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Martianus Minneus Felix Capella was a pagan writer of Late
Antiquity, whose career flourished some time during the 5th
century. Martianus composed his one famous book between the sack
of Rome by Alaric (410), which he mentions, but apparently
before the conquest of Africa by the Vandals in 429. As early as
the middle of the sixth century Securus Memor Felix, a professor
of rhetoric, received the text in Rome, for he quoted it.
According to Cassiodorus, Capella was a native of Madaura—which
had been the native city of Apuleius—in the Roman province of
Africa, and appears to have practiced as a jurist at Carthage.
His single famous encyclopedic work, Satyricon, or De Nuptiis
Philologiae et Mercurii et de septem Artibus liberalibus libri
novem ("On the wedding of Philology and Mercury and of the Seven
Liberal Arts, in nine books"), is an elaborate didactic allegory
written in a mixture of prose and verse, after the manner of the
Menippean satires of Varro. The style is wordy and involved,
loaded with metaphor and bizarre expressions. The book was of
stupendous importance in fixing the unchanging formulas of
Academia from the Christianized Roman Empire of the 5th century
until newly-available Arabic texts and the works of Aristotle
became available in Western Europe in the 12th century. These
formulas included a Medieval love for allegory (in particular
personifications) as a means of presenting knowledge, and an
attachment to the seven Liberal Arts. The book, which is
thoroughly pagan in culture and makes no allusion to
Christianity, continued to shape European education during the
early Medieval period and through the Carolingian renaissance.
The
book, embracing in resumé form the narrowed classical culture of
his time, was dedicated to his son. Its frame story in the first
two books relates the courtship and wedding of Mercury
(intelligent or profitable pursuit), who has been refused by
Wisdom, Divination and the Soul, with the maiden Philologia
(learning, but literally "word-lore") who is made immortal,
under the protection of the gods, the Muses, the Cardinal
Virtues and the Graces. The title refers to the allegorical
union of the intellectually profitable pursuit (Mercury) of
learning by way of the art of letters (Philology). Among the
wedding gifts are seven maids who will be Philologia's slaves:
they are the seven Liberal Arts: Grammar, Dialectic, Rhetoric,
Geometry, Arithmetic, Astronomy and (musical) Harmony. Art
herself gives an exposition of the principles of the science she
governs. Finally night has come. Architecture and Medicine are
present at the feast, but as they care for nothing but earthly
things, they are condemned to remain silent. Harmony escorts the
bride to the bridal chamber, where nuptial songs are sung.
The
remaining seven books contain expositions of the seven liberal
arts, representing the sum of human knowledge. Book 3 deals with
grammar, book 4 with dialectics, book 5 with rhetoric, book 6
with geometry, book 7 with arithmetic, book 8 with astronomy,
book 9 with music. These abstract discussions are linked on to
the original allegory by the device of personifying each science
as a courtier of Mercury and Philologia. The work was a complete
encyclopedia of the liberal culture of the time, and was in high
repute during the Middle Ages as a school text. The author's
chief sources were Varro, Pliny the Elder, Solinus, Aquila
Romanus, and Aristides Quintilianus. His prose resembles that of
Apuleius (also a native of Madaura), but is even more difficult.
The verse portions, on the whole correct and classically
constructed, are in imitation of Varro.
The
eighth book contains a very clear statement of the heliocentric
system of astronomy. It is possible that it inspired Copernicus,
who quotes Capella.
Allegory and labored metaphor utterly dominates, and the
personifications are purely mechanical. Each book is an abstract
or a compilation from earlier authors. The treatment of the
subjects belongs to a tradition which goes back to Varro's "Diciplinae,"
even to Varro's passing allusion to architecture and medicine,
which in Martianus Capella's day were mechanics' arts, material
for clever slaves, but not for senators. The classical Roman
curriculum, which was to pass— largely through Martianus
Capella's book— into the early medieval period, modified but
scarcely revolutionized by Christianity, was limited to rhetoric
and its accompanying arts, treating philosophy merely as a
matter of dialectics, a focus which served equally in public or
ecclesiastical education, which were increasingly becoming one
and the same. Even Augustine mentions architecture and medicine
as distinct from the other liberal arts.
In
the 11th century the German monk Notker Labeo translated the
first two books into Old High German. The encyclopedia of human
knowledge remained in early medieval days very much as it had
been represented to be by Martianus Capella, until the age of
the School of Chartres, Scholasticism and the new encyclopedic
knowledge of Thomas Aquinas. As early as the end of the 5th
century, another African, Fulgentius, composed a work modeled on
it. In the 6th century Gregory of Tours tells that it became
virtually a school manual (History of the Franks X, 449, 14). It
was commented upon copiously: by John Scotus Erigena, Hadoard,
Alexander Neckham, and Remi of Auxerre.
The
work was edited by Franciscus Vitalis Bodianus, and first
printed in Vicenza, 1499.
This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica
Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
The
above information has been copied in part or in
whole from Wikipedia.org
"The Free Encyclopedia." It may have been modified under
the GNU Free Document License Section 5 in the
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URL of Original Article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martianus_Capella
Date Article Copied:
August 4, 2006
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