleberge abbot of, 619 f
Evroult, St, 497, 533
Exeter, Joseph of, 536, 618
Fabius Pictor, 169
Favorinus of Aries, 301, 333
Felu, bp of Nantes, 437 ; (3) ihetorl^
cian, 339
Fenestella, 188
Ferreto, 589
Festus, Pompeius, 188, 300, 457, 604
FitzGerald and Ausonius, 3 10
Fleming, William the, 547. 563, 569 f
Fleury {Si BinoU'Sur*L§ire)t Servolus
Lupus and, 470; Abbo of, 49«f;
School of, 6^8 n. i ; MSS from,
603 n. i; Virgil, 613; Horace,
614; Ovid, 617; Cic. diSeH»t 697;
Quint., 630 ; Caesar, 633 ; Salliist,
633; Livy, 634; Val. Max., 635
Florence, Greek mss of c. X — ^XI,
501; MSS formerly in San Marco
(Ovid, Met,)^ 617; (Varro), 617;
(Seneca, 7n>^.)f 038; (Pliny, iS/M.),
639 ; other mss in Laurenuan
library {cod, Amiaiintu), 351 ; (Ck.
INDEX.
659
£^,),6i6; (Quint.). 631; {Uyy),
634; (Tacitus), 636; fresco in
'Spanish Chapel', 459, 644
Florence of Worcester, 513
Flcrista^ 641
Florus, 634; (a) Mestrius Florus,
195 n. 2
fare for esse, in mediaeval Latin, 643
Fortunatianns, a 16, 933
Fortunatus, Venantius, 436; 134
Fonmival, Richard de, 604, 615
France, study of Greek in, c. xii,
533 n L*t'n Verse in, 529 f, 647 ;
France N. of the Loire, 586, 639
Franciscans, at Oxford and Cam-
bridge, 551, 556; Alexander of
Hales in Paris, 551; Grosseteste,
55a f; Bona Ventura, 557; Ro|^
Bacon, 567; Duns Scotus, 570
Freculphus, 461
Fredegarius, 435
Frederic II, 544-6, 560, 587 n. a
Frontinus, 604
Fronto, 198, loi; MS of, 441
Fulbert, 490, 497. 508, 519
Fulda, 453 f ; 463-71 4691 483. SO^t
601, 603, 635 f
Fulgentius, 610 n. 9
Furcy, abbey of St, 610
Gnisford, 396, 405
Gale, Thomas, 391, 478
Galen, 311; iii, «86, 479, 491, 511,
539. 544. 563. 606
Gallen, Gallus and St, 443 ; Grimold,
468 ; Notker Balbulus, 479 f, 6ia ;
the Hungarians at, 483; Gunxo,
486; Ekkehard I, II, IV, 487 f;
Notker Labeo, 499; in c. X, 503 ;
scriptorium, ^99; MSS, 601 f;
Virgil, 185, 011; Horace, 614;
Statius, Siiv. , 618 ; Juv., 6ao ; Silius,
611; Cic. Top,, 626; Quint., 631;
Sallust, 633; Justin, 635
Gallus, Cornelius, 371
Gap, Guillaume de, 4151^34
Gargilius Martialis, 351, 619
Garlandia, Joannes de, 537 f; 53a,
573, 641, 648
Gaul, early monasteries, 307, and
schools of learning in, 333 f; study
of Virgil in, 317; Latin Scholar-
ship in, Ausonius, 309 f; Paultnus,
313; Sidonius, 330 f; Consentius,
^35 i victories of Qovis, 335;
St Maur, 357; Desiderios of
Vienne, 433; Gregory of Tours,
434; Fredemriui, 435; Fortuna-
tus, 436; *Virgilius Mmro', 437;
Greek in Gaul, 445
(Hutier de ChitUlon (or de Tlsle,
GutUterus ok Insuiis) ; AUxandreis^
530 f* 533. 617, 650 n. 1 ; M^ra^
Hum Dogma, 531, 586
Gaza, school of, 374
Gellius, 198-300, 303, 471, 574, 610
Gembloux, 497, 614, 630
Gennadiu% Torquatus, 316, 619
Geoffrey of Monmouth, 534, 617, 630
Geoffrey of Waterford, 565
Gerard of Cremona, (i) the trans-
lator, 540, 543 f, 548, 569, 606;
(3) the astronomer, 543 n. 4
Gerbert of Aurillac {SiHm/ef' //),
489 f ; ^84, 586, 618, 633, 635
German m c. ix, ^73; Germany,
classical MSS introduced into, 47a,
(Gunzojl, 486, (Otto of Freistnig^,
513; Greek in, 446, 535; Latin
Veise in, 5^3
Gerona, John bp of, 445
Gervase of Tilbury, 515, 534
Gervold of St Wandrille's, 461
Gesia Roman^rum, 534
Ghent, lost eoiiex Blandimus of
Horace from Benedictine monastery
near, 184, 614
Gilbert de la Porr^, 513; 341, 468,
510, 517, 645 f
Gildas, 433
Giles (Aegiditts), St, 446
Gilles de Paris, 565
Giraldus Cambrensii, 533 f; 553,
610, 647
Giossa Ordimtria of the Vulgate,
468
Glossaries, Graeco-Latin, 445, 480
Glykas, chronicler, 414
Glykvs, grammarian, 43 1
Gnipho, Antonius, 173
Godfrey of Viterbo, 535
Golias, M3, 535; GoiianH, 536
(^<'ik3^^^ 539
Gorgias, aS, 77, 306
Greueum est, non Ugiiur, 583
Grammar and Etymolo^, bqnnningt
of, 88 ; Stoics, 144-6; tradition of
Greek Gimmmar, 435; definitions
off 8. 458, 466; divisions of, 333;
personification of, 596, 64a n. 4,
O45 ; mediaeval study of, 03S-43 ;
Grammar and Logic, 639, 647
Gimmmarians, Greek, 137, 313-5,
318. 354 f. 3^; 381, 385, 393,
42 — 2
66o
INDEX.
419, 419, 495, 479; 573; Latin,
172-7; 188 f; 193 f; 197 f; 108,
an, 317 f* "5f «58t 493i d77»
584, 640-1
Grammatical terminolo^, Greek, 90,
97» »37 ^t 144 f ; L*tm, 189
Grammatiau, 8, 190; -ra, 170
Greek literature etc., conspectus of,
c. 840-800 B.C., 18; 800-1 B.C.,
104; 1-800 A.D., 960; 800-600
A.D., 340; 600-1000 A.D., 378;
1000-1468 A. D., 400. Gk. influence
in Latin literature, 167-9, 963-71,
and literary criticism, 177 f; his-
tories of Rome written by Romans
in Gk., 160, 964; Gk. literary
criticism, 59 1, 73 f, 80, 89 ; 973-86;
Gk. authors studied by Dion, 995,
Julian, 459, Synesius, 369, Themis-
tius, 346, Byx. age, ^94, 496 ; lost Gk.
historians, 416; Gk. hymns, 384;
survival of Gk. in S. Italy, 446 f,
57«» 587; ^^' in MA, 438, 440-50,
459, 461 f, 476, 490; Joannes
Scotus, 474-7; diplomatic, 461,
491, and ecclesiastical use of Gk.,
480 f, 501, 535, 585; Gk. monks
at Toul and Verdun, 484; Gk.
lectionary copied at Cologne ( I09 1),
501; Gk. in c. XI, 500-9; c. xii,
533-6; translations from Gk. text
of Plato, 474, 508, and Ar., 548 f,
566; Grosseteste, 553--6; William
of Moerbeke, 563 f ; Roger Bacon,
579 f, 575 ; attempts to teach Gk.
