Martianus Capella and the Seven Liberal Arts (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 257 Martianus Capella and the Seven Liberal Arts. By William H. Stahl. (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1971) The fifth century Roman writer Martianus Capella has long deserved to be the subject of a full-scale modern study. His influence is evident from the fact that his prescription for a liberal education became the basis for medieval instruction; everyone studied the Seven Liberal Arts: grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and harmony. Historians of science know Martianus as one of the few Romans who wrote on neo-Platonic mathematics and on astronomy; Copernicus learned through his work that, according to Heraclides of Pontus, the planets Venus and Mercury went around the sun. Students of Latin literature view Martianus' sole surviving work, De Nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii, as the inspiration for a number of allegories in medieval literature, including heavenly journeys like Dante's. Historians of religion prize Martianus' book as affording a fifth-century view of neo-Platonism, star-worship, the Greek pantheon, and even a bit of Etruscan religion. Martianus' work has been taken as a fair idea of the level of knowledge of an educated Latin of the fifth century A. D., or, from another point of view, as an example of the terrible state into which Latin learning had then fallen. The book under review does justice to all these separate concerns. More important, William Stahl has greatly increased our understanding of each of the specialists' views of Martianus by considering the De Nuptiis as a whole. Stahl's detailed, learned, and appealingly written Introduction gives masterly treatments of the place of Roman science in intellectual history; of Martianus himself; of the nature of Martianus' book and style; of the sources Martianus used; of why he did not include medicine and architecture from the list of subjects worthy of study (they were too practical); of why people who read him liked his work and thought it important; and of who read his work up until the time of the School of Chartres in the twelfth century. In discussing Martianus' sources, Stahl conveys valuable information about the work of Varro, Pliny, Solinus, and several others. The discussion of Martianus' influence incidentally conveys a great deal of information about how learning was transmitted in the early Middle Ages. As for Martianus' popularity and influence, Stahl argues convincingly that they were due to the sugar-coating provided by the book's charming allegorical setting, together with the all-in-one handbook nature of the presentation of its subjects. Even though the logical connection between the Seven Liberal Arts may have been far from obvious, Martianus' work was artistically a whole. Following Stahl's introduction, Richard Johnson discusses the allegorical setting in which Martianus presents his learning; the wedding of Hercules (symbolizing eloquence) and Philology (symbolizing learning). Each of the Seven Liberal Arts is personified as a bridesmaid at the wedding, and each in turn delivers a discourse on her own subject. Johnson uses the description of the wedding and the gathered divine guests to describe, albeit briefly, the religion of the period. This section is followed by a description of the discourses on what was later called the Trivium; Grammar (which included both linguistics and explication de texte) and Rhetoric being described by Johnson, and Dialectic (which included both logic and disputation) by Evan L. Burge. The history of each of these disciplines before Martianus is briefly and ably recounted, together with the exposition of what Martianus himself said. Professor Stahl then describes the discourses on what was later (by Boethius) called the Quadrivium: Arithmetic, Geometry (which, because of the usual Roman attitudes about science, chiefly concerns geography; the bridesmaid Geometry has her hair neatly arranged, but her feet are dirty and her shoes worn from travelling 258 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY over the earth); Astronomy; and Harmony. These highly detailed sections will be of immense value to historians of these disciplines. In his "Conclusion," Stahl argues that Latin science was indeed in the Dark Ages until the twelfth-century Renaissance. Since Roman society lost contact with original thinkers, living only on handbooks, it fell into intellectual decay. This decline of knowledge, Stahl argues, was largely the...