hard facts which they preserve. About half of the glossary of Festus, itself an abridgment of the work of Verrius Flaccus, has survived only in a sadly damaged Naples manuscript: without it, and what Paul has rescued of the remainder, our knowledge of archaic Latin would be far fuller of gaps than it is. His epitome was a mine, too, for later writers, who drew from it strange forms to adorn their pages. In virtue of his other great work, Paul has earned the name of the Father of Italian history. Neither of these books was written at the instance of the Emperor, who employed Paul in educational work and in the compilation of a set of Homilies for use in church.
Paul was something of a verse-writer, and some fables of his are by no means without merit; but both he and Peter were chiefly valued by their patron as teachers of grammar. We have writings of both of them on this subject, a subject touched by almost every one of the great scholars of the period we have been and shall be reviewing; Aldhelm, Bede, Boniface, Alcuin, not to mention a crowd of minor names, Irish and Continental. Especially in the Carolingian age, when serious efforts were afoot to raise the standard of education, were grammatical manuals of frequent occurrence. Their compilers used the works of recent predecessors and of more ancient writers in varying degrees, commonly contributing little of their own, save perhaps the order and arrangement of the material[1]. No detailed review of these writers will be attempted in this chapter, but they deserve mention, and honourable mention, since they ministered to the first needs of a fresh and very numerous generation of scholars.
In leaving Paul the Deacon, it is worth while to remark that he expressly disclaims knowledge of Greek (and Hebrew), and to note that Greek does not figure very conspicuously in the works of most of the important scholars in Charlemagne's own circle, though we can see that it was known to more than one of them. There may have been some few Greek books accessible to them: between 758 and 763 Pope Paul I had sent some to Pepin; "the grammar of Aristotle, of Dionysius the Areopagite; a geometry, an orthography" says the Pope, obscurely enough. But we do not fall on the track of these again.
The knowledge that Charlemagne revived education and learning in his empire is common property. I shall not dwell upon his methods, but rather upon the individual men whom he gathered about him to do the work, and upon the results they achieved. Three have already been mentioned, and I do not think it is insular prejudice which inclines me to regard Alcuin as the central figure.
He was not a great writer: interesting as are his letters and his poems, none of them can be rated high as literature. But as an organizer and administrator, and as a personally attractive man, he stands in the
- ↑ Smaragdus of St Mihiel (c. 820) takes illustrations from the vernacular, an interesting point.
