SOURCE: Levine, Philip. “The Continuity and Preservation of the Latin Tradition.” In The Transformation of the Roman World: Gibbon's Problem after Two Centuries, edited by Lynn White, Jr., pp. 206-31. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966.

[In the following excerpt, Levine discusses the importance of Vergil and other Latin writers in fourth-century Rome as evidenced by Macrobius and others.]

The long and notorious struggle of early Christianity for official recognition and ultimate ascendancy over traditional Roman paganism culminated during the fourth century in a series of momentous events. Historians of the period have carefully traced the course of this movement from the proclamation of the so-called Edict of Milan by Constantine in 312 or 313 on behalf of the Christians through the sequence of repressive measures instituted against the old religion by Constans and Constantius to the fatal thrust against the ancient state cult by Gratian in 382. It was in that year that the emperor, probably at the instigation of Pope Damasus, symbolically and financially obstructed the performance and maintenance of the public rites of worship in Rome. By his action, the altar that had stood in the Curia before the statue of Victory and received an offering of incense from the senators before each meeting was removed; at the same time, the Vestals and the Roman priests were deprived of their time-honored immunities and revenues.

The ramifications of these steps were far-reaching, for they struck at the very heart of what Romans had been traditionally indoctrinated from their most impressionable years to regard as a vital and essential part of their venerable heritage. The specific details of their polytheistic worship and the nature of their divinities need not be examined here, nor is it necessary to elaborate at length upon the curious, yet real, dichotomy that often existed between an enlightened Roman's public observance of ancestral divine rites and his private mental reservations or doubts regarding the very being or activity of their gods. This theological ambivalence or compartmentalization of thought and deed not infrequently gave rise to rather striking paradoxes. It allowed Cicero, for example, in his De Natura Deorum to represent a Roman high priest as inquiring skeptically into the very bases of religious belief and in his De Divinatione to portray himself, a member of the state augural college, as condemning the superstitious practices of divination, including augury. Their official priestly positions were apparently sufficient safeguards against charges of heresy. Hardly more than lip service seemed to be expected, and hence Romans like Pliny the Younger and Trajan at the beginning of the second century must have been puzzled as to why some early Christians would risk persecution or even death rather than pay formal tribute to their pagan rites.¹

The official attitude of the Romans was that they were a people whose successes were attributable to their gods and whose fortunes were dependent on their favor, which was to be secured through the proper worship of them. This tenet, frequently echoed in Latin literature, was hallowed by Virgil in his Aeneid and enshrined by Livy in his History of Rome in the Augustan Age.² Thus Rome's manifest destiny became intimately associated with and appeared inextricably bound to her ancestral religion, so that Gratian's restrictions, like those earlier of Constans and Constantius and later of Theodosius, constituted for the pagan aristocrats of that time a dire threat to the very foundations of their entire national heritage. This conflict of ideologies provoked the guardians of the old order to vindicate their position and labor to protect the continuity of their sacred tradition.

Gratian's ears were effectively stopped by Pope Damasus and Ambrose against the entreaties of the pagan senators; he would not even grant their delegation a hearing. But after his death in 383, Faustina, who exercised the regency on behalf of her young son, Valentinian II, found it advantageous to court the support of the pagan aristocracy, and she did so by appointing two of its leaders to high public office, naming Praetextatus pretorian prefect of Italy and Symmachus prefect of Rome. Thus, since the situation now seemed favorable for further action on the religious issue, Symmachus, seizing the opportunity, proceeded to Milan in 384 with a senatorial petition in his hands, and, in a famous address, which is preserved, made an impassioned plea for the revocation of Gratian's decrees of 382.³ He based his arguments on considerations of justice, tolerance, and present expediency, and eloquently reinforced them with touching appeals to ancestral tradition and poignant clichés of the past: Rome's success, prosperity, and safety, he held, were owing to and dependent on the observance of her ancient rites of worship. But Ambrose, like Augustine later, demolished these claims by hard logic and the evidence of historical realities.⁴ The petition was denied, as were similar ones brought later to Theodosius and Valentinian II. The revival of official paganism in Rome, fostered by the temporizing benefactions of Eugenius in 393, was short-lived, being decisively terminated by Theodosius' victory over the usurper on the river Frigidus on September 6, 394.

This familiar background of threat, challenge, and final defeat in the cause of their ancestral religion is essential to an understanding of the urgency attending the concern and efforts of the pagan aristocrats also to preserve other important aspects of their cultural heritage. Much of earlier Latin literature seems to have survived at least until the archaizing period of the Antonines, though it is by no means certain to what extent citations and allusions in Aulus Gellius' Noctes Atticae actually come from first-hand knowledge. The conservative curriculum of the Roman schools, with its emphasis on literature and rhetoric, contributed, as always, to the continuity of the Latin intellectual tradition, while the industry of legal scholars like Gaius under the Antonines and like Papinian, Ulpian, and Paulus under the Severi helped notably in the transmission of Rome's rich legacy in jurisprudence to posterity. But it was undeniably the religious crisis of the fourth century which kindled a keener consciousness of the country's glorious past and a deeper reverence for her sacred traditions in the hearts and minds of the pagan nobility.