in c. xiii-xiv, 576, 580, 584;
Graeco-Latin glossaries, 445, 480;
Gk. in dictionaries of Papias, 501,
and Hugutio, 535, and in mediaeval
grammars, 639, 641 (see also Dasi-
theus) ; Gk. pronunciation, 479, 488,
49 '» 573- ^*« Uxicograpfurs
Gregoras, Nicephorus, 490-9
Gregorius Corinthius, 413
Gregory of (i) Cyprus, 418; (9)
Nazianzus,343; (3)Nyssa,344,536;
(4) Tours, 434 f
Gregory (I) the Great, M\-l, ^^^i
III. 447; V. 484; VII (Uilde.
brand), 498; IX, 545
Grosseteste, 559 f ; 413, 567-9, 579 f
Grossolano, 535
Gui de Strasbourg, 565
Guibert of Nogent, 533, 636
Guido, (i) of Arezzo, 619; (9) delle
Colonne, 594, 693 n. 3
Guigo, 503, 598
Gttillaame, (i) te Bretoo, 549; (s)
see G€^
Gttiscard, Robert, 514
Gunther, ^^31617
Gunzo of Novara, 486, 691
Hadoardut, Exeerpta
i'»6«3
Hadrian, emp.,309 ; (9) pope (Adiisn)
I, 447; IV (NkOiolas BKakipcar),
590; (3) monk. 440 ( 45s
Hales(HaUes).55i. SttAimmAr{(Si
Harcourt, Philip, 695, 630
Harduin. of St Wandrille'i, 461
Harpocration, 303, 318-90
Hartmund of St Gallen, 479
Hart win the German, 517 n* 3
Harveng, Philip de, 5^5 n. «« 607
Hatto, bp of Basel, 409
Hauteville, Jean de; ArckUrtmius of,
5^5» 533* 650
Hebrew, 346, J45. 569, 579, 5J5;
Latin transl. from, 549, 544 n. o
Hecataeus, (1) of Miletus, 83; («) of
Abdera, 159
Iledwip and Bkkehanl II, ^7
Heidelberg Mss, 397, 607, on, 619
H^linand, 534, 649 n. 9
Heliodorus, 391
Helladius, 4^5
Helolssa (Helolse), 509, 511
Henri d'Andely, 514, 640
Henricus, (i) Septinidlensis ; (a)
Mediolanensis, 594
Henry the Fowler, 483; (9) Heujof
Huntingdon, 594; (3) Heoiy 11,
518, 599, 586, 698, 699 n. I
Hephaestion, 303, 391
Heracleides Ponticus, 98
Heracleitus, 99, 83, 91
Heracleon of Tilotis, 158
Herbert de Lotinga, 595
Herbord of Michelsberg, 614
Hermannus Contractus, 490 nVatleii-
bach, G. Q. ii*49-7); (9) Hemum
the Dalmatian, 513, 516. 540 n.;
(3) Hermann the Gennan, 546;
543 n- 4» 554t 5^* 571 n. I
Hermeias, 367
Hermippus, 135
Hermogenes, (1) 99; (9) 311
Herodes Atticus, 309 f, 398
Herodian, 31 a; 958, 303, 369
Herodicus, lOi, 398
Herodotus, 95, 83, 88; Dion. HoL
on, 974 f ; * Plutarch' on, 198
Herondas, 106, 115
Herrad of Landsperg, 533, 537, 595 f
INDEX.
66i
Hersfeld, 453, 603
Hesiod, 31, 37; 110, u;, 131, 141,
303; scholia, 4CM, 419, 410
Hesychius, (i) of Alexandria, 370;
388; (3)orMiletns, 371
Hierocles, the Neo-Platonist, 365
Higden, Ralph, 534
Hilary (St), (i) of Poitiers, 334, 630;
(i\ of Aries, 1x4
Hilaebert, 519, O47
Hildesbeim, 494, 50a, 535, 596,
634 n. 7
Hitnerius, 345
Hincmar, 341, 475, 604
Hipparchus, (1) son of Peisistratos*
31 f; (3) astronomer, 116
Hippias, (i) of Elis, 37 f, 78; (3) of
Tnasos, 38
Hippocrates, 93, 386, 479» 49«» 539t
544. 563* <5o6
Hirschau (Hirsau), 503, 604; 609
Hisptricafamina, 438
History, mediaeval ignorance of, 637
Holkot, 580
Homer, and the rhapsodes, 19 f ; So-
lon, 19; Peisistratus, 30, 159;
Hipparchus, 31; early interpola-
tions in, 33 ; influence of, 33-36 ;
H. and the Sophists, 37-9; his
mythology allegoricmlly interpret-
ed, 39f (cp. 147, 154, 337, 409);
H. in Plato's Ion and A'tf/., 30 f;
Aristophanes, Isocrates, 33 ; Zol-
lus, i09f ; ancient quotations from,
33; early 'editions' of, 34; Arts*
totle on, 35 f ; Homeric problems,
35 C 147.337; Homer's theory of
poetry, 67 ; his orators, 76
The Alexandrian age; Zenodotus,
119, 134; Rhianus, iso, 133;
Ptol. Philopator, 134; Aristo-
phanes of Byzantium, isd, 134;
Aristarchus, i3of, 1^4; Crates,
I54f; Didymus, 139!; Aristoni-
cus, 141
The Roman age; Lucretius, 368;
Virgil, 370; Dion. Hal. 375;
'Longinus*, 383 f; Dion Chnrs.,
390, 393 f; Plutarch, 399; Por-
phyry, 337 ; J«l»n. 35* J Syncsius,
361 f
The Middle Ages; Tzetzes, 400;
EuMalhius, 410 f; |x>pulAr Gk«
version of Iliad, 433; the Latin
Homer, 485, 633 f ; Roger Bacon,
573 f ; Dante, 593
MSS, 34, 1 19, ISO, 133 f, 140*374*449
Honorius of Autun, 594, 609, 634,
638; (s)pope Honorius III, 477, f 45
Horace, his Greek models, 370; lite-
rary criticism in, 183; early study
of, 184; his eurioia feUcUas, 191;
imitations or reminiscences of, 313,
331, 341; quotations from, 348,485,
510, 555, 501, 6r3; mediaeval MSS
of, 184 f, 488, 604, 613, 614
Hosius of Cordova, 445
Hoveden, Roger of, 534
Hrabanus, see Rabanm
Hroswitha, 486 f» 607 f
Hucbald, 481
Hugo and Leo, 535; (3) Huso of St
Victor, 534, 644 n. 3; (3) Hugo of
Trimberg, 608 n. 3, 6ia, 633
Hugutio, 535, 573, 593, 640
Hungarians, incursions of, 483 f, 493
Hyginus, 159; 187
Hymns, Greek, 303, 384; Latin, 437,
463, 500, 530
Hypatia, 107, 357, 360, 363 f, 403
Hypereides, 384 f
lamblichus, 344, 357, 3^4
Iconoclastic decrees, 383, 446 f
Ignatius, (1) St, his Epistles, 555;
(3) patriarch, 308; (3) grammarian,
393
Ilium, 154, 391 ; Julian at, 353
Immed of Paderbom, 498
Ina (Ine), 450
ffuidis in Seyllam eic,^ 531
Innocent III, 416
' instance ', 643
Intigntntnia^ 447 n. i
Ion, (i) of Ephesos, 30; (3) of Chios,
«85. 383
lordanes, 3^6, 433
Ireland, early knowledge of Greek in,
438, 448 (G. T. Stokes in Proc.
Royal Irish Acad,^ Feb. 189s, 179-
303) ; state of learning in, m n. 4,
458, 479; Giraldus on, 533 f
Irish protestors, generosity of, 453;
Irisn monks on the Continent, 439 f,
443, 4^8 f, 4^3* 484; Irish MSS at
St Gallen, 479
Imerios, 583
Isaeui, Dion. Hal. on, 376 f
Isidore (St), (1) of Pelusinm, 363;
(3) of Seville, 444 f; «54>393t458.
M f, 467 n. I, 479» 597t 009, 6i4f
638
Iflocratcfl on Greek poets, 33 f ; bit
t^e, 78; ArittoCle 00, 81; IXofi.
662
INDEX.
Hal. OD, 176 f; 384; later influence
, of, 353. 38?. 393
Ittrus of Paphoi, 133, 304
Italui, John, 403, 501
Italy (mediaeval), Greek in, 446-B;
c. XI, 500 f; c. XII, 555 f; c. xiii.
Sp n. 3; c. XIV, 5831, 587; Latin
Verse in, 534 (cp. Gaspary, Ital.LU,
i 1-49) ; survival of literary studies
in, 409; causes of the Renaissance
in. 587
Ivo of Chartres, (i) bp, 519; (1)
teacher, 515
Jackson, H., quoted, 95, 56s
Jacob of Edessa, 386, 404
Jacobus, (i) Clericus de Venetia, 507,
535 ; («) de Benedictis, 530 {Jac<h
pOK$ ifa Todi, 588)
James, M. R., 502 n. i, 545 n. 3, etc
Jandun (in Ardennes), Jean de, 581
J ebb, Sir Richard, aof, 16, 48 n., 55 n.,
76, no, 153, 154 n.
