SOURCE: Cameron, Allan. “The Date and Identity of Macrobius.” Journal of Roman Studies 56 (1966): 25-38.

[In the following essay, Cameron provides evidence for his argument that scholars have erred in linking the Macrobius found in certain records with the author Macrobius; that the author was known to his contemporaries as Theodosius; and that the Saturnalia probably dates from about 431.]

It has long been recognized that Macrobius' Saturnalia and Commentary on Cicero's Somnium Scipionis are no less important as social documents of their times than for the precious antiquarian and neoplatonic lore they preserve. But which times? And who was Macrobius?

In view of our relatively abundant prosopographical material from the late fourth and early fifth centuries, there should be a fair chance of identifying a man whose full name and rank stand on record: Macrobius Ambrosius Theodosius,¹vir clarissimus et insulstris.

The Theodosian Code can show three Macrobii holding office during our period: a vicar of the Spains in 399-400,² a proconsul of Africa in 410,³ and a praepositus sacri cubiculi in 422.⁴ It is customary to assimilate these three and identify the result with our Macrobius.⁵ A nicely documented career, it might seem. The composition of the Saturnalia is usually placed c. 395,⁶ and the Commentary, according to P. Courcelle,⁷ a decade earlier.

But this composite Macrobius can be shown to consist of at least two quite different men, of whom one certainly and the other probably is not our Macrobius. In any event our Macrobius was not known to contemporaries as Macrobius at all, but as Theodosius. In this paper I shall be arguing inter alia that he should be identified instead with the Theodosius who was praetorian prefect of Italy in 430—which would imply a later date than hitherto entertained for his literary activity, but one which can be defended on other grounds. I shall also briefly outline some of the implications of this later dating.

I

Of the three Macrobii of the Code, the praepositus can be ruled out at once. On the face of it his qualifications are attractive—indeed the most recent contributor to the subject regarded the identification as certain.⁸ As an official in the Eastern court he was probably a Greek, which squares nicely with Macrobius' statement that he was born ‘sub alio caelo’ (Sat. i, 1, 11). And he is explicitly attested as vir inlustris, being the first praepositus to be so honoured, whereas neither vicariate nor proconsulate carried the illustrissimate. But there is one decisive objection. A praepositus must at this period have been a eunuch.⁹ Now the one and only personal detail we know about Macrobius is that he had a son, to whom he dedicated both Commentary and Saturnalia (below, p. 37): and undoubtedly a son of his own flesh, for he explicitly alludes to the affection a father naturally feels for those ‘qui e nobis essent procreati’. Plainly our Macrobius was no eunuch. Moreover his greater familiarity with Latin literature (and his occasional mistranslations from Greek) suggest that he was no Greek either.¹⁰ We should probably therefore accept Jan's suggestion that the alium caelum is that of Africa.¹¹

The vicar of 399-400 and the proconsul of 410 may reasonably be assumed to be the same man.¹² It was normal to rise from a vicariate to a proconsulate (it should be noted in passing that a praepositus would never have held either post): Symmachus' friend Marcianus was vicar of Italy in 384 and proconsul of Africa in 394¹³—exactly the same interval between the two posts. Now this vicar is identified by prosopographers with Flavius Macrobius Maximianus, attested by an inscription as vicar of Africa some time in the 390's.¹⁴ If so, then plainly this man cannot be Macrobius Ambrosius Theodosius.

II

The correct order of Macrobius' three names is undoubtedly Macrobius Ambrosius Theodosius, as given in the subscriptio to the edition of the Commentary by Aurelius Memmius Symmachus, cos. 485, and Macrobius Plotinus Eudoxius, surely a descendant of Macrobius¹⁵ (below, p. 37). Since Symmachus' names are in the correct order, the presumption is that Macrobius' are too. The order varies in the tituli to the various MSS., where the Ambrosius is more often than not omitted: but almost all the explicits to individual books of the Saturnalia and the tituli to most of the excerpts from the De differentiis et societatibus graeci latinique verbi call him Macrobius Theodosius. Cassiodorus¹⁶ and Boethius¹⁷ too call him Macrobius Theodosius. It seems certain therefore that Theodosius was the last of the three. For this reason alone it is likely that he was known to contemporaries as Theodosius. For in the later empire a man was in most contexts called by only one of the often quite numerous names he might possess: and normally (if not invariably) by the last. That he was indeed called Theodosius is proved by the dedication to the De differentiis: ‘Theodosius Symmacho suo’, and by the dedicatory epistle to Avianus' Fables, where he is addressed as ‘Theodosi optime’.¹⁸

It has been suggested that he might have been called by both names indiscriminately: such a view cannot formally be disproved, but is hardly likely to commend itself to the impartial reader. Had Theodosius, for example, been a signum, he might have been called Macrobius in official and Theodosius in personal contexts. But a man was usually known either by one or more of his cognomina, or by his signum alone. Thus the man official documents call Publilius Optatianus, St. Jerome calls Porphyrius (his signum).¹⁹ So if Theodosius had been a signum, one might perhaps have expected Cassiodorus and Boethius to have used either Macrobius or Theodosius—but not both together.²⁰ Moreover it would be most unusual had he been called by the first of his names. Thus both evidence and analogy support Theodosius, while there is not a scrap of evidence or even probability in favour of Macrobius—especially now we have seen that there are no suitable Macrobii to identify him with in any event. The case of Cassiodorus provides an exact parallel: known in full as Flavius Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator, he was called Senator by contemporaries, but—quite erroneously—Cassiodorus in modern times. In default of any evidence to the contrary it seems natural to conclude that Macrobius was known to contemporaries as Theodosius in all contexts.

So it is among the Theodosii of the Code that we should be looking, not the Macrobii. And the only Theodosius for whom the illustrissimate is attested during the whole of the period in which Macrobius' literary activity must fall (384-485), is the praetorian prefect of Italy in 430.²¹ It is significant that the only surviving law addressed to this Theodosius sanctions a privilege for Africa Proconsularis on the basis of information received concerning Byzacena. It is natural to suppose that this information was supplied by Theodosius. Such solicitude for the interests of Africa, while not proving, certainly warrants the conjecture that Theodosius was himself an African.²²

It should be noted that even if Macrobius is the proconsul of 410, he would not at that date have attained the illustrissimate held by the author of both Commentary and Saturnalia. So even on the traditional identification, if the titles in the MSS. are those of the original publication (see below, p. 36), a date perhaps two decades later than the traditional 395 would be indicated. And it is to the question of the date of the two works that we must now turn.

III

Courcelle argues that the Commentary was known to St. Ambrose when he wrote his Hexaemeron²³ (which can be dated to 386-7), and to St. Jerome when he wrote his letter to Pammachius in 393 and his commentary on Amos in 406.²⁴ With regard to Ambrose, reference may now be made to M. Fuhrmann's thorough and convincing demonstration that it is neither a necessary nor even a satisfactory explanation of Courcelle's parallels between the Commentary and the Hexaemeron to posit Macrobius as Ambrose's source.²⁵ Quite apart from the fact that the parallels are not at all close, there are several details in Ambrose not to be found in Macrobius: that is to say another source must be postulated for Ambrose in any case. A more economical hypothesis is that both were drawing on the same or a similar source.

The ‘parallels’ in Jerome are no more cogent. Both passages are concerned with the ‘impar numerus’ 7, to which Macrobius assigns several pages. But it is hard to see why ‘Pythagoram et Archytam Tarentinum et Publium Scipionem in sexto … de impari numero disputantes’ in the letter should be an allusion to Macrobius’ Commentary rather than to the Somnium itself. For Macrobius nowhere mentions Archytas, nor (in this context) Pythagoras.

