Chapter XXI
CHRISTIANITY AND NATURAL SCIENCE: BASIL, EPIPHANIUS, AND THE PHYSIOLOGUS
Lactantius not a fair example—Commentaries on the Biblical account of creation—Date and delivery of Basil’s Hexaemeron—The Hexaemeron of Ambrose—Basil’s medieval influence—Science and religion—Scientific curiosity of Basil’s audience—Allusions to amusements—Conflicts with Greek science—Agreement with Greek science—Qualification of the Scriptural account of creation—The four elements and four qualities—Enthusiasm for nature as God’s work—Sin and nature—Habits of animals—Marvels of nature—Spontaneous generation—Lack of scientific scepticism—Sun worship and astrology—Permanence of species—Final impression from the Hexaemeron—The Medicine Chest of Epiphanius—Gems in the high priest’s breastplate—Some other gems—The so-called Physiologus; problem of its origin—Does the title apply to any one particular treatise?—And to what sort of a treatise?—Medieval art shows almost no symbolic influence of the Physiologus—Physiologus was more natural scientist than allegorist.
[Sidenote: Lactantius not a fair example.]
The opposition of early Christian thought to natural science has been rather unduly exaggerated. For instance, Lactantius, one of the least favorable to Greek philosophy and natural science of the fathers, should hardly be cited as typical of early Christian attitude in such matters. Nor does his opposition impress one as weighty.[2060] He ridicules the theory of the Antipodes,[2061] which he perhaps understands none too well, asking if anyone can be so inept as to think that there are men whose feet are above their heads, although he knows very well that Greek science teaches that all weights fall towards the center of the earth, and that consequently if the feet are nearer the center of the earth that they must be below the head. He continues, however, to insist that the philosophers are either very stupid, or just joking, or arguing for the sake of arguing, and he declares that he could show by many arguments that the heaven cannot possibly be lower than the earth—which no one has asserted except himself—if it were not already time to close his third book and begin the fourth. Apparently Lactantius is the one who is arguing for the sake of arguing, or just joking, or else very stupid, and I fear it is the last. But other Christian fathers were less dense, and we already have heard the cultured pagan Plutarch scoff at the notion of a spherical earth and of antipodes. We may grant, however, that the ecclesiastical writers of the Roman Empire and early medieval period normally treat of spiritual rather than material themes and discuss them in a religious rather than a scientific manner.
[Sidenote: Commentaries on the Biblical account of creation.]
But in the commentaries upon the books of the Bible which the fathers multiplied so voluminously it was necessary for them, if they began their labors with Genesis, to deal at the very start in the first verses of the first book of the Bible with an explanation of nature which at several points was in disagreement with the accepted theories of Greek philosophy and ancient science. Such comment upon the opening verses of Genesis sometimes developed into a separate treatise called Hexaemeron from the works of the six days of creation which it discussed. Of the various treatises of this type the Hexaemeron of Basil[2062] seems to have been both the best[2063] and the most influential, and will be considered by us as an example of Christian attitude towards the natural science and, to some extent, the superstition of the ancient world.
[Sidenote: Date and delivery of Basil’s Hexaemeron.]
Basil died on the first day of January, 379 A. D., and was born about 329. When or where the nine homilies which compose his Hexaemeron were preached is not known, but from an allusion to his bodily infirmity in the seventh homily and his forgetfulness the next day in Homily VIII we might infer that it was late in life. To all appearances these sermons were taken down and have reached us just as they were delivered to the people, to whose daily life Basil frequently adverts. The sermons were delivered early in the morning before the artisans in the audience went to their work and again at the close of the day and before the evening meal, since Basil sometimes speaks of the approach of darkness surprising him and of its consequently being time to stop.[2064] One of the surest indications either that the sermons were delivered extemporaneously, or that Basil was repeating with variations to suit the occasion and present audience sermons which he had delivered so often as to have practically memorized, occurs in the eighth homily where he starts to discuss land animals, forgetting that the last day he did not get to birds, but is presently brought to a realization of his omission by the actions of his audience and, after a pause and an apology, makes a fresh start upon birds. The Hexaemeron was highly praised by Basil’s contemporaries and was regarded as the best of his works by later Byzantine literary collectors and critics.
[Sidenote: The Hexaemeron of Ambrose.]