Jerome, St, a i9-«n ; 34a, 574, 594, 597
Jews ; their services to learning, 540,
54^1 545> 5^i tl^cir study of Aris-
totle and of Neo-Platonism, 54s
Joannes, (i) Lydus, 380; (1) Mauro-
P^> 404; (3) Hispalensis, 540 n.;
(4) ben David, 539; {%)iK^Garlandia
Joannes Scotus (Erigena), 'John the
Scot', 473 f; 215 n. 3, 140, 369,
505. 548, ,s86, 613
{ohannitius (lionein Ibn Ishak), 386
ohn, (i) the Geometer, 398; (3) the
Grammarian, 385 ; (3) the Saracen,
530, 534. See also Damascus^
Doxopatres (or Siceliotes)^ Italus^
Scyiitus; and Basingstoke^ Gerona,
KochelU^ Vandiins
fohn of Salisbury,5 1 7 etc. ; set Salisbury
[ohnson,DrSamuel,and Macrobius,337
[onson, Ben, 318, 350
[oseph, (1) of Sicily, 384; (a) of Exe-
ter, 516, 618
[osephus, 289
[ourdain, A. and C, 507 n.
fowelt, quoted, 70, 93, 94
[uba II, 187, 300
[ulian, (1) *the Apostate', 350-3; 205,
341, 374, 408; (2) bpof Toledo, 445
Julius Africanuis, 342, 390; (2) Koma-
nus, 201; (3) Kufinianus, 216; (4)
Victor, 216
Justin, 272, 635
Justinian, 260, 368, 375, 447, 583
Justinus of Lippstadt, 533
Juvenal, 196; in MA, 619 f; 485 ft
5i5n. 9,555 f
Juvencui, 216, 934
Kilwardby, abp, 561, 641
Kosbein, Henry, 564; 563 n. 6
Lactantius, 205, 603, 609
Lacydes, 149
iaicMS, Balbi on, 640 n. 2
Lambert of Hersfeld, 498* 624, 634
(Wattenbach, G. Q. & 97 f) ; {«)
author of Floridum^ 638
Lamprodes, 43
Lanfranc, 497, 502 f, 508
Langres, 604
Language, origin of, 92 f, 98
Laon, 480, 64O n.
Lascaris, Constantine, 382, 573
Latin literature etc., conspectus o(
c, 800-1 B.c, 166; 1-SOO A.D..
186; 800-000 A.I)., 204; 000-1000
A.D., 430; 1000-lSOO A.O., 496;
iaoo-1400 A.D. 538. The Latin
Classics, their survival in the
Middle Ages, 597-637 ; the Claa-
sics in Aldhelm, 451 \ Bede, 45s ;
Alcuin, 459; Theodulfui, 46s;
Einhard, 464; Walafrid Stimbo,
467; Ermenrich, 468; Servatus
Lupus, 469 f; Joannes Scotus, 476;
Enc and Remi, 478; Ratherius,
484; Gerbert, 4891; Luitpimnd,
491 ; iElfric, 492; Leo Marsicsnos
and Alfanus, 500; Bernard of
Chartres, 520; Bernard Silvester.
515; John of Salisbury, 510 f;
Peter of Blois, 522 ; Giraldus, 523 ;
de G
Neckam, 526; Joannes
landia, 528; Gautier and Alain de
risle, 530 f; Eberhard,'532; Gun-
t*»"» 533 J Grosseteste, 3*5; Vin-
cent of Beauvais, 5571; Roger
Bacon, 574 f; Richard of Buiy,
580; Mussato, 589; Dante, 591-3
Dictionaries; if^lfric, 493; PSpias*
501, 639; Balbi, 584, 640; Htt*
initio, 535, 572, 593, 640 ; Joannes
de Garland ia, 528. Grammare,
640-2; Donatus, 184; Prisciani
258 f; ylillfric, 493, 495; Caekar
the Lombard, 584. Latin Prose
in MA, 451 ; c. XII-XIII, 5^1-4;
560; 642 ; Latin verse, c. xi, 498;
c. XII-XIII, 5n-33t ^475 Pro-
nunciation of Latin, 434 f, 458,491
Laurus Quirinus, 427
INDEX.
663
III, the <Ismarian', 383, 387,306; 644, 647 ( 634
, the Armenian, 383, 38c ; VI, Lothair I, emp. (d. 855), 418, 46^,
le Wise, 388, 396; popes Leo II, 46^ ; II, king of Lorraine (d. 869),
y6 ; and fV, 447 460
Learning, seats of, in the Alexandrian
3 re, 105 f, 148 f, 159-164. See
so Sckoo/s
Leo
V
the
446 ; and IV, 447
Leo, (f) the Byzantine, 388; (s) Dia
conus, 398; (3) Marsicanos (Osti-
enxis), 500; (4) the mathematician.
386; (5) the philosopher, 394; (6)
of Naples, 4 1 5
Leon Magentinns, 44 1
Leontius of Byzantium, 383
Letters of the Greek alphabet, 87,
571; classified, 89, 375
Letter-writing, art of, 583 n. 3, 648
Levi ben Gerson, 541
Lexicographers, Greek, 315-111 370 f,
39»» 399» 419
Lexicons, Greek, 404-6; Latin, 188,
108, 639 f; 501, «i7f, 535. 584
Libanius, 347 f, 351 (ea. Forster, 1903-)
Libraries, at Athens etc, 86, 301 1 413;
Alexandria, ro7f, 110-4,409; rer-
gamon, i49f; Anlioch, 163 ; Rome,
157 f» "87, 108. 110, «3't ^38. U9f
*73»433; in Gaul, 117,131; Cassio-
dorus, 151 ; Pamphilun, ^41 ; Julian,
353; Synesius, 358; Isidore, 443 f;
Byzantine etc, 387, 411, 416; me-
diaeval, 606-37 ptusimi Bobbio,
440 f; St Gallen, 441, 479. 590;
Ligug^, ^45; York, 40; Fuldfa,
460; Hildesheim, 401 ; Nonantula,
483: Sainte Chapefle, Paris, 557;
St Albans, «8o, Ooi; Verona, 603;
Richard of Bury's, 605
Li^e, 448, 485, 604, 635
Limoges, abbey of St Martial at, 611,
610, 617
Literary Criticism, see Criiuism
litter ator, -tus^ 6, 8
Livy, Pohrbtas and, 171; recension of,
lie; fatsimiU from Mf tA^ S36; in
MA, 633 f ; 433, 498, 590
Lobon of Argon, 333
Lo^c, study of, 508, 511, 644; criti-
cised, 517 f, C16, 535; logic and
grammar, 639, 649; teat-books by
Tudlat, 40iU 1(78, Petms Hispairat,
578, and Bondan, 581
LoltiafMM, 318
I»mhafdft, 501 f, 584f 649 f
\^mAfm\ Briti«fa Mnscom, coins, let,
i4t. 164; Mtf, 570 n. 1-5, 576 a. !•
nmA ft^-%t pmsHm
Longinos, Canius, {31 f
'Longintis' On tki SMimi. i8s-6
Lortcb, MM from, 461, 480t 6031 6so,
614,617(634
Louis I, the Pioui (Z# Dib&mmmirt).