Such, in fact, is the situation revealingly portrayed in Macrobius' literary dialogue Saturnalia, composed during this period. The terminus ante quem of its dramatic date is fixed by the death of Praetextatus, one of its chief participants, in 384. Following a fashion long ago established by Cicero in this genre, the author had the event take place on a Roman festival, as indicated by the very title, a significant detail designed to point up the fact that the learned discussions were held at a time of enforced leisure, when the interlocutors could not have been engaged in the performance of their state responsibilities or other serious business. Moreover, in casting the dramatis personae, Macrobius, like his predecessor Cicero, selected men of the highest distinction for the key roles, for their auctoritas would lend considerable weight and dignity to the occasion. His principal speakers included Vettius Agorius Praetextatus, Nicomachus Flavianus, and Aurelius Symmachus, all outstanding public figures and vigorous defenders of the old religion. Among others, young Servius, later renowned as a Virgilian critic and commentator, was also a member of the group. The work itself is replete with historical, philological, religious, and other antiquarian lore. The author's avowed purpose was educational, for his aim was to incorporate this mass of information in a convenient form for his son's instruction, even as Cato the Elder had put together a sort of encyclopedia for the edification of his boy centuries earlier. In the wholly pagan milieu of the dialogue, which vividly recalls the golden days of the Roman Republic, the contemporary Christian menace to the survival of the old Latin tradition can only be inferred from the profound sympathy and nostalgia expressed for things of the past.

Particularly striking and symptomatic of the pagan crisis is the elaborate treatment accorded to Virgil in the Saturnalia. As the poet par excellence of Rome's traditions, achievements, ideals, and aspirations in the Augustan Age, he occupied soon after his death a very privileged position among the writers of his country. Indeed, along with Horace, he suffered the fate of becoming a school textbook as early as the first century.⁵ But in Macrobius an aura of holiness and inviolability attaches to his memory, while his Aeneid is regarded almost as divinely inspired pagan scripture. Thus in Book 1 of the Saturnalia, when the brash Euangelus, a carping critic who serves as a foil to the others, comments unfavorably on the epic poem, Symmachus replies, in the shocked presence of the others, “Virgil's fame is such that it can be neither augmented by anyone's praise nor diminished by anyone's censure.”⁶ And a little later, when Symmachus disparages the myopic view of most teachers who confine their interpretation of the Aeneid to the elementary level of verbal exegesis, and indicates that a detailed study of Virgil's work will be a principal aim of the dialogue, he speaks of the poem in terms quite appropriate to Holy Writ. “Let us not,” he says, “allow the sanctuary of the sacred poem to lie concealed. Rather let us search out the entrance to its secret thoughts, unlock the inner shrine of its temple and make it accessible to the educated so that they may honor it with their worship.”⁷

Thus the aristocratic circle of Symmachus and his friends, in its efforts to maintain the ancient Roman heritage, did not restrict its activity to the religious front, where pagan catholicity and tolerance, as epitomized in the plea presented at Milan in 384, proved no match against a Catholicism completely intolerant of all other beliefs (see pp. 208-209, above). The Saturnalia shows the great importance attached at this time also to earlier Latin literature and to Virgil in particular. Herein, perhaps, lies the key to a palaeographical enigma that has long baffled scholars of the history of calligraphy in the West. The normal capital hand used in Latin manuscripts through the fourth and fifth centuries was the so-called rustic, an uppercase lettering whose thicker strokes were executed on a slanted axis (fig. 1). But in two fragmentary parchment codices of Virgil (figs. 2, 3), known as the Augusteus and the Sangallensis, the capital writing is extremely formal in aspect, with the thicker strokes drawn on an axis that tends, though not consistently, to be more vertical.⁸ This script seems strikingly epigraphical in character and is generally designated as square capital. Palaeographers, chiefly on intuitive grounds, have long been inclined to regard this elegant book hand, which appears to have been reserved exclusively for Virgil, as a peculiar phenomenon of the fourth or fifth century. They have not, however, been able to explain satisfactorily its appearance at such a date and the complete lack of evidence for its use prior to the fourth century on either papyrus or parchment. But in view of the intense desire of the pagan society depicted in Macrobius' Saturnalia to glorify Virgil and to exalt him to an almost saintly status, the idea of honoring the poet with a monumental script of his own may quite possibly have emanated from the circle of Symmachus. The square capital in the two manuscripts⁹ is an obvious tour de force, but the exquisitely beautiful lettering on contemporary inscriptions engraved for the Christian pontiff Damasus by his famed calligrapher Furius Dionysius Filocalus (fig. 4) could readily have furnished a model and provided the impulse for pagan scribes to imitate it as a special tribute to Virgil, whose profound knowledge of pontifical lore, according to Praetextatus in the Saturnalia, would, in fact, have fully qualified him as a pontifex maximus.¹⁰

However that may be, Symmachus and his group showed a remarkable interest in the condition and transmission of Livy's text. Like Virgil's Aeneid, Livy's prose epic of Rome's history served to ennoble his country's grand traditions, and for that reason must have appealed strongly to the patriotic sentiments of those pagans who were so intent on conserving their ancestral heritage. Indeed, Symmachus seems to have projected an edition of Livy's entire corpus, for in a letter to Valerianus in 401 he speaks of a gift of the historian's complete works that he had promised but was as yet unable to provide because of the delay occasioned by the task of emendation.¹¹ The magnitude of this undertaking is best appreciated when it is recalled that Livy's history comprised 142 books. How far Symmachus succeeded in accomplishing his purpose cannot now be ascertained, but the manner of procedure is discernible in three subscriptions preserved in later manuscripts of Livy's first decade. The evidence points clearly to a cooperative enterprise. One subscription, occurring at the end of each of the ten books, indicates that a certain Victorianus emended the text for the Symmachi. A second subscription, found at the end of Books 6, 7, and 8, shows that Nicomachus Flavianus, the son-in-law of Symmachus, also helped to improve the text, while a third, recorded in Books 3, 4, and 5, reveals that Nicomachus Dexter, the son of Nicomachus Flavianus, also participated in Symmachus' grandiose scheme.¹²

