Page:The Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages.djvu/69

 IV] THE TRANSMISSION OF LETTERS 51 though the song-element is unimportant in the last seven books. These are strictly instructive, and sapless as the rods of mediaeval schoolmasters. The allegory of the first two books is pleasingly pedan- tic and the whole work presents the sterile union of fantasy with pedantry, so dear to the closing years of pagan scholarship, when the old straw was thrashed, re-tied in queer-shaped bundles, and then thrashed again. The process produced pabulum for coming generations.* The De Nuptiis Philologiae shows its author to have been a desiccated person, one who in his leisure might have enjoyed the romances of Achilles Tatius. We have a more living phenomenon in the personality of Anicius Boethius, who summarized pagan logic and ethics for the Middle Ages, as Capella summarized other sides of pagan culture. In somewhat adaptive mode Boethius translated Aristotle's CategorieSj with more elaboration, he translated and commented upon the philosopher's irtpl Ipfi.rjveta'ij De interpretatione. He composed two versions of the latter work, one for 1 St. Isidor of Seville, who wrote in the latter part of the sixth century, was an important personage of the transition, handing down not only Christian doctrine, but pagan learning also. In his Etymologies {Etymologiarum lihri XX) he includes the whole range of knowledge constituting early medieeval culture. The first book is entitled " De Orammatica " ; the second, " De Rhetorica et Dialectica"; the third, "Dequatuordiscipliuis mathematicis, arith- metics, geometria, musica, astronomia"; the fourth, "De medi- cina " ; the fifth, " De legibus ot temporibus." The dryness of this work and its poverty of thought are outdone only by the absurdity of its etymologies. Another work, kin in its saplessness, is the Myihologiarum lihri of Fulgentius (48(MVS0a4>.), for which see TenflTel-Schwabe. op. cit., II. $ 4«0; Ebert, op. eit., 1, 476-480; also cl. ComparetU, op. ct<., Cliap. VIII.