461, 465, 474; II, the Stammerer
{Li iRtfw), 481 ; IX (Saini)j 557
Louvatn, abbey of Pare near, 631
Lovato, 588
Locan, in MA, 617 f; 515, 530, 533,
589 ,
Lucca, 619 n. 5
Lucian, 307 f ; 310, 394, 491
Lucilius, tjrr, 164
Lucretius, 168, 168; in MA, 608 f;
443i 468, 515 n. 1, 531 n. 10, 601
Luctatius Placidus, 135
Ludolf of Luchow, 64 1
Luitprand, (1) king of the Lombards,
938 ; (3) bp of Cremona, 491, 614
n. I
Lycophron, 116, 111, 409
Lycnrgiis, (1) Spartan legislator, 10;
(1) Attic orator, 57
Lvons (1174)* council of, 563
* Lyric', 43 ( fyruus, 165 n. 1 ; Greek
lyric poetry, divisions of, 47 ;
* canon' of. 130; early study of,
41-50 ; in Himeritts, 34]
Lysias, Dion. Hal. on, 976 ly Caedlltts
on, 189, 484
Mabillon, 441, 598 etc
Macaritts of Fleory, 534
Macanlay and Ofaoan, 587 n. 7
Macharios (Ricbod of Trier), 459
MacroMtts, 994-7, 470, 477* 6ie
Maha0y, J. P., 85 n. «, 106 f, 117 f,
>33f n^ n. 3, 193 n., $96 etc
Mai, Cardhia], 397, 49s n. 4,61011. |,
646 n. 1
Maimonides, 541
Malalaa, 381
Mahnesbvry, 450, 476; WidiMi ei^
45 ». 453. 474. 5«4. «^» 613, 6|6
Manfred, 546 n. 4t 547
Maailiiia, 449, 611 u. $
Maottms, 606 •« 4« 610, 614 m. f , 6^
n. 4
MmumetiptMt/iusimUts from, 87, i •5*
se3« tifi, a6o. |96, ||i, $^ 40,
495* t^h 5>^> 566: lelcresKca to,
J9S, 4t7« 4<7« 47« ^.49^ 541* 559*
664
INDEX.
Libraries, Camdri^gt, Oxford^ LoH'
don etc., and names of ancient
authort and mediaeval monasteries
Map (Mapes), Walter, 535, 619, 639
Mara, William de, 571 n. 3
Marbod, 519, 609
Marcellinus, 373
Marchesini of Reggio, 640
Marculf, 494 n. 1
Marius Mercator, 304
Marsh, Adam, 550, 567
Martial, 196, 316, 619
Martianus Capella, ia8 f; 6, 353,
474-6. 478 f. 485, 488. 499, 531,
535. 646 n. , V .
Martm,(i) of Bracara, 435 ; (a) Martm
1.446
Matthew of Venddme, 514, 530, 647
Maur5pus, Joannes, 404; 174 n. 4
Maurus, 957, 465 ; St Maur-sur-Loire,
^57 * (^) A^P of Ravenna, 446
Mavortius, 185, 299, 614
Maximianus, 435
Maximus, (i) Tyrius, 306; (1) Con-
fessor, 381
Mayor, J. E. B., 134, 517 f
Media wta in niorte sumus, 480
Mcinwerk, 498
Meleager, 398
' Melic ', poets, early study of, 43-7
Menander, 105, 130, 398, 40a ; {2)
Rhet., 331 ; (3) Protector, 380
Merton, Walter de, 556
Merula, 440
Methodius, 384
Metrodorus, 30
Metz, 446, 485, 602
Meung, 514 n. 3 ; Jean de, 53a
Michael, (i) Attaliates, 407 ; {2) of
Ephcsus, 403 ; (3) Italicus, 4' 4 5 (4)
* Modista* of Marbais, 640 f, 64a ;
(5) 'the Stammerer*, 474; (7) Scot,
544-6
Michel, Mont-St., 625
Middle Ages in the West, 42g-6io ;
dates, 600-1000 A.D., 430; 1000-
1200 A.D., 496 ; 1200-liOO A.D., 538
Milan, Ambrosian library at, 44 1 , 607,
630 f
Millenary year, 493 ; Alfred's, 48a
Milton, 60 f, 369, 53a
Mimnermus, 48
Minucianus, 331
Modena, 479
modtnius, 355
Modestus, 187
Modista*, 641 f
Moerbeke, William of, 563-6
Moeris, 318
Moissac, 604 f, 639
Montaigne, 165, 2^ f
Monte Cassino, 450 f, 960, 500. 539,
560, 602-4, 647-9, 636
Montpellier, 606; iiss, 619, 617, 610
Morlal (Morlev), Daniel de, 543
Moschopulus (Moff^^rovXer), 419
Moschus, 115
Munro, 467, 2J2
Muratori, 4401, 54411. 3, 53511. 10 etc.
Murbach, 609 f, 609
Musaeum; at Alexandria, 105; An-
tioch, 163 ; scripionwn at Tour%
459. 466
Musaeus, 357
Mussato, 588 f
Naevius, 169, 171, 178
Namatianus, 603 n. 4
' Naso ' (Muadwin, bp of Autun), 586,
615
Neanlhes, 149
Neckam, Alexander, 596 f, 536, 648
Nemesianus, 604
Neo-Platonism and Neo-Platonista
(precursors, 306), 334 f, 357-69,
4"4. 505. 541 f
Neoptolemus of Parion, 193, 178, 971
Nepos, Cornelius, 969, 639
Newburgh, William of, 594
Nicaeus, 620
Nicander, 116, 159, 970 f
Nicanor, 315
Nicephorus I, emp. , 388 ; (9) patruunchv
385; (3) monk and philotopher,
3<>3 ; (4) Basilakes, 414; (5) Brjren*
nius, 407, 409 ; (6) Chumnus, 418 f;
(7) Gregoras, 490-9
Nicholas, (i) secretary of Bernard of
Clairvaux, 595, (k>o; (9) of St
Albans, 553 f
Nicolas d'Autrecour, 565
Nicolaus, (i) of Methone, 414; (9)
Damascenus, 571 ; (3) de Biberap
699 n. 6 ; (4) de Orbellis, 644 n. i
Nicomachi, recension of Livy by die,
2is{,/us, 936, 634
Nicomachus Flavianus, Virius, 591 f
Nigidius Figulus, 181
Nisi bis. School of, 949, 386
Nominalism, 939, 460, 506 ; Nomi-
nalists, Roscellinos, 508 ; William
of Ockham, 578 ; Buridan, 581
Nonantola, 483
Nonius Marcellus, 908
INDEX.
665
Nonnui, 356
Normans in France, 480 f, 483; in
Eneland, 498 ; at Thessalonica, 411;
in S. Italy, 447
Notker of St Gallen, (i) the Sum-
merer, Bai^/us, 479 f, 6i9 ; (a)
-^^«^. 499. 508
Novalesa, 603
Numenius, 339, 334 f
Ockham (Occam), William of, 578 ; ^07
Oflo (St), (i) abbot of Cluni, 485 ;
{2) abp of Canterbury, 450, 486
Olympiodonis, the elder, 365 ; the
younger, 365, 367 f
Omieron and Omega, 00
Omons, Imago Mundt of, 638
Onomacritus, ii
Onomatopoeia, 94, 146
Opilius, Aurelius, 173
Ordericus Vitalis, 543
cnchafcum, 529, 57a
Origen. 334, 594
Orion, 318, 370 n. 5
Orleans, \6i, 604 ; school of, 647-50
Orosius, 1 1 3 f, 307, 364, 484
Orthography, 171. 351, ^54, 458
Oris, 318, 370 n. 5
Osbemi, Glossarium, 607, 618
Osnabritck, capitular for foundation
of school at, 461 (spurious, Watten-
bach, G, Q, i* 150, i)
Oswald (St), abp of York, 494, 617
Osvmandyas, 117
Otho I, 484, 487, 491 ; II, 484, 491 ;
III, 24a, 484, 490-1
Otho of Lomello, 484 n. 1 (Chron*
Navalic. in Pertz, Mon, vii 106)
Otto of Freising, 513, 535
Ouen, St, 445
Ovid, 371 ; 469 ; in MA, 614-7 ; 417,
477 n. I, 500, 555t57S«;B9f
Oxford (1167), 606; Dommicans at,
551 ; Franciscans at, 556; early
study of Aristotle, 570, 57* ; re-
citations by Giraldus, 533 ; Michael
Scot (?), 546 ; Grosseteste, 551 f, 556,
567; Roger Bacon, 567 f, 573;
Duns Scotus, 576 f; Greek and
Hebrew professorships, 585 ; MSS,
376, 395 f. 556. 570 n. «, 57*,
608, 616. 631 ; Merton Coll., 556 ;
Oriel, 598 ; dates of other early
Colleges, 538
Pachvmeres, 443
Pacincus, 603
Pacuvius, 169 f, 199
Paderbom, toiool of, 498
Padua, univ., 606 ; 584, 588
Palaeologi, scholars under the, 416 f
Palaeologus, Manuel, 433
Palaemon, Q. Reranuus, 188
Palamas, Gregorius, 443
Palermo, 544 f, 565
Palimpaetts, 441, 599, ^1^ f
Pallaaas, 363
Pamphilus and Pamphila, 988
Panaetius, 158, 163, 364, %^
Panathenmea, 91, 169
Pandects, 583
Pantaenus, 393
Papias, 501, 579, 639
pfi^yri, 06, 85 f, 103, 108, III, 133 f
Papyrianus, 959
Parchment, 11 1, 556
Parian Marble, the, 1 16
Paris, 'the paradise of the world',
605 ; Julian at, 351 ; Norman siege
of, 481 ; schools of, 485, 606, 644;
uniTenity of (paradisut delUiarum,
5«7)f 5«8, 546, 55if 583. 644;
study of Aristotle at, 549 f, 585 ;
Council of (19 10), 549 ; Dominicans
and Franciscans, 551 ; Greek col-
lege of Philip Augustus, 416 ; Notre-
Dame, 551, 696, 631 ; Rtu de
Matire Albert, 558 ; Rue d$ Fouarrt,
564; Sainte Chapelle, 557; St
Germain-des-Pr^, 957, 476, 481,
630; Sorbonne, j8i, 585, 005, 695,
648; Paris in relation to QMurtres,
648, and Orleans, 649
Paris, Matthew, 413, 594, 553 f
Partheniua, 970 f
Parts of speech, 90, 97, 131, 143,
148, 974, 313, 650
Pascal I, 447
Paschasius Radbertut, 473, 589, 693
Patrick, St, 438
Paul I, 447, 474
Paul (St), Cannthian abbey of, 699
Paulinus, 913, 934
Paulus Diaconus, 456 , 188, 60^, 61 9,
618 (Wattenbach, (7. Q, i* 163-71)
Paulus Silentiarius, 380
Pausanias, 304 ; (9) the Attidst, 316
Pavia, 943 n. 3, 440 ; school at, 448,
463. 479
Pediasimus, 491
Peisistratns and Homer, 90 f, 159
Pelagius, 364
Pella, 169
Pepin-le-Bref, 447, 474
3
666
INDEX.