Other early subscriptions of this sort, transmitted in medieval copies of older exemplars, give concrete proof that more Latin authors had benefited from similar editorial activity around the time of the pagan religious crisis. Among those whose works are known to have been emended during that period are Juvenal, Apuleius, Persius, Martial, Quintilian, and Nonius.¹³ In almost every instance, some connection between the editor and the senatorial aristocracy can be established. Moreover, this work of text recension must have been much more extensive than surviving subscriptions indicate, for their preservation in later manuscripts was more a matter of chance than of policy. Thus present knowledge of the editorial efforts of Vettius Praetextatus, the distinguished pagan aristocrat who vigorously supported the cause of the old religion and played a major role in Macrobius' Saturnalia, comes only from a poem addressed to him by his wife Paulina, in which she specifically alludes to his emendation of both Greek and Latin texts in poetry and prose.¹⁴

There is no reason to assume that the scholarship done in the improvement of an author's text was necessarily very sophisticated in those days. Generally it involved no more than the collation of one manuscript, perhaps a recent copy, with one or more others presumed or hoped to be better. Errors in transcription, whether of commission or omission, could thus be discovered and rectified; brief exegetical notes and simple punctuation might at times be supplied. On occasion, as in the case of Persius, emendation was attempted without recourse to another manuscript,¹⁵ but in such instances probably only the most obvious verbal errors were corrected.

The importance, however, of such recension for posterity extends far beyond the elementary level of textual criticism on which it operated. This work assured the survival of earlier Latin writers at a very crucial point in history, for the general chaos and intellectual sterility of the third century doubtless imperiled the continuity of their transmission from the preceding period of the Antonines. Moreover, although the distinct advantages of the parchment codex over the papyrus roll were known and celebrated by the poet Martial as early as the last quarter of the first century,¹⁶ still the Romans were not at all inclined at first to adopt this convenient format for their literary texts. This reluctance may be attributed in great part to a common conservatism which naturally favors the retention of conventional practices regardless of the merits of an innovation. The humble origins of the parchment codex, which developed from the waxed tablet through the intermediate stage of the parchment notebook, probably militated against its acceptance for belles lettres. Existing evidence indicates that while the new format was employed for Christian theological writing from at least the middle of the second century and for juridical material from the middle of the third century, large-scale transference of pagan literature from the roll to the codex did not take place until the fourth century.¹⁷ It cannot be determined what part, if any, the religious crisis played in expediting the changeover, but the fact is that the codex form was available and became generally used for literature about the time when circumstances were already requiring the pagan aristocracy to inventory its ancestral heritage and concern itself with the problem of recovering, salvaging, and preserving all that it could of its sacred tradition. The written Latin word was no less an integral part of that tradition than the ancient Latin worship, and the testimony of subscriptions in the manuscripts proves that literary texts were also treated with an appropriate reverence.

The striking paradox is, of course, that the defeat of Roman paganism in religion, where, in fact, it had the least of enduring worth to offer to posterity, facilitated and confirmed the success of its struggle for survival in other areas. Roman schooling, with its strong emphasis on grammar, including literature, and rhetoric, provided the basic framework and vehicle for the continuity of the Latin intellectual tradition. In this connection, mention should be made of Martianus Capella's curious allegorical handbook, which was probably composed early in the fifth century. This work, called Liber De Nuptiis Mercurii et Philologiae by Fulgentius in 520, enjoyed an enormous vogue for some eight centuries, and, since it was essentially a compendium of previous instruction in the seven liberal arts and provided the bases for the later Trivium (grammar, dialectic, rhetoric) and Quadrivium (geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, music), it well illustrates the enduring quality of the traditional classical education.

The Christian Latin apologists, who were pagan men of letters before their conversion, derived some of their most powerful weapons from their classical training to defend their adopted faith and attack their foes. Thus, in the middle of the second century or perhaps in the first part of the third, Minucius Felix, a lawyer by profession, wrote an engaging dialogue entitled Octavius, perhaps the earliest monument of Christian Latin literature. In this work, the author deftly used Cicero's literary art and much of his language to dramatize a discussion that culminated in the conversion of a pagan intellectual to the new religion. Probably at about the same time as Minucius Felix, Tertullian, also a lawyer, fulminated against pagans and all other dissidents from his views with a bombastic violence that was the reductio ad absurdum of Latin rhetorical instruction. Again, early in the fourth century, Arnobius, a rhetorician of note, made an assault on ancient paganism in a colorful style laced with constant reminiscences of the Epicurean poet Lucretius, while his distinguished pupil Lactantius, a professor of rhetoric under Diocletian and later tutor to Constantine's son Crispus, upheld Christianity and interpreted it to the educated Roman society with a wide array of classical learning and in an impressive Ciceronian manner. Neither Arnobius nor Lactantius hesitated to apply to Christ Lucretius' eulogistic utterances on Epicurus.¹⁸ In these instances, as in many others, the best energies of intellectuals who were early nurtured on and thoroughly imbued with the Latin tradition were directed not only away from paganism but against it and to the support of Christianity.

