soul, or the intended literary effort, would fall into rhyme or resort to metre.
We have an example of the former in those often-cited tenth-century verses exhorting the watchers on the walls of Modena:
"O tu qui servas armis ista moenia,
Noli dormire, moneo, sed vigila.
Dum Hector vigil extitit in Troia,
Non eam cepit fraudulenta Graecia.
"Vigili voce avis anser Candida
Fugavit Gallos ex arce Romulea."
The antique reminiscence fills this jingle, as it does the sensuous
"O admirabile Veneris ydolum
Cuius materiae nichil est frivolum:
Archos te protegat, qui stellas et polum
Fecit et maria condidit et solum."[1]
And so on from century to century. At the beginning of the twelfth, a Pisan poet celebrates Pisa's conquest of the Balearic Isles:
"Inclytorum Pisanorum scripturus historiam,
Antiquorum Romanorum renovo memoriam,
Nam ostendit modo Pisa laudem admirabilem,
Quam olim recepit Roma vincendo Carthaginem."
For an eleventh-century example of more literary verse, one may turn to the metres of Alphanus, a noble Salernian, lover of letters, pilgrim traveller, archbishop of his native town, and monk of Monte Cassino, the parent Benedictine monastery, which had been the cultured retreat of Paulus Diaconus in the time of Charlemagne. It was destroyed by the Saracens in 884. Learning languished in the calamitous decades which followed. But the convent was rebuilt, and some care for learning recommences there under the abbot Theobald (1022–1035). The monastery's troubles were not over; but it re-entered upon prosperity under the energetic rule of the German Richer (1038–1055).[2] Shortly after his death two close friends were received among its
- ↑ Traube, "O Roma nobilis," Abhand. philos.-philol. Classe Bayer. Akad. Bd. 19, p. 301. This poem probably belongs to the tenth century. "Archos" is mediaeval Greek for "The Lord."
- ↑ The Rationes dictandi, a much-used book on the art of composing letters, comes from the hand of one Alberic, who was a monk at Monte Cassino