Pepys MS of Bernard Silvester, 5 16 n.
feriant qui nostra ttc,^ 119
Pergamon and its rulers (dates, 104),
148-53 ; the Library, 149-51 ; 1131
187, aoo; WraMf, 156; school of,
161 ; Persamon and Alexandria,
1 1 1 , 1 59-Oa ; Pergamon and Rome,
I5«. 157 fi "87» "o
Pericles, 76
P^ronne, 441 n.
Persius, 191, a 16, 486, 6a i
Peter of Blois, 541, 561, 647; (1) of
Pisa, 456 ; (3) Peter Lombard, 384,
^6o{LunibarduSt 535); (4) Peter the
Venerable, 511, 530, 540 n., 596
Peterborough, plundering of, 498
Petrarch, 334, 359, 580, 587, 608,
6a6, 650
Petronius, 10 1, 6^7
Petrus (i) (de) Riga, 530; (1) Eiias,
M7 n. 3; Helias, 525, 577, 640 f;
(3) Hispanus, 403 n. 5, 578; (4)
De Vineis, 546 n. 1
Phaedrus, 484, 611
Phalaris, 393
Pheidias, 170, 193
Philargyrius, 335
Philemon, (1) lo^^ (i) gram., 113
Philes, Manuel, 421
Philetas of Cos, 105, 118
Philippus of Thessalonica, 161, 398
Philo Judaeus, 389, 315
Philochorus, 169
* philologer *, ' philologist ', ' philo-
logy*, a; philologus, 5, II, i8a,
philolo^a^ 5i 1 1 ; modem philology,
II f
Philon of tiyblus, Herennius, 304; 141
Philopoiius, 1 14, 367, 360
Philostratus I, 337 ; 11, III, 319
Philoxenus of Alexandria, 334 n. i;
390
Phocylides, 49
Phoeoammon, 311
Photius, 388 f; Bibliotheca, 389;
literary criticism in, 390 f ; Letters^
39a ; Lexicons^ 391 f, 404 f
Phrantzes, \i%
Phrynichus, (i) dramatist, 53; (2)
Atticist, 317
Phrynis, 44
Pierre (1) de Chantre, 534; (3) la
Casa, 565
Pietro d' Al)ano (of Padua), 584
Pindar, 33, 45-47; i«7. 136; 385;
410, 419-31 ; (3) * Pindarus The-
banus ',633
Pisa, A56, 535, 583, 606 ; S. Cateiina,
pi. lacing 560
Pisander, cydic poet, 970
Pisides, Georgius, 380
Pitt, 483 n.
Planudes, 417 f • 444
Plataea, 39JB, 438
Plato, on Homer, 30 f, Solon, 48 f«
Antimachus, 3^; on the slndy
(40 0 And crTtidsm of poetrj.
68 f; on the drama, 61 f, on
rhetoric, 79, on compositions in
{>rose, 84; on classification of
etters, 89, and words, 90 f, and
on the origin of language, 99 f ;
? notations from Homer, »,
indar, 45, Tbeognis, 49, Arehi-
lochus, 50, Aesoiylus, 58, and
Euripides, 59; early MSS, 85 s
division of his dialogues into *tii*
logics', 138 ; Crai, 99 f, 4049
Gorg, 79 ; /mi, 30, 68 ; Fkatdm
(MS), 85, 87, 108 ; PitMdhtfj,79;
Ztfwx, 41, 84 ; Fr9iag, 41 ; Ri^^
31, 69 ; Timoiust 48
In Cicero, 365 f; Dion. Hal. ^j$^
377; * Longinus', .383 f; Dion
Chrys., 994; Plutarch, 495 f;
Aristides, 305 f ; MaximusTVniis,
306 f; Lucian, 309; Apuieitta,
310 ; Galen, 333 ; Clemens Alex.,
334; Eusebius, 343; Spmesioa,
359, 363; lexicon of Timaeus,
334 ; Neo-Platonisu, 334-7 * 35of.
357t 36«f 364-9 J Boethius, t4i ;
Commentators on, 331 f, 366-8;
G^JT* 359* 368, J'arm, 366^
J'Am*/o 368, J'A4Utirus^6i^ Pkih-
biu 368, Jiep* 350, %66t '/Umamst
24 1. 3««i 357. z66t
Mediaeval study of (i) in the East.
Oriental versions of, 385 ; Bye
study of, 403 ; Photius, 389, 393 ;
Arethas, 395; Psellus, 40 1 f, 418,
433 f ; fttcnmile from Bodleian
MS, 376, 395 ; (3) in the West,
5071 51 (i 557* Luitprand, 491 ;
Abelard, 509 ; Benuud of Char*
tres and William of Conches,
511; Theodoric of Chartres, 513,
and Bernard Silvester of Tours,
515; John of Salisbury, 510;
Alain de I'Isle, 533 ; William of
Auvergne, 553 ; Roger Bacon,
574, 583 ; inmience of the theory
of 'ideas', 505, 510, 519, 5*1,
533 ; transl. of Memo 508 ; PJUudm
INDEX.
667
508,553,574; TTmorMx (JoMines
Scotus, 474), Chmlcidius (cent.
IV) 486, 489. 507, 509-11, 513,
„, 5»5. Spf 55?. 574. 59«
Plautui, 169; Fahthd Varrpmanai^
174 n.; in MA, 607; 484, 541,610;
Mss 607 ; 44 1
Pliny, (1) the elder, 176, 193; In
MA, 0^8 ; 604, 605; (3) the younfrer,
1^5 ; in MA, 639
Plotinus, 335
Plotius Gallus, 1 73
Plutarch, 395-300; quoted, 33, 59;
(3) PluUrchus, the Neo-Platonist,
3<>4
* Poeta Saxo*, 480
Poetry, criticism of, (Athenian) 67-75 ;
(Roman) 177 f, 183 f, 191; Dion.
Hal. 375 f; 'Longinus', 383 f; see
also Criticism ^ literary. Poetry and
Sculpture, 393
Poets, mediaeval prejudice against
classical, 533, 537, 594-6 ; lists of,
633 ; 538 n. 7, 533 f
Pocgio (1416), 193, 443, 618, 631 f,
Poitiers, William of, 503 (i030— c.