In his commentary on Amos Jerome claims to be drawing on ‘saecularis philosophia et medicorum libri’ (ii, 5; PL xxv, 1037-8). The medical lore comes (ultimately at any rate) from Galen; the ‘saecularis philosophia’, according to Courcelle, from Macrobius. But a host of late writers, biblical commentators and neoplatonists alike, discussed the miraculous properties of the ‘impar numerus’: with many of these Jerome was undoubtedly familiar.²⁶ Macrobius, like Jerome, gives many medical illustrations of the properties of 7—indeed he devotes thirty sections to the subject. But the one and only medical example Jerome cites is not among them. Nor do any of Jerome's non-medical examples come from Macrobius either: indeed they are all biblical. Jerome's next few sentences contain some very recondite information on the decas, hecontas and millenarius, of which there is not a trace in Macrobius. All that they have in common is a reference to the Timaeus, the locus classicus for such number-mysticism,²⁷ and an allusion to the commonplace Pythagorean doctrine that the monad is a property of God.²⁸ The conclusion seems inescapable that Jerome drew the material for this chapter from some quite different (and presumably Christian) source. It is more than likely in fact that here, as in almost all his other biblical commentaries,²⁹ Jerome was following the (now lost) commentary by Origen. Elsewhere he explicitly refers to Origen as dealing ‘de impari numero’ (ep. 48, 13), and Pease long ago observed that a large number of Jerome's medical illustrations came to him via Origen.³⁰

There is therefore no evidence here that Macrobius' Commentary was published by 387, 393 or even 406.

IV

In the first chapter of the Saturnalia (i, 1, 5) Macrobius (it would be pedantic to start calling him Theodosius again at this late hour) excuses himself for committing one or two slight anachronisms. He has, he says, included among his interlocutors ‘one or two’ (‘unus aut alter’) whose ‘matura aetas posterior saeculo Praetextati fuit’. He cites (from Athenaeus) the venerable precedent of Plato, who made Parmenides and Socrates dispute ‘de rebus arduis’ although ‘huius pueritia vix illius apprehenderit senectutem’ (whether this was in fact an anachronism on Plato's part is still disputed: what matters is that Macrobius thought it was). It is clear from this example that what Macrobius has done is to include in his gathering of the Roman intelligentsia of the age of Praetextatus ‘one or two’ who were in fact only children or at most in their 'teens at the dramatic date of the Saturnalia, youths not then capable of disputing ‘de rebus arduis’. Compare his remark at i, 1, 6 ‘annos ergo coeuntium mitti in digitos exemplo Platonis nobis suffragante non convenit’.

V

It now becomes important to know the exact dramatic date of the dialogue. The terminus ante is 384, the year Praetextatus, the leading interlocutor, is known to have died, and the date usually favoured is a year or so before then. A brief examination of the literary antecedents of the Saturnalia will show that the dramatic date is almost certainly 384 itself.

Two works with which Macrobius was undoubtedly very familiar are Cicero's De Republica and Athenaeus' Deipnosophists. The deep influence exerted on him by the De Republica is attested not merely by his massive commentary on the Somnium Scipionis: in addition he deliberately evokes the work in the first chapter of the Saturnalia:

‘Neque enim Cottae, Laelii, Scipiones amplissimis de rebus, quoad Romanae litterae erunt, in veterum libris disputabunt, Praetextatos vero, Flavianos, Albinos, Symmachos et Eustathios, quorum splendor similis et non inferior virtus est, eodem modo loqui aliquid licitum non erit’

(i, 1, 4).

‘Just as Cicero had summoned from the past Scipio and his circle, so Macrobius brought back to life the last pagans of Rome.’³¹ That is to say, Macrobius was consciously thinking of the De Republica when he devised the setting of the Saturnalia. If so, then he cannot have been unaware that Cicero had deliberately set the scene of his dialogue only a week or so before the sudden death of Scipio, the leading interlocutor.³² Indeed Scipio's death is unmistakably foreshadowed in the Somnium.³³

The influence of the Deipnosophists on the Saturnalia is equally obvious.³⁴ ‘Athenaei enim convivium ante oculos fuisse Macrobio docet universa Saturnaliorum forma, docet ratio et dispositio dialogi simillima, docet argumentorum in tanta varietate tanta similitudo’.³⁵ If so then Macrobius can hardly have failed to notice that Athenaeus explicitly states that Ulpian, the host to his banqueters, died a few days after the feast (xv, 686 C).

Both these dialogues then, which influenced Macrobius in the conception and lay-out of his own dialogue, were set very shortly before the sudden death of the principal interlocutor and host.³⁶ Praetextatus plays both roles in the Saturnalia; he is explicitly styled rex mensae. … It is hard to resist concluding that Macrobius deliberately set the Saturnalia only a week or so before Praetextatus' death. Indeed his death may have been mentioned or foreshadowed at the (now lost) end of the dialogue, thus making the dramatic date explicit, just as the deaths of Scipio and Ulpian were in the De Republica and Deipnosophists (and Socrates' in the Phaedo).³⁷

Praetextatus was still alive on 9th September, 384,³⁸ but dead by 1st January, 385, when he was to have entered on the consulship for that year. It is likely that he died in November or December, 384. Now is it just a coincidence that the feast of the Saturnalia, after which the dialogue was named, and concerning which Praetextatus himself is made to give a long disquisition in Bk. 1, took place in December? I would suggest that Macrobius selected the nearest holiday to the day on which Praetextatus died just as Cicero had chosen the nearest holiday before Scipio's death. The reason both chose a holiday in which to set their dialogues is obvious: only during a holiday could busy Roman aristocrats have managed to devote three consecutive days to uninterrupted discussion. The Saturnalia is supposed to be a record of the discussion held on each of the three days of the feast, which begins on 17th December. I would suggest then that the dramatic date of Macrobius' dialogue is 17th to 19th December, 384.³⁹

VI

Now all the interlocutors were real persons, and with only three exceptions there is evidence to suggest that every one of them would have been perfectly old enough to debate ‘de rebus arduis’ with Praetextatus. The three exceptions are Avienus, the Vergilian commentator Servius and Caecina Decius Albinus (junior). And the other interlocutors are made to comment on the youth of precisely these three.⁴⁰ Plainly then they are the candidates for Macrobius' anachronisms.

Something is known of the career of Decius (as he was known to distinguish him from his homonymous father). He was consularis Numidiae some time between 383 and 392, governor of Campania in 397-8, quaestor in 399 and finally city perfect in 402.⁴¹ His father (himself an interlocutor) was an exact contemporary of Symmachus (Sat. i, 2, 15), who was born c. 340. By 384 then Albinus senior will have been in his mid-40s, quite old enough (certainly by Roman standards) to have a son in his late 'teens. And since Decius' official career starts not long after 384, he can hardly have been much younger than that in 384 (Chastagnol conjectures that he was born c. 365). So although he was still an adulescens in 384, his inclusion by Macrobius may not have been an outright anachronism. In any case, he is not a participant in the dialogue. He is represented only as one of the Platonic characters who open the dialogue by inquiring of someone who was present what happened. He is not one of those who actually debated ‘de rebus arduis’. The two anachronisms proper must then be Servius and Avienus.

Before we consider the chronology of Servius and Avienus, it would be useful to know why Macrobius deliberately chose to commit the anachronism of importing them into the circle of Praetextatus. In Servius' case at least the reason is clear enough. Macrobius wanted his interlocutors to discuss Vergil, and Servius was a leading authority on Vergil. Evidently he felt that it would be pedantic to exclude Servius from his gathering just because in real life he happened to have been born a few years too late to have known Praetextatus.

