| Martianus Capella |
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Information AboutMartianus Capella |
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| year of birth missing | |
| 5th century deaths | |
| late antique latin writers | |
| latin writers | |
| late antiquity | |
| rhetoricians | |
| capella, martianus | |
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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 Satire s 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 Europe an 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 , 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 Personification s 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 , Hadoard , Alexander Neckham , and Remi Of Auxerre . The work was edited by Franciscus Vitalis Bodianus , and first printed in Vicenza, 1499 . SEE ALSO EXTERNAL LINKS
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