1089)
Polemon, (i) of Athens, 164; (3) of
Ilium, 153, 160-3, 304
Pollio on Sallust and Cicero, 180;
(3) Valeriuj^ Pollio, 317
Pollux, 330 ; 303, 308
Polybius, 117, 160, 170, 364, 373;
Byz. excerpts from, 397, 436
Pompeius (Maurus), commitUum artis
Donaii, 335, 463
Pompeius Trogus, 373, 574, 637
Pompilius Androniciis, 173
Pomponius, (i) Marcellus, 187; (3)
Mela, 330
PompoM, 603
Pope, 311 n. I, 385
Porcios Licinns, 173
Porphjrrio, I 8a, 300
Porphyry, 33of; his IfUrodMcti^n le
tfu CaUgoriis^ 336, expounded by
Ammonitts, 367, and David the
Armenian {/tunmiU^ 338), 365 ;
traml. by Vtctonnus, 339; traasL
ami expownded by Botfthtot, 339,
^}.^ 50.^-7; Hrk on, 478; Jotei
rA V^nrti^es, 484 ; Gerbert, 490 ;
AKelttfd. 509 f; 538 n. 9; H^merU
Qntstimtty .16, 337 ; the Seven Arts
(Tzetar^*), 40<)
P'M^vMi, 3ii>f, 3915
Poteidonius, 163 f, 165 f, 369, 373
prutUrtropier^ 303
Praxipnanes, 7, too
Priscian, 358 f; Ms authorities, 314;
in MA, (Alcuin) 458, (Rabanus
Maurus) 46^; 468, 479, 485, 574 f^t
638, 640 f, 649 ; quoted, 6a3 ;
'Grammar and Priscian', outside
Chartres cathedral, 645
Probus, 184, 193-4, 199
Proclus, (li Neo-Platonist, )6«-7 ;
transl. of his *Theoloffica1 Ele*
ments', 563, /k/. 566; (3) author
of Chrtstomaiky^ 371 f
Procopius, (1) rhetorician, of Gasa,
374, 414 ; (3) historian, of Caciarea,
37?
Prodicus, 78
Frpmptorium Parvulorum^ 640 n. 3
Prose, Athenian study of, 76 f, 83 f ;
place of proie in Athenian edu-
cation, 84
Protagoras, 37, 78, 91
Prudentius, 488; (3) bp of Troycs,
475
Priim, 470, 6o3 ; Regino of, 480, 484
Psellus, 401 f; 381, 578
Ptolemies, rulers of Egypt ; dates of
accession, 104; I« 11, IIIi 159;
I (Soter)^ 101, 105, 118, (portrait)
143; II {Philadilfiiut\ 101, 105-8.
HI, 115, 118, (portrait) 143; III
or IX (Eutrgtta I or II), 58, I f 1 ;
IV (PkUopaUf), 134; V {fifi-
phana)^ 111; IX (BuirgtUi II I.e.
Phys€0n), 135, 160
Ptolemy, (1) of Atcalon, 389; (3)
Chennus, 304; (3) ClaudhM,^4;
his Almagest^ 540, 543 f ; hit /Km/*
tphert^ 513
punctuation, 97, 135 f, 315, 459
Pydna, 157, 169 f
Pythagoras, 39, 91, 593
QMadrhrium, 643
^uaiifttu for «/, 643
Qurrt/ms, 531
ffcf n€S€ii pmrUt tU,^ 643
Qufntiltaa,ananalogist« lyysgfmiDiiMf
and literary crHiosm in, 19^; 303 ;
^S9« ^78 : on tm and enmiim, 64% % in
Joim MA, 6jof s Scrvsias Lspva. 470;
490; Bernard of CWrtrct, 519; foicimc
de Ronca, 507; mm (fuHmi^
J03, 443, 6ior
668
INDEX.
Rabanus (or HrabaDus) Maurus, 465-7;
UOf «53i «59» 469, 609, 6«i, 6«3,
635 (cp. Hauck, Kirchengeschicktet
"555 0
Radegunde (St), 436
RaduTfus Tortarius, 539
Ragevinus, 633
Ramsey abbey, ^91
Rathenus, 484, 007, 609, 621, 610
Raymund of Toledo, 540; (a) Kay-
mundus Lullius, 576
Realism aod Nominalism, 139, 506,
508 f; extreme Realists, Joannes
Scotus, 477; Anselm, 508; William
of Champeaux, 509 ; moderate (or
Aristotelian) Realists, Alexander of
Hales, 551, $57, Thomas Aquinas,
561, All)ertus Magnus, 558
Recensions of Latin Mss, 115 f, 130,
935, 158, 607, 617, 61(^11,630, 634 f
Recurrent verses, 131
Rcgensburg, 467
Re^rino, 4^, 48^^
Reichenau, 467 f ; 464, 480 n. 7, 486,
499, 603 ; MSS 617, 639
Remi(gius) of Auxerre, 478 ; 485, 630
Renaissance, precursors of the, 418 I,
414, 46^, 531, 588-91; causes of
the Italian, 587 ; a gradual process,
587 ; authors appreciated in, Cicero,
588; Virgil, 610; Lucian, 310;
Litters of Symmachus (114) and
St Jerome, 111
Resbacus, 441
Revivals of learning, early, 586, 587 n.
Rhapsodes, 19 f, 30 f, loi
Rheims, 480, 485, 489, 601, 614; St
Thierry near, 6a8
Rhetoric, rise of, 76 f ; literary criti-
cism a part of, 83
Rhianus, 120, 133
Rhodes, 163 f
Rich, Edmund (St Edmund of Abing-
don), abp of Canterbury, 553, 567,
570
Richard of Bury, 580, 605, 610
Richard, (1) Ttveque, 517 n., 519 f;
(3)ofSl Victor, 534
Richer, 489 f, 633
Rienzi, 587
Riquier, St, 480
Robertus Retinensis, 540 n.
Rochelle, John of, 553
Rodolfus Glaber, 494 n. 3 ; 595
Rodolphus of Bruges, 513, 540 n.
Roman age, dates in (1) Latin lite-
rature etc., 166, 186, 304; (3) Gk.
literature etc., 960, 340; end o(
360, 375, 433; Rommn hutoriuis
who wrote in Gk., 169, 964 ; Gk.
inBuence in Roman literature ( 167 1)
and literarv criticism, 177; Roman
study of Gk., 363-73
Romanus (C. Julius), aoi ; (9) Bjs.
poet, 384
Rome, Gk. influence in, 167 ft 165-
73 ; libraries in, see LibrarUs %
monasteries for Gk. monks in, 446 f;
Gk. at St Paul's and St Peter's,
500 f; ruins of, 599, 587; Vertui
Romae^ 477 n. 1
Roacellinus, 508 f, 578
Rosetta Stone, 117
Rosla, Heinrich, 593
Rouen, (Juvenal) 019; cathednl of,
646 n.
Rudolf, AHfta/s, 636
Rufinianus, 316
Rusticus, his letter to Eucherius, 917
Rutilius Lupus, 189
Sabas, convent of St, 384
Sabbionetta, Gherardo di, 543
Saevius Nicanor, 17 j
Saintsbury, G., 55 f, 183, 196, aSo,
«86, 397. 311 n. 7,373
Salisbury, John of, 517 f; his clawiol
learning, 531 f; facsimile from
Beckett copy of his Afit. etc 516 ;
507> 51 >i 513* 536f 561* S^tt 58^ n«>
010, 617, 619 f, 631, 639, 64^ 646
Sallust, 369; in MA, 633; 486, 4^,
501. 590. 636 n. 4
Salmasius, 397
Salomo III, of St Gallen, 479
Salvian, 308
Sappho, 44, 370, 376, 383, 307 ; the
'greater Sapphic' metre, 4i3 n. i
Saracen, John the, 530, 534
Scaliger, the elder, 343
* Scholar' and 'Schohirship', if;
Scholarship and PhilologjTi « f ;
subdivisions of Classical Scholftr-
ship, 14
Scholastic Problem, the, 939 f, 505 f ;
Scholasticism, authorities on, 504 n;
doctores scAo/astici, 504
ScAoiMt on Homer, 140; i3o; Henod*
409, 430 ; Pindar, 419, 431 ; Aetch,
Soph. Eur., 430; Aiistoph. 3«r,
409, 430; Dem. 348, 350; Lyoo-
phron, 409 • Alexandrian Poets,
142 f; Terence, 318, 490; Cicero,
191, 441 ; Virgil, 184,335; Hocaoe.