Basil’s work, however, was not the first of its kind, as Hippolytus and Origen, at least, are known to have earlier composed similar treatises, and still earlier in the treatise of Theophilus To Autolycus we find a few chapters[2065] devoted to the six days of creation. In one of his letters Jerome states that “Ambrose recently so compiled the Hexaemeron of Origen that he rather followed the views of Hippolytus and Basil.”[2066] This Latin work of Ambrose is extant and seems to me to follow Basil very closely. At times the order of presentation is slightly varied and the work of Ambrose is longer, but this is due to its more verbose rhetoric and greater indulgence in Biblical quotation, and not to the introduction of new ideas. The Benedictine editors of Ambrose admit that he has taken a great deal from Basil but deny that he has servilely imitated him.[2067] But a striking instance of such servile imitation is seen in Ambrose’s duplicating even Basil’s mistake in omitting to discuss birds and then apologizing for it, reminding one of the Chinese workman who made all the new dinner plates with a crack and a toothpick stuck in it, like the old broken plate which he had been given as a model. It is true that Ambrose does not first discuss land animals for a page as Basil did, but makes his apology more immediately. The opening words of the eighth sermon in the twelfth chapter of his fifth book are, “And after he had remained silent for a moment, again resuming his discourse, he said....” Then comes his apology, expressed in different terms from Basil’s and to the effect that in his previous discourse upon fishes he became so immersed in the depths of the sea as to forget all about birds. Thus the incident which in Basil had every appearance of a natural mistake, in Ambrose has all the earmarks of an affected imitation. It is barely possible, however, that Origen made the original mistake and that Basil and Ambrose have both imitated him in it. On the other hand, we are told that the Hexaemerons of Origen and Basil differed fundamentally in this respect, that Origen indulged to a great extent in allegorical interpretation of the Mosaic account of creation,[2068] while Basil declares that he “takes all in the literal sense,” is “not ashamed of the Gospel,” and “admits the common sense of the Scriptures.”[2069]
[Sidenote: Basil’s medieval influence.]
At any rate, Basil’s Hexaemeron seems to have supplanted all such previous treatises in Greek, while its western influence is shown not only by Ambrose’s imitation of it so soon after its production, but by Latin translations of it by Eustathius Afer in the fifth, and perhaps by Dionysius Exiguus in the sixth century. Medieval manuscripts of it are fairly numerous and sometimes of early date,[2070] and include an Anglo-Saxon epitome ascribed to Aelfric in the Bodleian Library. Bartholomew of England[2071] in the thirteenth century quotes “Rabanus who uses the words of Basil in the Hexaemeron” for a description of the empyrean heaven which I have been unable to find in the works of either Rabanus or Basil. Bede, in a similar, though much abbreviated, work of his own, states that while many have said many things concerning the beginning of the Book of Genesis, the chief authorities, so far as he has been able to discover, are Basil of Caesarea, whom Eustathius translated from Greek into Latin, Ambrose of Milan, and Augustine, bishop of Hippo. These works, however, were so long and expensive that only the rich could afford to purchase them and so profound that only the learned could read and understand them. Bede had accordingly been requested to compose a brief rendition of them, which he does partly in his own words, partly in theirs.[2072]
[Sidenote: Science and religion.]
The general tenor of Basil’s treatise may be described as follows. He accepts the literal sense of the first chapter of Genesis as a correct account of the universe, and, when he finds Greek philosophy and science in disagreement with the Biblical narrative, inveighs against the futilities and follies and conflicting theories and excessive elaborations of the philosophers. On such occasions the simple statements of Scripture are sufficient for him. “Upon the essence of the heavens we are contented with what Isaiah says.... In the same way, as concerns the earth, let us resolve not to torment ourselves by trying to find out its essence.... At all events let us prefer the simplicity of faith to the demonstrations of reason.”[2073] These three quotations illustrate his attitude at such times. But at all other times he is apt to follow Greek science rather implicitly, accepting without question its hypothesis of four elements and four qualities, and taking all his details about birds, beasts, and fish from the same source.
[Sidenote: Scientific curiosity of Basil’s audience.]
Moreover, while Basil may affirm that the edification of the church is his sole aim and interest, it is evident that his audience are possessed by a lively scientific curiosity, and that they wish to hear a great deal more about natural phenomena than Isaiah or any other Biblical author has to offer them. “What trouble you have given me in my previous discourses,” exclaims Basil in his fourth homily, “by asking me why the earth was invisible, why all bodies are naturally endued with color, and why all color comes under the sense of sight? And perhaps my reason did not appear sufficient to you.... Perhaps you will ask me new questions.” Basil gratifies this curiosity concerning the world of nature with many details not mentioned in the Bible but drawn from such works as Aristotle’s Meteorology and History of Animals. This scientific curiosity displayed by Basil’s hearers is the more interesting in that artisans who had to labor for their daily bread appear to have made up a large element in his audience.[2074] It is perhaps on their account that Basil often speaks of God as the supreme artisan or artificer or artist,[2075] or calls their attention to “the vast and varied workshop of divine creation,”[2076] and makes other flattering allusions to arts which support life or produce enduring work, and to waterways and sea trade.[2077] He also seems to have a sincere appreciation of the arts and admiration of beauty, which he twice defines.[2078]
[Sidenote: Allusions to amusements.]
