Life
(Literature and the Ancient World, Critical Edition)
Martianus Capella (mahr-shee-AY-nuhs kuh-PEHL-uh) was a Roman after the Fall of Rome and a pagan in a world officially Christian. He wrote at the end of the fifth century c.e. in Carthage, North Africa, then under the control of Vandals. Capella’s surviving work, De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii (n.d.; Philologia, 1971), begins with two books (or chapters) devoted to an allegory of the marriage of Philology (“literary study”) with the god Mercury and their ascent to heaven. This allegory implicitly promises divine rewards to scholars who similarly devote themselves to study. There follow seven books that treat each of the seven liberal arts: grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric (the three subjects of the medieval trivium) together with geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, and music (the four subjects of the medieval quadrivium). The work is written in a mixture of prose and verse (the ancient genre of Menippean satire) and contains much curious and arcane lore from earlier authors, many of whose works were later lost.