INDEX.
669
100; Persios, 490; Juvenal, 390,
630
Schoob of Alexandria, 105 f, 3431
334 f. 354 f» 357 f» 3^8 ; Pergamon,
ij8f; Athens, 343, 345. 347, 35".
364-8; Antioch, 344, 347; other
Schools, 374, 386 ; Sdiools in Gaul,
aoo- 1 3, 433 ; monastic and cathedral
Schools, 550; see also under the
several monasteries and cathedral
cities
' Science *, study of Greek and, com-
bined by Gunzo, 486, and Roger
Bacon, 575
Scot, Michael, 544-6, 569, 571
Scott, Sir Walter, 4, 447, 546
Scotus, Duns, 576 f, 644
Scotus (Erigena), Joannes, 473 f; 445
n. 3. «40, 369. 505' 548, 5*^^. ^«3
Scriptorium^ 599 H 459i 461, 466
Scylitzes, John, 407
Secundus, 534
Sedulius, (i) author of Carmen Pat"
chale^ 135 ; (1) Irish monk, at
Li^ge, 448, 014, 643, 646, 648,
635
Segueriana^ Lixita^ 406
Seleucids, 163
Seleucus of Alexandria, 489
Selling, William Tilley of, 450
Seneca, (i) the elder, 189; in MA,
618; (4) the younger, 9, 190; in
MA, 617 ; 518 n. 7, 555, 569, 574 f,
588, 591 f, 644 ; (3) Pseudo-Seneca,
435» 59«
Sereshel, Alfred, 536, 547, 560
Sergius, (i) of Kesaina, 386; (4)
patriarch of Constantioople, 381 ;
(«) bp of Naples, 486
SerTo Grammaticns, 544
5>ervatus Lupus, 469 f ; 459, 478, 635
Servtuft, 418, 445-7, 468, 480, 6o|;
(4) Scrvitts Qodiot, 173
Sextus Kmpirictts, 177, 343
Sexttts Pompeitts, mrnmarian, 466
Shirwood, J7f, 578
Siceliotes, folui, 407
Stdooiof, Apontnans, 406, sjo-j
Siger 6i BralMiit, 564
Swoftttts, ^4
Siittts Italicait, 644
Stlrecter 11 (G«rbert f^.). 444, ^f
Simon, ai>bo( fA St Albant, 600 1
Stmofiidef of Ceot, 44 U ^"fi* ^f
Simplicttts, j68, ffil
itmerui, li«f«tio <Ml« %^ ■• f
Sion, on the upper Rhone, 499
Socrates, 54, 61, 68, 84, 94
Solinus, 40I, 430
Solon, 19, 44; his poems, 48 f, 306
Sopater of Apamea, 374
Sophocles, 44, 57-91 61, 63, 148,
t3>* 164, 169, 476, 484f, 361 f, 406,
558; PhUo€UUt^ 494; select plays,
304 ; bust, 304
Sophonias, 441
Sophron, 116
Spain, Greek in, 444 ; study of
Aristotle among the Arabs, 539-4 ii
and Jews in, 544
Spara{^Servd)dirsum^ 485 (Perts,
Men, iv 6^)
Speier (Livv), 634; Walther of, 488
Staberius Efros, 1 73
Statilius Maximus, 401
Sutius, 196; in MA, 618; 444,485,
4981 5^* 59^ ^ 604
Stavelot, (Val. Maximus), 63^
Stephanus, (1) of Alexandria, 584;
(4) of Bytantium, 371
Stephen IV, 447; (4) of St Sabat, 384
Stesichorus, 43, 130, 483
Stilo, L. Aelius, 174
Stobaeus, 374
Stoics, Grammar of the, 144-6
Strabo, 473 ; 86
Strassburg, pi. 00 537, 596 n. 1, 614,
631
Student-songs, mediaeval, 640
Sublime, treatise on the, tSs^
tubtcripli&mt in MM, 415 f, 435, 45S
' substantive *, 6^4
Suetonius, i^h 404; in MA, 635;
463f 4^1 47*; ^ Grmm, 8, 156,
i7of; Di P0iiis, 467 n« 4; FnUm,
Sunaa, 399 1 GroMtteelt «id« 5f|
Sulpicittf (1) ADolUnaHt, 198 1
(4) Galot, 169; (1) Stvcmi, $34$
(4) Victor, f 16
Symbob Med in Gfcek criCidMif 146.
I3»» >40
Syaseon, (1) the gruflMMfiMiy 4^1
(4) 'Magiitef', 30«; J3) Mcta-
phfMlee, foS: (4) of 8c Maiae, 40i
SyauaadHia, |f ) 00 AristoplMUMS, 341 ;
(4) COM. 191 A.D., 41^: (1) COM.
4^5 A.D^ 416, 4t7
SyiMEiMS, MinMcl awl C^OfgCf jSf
Sracebi, ti/^%% %4% m» t
'8rstiptti\407
Syiiaa eCttdy of AffiloCk, |0f r
SynflMMiy |if
6/0
INDEX.
Tacitus, 101 ; in MA, 656; 604; De
Oratoridus, 195
Tarsus, 163
Tegemsee, 616; Metellus of, 613
Tennyson and Dion. Hal., 480;
Quintus Smymaeus, 354
Terence, 169; in MA, 607 f; 487,
499* 598
Terentianus Maunis, aoo, 603
Terentius Scaunis, 188, 197
Theagenes of Rhegium, 7, 19
Thegan, 465
Themistius, 345, 553 n. 10
Theocritus, 115, 169, 170, 361
Theodora, mother of Michael III,
383. 388
Theodore, (i) of Mopsuestia, 344;
(a) of Studion, 384 f, 388; (3) of
Tarsus, 449 f, 452
Theodoret, 357, 364
Theodoric the Great, 136, 338, 144-8,
260. (2) Theodoric of Chartres,
5"3i 5<7 n. 3. 586 n. 4; his £>/a-
teuchon, 513 n. 4, 519 n. 5, 645
Theodorus, (i) of Byzantium, 79;
(2) Metochites, 410; (3) Prodromus,
4'o; 354. 4«4. 573
Theodosius I, 341; 11, 330, 356, 374,
^3^i (3) Alexandrian grammarian
ic. 400A.D.), 354; 138, 381. 573;
(4) Diaconus, 308
Theodulfus, bp of Orleans, 461 ; 119
n. 4, 612, 615, 647
Theodulus, Eclogues oi, 515
Theognis, 49 (cp. E. Harrison, Stttdus,
1903, c. i)
Theo^^nostus, 385
Theon, (1) commentator on poets,
143 ; (2) Aelius, rhetorician and
commentator on prose authors, 311;
(3) philosopher and mathematician,
357 (all of Alexandria); (4) Theon
of Smyrna, 322
Theophilus, (i) patriarch of Alexan-
dria, 360, 364 ; (2) Byzantine emp.,
386, 388
Theophrastus, 99, 175, 165, 275, 277,
184, 504
Theophylact, (1)408; (2) Simocattes,
380, 426
Thessalonica, fall of (i 185), 411,415;
feuds of (1^46), 423
Thomas Aqumas (St), see Aquinas
Thomas Magister, 409; (2) Th.
Scholasticus, 308 ; (3) Th. of
Celano, 530 ; (4) bp of St David's,
567, 564 n. 4
Thrasymachm, 78
Thucydidet, on Homer, 961 33;
influence of Sidlian rhetoric 00, 8a ;
Dion. Hal. on, 475-^; 'Lonpiniu't
98^ f; Lucian, x(At\ Life ot, 141
TibuUus, in MA, 631; 530, 5«8, 604
Timaeus, (1) historian, lOa ; (s) lesioo*
grapher, 3J4
Timonof Phlius, id, 106, 1 15, 1 19, i6«
Timotheus of Gaza, 369
Tiro, 181, 201
Toledo, Latin translations (rain the
Arabic executed at, 593, 539 f.