At the risk of digression, it is perhaps worth noting further that Basil’s hearers seem to have been very familiar with, not to say fond of, the amusements common in the cities of the Roman Empire. Twice he opens his sermons with allusions to the athletes of the circus and actors of the theater,[2079] apparently as the surest way of quickly catching the attention of his audience, while on a third occasion, in concluding his morning address on what appears to have been a holiday, he remarks that if he had dismissed them earlier, some would have spent the rest of the day gambling with dice, and that “the longer I keep you, the longer you are out of the way of mischief.”[2080] He also alludes to the spinning of tops and to what was apparently the game of push-ball.[2081]
[Sidenote: Conflicts with Greek science.]
Taking up the contents of the Hexaemeron more in detail, we may first note those points upon which Basil supports the statements of the Bible against Greek science and philosophy. He of course insists that the universe was created by God and is not co-existent, much less identical, with Him.[2082] He also denies that the form of the world alone is due to God and that matter is of separate origin.[2083] Nor will he accept the arguments of the philosophers who “would rather lose their tongues” than admit that there is more than one heaven. Basil is ready to believe not merely in a second, but a third heaven, such as the apostle Paul speaks of being rapt to. He regards a plurality of heavens as no more difficult to credit than the seven concentric spheres of the planets, and as much more probable than the philosophic theory of the music of the spheres which he decries as “ingenious frivolity, the untruth of which is evident from the first word.”[2084] He also defends the statement of Scripture that there are waters above the firmament, not only against the doctrines of ancient astronomy,[2085] but also against “certain writers in the church,” among whom he probably has Origen in mind, who interpret the passage figuratively and assert that the waters stand for “spiritual and incorporeal powers,” those above the firmament representing good angels and those below the firmament standing for evil demons. “Let us reject these theories as we would the interpretations of dreams and old-wives’ tales.”[2086]
In connection with Basil’s defense of the plurality of the heavens it may be noted that R. H. Charles presents evidence to show “that speculations or definitely formulated views on the plurality of the heavens were rife in the very cradle of Christendom and throughout its entire development,” and that “the prevailing view was that of the sevenfold division of the heavens.”[2087] He fails, however, to discriminate between the doctrine of Greek philosophy that the universe was one, although the circles of the planets are seven, and the plurality of the heavens, which Basil insists that the philosophers deny; and very probably the Jewish and early Christian notions of successive heavens full of angels and spirits developed from the spheres of the planets. Among the various early heresies described by the fathers are also found, of course, many allusions to these seven spheres or heavens. The disciples of Valentinus, for example, according to Irenaeus and Epiphanius, “affirm that these seven heavens are intelligent and speak of them as angels ... and declare that Paradise, situated above the third heaven, is a powerful angel.”[2088]
[Sidenote: Agreement with Greek science.]
On the other hand, we may note some points where Basil is in accord with Greek science. He warns his hearers not to “be surprised that the world never falls; it occupies the center of the universe, its natural place.”[2089] He advances numerous proofs of the immense size of the sun and moon.[2090] He accepts the hypothesis of four elements but abstains from passing judgment upon the question of a fifth element of which the heavens and celestial bodies may be composed.[2091] He thinks that “it needs not the space of a moment for light to pass through” the ether.[2092]
[Sidenote: Qualification of the Scriptural account of creation.]
Moreover, Basil finds it necessary to qualify some of the statements in the first chapter of Genesis. He interprets the command, “Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place,” to apply only to the sea or ocean, which he contends is one body of water, and not to pools and lakes,[2093] recognizing that otherwise “our explanation of the creation of the world may appear contrary to experience, because it is evident that all the waters did not flow together in one place.” In this connection he states that “although some authorities think that the Hyrcanian and Caspian Seas are enclosed in their own boundaries, if we are to believe the geographers, they communicate with each other and together discharge themselves into the Great Sea.” He speaks of “the vast ocean, so dreaded by navigators, which surrounds the isle of Britain and western Spain.”[2094] Later he contends that “sea water is the source of all the moisture of the earth.”[2095] He has also to meet the following objection made to the eleventh and twelfth verses of the first chapter of Genesis: “How then, they say, can Scripture describe all the plants of the earth as seed-bearing, when the reed, couch-grass, mint, crocus, garlic, and the flowering rush and countless other species produce no seed? To this we reply that many vegetables have their seminal virtue in the lower part and in the roots.”[2096]
[Sidenote: The four elements and four qualities.]