Nevertheless, despite the official recognition of Christianity by Constantine and its formal victory over the old religion during the course of the fourth century, the Roman pagan and the Roman Christian still continued to receive the same traditional schooling in grammar, literature, and rhetoric. The fact is that the Latin Church had no suitable works with which to replace the pagan school texts, and a secular education remained a precondition for religious instruction. This situation, which persisted also through the fifth century and even later, has an important bearing on the apparent contradictions of attitude on the part of the Christian fathers toward pagan culture. The dilemma that confronted them can already be discerned in the ambivalence of Tertullian, who savagely attacked pagan literature on the one hand and recognized the necessity of its study on the other. Thus, in his De Idololatria he inveighs against schoolteachers and professors of literature for their traffic with manifold idolatry. He would forbid the Christian from teaching literature, since this would imply a personal commitment to its pagan substance, but allows a believer in Christ to be exposed to it, since “without secular studies divine studies cannot be pursued.”¹⁹ The religious indoctrination that the learner presumably received at home would help him to reject whatever conflicted with his faith. Tertullian's assault on pagan philosophy is well known. In a characteristic outburst he rhetorically asks, “What is there in common between Athens and Jerusalem, the Academy and the Church, heretics and Christians?”²⁰ The implications of this question were destined to haunt the conscience and occupy the attention of the Church fathers for a long time to come.

In the latter half of the fourth century, Ambrose, the reluctant bishop of Milan and prominent antagonist in the dramatic episode of the pagan religious revival, demonstrated how, in the best humanistic tradition, secular learning could be constructively employed to serve Christian ends. Compelled, as he says, by his sudden elevation to the episcopal seat in 374 to begin teaching before learning,²¹ he conscientiously and energetically went about the fulfilment of his administrative and spiritual responsibilities, and it was in this connection that he wrote for the guidance of young clerics a treatise called De Officiis Ministrorum, the first systematic presentation of Christian ethics. This title, however, recalls a similar composition by Cicero, on which, in fact, it was modeled and which was itself derived in good part from the ethical teaching of the Greek Stoic philosopher Panaetius. Ambrose's procedure here plainly evinces how the Latin tradition could continue to operate effectively in a Christian environment. From Cicero he borrowed not only the conception and the general arrangement of the work but also much of its language and content. Their motivation was similar, as Ambrose pointed out when he said, “Just as Tullius wrote to educate his son, so do I to instruct you who are my sons.”²² Though the illustrative examples drawn from pagan history by Cicero were supplemented or substituted with others from Scripture, the result was not a hybrid product, but a thoroughly Christian creation that was both a tribute and a challenge to the classical tradition. For not only did Ambrose pay Cicero the compliment of imitation, but he also showed that the best aspects of Stoic ethics were compatible with Christian doctrine and, in fact, were already present in the Christian tradition.

So powerful was the force of the Latin tradition in Ambrose's learned contemporary Jerome that it precipitated in him a memorable traumatic experience since it seemed to come into conflict with the Christian faith he had inherited by birth. Like many others of his age, he had been expertly initiated into Latin literature and thought during the period of his formal schooling. At Rome the famed pagan teacher Aelius Donatus, whose work on Latin grammar remained standard for more than a thousand years, counted him, as well as the Virgilian commentator Servius, among his pupils. On his first visit to the East, around 374, Jerome fell seriously ill with a fever, and, as he lay close to death, he had his wondrous vision of being arraigned before the tribunal of God. When, on being asked his status, he replied that he was a Christian, the judge who presided rebuked him, saying, “You are lying; you are a Ciceronian, not a Christian.”²³ In the letter in which Jerome relates this episode to the nun Eustochium about a decade after the event, that is, at the time of the pagan crisis occasioned by the removal of the altar of Victory, he discloses that on that trip to the East to fight the good fight, he brought along with him the personal library that he had put together at Rome. His attachment to his books was so strong that he could not bring himself to part with them. Thus, as he writes in the letter, after piously fasting, he would turn to his Cicero, and, after long nocturnal vigils of tearful penance for sins, he would take up his Plautus. These acts, of course, were representative of the reasons for his punishment in the dream, according to which he had solemnly vowed never again to own or read secular books on pain of being guilty of denying God. The recurrence of allusions to pagan authors in Jerome's subsequent writings has long puzzled scholars, but however the matter is explained, the fact itself demonstrates how profoundly he had remained addicted to the old tradition, which, in his conscience, he had not yet fully reconciled with his Christian commitment at the time of the vision.

Moreover, about 387, when the religious crisis in Rome was not yet completely settled, Jerome informs Paula and Eustochium that for more than fifteen years he had not taken up a book of Cicero, Virgil, or any other secular author and that any mention of them in his citations comes from a misty reminiscence out of a distant past.²⁴ The truth or falsity of this claim is not an issue here. More significant is the positive stand that he takes in defense of his propensity for the ancient culture after the decisive defeat of Roman paganism in 394, when the forces of Theodosius crushed Eugenius' army near Aquileia on the bank of the Frigidus. In a letter of 397 or 398 to a certain Magnus, who inquired into the reason for the classical citations in his writings, Jerome replied that there was ample precedent for this practice in the Bible as well as in many Greek and Latin ecclesiastical authors. He pointed out, moreover, that by pruning offensive elements from secular learning he was creating a homebred literature that could serve the Lord, that a knowledge of pagan writing was desirable to meet the foe on his own ground, and that, except for the unlettered Epicureans, pagan authors offered much learning and information in their books.²⁵ No less indicative of Jerome's shift in position is his response in 401 or 402 to the charges of his bitter enemy Rufinus, who, referring to the vow made in the remarkable vision of 374, accused him of perjury and sacrilege. Rufinus reproached him not only because he continued to quote his favorite pagan writers, but because in Bethlehem he had monks copy Ciceronian dialogues for him and taught classics to children who had been entrusted to him to learn the fear of God.²⁶ Jerome now is much more cavalier in defending himself: he had promised, he argues, to refrain in the future, not to forget what he had retained from the past; besides, he had a strong suspicion that Rufinus himself was reading Cicero covertly; moreover, it was only in a dream that he had taken the vow, and even his foe could not claim to have lived up to all the promises that he had made at the time of his baptism.²⁷ The charges relating to the Ciceronian dialogues and the teaching of classics are wholly ignored. So obviously feeble and incomplete a rebuttal can only suggest that Jerome felt at this time that circumstances had sufficiently changed to make a fuller apology for his chronic classicism unnecessary.

