Page:Cambridge Medieval History Volume 3.pdf/559

516 first rank. Socially we can see that he must have been very acceptable; in the common phrase of to-day, he had a genius for friendship. In promoting the revival of education he had this advantage over his helpers, that alone among then he was possessed of the traditions and methods of a long-established and thriving school.

The mass of writing for which he is responsible is very large. There are Biblical commentaries, not more distinguished for originality than those of Bede: treatises upon the Adoptionist heresy which sprang up in his time in Spain, and upon the Trinity, accounted his best theological work. There is a liturgical corpus, of great importance in the history of worship, of which a Homiliary, a Lectionary, and a Sacramentary are the chief members. Of a revision of the text of the Latin Bible due to him there is a constant tradition which we need not doubt, though we possess no record of the imperial order under which it is said to have been undertaken, and there are few allusions to it in Alcuin's own writings. Moreover, the task of distinguishing the Alcuinian text from other current types is beset with difficulties. There is also a series of educational manuals: we have those on Grammar, Rhetoric, and Dialectic, and there seem to have been others. They were not popular for long, and were not intrinsically very valuable. Still, they were pioneer work, and as such they doubtless had an influence not to be despised.

As to his own range of reading, apart from the theology which ranked as standard in his time, something must be said. The mass of verse which we have from him shews his knowledge of such authors as Virgil – some study of whom may be assumed in the case of everyone with whom we shall be concerned – Statius, Lucan, and of the Christian poets Juvencus, Prudentius, Arator, Sedulius and others who, like Virgil, were read by all who read at all. His list of the writers who were to be found in the library at York is instructive though incomplete (it omits, for example, Isidore); but it contains few names which ceased to be familiar in later centuries. Of theologians, Victorinus and Lactantius, of poets, Alcimus Avitus, of grammarians Probus, Focas, Euticius Pompeius, Cominianus, are those who became comparative rarities in and after the twelfth century. The most learned of Alcuin's letters are those that relate to astronomy, in which the Emperor was interested. In one of them he asks for a copy of Pliny's Natural History to help him to answer certain queries, and elsewhere in his correspondence he quotes Vitruvius and alludes to Dares Phrygius as if he knew the Trojan History current under that name. He is also credited with the introduction of a few texts to the Continent – the spurious correspondences of Alexander the Great with Dindimus, king of the Brachmani, and of St Paul with Seneca. If not very important, both of these became excessively popular: more so than the Categoriae of Augustine, the transmission of which is also due to Alcuin.

His knowledge of Greek is a matter of controversy, but at least