Page:Cambridge Medieval History Volume 3.pdf/531

488 Palatine Apollo. Yet, but for Gregory and his mission of Augustine, there would have been no Aldhelm, no Benedict Biscop, no Bede, no Alcuin, no opening for the enormously important influence of Theodore of Tarsus and of Hadrian the Abbot.

But, this great service apart, his voluminous works were, if not in themselves of great literary value, the progenitors of literature which is of the highest interest. Alfred translated his Pastoral Care; Aelfric drew copiously from his Homilies on the gospels. His Moralia on Job gave occupation to calligraphers and excerptors in Spain and Ireland. Above all, his four books of Dialogues formed a model for subsequent writers of the lives of saints as well as a sanction for that mass of miracle and vision literature in which so much of the imaginations and hopes of the medieval peoples is preserved for us.

Thus in the persons of Cassiodorus, Benedict, and Gregory, Italy, which had provided the world with a great literature, furnished also the means by which that literature was to be preserved. It was her last contribution to the cause of learning for many years.

We must turn to the other great fields of western learning, and first to Africa and Spain.

The existence of a flourishing Latin literature in Africa is generally realised: the names of Tertullian, Apuleius, Cyprian, Augustine, Martianus Capella stand out as representative in earlier centuries; something too has been said (I. 322) of the less-known writers of the period of the Vandal kingdom, of Dracontius, almost the last of Christian poets to treat of mythological subjects, and of those (Luxorius and others) whose fugitive pieces have been preserved in the Latin anthology of the Codex Salmasianus. We come now to their successors. From Verecundus, Bishop of Junca († 552), we have an exposition of certain Old Testament canticles which are commonly attached to the Psalter and used in the Church services. In this work Verecundus refers his reader to the Natural History of Pliny the Elder, to Solinus, and to a form of the famous Physiologus, that manual of allegorised natural history which in later times afforded a multitude of subjects to illuminators and sculptors. From this region and period also comes in all probability a poem on the Resurrection of the Dead and the Last Judgment, dedicated to Flavius Felix (an official to whom some poems in the Salmasian Anthology are addressed). It has been handed down under the names of Tertullian and of Cyprian. Both attributions are out of the question. The author, whoever he was, had written other poems, notably one on the four seasons of the year, to which he alludes. In the resurrection-poem a singular point of interest is that it shews traces of obligation to the ancient Apocalypse of Peter.

The two epics of Fl. Cresconius Corippus, the Johannis, produced about 550, and the De laudibus Justini (minoris), of sixteen years later, are from the purely literary point of view the most remarkable