Now if Servius and Avienus were only in their 'teens in December, 384, are they likely to have been established literary figures by 395, scholars worth importing into the circle of Praetextatus at the cost of anachronism? Is Servius' reputation as a Vergilian scholar likely to have been established only ten years after he was too young to debate ‘de rebus arduis’? The date of his great commentary on Vergil is unfortunately quite uncertain. Georgii suggests some time between 395 and 410:⁴² an even later date is perfectly possible. Its very scale and bulk suggest that it is not the work of a young man.

Of Servius' other works a treatise on metre can be dated at least approximately. It is dedicated to a certain Albinus: ‘Clarissimo Albino Servius grammaticus. tibi hunc libellum, praetextatorum decus Albine, devovi’.⁴³ No fewer than three Caeonii Albini appear in the Saturnalia; it would be attractive to suppose that one of these was Servius' dedicatee. But Servius' Albinus was a praetextatus, that is to say under sixteen, and we have already seen that Servius was younger than most of the other interlocutors. The usually favoured candidate is Decius Albinus. If he was born c. 365, he was probably a more or less exact contemporary of Servius, perhaps even a little older. But is it likely that Servius wrote this work before he was himself sixteen? Decius Albinus can in any case be ruled out on other grounds: for he was known as Decius, not Albinus. Chastagnol suggests Rufius Albinus, city prefect in 389-91, on the ground that Macrobius specifically remarks that he admired Vergil's metrical archaisms (Sat. 1, 24, 19). A very suitable person to dedicate a treatise on metre to: but a man who was city prefect in 389 could not possibly have been less than sixteen at the earliest possible date for Servius, still in his 'teens in 384, to have written such a work. The only other suitable candidate is the city prefect of 414, Caecina Decius Aginatius Albinus (known as Albinus), son of Decius Albinus the prefect of 402. He reached his prefecture very early: according to Rutilius Namatianus he was at the time

‘vitae flore puer, sed gravitate senex’

(i, 470).

Not a very helpful indication, but he can hardly have been much less than twenty-five. This would put his birth c. 390 at earliest, by which time his father, born as we have seen c. 365, might reasonably be expected to have married and sired a son. He could not have reached sixteen before c. 405, in which case Servius' treatise can hardly be placed before 400 and may well be much later. The Basilius to whom his commentary on Donatus' Ars is dedicated is presumably the Basilius prefect of Rome in 395, who was still alive and active in 408.⁴⁴

The identity of Avienus is uncertain. The most likely candidate is the fabulist Avianus, the correct form of whose name seems in fact to have been Avienus.⁴⁵ Since Avianus had paid Macrobius the compliment of dedicating his Fables to him, it would be very appropriate for Macrobius to have returned the compliment by casting Avianus as an interlocutor in his Saturnalia: Cicero made Varro an interlocutor in his Academica after hearing that he was soon going to receive a dedication from him (Att. xiii, 12, 3). If I am right about the date of Macrobius, then it would follow that Avianus, as a contemporary of Macrobius, would certainly have been too young to debate ‘de rebus arduis’ in 384. But clearly it would be circular to use this as an argument in support of my thesis.

I would suggest then that when Macrobius says that the ‘matura aetas’ of Servius and Avienus fell after the ‘saeculum’ of Praetextatus, this implies that he was writing not ten years or less after Praetextatus' death, but a full generation after, when Servius and Avienus were both established figures in the scholarly world. In all probability after the publication of Servius' commentary. The very phrase ‘saeculum Praetextati’ suggests of itself that its writer lived in a different ‘saeculum’.

VII

This raises a point which has never been properly considered before. How many of the interlocutors were still alive when the Saturnalia was published? On the communis opinio all but Praetextatus and Flavian.

But let us consider once more the words in which Macrobius compares the interlocutors of the Saturnalia with those of the De Republica:

‘Neque enim Cottae, Laelii, Scipiones … Praetextatos vero, Flavianos, Albinos, Symmachos et Eustathios, quorum splendor similis et non inferior virtus est, eodem modo loqui aliquid licitum non erit.’

When Cicero wrote the De Republica, its interlocutors were all long since dead. In fact, though in some of his dialogues Cicero cast himself and his friends as interlocutors, he had originally intended ‘neminem includere in dialogos eorum qui viverent’ (Att. xiii, 19, 3). And he never mixes the living with the dead (as, on the conventional view, Macrobius did). In choosing contemporary interlocutors there was always the risk of giving offence to those left out:⁴⁶ witness Cicero's rewriting of the Academica to substitute Varro for Brutus when he heard that Varro had been dropping hints to Atticus that he would like to be represented—and his hesitation at the last moment whether or not to write Brutus back in again.⁴⁷ Tacitus thought it wiser to omit from his Dialogus the great Regulus, still alive and powerful, and confine himself to those who were safely dead.⁴⁸

Now for his De Republica Cicero deliberately chose the circle of Scipio as, in his judgment, the last great men of the golden age of Rome; men at once clarissimi et sapientissimi (i, 13) and better suited than any now living to expound this most important subject to a generation sadly in need of such instruction. Surely Macrobius chose Praetextatus and his circle for precisely the same reason. Like Cicero he was evoking the great names of the past, the last great men before the collapse of paganism which followed their death, leading inexorably (or so at any rate pagans naturally believed) to the sack of Rome in 410 and the dismemberment of the Western Empire. Macrobius' use of the plural is significant: ‘Praetextatos, Flavianos …’ Men like Praetextatus and Flavian; they were symbolical figures, standing for the golden age now past. And surely when Macrobius wrote they were all dead.

Symmachus died c. 402.⁴⁹ Publilius Caeonius Caecina Albinus, Symmachus' exact contemporary, was still alive in 403, when Jerome referred to him as senex (ep. 107): probably therefore he did not live very much longer. Euangelus was still alive in 397 (Symmachus, ep. vi, 7): and it would have been most unkind of Macrobius to draw Euangelus such a boor while the unfortunate man was still alive. Caecina Decius Albinus was certainly alive in 402, when, still a young man, he is attested as city prefect. Postumianus was still alive in 395, but since his grandfather was consul in 314, he must presumably have been quite old by then.⁵⁰ Horus, a boxer before he turned to philosophy, was an Olympic victor in 364,⁵¹ when he must presumably have been in his twenties. Caeonius Rufius Albinus was still alive in 416.⁵² It is unlikely that Eustathius, Eusebius or Dysarius lived longer than this. Eustathius was a close friend of Flavian (i, 6, 4,) and so probably in the same age group: Flavian was fifty in 384. And it is clear from vi, 10, 1 that Eusebius and Dysarius were both past middle age in 384. Servius and Avienus, on the other hand, both only in their 'teens in 384, may well have lived till 420 or later. But the last date to which an interlocutor is known to have lived (and we have no reason to suppose that he died immediately afterwards) is 416. If I am right, then this is a terminus post quem for the composition of the Saturnalia.

VIII

One other argument which has been used to support an early date for the Saturnalia may now be considered. It has sometimes been contended that it must have been published before Servius' commentary on Vergil, because there is no sign that Macrobius made use of Servius' work, which, in view of their common concern with Vergil, he surely would have, had it been available. This is a curious argument, for its converse is equally valid—or invalid. One could just as plausibly argue that Macrobius must have written after Servius because there is no sign that Servius made use of Macrobius. Though Servius does not indicate his debt to earlier commentators by scrupulous documentation of sources (this was not expected of commentators in antiquity), and usually only mentions them to refute them (a trick not confined to ancient commentators), he does at least mention them sometimes. And since there are passages of Vergil about which he and Macrobius held different opinions, it is only natural to suppose that he would have mentioned Macrobius, if only to refute him, had the Saturnalia appeared only a few years before his commentary. He mentions other contemporary writers on Vergil, such as Avienus.⁵³ But if Servius betrays no knowledge of Macrobius, Macrobius certainly knew of Servius. The very fact that he was prepared to commit an anachronism to have him as an interlocutor is sufficient proof of this. Moreover he praises him as ‘litteratorum omnium longe maximus’ (i, 24, 20)—though to avoid too flagrant an anachronism he adds that he was ‘inter grammaticos recens professus’ (i, 2, 15)—and makes him discourse, appropriately enough, on Vergil.

