Martianus Capella’s Marriage of Philology and Mercury

Martianus Minneus Felix Capella came, according to Cassiodorus, from Madauros in Roman Africa and apparently practised as a lawyer at Carthage. His work, also known as On the Seven Disciplines, is written in an ornate, allusive style, in prose mixed with verse after the manner of Varro’s Menippean satires. The first two books tell of the courtship and wedding of Mercury and the maiden Philology; in the other seven, each of the seven handmaids given to the bride expounds her art — the verbal arts of grammar, dialectic and rhetoric, later called the trivium, and the mathematical arts of geometry, arithmetic, astronomy and harmony, the quadrivium. The eighth book describes an Earth-centred universe in which Mercury and Venus nevertheless circle the Sun — a view that Copernicus, in the first book of De revolutionibus, singled out as one not to be disregarded.

The book was read, taught and commented upon throughout the early Middle Ages. In the 6th century Gregory of Tours wrote of it as virtually a school manual; in 534 (or, as A. Cameron argued, in 498) the Roman rhetor Securus Melior Felix, who set out to correct it, noted that its text was already badly corrupted by copyists. It shaped education in the Carolingian age, John Scotus Eriugena and Remigius of Auxerre wrote commentaries on it, and in 1959 C. Leonardi catalogued 241 surviving manuscripts.

When it was written is disputed. Martianus mentions the sack of Rome in 410. The traditional dating puts the work between 410 and 429 (or 439), before the Vandal conquest, partly because the epilogue mentions the proconsul of Carthage; but the office is now known to have existed under the Vandal kings as well, and many scholars place the work in the last quarter of the 5th century — D. Shanzer in 470–480. S. Grebe has argued for an even later date, 496–523.