celebrated long afterward as "King Roger's Book." Under William I the chief literary figures are likewise connected with the court: Eugene the Emir, a Greek poet thoroughly conversant with Arabic and deeply versed in the mathematics and astronomy of the ancients; and Henricus Aristippus, archdeacon of Catania and for a time chief minister of the king, a collector of manuscripts, a translator of Plato, Aristotle, and Diogenes Laertius, and an investigator of the phenomena connected with the eruption of Etna in a spirit which reminds us less of the age of the schoolmen than of the death of the younger Pliny. Such a literary atmosphere was peculiarly favorable to the production of translations from the Greek and Arabic into Latin, and we can definitely connect with Sicily the versions which made known to western Europe the Meno and Phaedo of Plato, portions of the Meteorology and of certain other works of Aristotle, the more advanced writings of Euclid, and the Almagest of Ptolemy, the greatest of ancient and mediæval treatises on astronomy. In a very different field we have from Roger's reign a Greco-Arabic psalter and an important group of New Testament manuscripts. "While we Germans were in many respects barbarians," says Springer, "the ruling classes in Sicily enjoyed the almost over-ripe fruits of an ancient culture and combined Norman vigor of youth with Oriental refinement of life."[1]
- ↑ Bilder aus der neueren Kunstgeschichte, I, p. 159.