Georgii points out that the interpretations Macrobius puts in Servius' mouth bear no particular relation to those advanced by Servius in his commentary, and sometimes actually contradict them. Surely, he argues, Macrobius would at least have ascribed to Servius opinions held by Servius (however much he might have disagreed with them himself) had Servius' commentary been published by the time he wrote. This argument is not so impressive as it might seem. Galen, the famous physician, is one of Athenaeus' interlocutors. Yet although the Deipnosophists was published probably after Galen's death, and certainly after he had written most of his very voluminous works, not a trace of any of the sentiments he expressed in those works can be found in what Athenaeus chose to put in his mouth in the Deipnosophists.⁵⁴ And Cicero so flagrantly misrepresented Brutus' views on the neo-atticist controversy in his Brutus that Brutus protested.⁵⁵ Gorgias and Phaedo are said to have disowned completely the sentiments ascribed to them by Plato in the dialogues named after them.⁵⁶ Very likely Macrobius simply did not bother to check that the opinions he had ascribed to Servius (some of which he took straight from Gellius) squared with what Servius had written in his own commentary. This sort of thing does not seem to have mattered very much in a dialogue (‘nosti modum dialogorum’, as Cicero remarked when accused of misrepresenting his interlocutors). Many of the opinions Macrobius ascribed to Praetextatus, Avienus and his other characters are likewise transcribed more or less word for word from the pages of Gellius, Porphyry or Serenus Sammonicus and can at best have represented the true opinions of those characters only very approximately.⁵⁷

The balance of probability is surely then that the Saturnalia was published after Servius' commentary (which can hardly have appeared much before 410, and may be later).⁵⁸

IX

R.-E. van Weddingen has recently drawn attention to a significant parallel between Macrobius' Commentary and Favonius Eulogius' Disputatio de Somnio Scipionis.⁵⁹ In the passages in question both writers are commenting on the music of the spheres: Macrobius has comparatively little to say in proportion to the scale of his commentary as a whole, while Favonius devotes a disproportionate amount of space to a highly technical disquisition on musical theory. He introduces his chapter by comparing the elements of music to the elements of ordinary speech, which consists of nomina and verba, which in turn are composed of syllabae and litterae: in his exposition he uses technical terms like nete and hypate (xxii, 1 f.). Macrobius announces that ‘nec … quia fecit in hoc loco Cicero musicae mentionem, occasione hac eundum est per universos tractatus qui possunt esse de musica’: for him ‘tractatus succinctus … qua licuit brevitate sufficiet. nam netas et hypatas … percurrere … et quid in sonis pro littera, quid pro syllaba, quid pro integro nomine accipiatur adserere, ostentantis est, non docentis’ (ii, 4, 11). The conclusion seems inescapable that Macrobius is criticizing Favonius for treating this passage in the Somnium as an opportunity to display his own erudition, instead of simply interpreting Cicero.⁶⁰

Unfortunately the date of Favonius' Disputatio cannot be fixed exactly. Van Weddingen places it some time between 390 and 410, Courcelle is prepared to descend as late as 426.⁶¹ And while it may have been written in 390, we cannot rule out a date nearer 426. Nor need Macrobius' Commentary have been written immediately after the appearance of the Disputatio. And the Saturnalia was written after the Commentary.⁶²

X

It has always been taken as axiomatic that Macrobius was himself a contemporary and acquaintance of Praetextatus, Flavian and Symmachus. But what is the evidence? All those represented as interlocutors in the Saturnalia either belonged or (from the point of view of chronology) could have belonged to the circle of Praetextatus and Symmachus. Decius Albinus was still only a young man at Praetextatus' death, but will probably have known Praetextatus through his father. Avienus and Servius were a little younger and may never actually have known Praetextatus himself, though Servius may perhaps be the Servius to whom Symmachus addressed one letter (ep. viii, 60). Many of the other interlocutors are either mentioned in Symmachus' letters or actually received letters from him.

But not Macrobius. There are no Macrobii (and no suitable Theodosii) mentioned anywhere in Symmachus' extensive correspondence. Yet if Macrobius had really been an intimate of Symmachus it is surely very strange that his name does not occur among the one hundred and thirty-four⁶³ correspondents of Symmachus whose names are preserved. And if the Saturnalia had been published during Symmachus' lifetime, it is even harder to explain Symmachus' failure to mention it. Symmachus was a vain man, who prided himself above all on his literary culture. Had he known of the high compliment paid him in the Saturnalia, where he is represented as one of the most learned and cultured men of the day and his house in Rome chosen as a venue for Macrobius' gathering, it passes belief that he refrained from commenting on it in a letter to one or more of the other interlocutors—the Albini, for example. And the same would apply if, as Türk for example claims, the Symmachus to whom Macrobius dedicated his De differentiis had been Q. Aurelius Symmachus. It can hardly be argued that Symmachus' silence is due to mere chance. For almost two-thirds of his 900 surviving letters belong to the period between 395 and his death in 402 or 403⁶⁴—precisely the period in which the composition of the Saturnalia is usually set. Many of these letters were addressed to his own son-in-law, the younger Flavian, whose father features prominently in the Saturnalia. It may surely be regarded as certain that the Saturnalia was not published—or even projected—during Symmachus' lifetime.

Yet Macrobius was certainly the friend of a Symmachus (cf. the dedication ‘Theodosius Symmacho suo’). With Q. Aurelius Symmachus himself ruled out, presumably one of the numerous later Symmachi, his son, nephew or grandson. This of itself is an argument for a later floruit for Macrobius—especially since the De differentiis was probably written before both Commentary and Saturnalia (see n. 72).

In all probability then the Saturnalia did not appear till after the posthumous publication of Symmachus' Letters (between 402 and 408⁶⁵). If so, then it would hardly be surprising if, like modern scholars, Macrobius had turned to them for information on Symmachus and his friends. For example, what made him choose Euangelus for the villain of his piece? Could it be because Symmachus mentions in a letter an Euangelus whose ‘incautus animus’ got him into trouble (ep. vi, 7)? And what made him choose Dysarius for his doctor and Horus for his philosopher? Could it be because Symmachus had referred to an ‘amicissimus vir’ Dysarius who ‘inter professores medendi summatem iure obtinet locum’ (ep. iii, 37)? And in a letter to the elder Flavian himself Symmachus writes that Horus ‘philosophus vita atque eruditione praecipuus, iam diu mihi carus et amicus est et inter prima numerat dona fortunae si optimis quibusque iungatur’ (ep. ii, 39)—a wish that Macrobius certainly fulfilled for him.

It should also be borne in mind that Macrobius does not represent himself as an interlocutor, not even as one of the non-participants who open the proceedings in typically Platonic style by being told what happened by one of the guests. Now surely if Macrobius had been a member of Praetextatus' circle, if he had himself attended gatherings such as the one he depicts with such admiration and reverence in the Saturnalia, then he would not have missed the opportunity of naming himself among Praetextatus' guests, even if only with all due modesty. … It has been suggested to me that he may have not done so because he did not feel himself the social equal of such as Symmachus and Praetextatus. But then neither were humble grammarians, rhetors and doctors like Servius, Eusebius and Dysarius.⁶⁶ I suspect that Macrobius' reason was the same as Cicero gave for not including himself in his De Oratore, ‘puero me hic sermo inducitur, ut nullae esse possent partes meae’ (Att. xiii, 14, 4).