With Augustine, a younger contemporary of Jerome, the reconciliation or fusion on the old pagan Latin tradition with the nascent Christian Latin tradition is further advanced. Like Jerome, he was by education and training deeply immersed in Latin literature and lore. Indeed, it was his youthful study of Cicero's dialogue Hortensius that had opened his mind to philosophy, especially Neoplatonism. In 384, on the recommendation of Symmachus, spokesman for the pagan party and then prefect of Rome, he was appointed to the chair of rhetoric in Milan,²⁸ where, under the influence of Ambrose, he underwent his conversion to orthodox Christianity.

The pagan backlash resulting from Alaric's sack of Rome in 410 provided the immediate motive for Augustine's monumental City of God. In this work he sought to lay once and for all the ghost of Roman pagan worship, of which vestiges inevitably long continued to persist, but his approach to the old tradition was far from being wholly negative or destructive. The fatum Romanum, canonized in Virgil's Aeneid as the manifest destiny of imperial pagan Rome, was reinterpreted as an essential and integral preliminary of the fatum Christianum, whose realization lay, not, as even the Spanish Christian poet Prudentius thought, in the Christianization of temporal Rome, but in the eternal City of God. This enlarged Augustinian view of the ancient past and its legacy provided a firm philosophic basis for the continuity of the Latin tradition in the now predominantly Christian context.

Such a perspective, in fact, underlies Augustine's enlightened attitude in the De Doctrina Christiana, where he says, “There is no reason why we should not have studied literature just because pagans say that Mercury is its god, nor need we avoid justice and virtue because they have dedicated temples to justice and virtue and preferred to worship in stone what should be borne in one's heart. Rather, every good and true Christian should understand that truth, wherever found, comes from his God.”²⁹ Thus Augustine, no less than the pagan interlocutors in Macrobius' Saturnalia, could appeal to Virgil for a truth beyond the literal meaning of his words. His language needed only to be allegorized, Christianized, or regarded as prophecy. For example, though Jerome had ridiculed the notion,³⁰ Augustine himself was willing to believe that the coming of the Messiah was foretold in Virgil's fourth Bucolic, where the message is given on the authority of the Cumaean Sibyl.³¹ In his interpretation, pagan Rome had not lived up to the high ideals prophetically set forth by Anchises in Book 6 of the Aeneid, where the future nation is enjoined “to spare the humbled and beat down the proud.”³² When Augustine exhorts noble Romans to abandon their gods, he alludes to the supreme sacrifice of Christian martyrs with words that Aeneas used to describe his men who had died in the fight against Mezentius: “With their blood they gained this fatherland for us.”³³ But the fatherland is now, of course, the heavenly one, and in the same passage, Augustine, recalling the promise made by Jupiter to Venus regarding the future Romans, speaks of the one true God who, in the heavenly fatherland, “sets limits neither in space nor in time, / but will grant sovereignty without end.”³⁴

This transmutation of the Latin tradition is also observed in Augustine's adaptations of the literary form of the philosophic dialogue and rhetorical treatise. During the critical period of his conversion and baptism in 386-387, he dovoted himself to the composition of such works as Contra Academicos, De Beata Vita, and De Ordine, in which he sought, in artistic fashion, to organize and present his thoughts philosophically on fundamental questions that concerned him in the light of his recent espousal of the orthodox faith. Put long ago on the path of such speculation by his reading of Cicero's Hortensius, he followed his predecessor in style and method but transcended him and created something new by infusing into the old inherited mold the Christian essence of his original thinking. Similarly, in writing Book 4 of the De Doctrina Christiana, in which he addressed himself to the task of instructing the Christian preacher, Augustine resorted to Cicero's Orator for the broad outline of the work and for his general oratorical theory, but was alone responsible for its Christian orientation and the choice of apposite illustrations drawn from the writings of St. Paul, Cyprian, and Ambrose.

The pagan religious crisis of the fourth century and its aftermath thus contributed considerably to the preservation and revitalization of the Latin tradition. The pagan intellectuals attempted to salvage from it what they could, while the early Church fathers, who were bred on it in their schooling, made efforts to adapt it to the needs of triumphant Christianity. Moreover, during this period of transition at the end of the fourth century and the beginning of the fifth, the force of the old culture was still sufficiently dynamic to produce an excellent historian like Ammianus Marcellinus, who, though a Greek by birth from Syria, was the true follower and continuator of Tacitus, and poets like Ausonius, Claudian, and Rutilius Namatianus, who, though differing in their relative merits, alike cultivated the pagan Muse and justly claim a place in any literary account of Rome. Pagan religion as such, however, had been effectively administered its coup de grâce by Augustine in his City of God.

