CHAPTER XIX.
LEARNING AND LITERATURE TILL THE DEATH OF BEDE.
Boethius, according to the famous phrase, is the last of the Romans. Between him and the writers who mark the highest point of the Carolingian Renaissance—one may take Einhard as a sample—three centuries intervene. It is the first part of my task to trace the paths along which the torch of learning was carried from the one height to the other.
With what equipment was the journey begun? A reader of the Saturnalia of Macrobius cannot fail to be impressed with the abundance and variety of the ancient literature which the literary man at the beginning of the fifth century had at his disposal—sacral, antiquarian, critical—reaching back to the days of Ennius. It may fairly be said that down to the time of Alaric's invasion the Latin literature was intact; and that long after that date, at many educational centres in Italy, Gaul, Spain, Africa, large stores of works now lost to us were preserved and used. Still, the existence of a not inconsiderable part of the literature was bound up with that of Rome: particularly that part which was specifically pagan. Of treatises like those of Veranius on the Pontifices or Trebatius Testa De religionibus there were probably few if any copies outside the public libraries of the city: no Christian would be at the pains of transcribing them; a single conflagration put end to them for good and all. What perished during the fifth century we shall never know; but we may be sure that between the days of Macrobius and Boethius there must have been extensive losses.
The works of Boethius are not of a kind to throw much light upon the preservation of Latin literature in his time. Some are versions or adaptations of Greek sources which for the most part still exist. The greatest, the De consolatione Philosophiae—in external form resembling the work of an African writer of the previous century, Martianus Capella—witnesses, indeed, to the nobility of the man who wrote it: but the conditions under which it was produced (and for that matter, its whole scope) forbid us to expect from it that wealth of quotation and reference which might have characterised it, had it emanated from the home of Boethius and not from his prison[1].
Among the contemporaries of Boethius there is one, Cassiodorus, of whose literary resources we can form a more precise estimate. It is
- ↑ This statement is not meant to exclude the possibility of the indebtedness of Boethius to earlier writers in the general lines or even in the subject-matter of his work.