XI

Georgii's dating of the Saturnalia to 395 is particularly unlikely. It would have been exceedingly tactless and needlessly provocative for anyone writing then to have chosen Flavian as a protagonist, only a year after his defeat by Theodosius and suicide in September, 394.⁶⁷ Even more so to have assigned him a long discourse on—of all things!—the various sorts of sacrificial victims and methods of sacrificing (iii, 1-9). Readers would have recalled with amusement or distress (according as they were Christians or pagans) his lavish but fruitless sacrifices before the fateful battle on the River Frigidus. It is hardly conceivable that this was written immediately after Flavian's death, in the period when his son, the younger Flavian, was living in retirement and disgrace, his life spared on condition that he was baptized a Christian.

That the Saturnalia is a pagan work is undeniable. Indeed it has often been claimed as a work of pagan propaganda: one recent writer has gone so far as to call it a pagan ‘machine de guerre’.⁶⁸ Now if it had been published in 395 this is certainly what might have been expected of a work which featured as dramatis personae Praetextatus, Flavian and Symmachus—names which at that time could not help but evoke the struggle over the altar of Victory and the defeat of the pagan cause on the Frigidus.

But it would be a very curious sort of propaganda for this period of crisis, when the tension between paganism and Christianity was crystallized as never before. Macrobius could so easily (say) have assigned Symmachus a speech on the history and significance of the cult of Victoria. But what do we find instead? The first subject discussed by this notorious band of die-hard pagans is the genitive plural of the word Saturnalia. Then they pass on to etymology: Janus and Diana are really the same, the letter D often being added to I ‘causa decoris’. The Ides are so named because that is the time we see the full moon, ‘a videndo … quod Graeci ιδεĩν dicunt (i, 15, 16)’. Much is said on the language, learning and sources of Vergil, Roman pontifical lore, humour, food, drink and pseudo-scientific curiosities.⁶⁹ Much of this could have come straight from Gellius—indeed much of it does, unacknowledged.

In a sense, of course, this antiquarianism was bound up with the traditions of the pagan past. But there is no suspicion of polemic, nothing at all to offend the most narrow-minded Christian. Indeed there is more to offend the pagans of 395. The section on Hercules Victor (Sat. iii, 6, 9 f.) and the statement that Hercules ‘humano generi virtutem … praestat’ (ib. i, 20, 6) would have rung very hollow in the ears of a 395 audience, who would at once have recalled (the Christians among them with glee) that Hercules had been the blazon on Flavian's standards for the battle of the Frigidus: and that after the battle the victorious Theodosius had ‘derided the image of Hercules and the fruitless courage it had inspired’.⁷⁰ Could any pagan who had lived through the Frigidus have written this?

It is often claimed that there is an allusion to Christianity in the name of Euangelus, and that this is why he is represented as such a boor. But his boorishness is sufficiently accounted for by the role … in which he is cast, the uninvited guest who disagrees with and provokes the other guests—a regular feature of every literary symposium.⁷¹ And if my explanation of how Macrobius came to choose him for this role (above p. 34) is correct, then it is no more than a coincidence that he happens to bear the name Euangelus.

Significant, too, is Sat. ii, 4, 11, where Macrobius, alone among pagan writers, alludes to the story of the murder of the Innocents (‘pueros, quos in Syria Herodes rex Iudaeorum intra bimatum iussit interfici’). Now the obvious (and in later times well-worn) line for the opponent of Christianity was to reject this story, unsupported as it is by any non-Christian (especially anti-Herod) source, and convict Matthew (ii, 16) of falsehood. Yet not only does Macrobius not do this: he writes as though he could expect his readers to take the story for granted. A bad slip for a pagan propagandist.

If then he did not intend to exploit their paganism, why did Macrobius choose the interlocutors he did? Surely because he chose them not (or at any rate not primarily) for their paganism, but for their erudition: because he was writing a generation after their death, when they were remembered not so much for their part in the abortive last pagan revival, as for being the last generation of Roman senators to live up to the Ciceronian ideal of viri at once clarissimi et sapientissimi (cf. De Rep. i, 13).

We are fortunate enough to possess a most instructive parallel to this attitude in the inscription to the statue erected in honour of the elder Flavian in the Forum of Trajan in 431 (CIL vi, 1782). It was in that year that the younger Flavian, then in his seventies, succeeded in obtaining from Valentinian III the official rehabilitation of his father. It is clear that by 431 all had been forgiven and forgotten. Flavian's disgrace, we read, was brought about by ‘caeca insimulatio’ and ‘livor improborum’. He is no longer an impious pagan who rebelled against his Emperor, but ‘inlustris et sanctissimae aput omnes recordationis’.

More significant, we find precisely this idealization of Flavian as one of the last great men of a Golden Age now past that we have observed in the Saturnalia. Through Flavian, say the Emperors in whose name the statue is dedicated,

‘locupletioris adhuc reipublicae bona vel adservata vel etiam aucta … gaudete ergo nobiscum, patres conscripti, optimo imperii nostri opere, ut nobiscum recognoscitis, et redditam vobis esse et patriae senatoris eius memoriam, et dignitatem probate, cuius consortio clariores fuistis et in posteris eius eadem aput nos reverentia vigetis.’

Men who had witnessed the sack of Rome, the loss of Spain and Gaul to the Sueves and Goths and of Africa to the Vandals, could now look back on Flavian and forget his paganism and treason, and remember only that he had been one of those great men of a ‘locupletior respublica’. He was one of the ‘saeculum Praetextati’, those last Romans of old Rome who had died too soon to see ‘the triumph of barbarism and religion’. It is in this context and from this viewpoint that Macrobius conjured up ‘Praetextatos … Flavianos, Albinos …’, just as Cicero had the circle of Scipio.

In the 430's the non-militant and sentimentally pagan atmosphere of the Saturnalia becomes at once both intelligible and indeed characteristic of the period. For in the years following the sack of Rome pagans and luke-warm Christians alike began seriously to wonder whether it was after all just a coincidence that the fall of Rome and the loss of the Western Empire had followed so soon after the disestablishment of the pagan cults and priesthoods—just as Symmachus had so eloquently foretold. So they turned back to look once more at those time-honoured traditions that the Christian Emperors had so intolerantly (and perhaps unwisely) cast aside. And it was precisely this reaction, this sentimental anti-quarianism and nostalgic idealization of the past, that inspired St. Augustine to fight back with the same weapons and write his Civitas Dei.

But we must be careful not to overestimate the consciously pagan element in the Saturnalia (or even the Commentary). Much had changed in the thirty-seven years between the death and rehabilitation of the elder Flavian. The ‘patres conscripti’ addressed by the Emperors in 431 were now almost all Christian—even the Symmachi and Albini. The younger Flavian himself had been a Christian since 394. But this did not mean that the ideals of the pagan past were rejected by the new generation. One of the most striking and important aspects of this Christianization of the Roman aristocracy is that ‘the secular traditions of the senatorial class, traditions which one might have assumed to be intimately bound up with the fate of their pagan beliefs, came to be continued by a Christian aristocracy’.⁷²

Macrobius' primary purpose in writing the Saturnalia was to provide a ready and readable compendium of ‘quicquid … in diversis seu Graecae seu Romanae linguae voluminibus elaboratum est’ (i, 1, 2), for the reason which he puts into the mouth of Servius, ‘quia saeculum nostrum ab Ennio atque omni bibliotheca vetere descivit’ (vi, 9, 9). The fact that this attempt to turn men's minds back to the heritage of the civitas terrena might turn them away from the promise of the Civitas Dei, may not have been the consideration which weighed most heavily with him. The pagan past is idealized on every page: but because it is past, not because it is pagan. And while there is no need to deny that he was himself a pagan, equally there is no need to assume that he was aiming at an exclusively pagan audience.⁷³ Indeed, had the Saturnalia been pagan propaganda aimed at a pagan audience, it is strange that it should have been so popular throughout the Christian Middle Ages.