Basil regards the words of Genesis, “God called the dry land earth,” as a recognition of the fact that drought is the primal property of earth, as humidity is of air; cold, of water; and heat, of fire. He adds, however, that “our eyes and senses can find nothing which is completely singular, simple, and pure. Earth is at the same time dry and cold; water, cold and moist; air, moist and warm; fire, warm and dry.”[2097] Indeed, as he has already stated in the previous homily, the mixture of elements in actual objects is even more intricate than this last sentence might seem to indicate. Every element is in every other, and we not only do not perceive with our senses any pure elements but not even any compounds of two elements only.[2098]
[Sidenote: Enthusiasm for nature as God’s work.]
Basil is alive to the absorbing interest of the world of nature and to the marvelous intricacies of natural science. He tells his hearers that as “anyone not knowing a town is taken by the hand and led through it,” so he will guide them “through the mysterious marvels of this great city of the universe.”[2099] As he had said in the preceding homily, “A single plant, a blade of grass is sufficient to occupy all your intelligence in the contemplation of the skill which produced it.”[2100] He sees “great wisdom in small things.”[2101] Thus by the argument from design he is apt to work back from nature to the Creator, so that his enthusiasm cannot be regarded as purely scientific. Going a step farther than Galen’s argument from design, he contends that “not a single thing has been created without reason; not a single thing is useless.”[2102]
[Sidenote: Sin and nature.]
Basil also cherishes the notion, which we have already found both in pagan and Christian writers, that human sin leaves its stain or has its effect upon nature. The rose was without thorns before the fall of man, and their addition to its beauty serves to remind us that “sorrow is very near to pleasure.”[2103]
[Sidenote: Habits of animals.]
Basil discusses the habits of animals largely in order to draw moral lessons from them for human beings and he has several passages in the style supposed to be characteristic of the Physiologus. But he also refers in a number of places to the ability of animals to find remedies with which to cure themselves of ailments and injuries, or to their power of divining the future. The sea-urchin foretells storms; sheep and goats discern danger by instinct alone. The starling eats hemlock and digests it “before its chill can attack the vital parts”; and the quail is able to feed on hellebore. The wounded bear nurses himself, filling his wounds with mullein, an astringent plant; “the fox heals his wounds with droppings from the pine tree”; the tortoise counteracts the venom of the vipers it has eaten by means of the herb marjoram; and “the serpent heals sore eyes by eating fennel.”[2104]
[Sidenote: Marvels of nature.]
Indeed, far from being led by his acquaintance with Greek science into doubting the marvelous, Basil finds “in nature a thousand reasons for believing in the marvelous.”[2105] He is ready to ascribe astounding powers to animals, and believes, like Pliny, that “the greatest vessels, sailing with full sails, are easily stopped by a tiny fish.”[2106] He tells us that nature endowed the lion with such loud and forceful vocal organs “that often much swifter animals are caught by his roaring alone.”[2107] He also repeats in charming style the familiar story of the halcyon days. The halcyon lays its eggs along the shore in mid-winter when violent winds dash the waves against the land. Yet winds are hushed and waves are calm during the seven days that the halcyon sits, and then, after its young are hatched and in need of food, “God in his munificence grants another seven days to this tiny animal. All sailors know this and call these days halcyon days.”[2108]
[Sidenote: Spontaneous generation.]
Like most ancient scientists, Basil believes that some animals are spontaneously generated. “Many birds have no need of union with males to conceive,” a circumstance which should make it easy for us to believe in the Virgin birth of Christ.[2109] Grasshoppers and other nameless insects and sometimes frogs and mice are “born from the earth itself,” and “mud alone produces eels,”[2110] a theory not much more amazing than the assertion of modern biologists that eels spawn only in the Mediterranean Sea. Basil states that “in the environs of Thebes in Egypt after abundant rain in hot weather the country is covered with field mice,” but without noting that abundant rain in upper Egypt in hot weather would itself be in the nature of a miracle.
[Sidenote: Lack of scientific scepticism.]
Basil is less sceptical than Apollonius of Tyana in regard to the birth of lions and of vipers, repeating unquestioningly the statement that the viper gnaws its way out of its mother’s womb, and that the lioness bears only one whelp because it tears her with its claws.[2111] Of purely scientific scepticism there is, indeed, little in the Hexaemeron. Basil does, however, question one of the powers ascribed to magicians, and this is his only mention of the magic art. Discussing the immense size of the moon and its great influence upon terrestrial nature, he declares ridiculous the old-wives’ tales which have been circulated everywhere that magic incantations “can remove the moon from its place and make it descend to the earth.”[2112]
[Sidenote: Sun worship and astrology.]