Despite the unsettling political, social, and economic conditions induced and aggravated by the vast Germanic inroads into the various sections of the Western Empire during the course of the fifth century, the Latin cultural tradition still remained firmly entrenched among the Roman aristocracy, which by now had been mostly Christianized, and in the classical schools, which, however restricted in some areas, continued to operate in others, particularly in Africa and Italy.³⁵ Though the deposition of the last Western Roman emperor, Romulus Augustulus, and the elevation of the Goth Odoacer in 476 marked only the formalization of a long-standing de facto situation, nevertheless the new rulers of western Europe regarded themselves as heirs to the Roman civilization, which, of course, by their conquests they had, in fact, helped to undermine. Many of the existing political, legal, and administrative institutions and practices were simply taken over by these barbarian invaders, but their attitude toward the more intellectual phases of classical culture varied: some were tolerant or sympathetic, others were indifferent or hostile.³⁶ In Italy, the long reign of the Ostrogothic king Theodoric from 493 to 526 provided an environment that was especially favorable to the preservation and continuity of these other aspects, now unencumbered by the religious conflict that raged a century earlier between paganism and Christianity. This king, perhaps more literate than tradition would have it, had his daughter Amalasuntha educated in both Greek and Latin; she, as regent, entrusted the instruction of her youthful son Athalaric to a Roman tutor. Moreover, Theodoric's nephew Theodat, who joined Amalasuntha on the throne in 534, was extolled by Cassiodorus for his knowledge of literature and characterized by Procopius as better versed in Plato's philosophy than in the art of war.³⁷

Amid this stir of intellectual interests in the ruling family, despite the seething political intrigue in the background, the activity of conserving and transmitting Rome's literary heritage seems again to have been intensified. As before, subscriptions surviving in later manuscripts provide direct evidence. In some instances they reveal that third-generation descendants continued or resumed the editorial efforts of their renowned forbears, this time not as a hedge against Christianity, but for a culture menaced by the inevitable consequences of an encroaching tide of barbarization with which it was fundamentally incompatible. A subscription occurring at the end of Book 1 of Macrobius' Commentary on Cicero's Dream of Scipio indicates a remarkable perpetuation of ancestral connections and traditions, for, according to the note, this Neoplatonic work was emended and punctuated by Aurelius Memmius Symmachus with the assistance of Macrobius Plotinus Eudoxius.³⁸ Here a great-grandson of the Symmachus who played so important a role in the religious crisis of a century before is joined in editing a text by a relative, if not a direct descendant, of its author Macrobius, who, it will be recalled, also wrote the literary dialogue Saturnalia, where the elder Symmachus appears as a major figure and proponent of pagan Latin culture. The later Symmachus, however, who was the father-in-law of Boethius and, like him, was eventually condemned to death by Theodoric, proved himself a ready defender of orthodoxy when he supported the position of his namesake Pope Symmachus in the Laurentian schism.³⁹ Consequently, while the religious loyalties of the old Roman nobility had changed, the inherited literary and intellectual tradition transcended them.

This sort of situation is strikingly reflected in other subscriptions going back to the same period. Thus, from the testimony of such evidence, Turcius Rufius Apronianus Asterius, consul ordinarius in 494, is known to have edited both the pagan Latin poet Virgil and the Christian Latin poet Sedulius.⁴⁰ Again, at the end of Horace's book of Epodes, there is appended in some eight manuscripts a note stating that the text was read and corrected by Vettius Agorius Basilius Mavortius, who was consul in 527.⁴¹ This same name is also found in a rustic capital manuscript of Prudentius.⁴² From such data as these the final resolution of the religious dispute of the last part of the fourth century can readily be inferred. The editor was doubtless a kinsman of the Vettius Agorius Praetextatus who, like the elder Symmachus, appears in the Saturnalia as a staunch partisan of the old tradition and was celebrated in his day for his expert knowledge of pagan worship (see p. 210, above). But now this Christian descendant of Praetextatus' family concerned himself both with the text of Horace, who in many ways was the most pagan of Latin poets, and with that of the Christian Latin poet Prudentius. Yet the most remarkable aspect of this significant juxtaposition of textual and literary interests emerges only when it is recalled that in 402-403 Prudentius had written two books of hexameters entitled Contra Symmachum, in which he, like Ambrose earlier, attacks paganism and Symmachus' noble plea for tolerance and the ancient religion (see p. 208, above), turning the episode of the pagan revival into an epic of Christian victory over heathenism. Moreover, since the rustic capital script, in which this oldest extant Prudentius codex is executed, had almost exclusively been reserved for pagan Latin authors,⁴³ its extraordinary use at the end of the fifth century or at the beginning of the sixth for a Christian poet was probably owing to some special purpose or intention. The explanation for this phenomenon perhaps lies in the recognition accorded at that time to Prudentius' high literary achievement, for which he might well have been deemed worthy of the same calligraphy as the earlier Roman writers whose works were being transcribed contemporaneously in that majuscule book hand. He was, in fact, the Christian Virgil, and this venerable manuscript of his poetry constitutes a graphic symbol of the confluence of Latin and Christian currents uniting to form the swelling stream of a Christian Latin tradition that coursed through the Middle Ages.