Now if Macrobius is to be identified with Theodosius, praetorian prefect of Italy in 430, then it is probably fair to deduce that he had not published either Commentary or Saturnalia by 430, since before then he did not hold the illustrissimate securely attested for their author.⁷⁴ The composition of the Saturnalia is then to be placed precisely in the period following the rehabilitation of an idealized Flavian. It is unnecessary (and would be implausible) to suppose that Macrobius wrote at the instigation of the younger Flavian. There is no trace of apologia for Flavian, nor is he singled out in any way from the other interlocutors. But it does seem reasonable to conjecture that it was in part at least as a result of Flavian's spectacular rehabilitation in 431 that it occurred to Macrobius to cast the material he had been collecting for a number of years (cf. i, 1, 2) into a dialogue conducted by those last great men of the ‘locupletior respublica’. It is suggestive too—and perhaps more than coincidental—that so many of the contemporaries of the prefect of 430 should have had forbears who appear in the Saturnalia. The prefect of Italy in 431 was the younger Flavian, in 429 Volusianus, son of Rufius Albinus, in 430, Theodosius' immediate successor, Decius Aginatius Albinus, son, nephew and grandson respectively of the three Albini of the Saturnalia.⁷⁵ And Macrobius, it will be recalled, was the friend of a descendant of Q. Aurelius Symmachus. We have seen already how Macrobius chose some of his minor interlocutors (p. 34): we can now see why he chose the aristocrats he did—and why the Albini are so well represented.

If I am correct in arguing that Macrobius did not include any living persons among his interlocutors, then an interesting consequence may follow. The younger Flavian was born c. 358,⁷⁶ and so c. 26 in 384, perfectly old enough to debate ‘de rebus arduis’. Moreover he was a scholar and man of letters like his father.⁷⁷ Why then is he not among the interlocutors of the Saturnalia with his father? The Caeonii Albini, father and son, are both represented, though Decius Albinus was nowhere near so distinguished a scholar as the younger Flavian and was, moreover, not so old as him in 384. Could it be that Flavian was not included because at the time Macrobius wrote he was still alive? His absence needs to be explained, and this is the only satisfactory explanation I can find. If so, then the Saturnalia was probably not written very long after 431, when Flavian was already seventy-three.

XII

The name of the son to whom both Saturnalia and Commentary are dedicated is Eustachius or Eustathius: editors usually print Eustachius, but several of the earliest MSS. of both works give Eustathius, and since ‘c’ and ‘t’ are almost indistinguishable in minuscule hands, it is hardly possible to be dogmatic on the point. With engaging lack of consistency these same editors all print Eustathius for the name of the interlocutor, despite the fact that in MSS. he is equally often called Eustachius (see Willis on Sat. i, 6, 4, etc.)—and in the same MSS., moreover, which call Macrobius' son ‘Eustachius’. More sensible, surely, to print Eustathius (by far the commoner name) in both cases.

Now in 462 we find as city prefect of Rome a certain Plotinus Eustathius.⁷⁸ Plotinus would be a peculiarly appropriate name for a neoplatonist philosopher and keen admirer of the great Lycopolitan (cf. Comm. i, 8, 5) to have given his son. But there is a much weightier reason for accepting the identification. For it is precisely a generation later that we find Macrobius Plotinus Eudoxius collaborating with Memmius Symmachus over an edition of Macrobius' Commentary. It is generally agreed that this man must have been a descendant of Macrobius. Is he not, more precisely, the son of Plotinus Eustathius and grandson of Macrobius? So far as I know there are no other Plotini among the fifth-century Roman aristocracy—nor is it a name one would expect to find there very often. The following stemma is too attractive not to be true: but to be true it is necessary for Macrobius' floruit to fall not earlier than c. 430—welcome confirmation of the identification with the praetorian prefect of that year. It may be added that the preface to the Saturnalia implies that Eustathius was only a boy at the time of writing; on my date for the work this would make him about forty when he was city prefect.

Macrobius Ambrosius Theodosius, praetorian prefect 430

❙

Plotinus Eustathius, city prefect 462

❙

Macrobius Plotinus Eudoxius, v.c., friend of the consul for 485

XIII

It is widely held that the Saturnalia paints a faithful first-hand picture of the interests and ideals of the circle of Symmachus. Indeed the most recent study of the Saturnalia has for a sub-title ‘Eine Untersuchung über die Bildungsbestrebungen im Symmachuskreis’.⁷⁹ But if the arguments adduced above have any validity, this view must now be abandoned. Macrobius saw the ‘saeculum Praetextati’ through the rose-coloured spectacles of one who had heard of it only from old men (among them no doubt the younger Flavian) who sadly contrasted the iron days of the present with the golden days of their youth.

We must then make allowances for this idealization of the protagonists of the Saturnalia. And not only this. It has not escaped notice that Ammianus Marcellinus paints a strikingly different picture of the pursuits of the Roman aristocracy at the end of the fourth century:⁸⁰ degenerate, haughty, avaricious drones, interested only in racing, dicing and eating, men who locked up their libraries like the family vault, ‘detestantes ut venena doctrinas’. What has not been noticed is that Macrobius praises his chosen band for precisely those virtues which according to Ammian they so conspicuously lacked.

For example, Ammian criticizes the aristocrats for their cruel, unfeeling treatment of their slaves (xxviii, 4, 16). Macrobius puts an eloquent high-minded plea for a more humane attitude (taken from Seneca, ep. 47) into the mouth of Praetextatus (i, 11, 1-50). Yet it is Ammian, not Macrobius, who more accurately reflects the attitudes of at any rate Symmachus, which, as his own letters reveal, ‘ranges from callous cruelty to a sort of vexation at having to bother with such fellows’.⁸¹

Ammian attacks their lavish and ostentatious banquets (xxvii, 4, 13; xiv, 6, 16). Macrobius dwells time and again on the frugal, unpretentious character of the meals his heroes eat: why, they did not even know the meaning of some of the extravagant menus they had read about in the books of the ancients (iii, 13, 2; 17, 12)!

Macrobius denies vigorously that any actor had ever darkened the portals of Praetextatus and his friends (ii, 1, 7; iii, 14, 11 f.). According to Ammian their houses echoed continually with the sound of singing and music, and ‘pro philosopho cantor, et in locum oratoris doctor artium ludicrarum accitur’ (xiv, 6, 18).

Ammian complains that in their exclusiveness they despised anyone born outside the pomerium: they would expel an ‘honestus advena’ (that is Ammian himself) from the city in time of food shortage⁸²—but allow foreign dancing-girls to stay! Macrobius took care to include among Praetextatus' guests three Greeks and even an Egyptian. And he particularly stresses that no one had ever seen a dancing-girl in any of their houses.

It is hard to resist the conclusion that Macrobius is deliberately rebutting Ammian's accusations. On any dating he will easily have been able to read Ammian's history, the last books of which appeared (in Rome) in about 392.⁸³ And what more natural than that he should have sought to answer Ammian's slashing denunciation of the very men he considered the last of the Romans?

We should do well to view with some suspicion this tendentious and idealized portrayal of the ‘saeculum Praetextati’ composed almost half a century after the death of its leading representative.

Notes

1. For his names see below, p. 26.

2. xvi, 10, 15, cf. viii, 5, 61: Vicar, it should be noted, not the non-existent post of ‘praetorian prefect of the Spains’ as given in virtually all editions and reference works from Gronovius (1670) down to Jan, Teuffel, Schanz, P-W, OCD, Sandys and Stahl (n. 5 below, p. 6), not to mention many less authoritative works. It is sad to think of three centuries of scholars copying this error from one another without ever looking up the original text.