543 ^ 54^1 5^5 ; Abraham of, 549
Toulouse, 109, ^18, 517, 606
Tours, St Martm of, 107, 934, 4389
598; St Martin's abbey at, «c«;
Alcuin at, 457 f, 599 f; Odo, 4851
Gerbert, ^89; Bernard Silvester,
514; iiss from, (Nonius) 603, (Vir-
gil) 613, (Cic. di Sen,) 637, (Uvy)
^34t (Suetonius) 635; Greiek mut
at, 481
Tragic poets (of Athens), text of, 57 ;
quotations from, 58; select plays* 394
Tridinius, 420; autograph of, 498
Trivium, 643
Troy, the tale of, 24-6, 34, 154* 3^ f
in MA, 514, 536, 622 f, 637
Tryphiodorus, 357
Tryphon, 141
Tyrannion, i38f
Tyrtaeus, 48
Tzelzes, 408 f
Ulpian, (i) jurist, 330; (a) scholiast,
350
Uncial characters, 461, 471
'Universals*, controversy on, S39,
5o<^f 475i 486, 508, 51a, 5S0, 570
Universities, 605 ; 356, 374
Upsilon^ 90, 385
ValeriusCato, 182,168; (2) Val.P6Uio»
31 7 i (3) Val. Flaccus, MSS of, 6si;
442 ; (4) Val. Maximus, S30; in
MA, 635; 478, 529, 604,63s; (5)
Q. Valerius of Sora, 1 7s
Vandiires, John of, 484
Varro, 173-6, 264; 138, 146, lys,
178, 181 f, 188, 20S, aiOb «i5t
223 f, 228, 241, 257, 300; in MA,
627; 476
Varro Atacinus, 260
Vegetius, 230; in MA, 635; 4^6
Velius Longus, 184, 188, 197, 2%\
Velleius Paterculus, 603
INDEX.
671
Verona, 484, 603, 608, 626
Verrius Flaccus, 188, 271, 457
Verse, passages rendered in English,
40, 56. 168, an, 143, 341, 363
Vestinus, 316
Victor, Julius and Sulpicius, 116
Victor III {DesieUrius), 500
VictorianuSy his recension of Livy,
215 n. 6, 634
Victorinus, 117 f; 205, 133, 139, 489,
499. 507
Viennc, Council of, 584
Vilgardus, 595
Vincent of Eleauvais, 557 f; 586, 638;
Virgil, 610; Ovid, 615; Statius,
618; Martial (Coquus), 610; Ju-
venal, 610; Tibullus, 691; Cicero,
614 f; Pliny the younger, 630
Viptdobotietise^ Lexicon^ 406
Vinsauf, GcofTrcy de, 516, 648 n. 4
Virgil, and Lucretius, 168; his Greek
originals, 169 f; early study (and
criticism) of, 183 f; Probus, 193;
Gellius, 199; in c. iv, ai6f; Au-
sonius, lit; Servius, 318 ; Jerome,
i%\\ Augustine, m; Macrobius,
1^5 f ; in c. V, Sidonius, 331 f ; As-
terius, 135; in MA, 6iof; Alcuin,
459; Servatus Lupus, 471 f; Odo,
485 ; Notkcr Labeo, 499 ; Anselm,
503; Ekkehard I, II, 487 f; Hilde-
bert, 529; Dante, 589,591,611; Del
Virgilio, 589; the Fourth Eclogue^
463, 610 f, 618; allegory of the
Aetuid, 515, 610; MSS, 611; foe-
simile, 185; 103, 335, 44? f, 459,
598; tomb of, 611; legends of,
611 n, 8, 637 (cp. Teuflel, § S31,
n)
Virgil, (i) bp of Salzburg, 448 (Wat-
tenbach, (7. ^. i« nif); (1) 'Vir-
gilins Maro', the grammarian, 437 {^
638 (ed. HUmer, 1886); (3) Giov.
del Virgilio, 589 f, 6f6
Virgilium, Ugiiur, 643
Vitri, Philip de, 615
Vitruvius, 5, 464
Vocabularies, 597 f, 574, 640
Volcatius Sedigitus, 178
Vulgate, SM, 151, S54 n. 3, 43a, 444,
57i.59»^<54«
Walafrid Strabo (or Strabus), 467
Walter of Ch&tillon, 617; see GauHer
Waltharius (Walter of Aquitaine), 488
Wandrille*s, St, 461
Wibold, or Wibald, abbot of Corvey,
M5. <5«4. ^Ih n- « ; cp. 596
Widukind of Corvey, 486
Winric of Trier, dii
Wirecker, Nigellus, 51 j
World, expected end of the, 493 f
Xanthopulus, 43 s
Xenophanes, 19
Xenophon, 84, 86, 975, 378, 984,
«95 ; imitated, 304, 407
Xiphilinus, (i) patriarch, 401 f ; (1)
Historian, 407
York ; Alcuin, 455 f ; 460 ; Fridugis,
600 n«
Zacharias, Greek pope, 447, 454
Zeno, 1 46
Zenodotus, (i) of Ephesos, 114, 119-
31, 137, 140; (3)of Mallos, 158
Zollus, date of, 108 f; 33
Zonaras, historian, 414; the lezicoQ
(406) bearing his name, probid>ly
by Antonius Monachus (see Stein's
Herthius^ ed. maior, ii 479 f)
GREEK INDEX.
tUriaTucii (wrQcit), 145
dWiiyofHKtas, 147
dm-Uriyfui, Ii6» 13 1» I40
^TUfv/da, 137, 174
ddpurrot, 146
dp$pw^, 97, 100. 137, 144, 374
dp/iwiait 175, 177
iartplaKott 126, 131
'Arrurtard, 319
a^3j^<rira, 36
d^wi'a, 80, 97, 175
/S^-a, nicKname, 144
7d3a/>ot (diliapot), 415
ypatifiariKiff, 7-9
ypofifiariK^ rpayt^Sla, 88
yp<ififMTiK6t, 6 (
ypofiftaTicrittt 6
3(3cuncaXf(u, 64, 171
dtop^wr^, 119; cp. 139, 154
iixXfi, 131
cl (name of letter), 90, 196
Uibotif of Homer, 13a
iwioi'VfUa, 91
^M/^wi'a, 89, 97, 375
KdOcLpffit, 61
icaraXXi}X6n7t, 313
KaTTfyopovfUPOp (rd), 98
icdrw^ci' r6^t, 6, 320
K€fiaO¥iw, 126
KiBdpa, KlOapit, 43
«X^<rtt, 97
KplTlxbtt 10
icwXoi', ia6, 137, 274, 394 n. 1
X^|if, 80, 99; \4^€it, of Theophras-
tus, 9Q1 177 ; of Aristoph. Byz., ia8;
of Dulymus, 139; of the Stoics,
144, 146
Xvpurdt, 43 n. 4i cp. 965 D. i
fuXiK^s, 43 n. 5
/AcXMTMOt, 43
fuff&nft, 'participle', 148
fUToxiit 'participle*, 131, 974 n. i
tdfififf If, 09-71 (on 'imitAtioD*)
/wf and PIP, 161
6/3eXof, 116, 131
6po/m, ^/la, 90 f, 97 f, 100^ 131,
'37 1 »44f. '48
oj) (name of letter), 90
waSiap, re/ii, I41
wapaypai^^i, 8q, 97
wapd<ni/i», 97
Wi'ra^Xot, 114
rfraiccf, 111, 1 10, 156
wot&nit and roaonft, 167
wTuait, 97; vriMrcif, 97, 138, 145
/kif^6f, 13 n. 1
fffXXuj9os, 111
anyfiifi, 115, 131, I40, 315
ffCfifiafia, 145
ffMiffnot, 801 97, 174
o^oXaoTuc^ff, 504
TiJiTTW, 138, 355
iwopoXiit, i^, 19 n. 1
vwo6iaffTo\^it 115
inroBiaiis, 118
inroKtlfUPOP (t6), subjicimmt 98
^r^oca, 19
0^ot, 181 f
^oPTOffla, 71, 317
^6Xo70f (and ^ikoXayla), ^f; 331,
360
0«in^«rTO. 89, 97, 175, 307
}f/i\d and Sa^^, 175
w (not ta At^ya), 90
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