The Latin literary and intellectual tradition, which is reflected in the above-mentioned manuscript notations, reached its zenith in the sixth century with Boethius, whose manifold genius harmoniously combined Christian devotion with a profound sympathy for ancient culture and an earnest passion for pagan philosophy. Had his life not been cut short in 524 by execution on orders from Theodoric for political reasons, he might well have completed his ambitious plan to translate all Plato and Aristotle into Latin. Not even Cicero had ventured anything so grandiose. Boethius, however, was probably the last Roman sufficiently equipped to undertake and carry out such a project.

With Boethius and his long-lived contemporary Cassiodorus, a definite watershed is reached. The old classical schools, to be sure, were still functioning during the sixth century in places like Rome, Milan, Ravenna, and Carthage,⁴⁴ but the responsibility for the continuity or, at least, the preservation of the Latin tradition devolved more and more upon the Church and its monastic institutions. The protracted wars between the East Goths and Byzantium in 535-555 and the subsequent devastations of the Lombardic invasion commencing in 568 exacted a heavy toll in the economic resources and intellectual vigor of Italy during the latter half of the sixth century. Cassiodorus, frustrated in his cherished hope to establish at Rome a university of Christian studies by the death of Pope Agapetus in 536 and the generally troublous times, subsequently retired from his distinguished public career of many years in the service of the Ostrogothic kings Theodoric, Athalaric, and Vitiges. Around 540, or perhaps a decade or so later, he established at his ancestral Squillace in Bruttium a monastery aptly called Vivarium after the fishponds (vivaria) that adorned the picturesque site.⁴⁵ The precise relationship of the organization of Vivarium to the Rule of St. Benedict and the anonymous Regula Magistri is a much tormented question that need not be examined here. What is important is the program of work and learning instituted by Cassiodorus for his monks. He made specific provision for the mentally less gifted brethren to be occupied with manual labor in the fields and orchards, but for those who were better endowed intellectually he prescribed a course of theological instruction based not only upon a study of the Bible but also upon supplementary religious and profane readings that would aid in the interpretation of Scripture. The syllabus of this educational scheme is contained in the two books of his Institutiones Divinarum et Secularium Litterarum, a very significant formative work of the Middle Ages and an excellent bibliographical guide for the development of monastic libraries. In devising such a curriculum at Vivarium he was, of course, following the path of the Church fathers before him who had recognized that a properly designed secular indoctrination comprising the artes liberales could serve as a means to a better understanding of the Bible and Christianity.⁴⁶

To implement his program and assure its success, Cassiodorus took pains to build up a library of both Christian and pagan literature in his monastery and made the copying of manuscripts an integral part of the rule under which his monks lived. The importance that he attributed to the occupation of transcribing books is manifest in the glowing praise that he bestows upon the copyist of Scripture: “Blessed is his effort, laudable his industry, to preach to men with the hand, to reveal tongues with the fingers, to give salvation to men in silence and to fight against the illicit deceits of the devil with pen and ink. Every word of the Lord written down by the scribe is a wound dealt to Satan.”⁴⁷ Such enthusiasm for scribal activity inevitably carried over to the copying of secular texts as well, for they provided the requisite classical foundation for the development and expansion of a Christian culture as envisaged by Cassiodorus. The ultimate fate of the books of Vivarium after the death of its founder in the last quarter of the sixth century is shrouded in uncertainty.⁴⁸ The once popular theory that some of them at least reached the monastery of Bobbio, which was settled in 612 by the Irish missionary St. Columban, appears untenable. More likely, parts of the library made their way into the Lateran collection in Rome. But wherever they came to reside, they probably served in many instances as archetypal sources of later editions of the Latin authors whose cultural legacy to posterity survived the ravages and attrition of time and events.

Hence, like the pagan aristocrats at the end of the fourth century and their Christianized descendants a century later, Cassiodorus, the last Italian representative of that illustrious intellectual line, made an enduring contribution to the preservation of the literature and learning of pagan Rome and thus sustained and assured the continuity of the Latin tradition at the very twilight of late antiquity. With the advent of the Dark Ages, this noble heritage of the past, now inextricably synthesized with Christian culture, yet retaining also its own integrity, discovered its refuge and haven in the Church and especially in monasteries created or revitalized by Irish monks in the late sixth and seventh centuries and by their English brethren in the eighth. From such centers, where it was sheltered and fostered under the Benedictine Rule, the ancient legacy emerged to be rediscovered in the Carolingian Renaissance and eventually to be transmitted to modern times.

Notes

1. Cf. Pliny the Younger Epistulae 10.96, 97.

2. For references to this belief in literature, see A. S. Pease's notes on Cicero De Natura Deorum 2.8 (superiores); 3.5 (fundamenta iecisse).

3. Symmachus Relatio 3, ed. O. Seeck, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Auct. Antiquiss. 6.1 (1883), 280-283. For a convenient collection of the relevant texts of Symmachus and Ambrose, with a German translation and commentary, see J. Wytzes, Der Streit um den Altar der Viktoria (Amsterdam, 1936). On this entire subject cf. the excellent article by H. Bloch, “The Pagan Revival in the West at the End of the Fourth Century,” in The Conflict between Paganism and Christianity in the Fourth Century, ed. A. Momigliano (Oxford, 1963), pp. 193-218.

4. Cf. Ambrose Epistulae 17; 18; 57.

5. Cf. Juvenal 7.225-227.

6. Macrobius Saturnalia 1.24.8.

7. Ibid., 1.24.13.

8. Regarding these manuscripts, see E. A. Lowe, Cod. Lat. Ant. 1.13 and 8∗∗13 for the Augusteus, and 7.977 for the Sangallensis.