3. xi, 28, 6.

4. vi, 8, 1.

5. See the authorities cited by W. H. Stahl, Macrobius' Commentary on the Dream of Cicero (New York, 1952), pp. 6 f., to which add, e.g., M. Fuhrmann, Philologus cvii, 1963, 308. I am at a loss to know from what source S. E. Stout, TAPA lxxxvi, 1955, 252, writes of Macrobius beginning in 390 ‘the political career which sixteen years later led to his assassination’.

6. Following the standard article by H. Georgii in Philologus lxxi, 1912, 518 f.

7. REL xxxiv, 1956, 232 f.

8. M. Fuhrmann, Philologus cvii, 1963, 301 f.

9. Magnus Maximus is the only Emperor who appointed a non-eunuch praepositus (Zosimus iv, 37, 2)—a short-lived experiment, for we soon find the eunuch Gallicanus as his praepositus. Cf. M. K. Hopkins, Proc. Camb. Phil. Soc. clxxxix (n.s. 9), 1963, 68.

10. cf. Stahl, op. cit. (n. 5), 4-5, and the works of Mras and Wissowa there cited. Note also the manner in which he introduces Greek words: cf. especially Sat. i, 15, 16, ‘quod Graeci ιδεĩν dicunt, nos v littera addita videre dicimus’; Comm. i, 5, 9, etc. Contrast Ammianus, who reveals that he is a Greek by using the first person in such explanatory phrases, e.g.: ‘Machina … quam ελεπολιν Graeci cognominamus’ (xxiii, 4, 10). Cf. CQ n.s. xiv, 1964, 324. It has been suggested to me that this point is not valid because the characters in the Saturnalia are (for the most part at any rate) Romans and would therefore have been made to speak as Romans even if their creator had been Greek. This might certainly apply for the Saturnalia, but Macrobius in fact uses nos meaning ‘we Latin-speakers’ far more often in the Comm., where he is speaking throughout in his own person. Cf. also § ii of my article cited in n. 18.

11. Macrobii Opera i (1848), p. 6. It would be perfectly natural for a man writing in Rome to say that Africa was ‘sub alio caelo’. At De Bello Gild. 2 Claudian calls Africa ‘alterius convexa poli’.

12. For the proconsul see the fanciful speculations of L. Leschi (Études d'épigr., d'archéol. et d'hist. Africaines, 1957, 132 f.) on the role of ‘le dernier proconsul paien d'Afrique’ in the Donatist controversy. The vicar was fined for misusing the cursus publicus (C. Th. viii, 5, 61), but this would have been forgotten ten years later. Cf. now A. Chastagnol, Les empereurs romains d'Espagne (1965), 277.

13. A. Chastagnol, [Les] Fastes [de la préfecture de Rome au Bas-Empire], 1962, 268-9.

14. AÉ 1912, no. 178: W. Ensslin, in P-W xiv, 2533, though cf. S. Mazzarino, Stilicone, 1942, 81, n. 6. Doubtless a relative of Flavius Macrobius Longinianus, whose brilliant career at court began in 399 (Chastagnol, Fastes, 255): it was normal for a man to take his relatives with him as he rose in the imperial service (cf. the notorious case of the family of Ausonius).

15. Preserved in most MSS. at the end of Bk. i of the Comm.: see Willis' ed., vol. ii, p. 94. Oddly enough Willis heads every other page throughout his edition ‘Ambrosii Theodosii Macrobii’, without explaining why he chose this particular combination.

16. Expos. Psalm., ed. Adriaen, Corp. Christ. I, 1958, 30, 20-1; 116, 125 f.

17. In Isag. Porph. i., CSEL xlviii, 1906, 31, 21 f.

18. cf. my article ‘Macrobius, Avienus and Avianus’ in CQ n.s. xvii, 1967.

19. cf. Chastagnol, Fastes 80-82.

20. Indeed if any of Macrobius' names is a signum, Macrobius itself would surely be at least as likely a candidate. It has the three normal characteristics of the signum: it is a Greek word, it means something, and it ends in -ius. And it is in fact found as a signum: ‘Flavius Paranius οκαι Μακροβίος’ (P. Oxy. 1303, a.d. 336), whereas, so far as I have been able to discover, Theodosius is not. At any rate it is not included by G. Évrard in her list of names beginning Theo- which are found as signa (Mél. d'arch. et d'hist. lxxiv, 1962, 624).

21. C. Th. xii, 6, 3: probably the Theodosius who was primicerius notariorum in 426 (cf. C. Th. vi, 2, 25). This identification was suggested in passing by S. Mazzarino, ‘La politica religiosa di Stilicone’, Rend. Ist. Lombardo, 1938, 255 f. a.d. 384 was the year of the death of Praetextatus: 485 is the year of Memmius Symmachus' consulate. In the subscriptio both he and Macrobius Plotinus Eudoxius are styled only ‘v.c.’ After his consulate Symmachus would have acquired, and would certainly have used, the title ‘v.c. et inl.’ (he was careful to give Macrobius Theodosius this title in the same subscriptio).

22. Laws were very frequently based on information supplied by the recipient: cf. A. H. M. Jones, Later Roman Empire 1 (1964), 351 f.

23. REL xxxiv, 1956, 232 f.

24. REL xxxvi, 1958, 214 f.

25. See n. 8.

26. At Ep. 48, 13 he lists ‘qui Ecclesiasticorum de impari numero disputarint: Clemens, Hippolytus, Origenes, Dionysius, Eusebius, Didymus’. The subject is treated in detail by W. H. Roscher, Hebdomadenlehren der griech. Philosophien und Ärzte (1906), and cf. F. E. Robbins, ‘The Tradition of Greek Arithmology’, Class. Phil. xvi, 1921, 97 f.

27. Favonius Eulogius, for example, writing at about the same time as Jerome, though independently of both Jerome and Macrobius, also refers to the Timaeus apropos of the properties of 7.

28. cf. for example, another contemporary writer, Calcidius, In Timaeum pp. 88, 16; 297, 9 Waszink, with the passages quoted by Waszink ad locc. In fact it is common to most arithmological treatises: cf. Robbins, op. cit. (n. 25), 121, and M. Sicherl, Abh. Mainz x, 1959, 704-5.

29. Courcelle, Lettres grecques [en occident ²], 1948, 88 f.

30. Harv. Studies xxv, 1914, 73 f.

31. H. Bloch, Conflict between Paganism and Christianity, ed. A. Momigliano, 1963, 208.

32. cf. J. Carcopino, Autour des Gracques (1928), 109, cf. 85.

33. As Macrobius himself explicitly comments at Comm. i, vii, 9; viii, 2.

34. Courcelle, Lettres grecques 10-11, following Wissowa, thinks that both Macrobius and Athenaeus were drawing on a common source; but Wissowa did not persuade J. Martin, Symposion: die Geschichte einer literarischen Form (1931), 286. The very fact that Macrobius does not name Athenaeus is suspicious: for it is his regular practice not to name the direct source of his information. For example he nowhere names either Gellius or Plutarch, both of whom he certainly used directly and extensively.

35. Kaibel, ed. of Athenaeus, i, 1887, xxxi f.

36. And there are several other parallels: Cicero's De Oratore is set shortly before the death of Crassus, and his De Senectute shortly before the death of Cato. cf. also Plato's Phaedo and Theaetetus (which has two dramatic dates, the first as Theaetetus is carried dying from battle).

