Martianus Capella

• 1. Introduction

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  Martianus Minneus Felix Capella wrote exactly one book. C. S. Lewis, in The Allegory of Love, declared it the strangest thing the universe had ever produced. Lewis wrote: "the universe, which has produced the bee-orchid and the giraffe, has produced nothing stranger than Martianus Capella." The book was De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii, translated as "On the Marriage of Philology and Mercury." It was a wedding allegory in which the seven liberal arts appeared as bridesmaids at a cosmic feast. The prose was wordy and involved, heavy with metaphor and strange turns of phrase. Yet by the thirteenth century, Martianus was still credited as the efficient cause of the study of astronomy in European schools. What kind of man produces a book this strange, and how does it become the backbone of medieval education? The lunar crater Capella carries his name today, one of the stranger honors in the history of Latin letters.

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• 2. The African Jurist

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  Madaura, in the Roman province of Africa, was the city that produced Martianus. The scholar Cassiodorus records that this was also the city that had given the ancient world Apuleius. Today Madaura is Souk Ahras, in northeastern Algeria. Martianus appears to have practiced as a jurist at Roman Carthage. That placed him in one of the late empire's most active legal and intellectual centers. He was writing after Alaric I sacked Rome in 410, an event he mentions in the text. He apparently finished before the Vandal conquest of North Africa in 429. That window of roughly two decades is the only firm anchor scholars have for De nuptiis. Like his near-contemporary Macrobius, who also produced a major work on classical Roman religion, Martianus never directly identifies his own religious affiliation. Much of the book takes the form of dialogue, and the opinions of its speaking characters may not represent the author's own views. A manuscript subscription at the end of Book I led Gerardus Vossius to place Martianus in the sixth century. That error created a long-standing misconception about when he actually lived. Whatever his personal convictions, De nuptiis takes place in a universe where the gods of classical Rome were very much alive.

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• 3. The Cosmic Wedding

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  In the first two books of De nuptiis, a god goes courting. Mercury, who personifies intellectually profitable pursuit, had already been turned down by Wisdom, Divination, and the Soul as potential wives. He turns instead to Philologia, whose name means quite literally the love of letters and study. She is elevated to immortality under the collective protection of the gods, the Muses, the Cardinal Virtues, and the Graces. The allegorical title points to this union: Mercury's profitable intellectual pursuit joined to Philologia's love of learning through letters. Behind this elaborate frame lies the influence of Neoplatonism, the Platonic tradition pioneered by Plotinus and his school. Martianus cast his narrative as a prosimetrum, a form alternating prose with elaborately allusive verse, following the Menippean satire tradition of Varro. He dedicated this work to his son. Among the wedding gifts were seven maids assigned to serve Philologia. Each would stand up in turn to give a full exposition of her science.

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• 4. Seven Arts, Seven Voices

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  Grammar arrived at the wedding feast as an old woman carrying a knife. In Martianus's telling, that knife was for excising children's grammatical errors. Rhetoric appeared tall and formidable, wearing a dress decorated with figures of speech and bearing arms designed to wound adversaries in debate. Dialectic joined them, then Geometry, Arithmetic, Astronomy, and lastly musical Harmony. The tradition behind this curriculum ran back to Varro's Disciplinae; even Varro had mentioned Architecture and Medicine in passing. Both were present at Martianus's celestial feast. Since they deal with earthly and material things, they were required to remain silent in the divine company. Architecture and Medicine were, in Martianus's framing, fit for clever slaves but not for senators. The classical Roman curriculum passed through this book into early medieval Europe, modified by Christianity but not fundamentally transformed by it. The eighth book, however, contains a cosmological claim that would have seemed anomalous even by ancient standards.

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• 5. The Anomalous Orbits

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  In the eighth book of De nuptiis, Martianus describes a modified geocentric model of the cosmos. The Earth sits at rest in the center. The Moon, the Sun, three planets, and the fixed stars all circle it in their usual paths. But two bodies deviate: Mercury and Venus, Martianus writes, circle the Sun rather than the Earth. Copernicus, in Book I of his De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, singled out this observation as something not to "disregard." For an allegorical educational text to contain a partial departure from standard geocentric cosmology was remarkable. That Copernicus cited a specific book of Martianus tells us how long this fifth-century text stayed in active scholarly circulation.

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• 6. Seven Centuries of Copying

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  Fulgentius, another North African writer, modeled his own work on De nuptiis by the end of the fifth century. That placed him within a generation of Martianus himself. By the sixth century, Gregory of Tours was describing De nuptiis as virtually a school manual. Around 534, Securus Memor Felix, a professor of rhetoric in Rome, was preparing a new edition. He noted that the text had already become hopelessly corrupted. He was working, as he put it, from "most corrupt exemplars." Michael Winterbottom later suggested that Securus Memor's work may be the basis of an impressive number of extant books written in the ninth century. De nuptiis shaped European education not only through the early medieval period but through the Carolingian Renaissance. In his 1959 study, C. Leonardi catalogued 241 surviving manuscript copies. The book attracted copious commentary: John Scotus Erigena wrote on it, as did Hadoard, Alexander Neckham, and Remigius of Auxerre. In the eleventh century, the German monk Notker Labeo translated the first two books into Old High German. Martianus played a major role as transmitter of ancient learning until the rise of scholastic Aristotelianism began to displace his framework. By the time the printing press arrived, the urgent question was not whether to spread De nuptiis further, but whether anyone still needed it.

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• 7. The Print Legacy

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  Franciscus Vitalis Bodianus edited the editio princeps of De nuptiis, which was printed in Vicenza in 1499. That late appearance in print was itself a sign: the book's reign as a necessary educational text was ending. The number of later printed editions remained modest. For much of the subsequent period it survived mainly as an elementary primer on the liberal arts. A. Dick prepared the standard modern critical edition for the Teubner series in 1925; J. Willis produced a new Teubner edition in 1983. Modern scholarship approaches De nuptiis less for the ideas themselves than as evidence of what different eras considered essential knowledge. Columbia University Press published a two-volume study, Martianus Capella and the Seven Liberal Arts. The first volume appeared in 1971, the second in 1977. Volume one, by William Harris Stahl, examined the mathematical traditions behind the Quadrivium. Volume two, translated by Stahl and R. Johnson with E. L. Burge, gave English readers their first substantial access to De nuptiis itself. Individual books of De nuptiis have continued to attract scholarly attention. The geometry and dialectic books received French editions in 2007; the arithmetic book received one in 2003.

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