9. A parchment scrap of another Virgil manuscript in this rare capital was found at Oxyrhynchus (Pap. Oxy. 1098) (see Lowe, op. cit., 10.1569).

10. Macrobius Saturnalia 1.24.16.

11. Cf. Symmachus Epistulae 9.13, ed. Seeck, p. 239.

12. For the text of the subscriptions, see O. Jahn, “Über die Subscriptionen in den Handschriften römischer Classiker,” Ber. Sächs. Ges. Wiss. (1851), p. 335; K. Büchner, “Überlieferungsgeschichte der lateinischen Literatur des Altertums,” in Geschichte der Textüberlieferung, I (Zurich, 1961), 355-356.

13. See Jahn, op. cit., pp. 330-335, 360; Büchner, loc. cit. Cf. also E. Lommatzsch, “Litterarische Bewegungen in Rom im vierten und fünften Jahrhundert n. Chr.,” Zeitschr. für vergl. Litteraturgesch. n. F. XV (1904), 186.

14. For poem, see Anthologia Latina. pars post.: Carmina Epigraphica (1895), ed. F. Buecheler, no. 111, vv. 8-12; Jahn, op. cit., p. 341.

15. Cf. Jahn, op. cit., pp. 332-333, 369.

16. For relevant details, see C. H. Roberts, “The Codex,” Proceedings of the British Academy, XL (1954), 176-180.

17. Cf. Büchner, op. cit., p. 348.

18. Cf. Arnobius 1.38 and Lucretius 5.1-54; also Lactantius Divinae Institutiones 7.27.6 and Lucretius 6.24-28.

19. Tertullian De Idololatria 10.

20. Tertullian De Praescriptione Haereticorum 7.9.

21. Ambrose De Officiis Ministrorum 1.1.4.

22. Ibid., 1.7.24.

23. Jerome Epistulae 22.30.1.

24. Jerome In Epistolam ad Galatas 3, ed. Vallarsi, pp. 485-486 (Patrologia Latina [hereafter cited as PL], XXVI, 427-428).

25. Jerome Epistulae 70.

26. Rufinus Apologia contra Hieronymum 2.6-8, 11, ed. M. Simonetti, pp. 87-90, 91-92 (PL, XXI, 588-590, 591-592).

27. Jerome Apologia adversus Libros Rufini 1.30-31 (PL, XXIII, 421-424).

28. Cf. Augustine Confessions 5.13.23.

29. Augustine De Doctrina Christiana 2.72. Of this work, Books 1, 2, and part of 3 were composed in 397, the rest of Book 3 and all of Book 4 were completed in 426-427; cf. M. Schanz, C. Hosius, and G. Krüger, Gesch. der Röm. Lit., 4.2 (Munich, 1920), 444.

30. Jerome Epistulae 53.7.

31. Augustine Epistulae ad Romanos Inchoata Expositio 3 (PL, XXXV, 2089).

32. Virgil Aeneid 6.847-853.

33. Augustine City of God 2.29, citing Virgil Aeneid 11.24-25.

34. Cf. Virgil Aeneid 1.278-279.

35. Cf. H. I. Marrou, A History of Education in Antiquity, English trans. of the French 3d ed. by G. Lamb (London and New York, 1956), pp. 345-347; P. Riché, Education et Culture dans l'Occident Barbare, VI^e-VIII^e Siècles (Paris, 1962), pp. 62-69, 76-78.

36. For details see Riché, op. cit., pp. 91 ff.

37. Cf. Cassiodorus Variae 10.3, ed. T. Mommsen, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Auct. Antiquiss. 12 (1894), 299; Procopius De Bellis 5.3.1.

38. See Jahn, op. cit., p. 347; Büchner, op. cit., p. 365.

39. Cf. J. Sundwall, Abhandlungen zur Geschichte des Ausgehenden Römertums (Helsinki, 1919), pp. 159-160; E. Stein, Histoire du Bas-Empire, trans. from German, with additions, by J.-R. Palanque (Paris, 1949), II, 137.

40. Jahn, op cit., pp. 348-351; Büchner, op. cit., p. 356; Sundwall, op. cit., pp. 94-95.

41. Jahn, op. cit., pp. 353-354; Büchner, loc. cit.

42. Paris, Bibl. Nat. lat. 8084, on which see Lowe, op. cit., 5.571a; S. Jannaccone, “Le Par. 8084 de Prudence et la Recensio de Mavortius,” REL, XXVI (1948), 228-234; M. P. Cunningham, “Some Facts about the Puteanus of Prudentius,” TAPA, LXXXIX, (1958), 32-37.

43. Cf. G. Battelli, Lezioni di Paleografia (3d ed.; Vatican City, 1949), p. 60. Later use of the rustic capital for Christian writings reflects an artificial revival of this script; cf., e.g., fols. 2 verso-8 verso of Turin, Cod. Bibl. Naz. E. IV. 42, a Sedulius manuscript assigned to the seventh century, about which see Lowe, op. cit., 4.447.

44. See n. 35, above.

45. For a description, see Cassiodorus Institutiones 1.29.

46. Cf. ibid., 1.27-28. See also Cassiodorus Variae 9.21, ed. Mommsen, pp. 286-287.

47. Cassiodorus Institutiones 1.30. Cf. also his Variae 12.21, ed. Mommsen, pp. 377-378.

48. For bibliography, see A. Momigliano, “Cassiodorus and Italian Culture of His Time,” in Secondo Contributo alla Storia degli Studi Classici (Rome, 1960), p. 194 n. 8.