37. A work with which Macrobius seems to have been familiar: cf. Courcelle, Lettres grecques 27 f.

38. C. Just. i, 54, 5.

39. F. Cavallera, Saint Jérôme i, 2, 1922, 23-4, argues that Praetextatus must have died before Pope Damasus (11th December) because the letters in which Jerome mentions Praetextatus' death (Epp. 23 and 39) do not also mention Damasus'. This is a reasonable, if not compelling inference, but even so it is unlikely that Macrobius would have been much concerned that Praetextatus had in fact died a week or two before rather than after the Saturnalia (and if he wrote as late as the 430's, he may well not have known to within a week when exactly P. did die).

40. vi, 7, 1; vii, 3, 23; i, 2, 15; vii, 11, 1; i, 2, 3.

41. Chastagnol, Fastes 257 f.

42. Philol. lxxi, 1912, 5.

43. GLK iv, 456.

44. Chastagnol, Fastes 246-7. In view of the rather lower date for Servius here suggested, I would now modify my view (Hermes xcii, 1964, 363 f.) that he was actually responsible for the late-fourth-century revival of interest in Juvenal and other ‘Silver Age’ Latin poets. He is a manifestation rather than the inspiration of this movement. I do not think that this affects the main course of my argument about the date of the movement as a whole, or my point about the Historia Augusta.

45. cf. my article cited n. 18 above.

46. cf. Pease, Cicero, Nat. Deor. i (1955), 25-6.

47. cf. Plasberg's preface to his Teubner ed., 1922, iii f.

48. ‘Artistic propriety and convention discountenanced the introduction of the living’: R. Syme, Tacitus i (1958), 108 (assuming a late dating for the Dialogus). cf. also Ovid, Trist. ii, 467-8, ‘praestantia candor nomina vivorum dissimulare iubet’.

49. cf. Seeck's ed., praef. pp. lxii-iii.

50. cf. Chastagnol, Latomus xx, 1961, 749 f.

51. Libanius, Epp. 1278, 1279.

52. The date of Rutilius' De Reditu: I hope to argue elsewhere for 416 rather than 417 or 415 (as recently argued by I. Lana in his Rutilio Namaziano, 1961, 1-104).

53. On Aen. x, 272; 388: cf. my article cited n. 18.

54. cf. Gulick, Loeb ed., i, 1927, xii.

55. cf. R. E. Jones, AJPh lx, 1939, 307 f.

56. Athenaeus 505 d-e.

57. Hence I am dubious of H. Bloch's claim (Harv. Theol. Rev. xxxviii, 1945, 207 f.) that the discourse assigned to Praetextatus in Sat. i, 17-24 represents Praetextatus' religious views rather than those of Porphyry … (Courcelle, Lettres grecques 17-20).

58. Servian scholars seem agreed that such parallels as there are between the Servian corpus and Macrobius are to be explained by use of a common source: cf. R. B. Lloyd, Harv. Studies lxv, 1961, 306. I am quite unconvinced by E. Türk's recent contention that Servius Danielis drew on Macrobius (REL xli, 1963, 327 f.).

59. In the preface to his edition (Coll. Lat. xxvii, 1957) 7, n. 2.

60. Courcelle (REL xxxvi, 1958, 211) argues that both are drawing on Calcidius' In Timaeum. But though Favonius certainly did (F. Skutsch, Philol. lxi, 1902, 196; J. H. Waszink, Studien zum Timaioskommentar i, 1964, 77, n. 1 and a letter to me dated 25th August, 1965), Macrobius equally certainly did not (Waszink, preface to his edition of Calcidius, 1962, xv; K. Mras, Sitzb. Berlin 1933, 255). And it is hard to believe that Favonius would have copied out Calcidius' already hackneyed simile in the way he did had he read Macrobius' polemic. The objections of M. Sicherl, Rh. Mus. cii, 1959, 355-8, are equally baseless.

61. REL 1958, 212-3, having argued that it was used by Augustine for the last book of the Civ. Dei. M. Sicherl's calculations in Abh. Mainz x, 1959, 668, are vitiated by his belief that the Superius consularis of Byzacena to whom the work is dedicated (whom Sicherl takes to have been a pupil of Favonius) was an ex-consul, instead of a rather lowly provincial governor! Moreover, his (in any case out of date) figure for the minimum consular age is applicable only for the principate. Superius is not otherwise attested.

62. G. Wissowa, De Macrobii Sat. Fontibus, Diss. Breslau 1880, 12. Sat. i, 24, 25, read in context, certainly need not imply that the Comm. had not yet been written (as Jan conjectured, vol. i, p. 13): cf. § iii of my article cited in n. 18.

63. This point was made by Mazzarino, op. cit. (n. 21), 256. For a convenient list of the correspondents, classified according to religion (54 pagan, 33 Christian, 47 uncertain), see J. A. McGeachy Jr., Class Phil. xliv, 1949, 226, n. 25.

64. Seeck, preface to his ed., p. lx.

65. Seeck, ib. p. xxiii.

66. It is natural to bracket Macrobius with Servius, but it must be remembered that Macrobius is not a mere grammaticus, but a high imperial official. There are many other examples of such dignitaries writing grammatical works in this period: cf. H.-I. Marrou, St. Augustin et la fin de la culture antique,⁴ 1958, 91-3.

67. As pointed out already by W. Hartke, Römische Kinderkaiser, 1951, 133, n. 1.

68. E. Türk, REL 1963, 348. I would now modify my remarks in JRS lv, 1965, 241 on the pagan character of the Sat.

69. For a good summary of the contents and character of the Saturnalia, cf. T. R. Glover, Life and Letters in the Fourth Century, 1901, 176 f., or T. Whittaker, Macrobius, 1923, ch. i.

70. Theodoret, HE v, 24; cf. H. Bloch, Harv. Theol. Rev. xxxviii, 1945, 236-7, with n. 94.

71. J. Martin, op. cit. (n. 33), 64.

72. P. R. L. Brown, JRS li, 1961, 4.

73. I cannot believe that Türk is right to see pagan propaganda in the representation of Vergil as ‘pontifex maximus’: as he himself admits (REL 1963, 348), this motif is common to Servius Danielis as well. It is arbitrary (and implausible: see n. 57) to claim that Servius Danielis derives from Macrobius.

74. By virtually all MSS.: not, however, by any of the MSS. carrying the excerpts from the De differentiis. Hence Jan conjectured, no doubt rightly (i, p. xv), that Macrobius wrote this book before his promotion. The MSS. of Aurelius Victor's Caesares similarly omit the title after his name—rightly, for although he held the illustrious post of prefect of Rome, he did not attain it till 389, while the Caesares appeared in 360 (in JRS liv, 1964, 14, I wrongly included Victor in a list of fourth-century writers whose MSS. do record such titles of rank).

75. See the fasti in J. Sundwall, Weströmische Studien (1915), 22.

76. Chastagnol, Fastes 239.

77. His edition of the first decade of Livy is attested by the famous subscriptio to be found at the end of Bks. 6, 7 and 8.

78. J. Sundwall, Weströmische Studien 1915, 74, no. 160.

79. E. Türk, Diss. Freiburg 1961 (unpublished).

80. F. Holmes Dudden, Life and Times of St. Ambrose i, 1935, 28 f., who accepts Macrobius' picture without reservations, reconciles it with Ammianus' by the simple assumption that they are writing about different sections of Roman society. But they purport to be writing about the same section, and it was precisely the absence of a literary circle such as Macrobius depicts which disillusioned Ammianus.

81. J. A. McGeachy Jr., Q. Aurelius Symmachus and Senatorial Aristocracy of the West, Diss. Chicago, 1942, 92.

82. cf. JRS liv, 1964, 27.

83. O. J. Maenchen-Helfen, AJPh lxxvi, 1955, 384 f.

    I am grateful to Professors A. Chastagnol, A. Momigliano and Sir Ronald Syme, and to P. R. L. Brown and J. F. Matthews for commenting on an earlier draft of this paper. It was read to the London Classical Society on 2nd March, 1966.