Sun worship still existed in Basil’s time and he hails the fact that the sun was not created until the fourth day, after both light and vegetation were in existence, as a severe blow to those who reverence the sun as the source of life.[2113] However, he does “not pretend to be able to separate light from the body of the sun.”[2114] Theophilus in his earlier discussion of creation had stated, perhaps copying Philo Judaeus, that the luminaries were not created until the fourth day, “because God, who possesses foreknowledge, knew the follies of the vain philosophers, that they were going to say, that the things which grow on earth are produced from the heavenly bodies”—which is, indeed, a fundamental hypothesis of astrology—“so as to exclude God. In order, therefore, that the truth might be obvious, the plants and seeds were produced prior to the heavenly bodies, for what is posterior cannot produce that which is prior.”[2115] Basil does not make this point against the rule of inferior creation by the heavenly bodies, but in a succeeding homily he feels it necessary to devote several paragraphs[2116] to refutation of the “vain science” of casting nativities, which some persons have justified by the words of God concerning sun, moon, and stars in the first chapter of Genesis, “And let them be for signs.” Basil questions if it be possible to determine the exact instant of birth, declares that to attribute to the constellations and signs of the zodiac the characteristics of animals is to subject them to external influences, and defends human free will in much the usual fashion. He is ready, however, to grant that “the variations of the moon do not take place without exerting great influence upon the organization of animals and of all living things,” and that the moon makes “all nature participate in her changes.”[2117]
[Sidenote: Permanence of species.]
Basil’s utterances concerning the world of nature are not always consistent. In describing the creation of vegetation he asserts that species are unchanging, affirming that “all which sprang from the earth in the first bringing forth is kept the same to our time, thanks to the constant reproduction of kind.”[2118] Yet a few paragraphs later we find him saying, “It has been observed that pines, cut down or even submitted to the action of fire, are changed into a forest of oaks.”[2119] Nevertheless in the last homily he again asserts that “nature, once put in motion by divine command, ... keeps up the succession of kinds through resemblance to the last. Nature always makes a horse succeed to a horse, a lion to a lion, an eagle to an eagle, and preserving each animal by these uninterrupted successions she transmits it to the end of all things. Animals do not see their peculiarities destroyed or effaced by any length of time; their nature, as though it had just been constituted, follows the course of ages forever young.”[2120]
[Sidenote: Final impression from the Hexaemeron.]
Concerning Basil in conclusion we may say that while he can scarcely be called much of a scientist, he is a pretty good scientist for a preacher. His knowledge of, and errors concerning, the world of nature will probably compare quite as well with the science of his day as those of most modern sermons will with the science of our days. His occasional flings at Greek philosophy are probably not to be taken too seriously. But what interests us rather more than Basil’s attitude is that of his audience, curious concerning nature. Just as it is evident that many of them go to theaters and circuses, or play with dice, despite Basil’s denunciation of the immoral songs of the stage and the evils of gambling; just so, we suspect, it was the attractive morsels of Greek astronomy, botany, and zoology which he offered them that induced them to come and listen further to his argument from design and his moral lessons based upon these natural phenomena. Nor were they likely to observe his censure of incantations and nativities more closely than his condemnation of theater and gaming. It would be rash to infer that they always practiced what he preached. By the same token, even if the church fathers had opposed scientific investigation—and it hardly appears that they did—they would probably have been no more successful in checking it than they were in checking the commerce of Constantinople, although “S. Ambrose regards the gains of merchants as for the most part fraudulent, and S. Chrysostom’s language has been generally appealed to in a similar sense.”[2121]
[Sidenote: The Medicine Chest of Epiphanius.]
The same recognition of an interest in nature on the part of his audience and the same appeal to their scientific curiosity, which we have seen in Basil’s sermons, is shown by Epiphanius of Cyprus (315-403) writing in 374-375 A. D.[2122] He calls his work against heresies the Panarion, or “Medicine Chest,” his idea being to provide antidotes and healing herbs in the form of salubrious doctrine against the venom of heretics whose enigmas he compares to the bites of serpents or wild beasts. This metaphor is more or less adhered to throughout the work, and particular heresies are compared to the asp, basilisk, dipsas,[2123] buprestis,[2124] lizard, dog-fish or shark, mole, centipede, scorpion, and various vipers. We are further told of substances that drive away serpents, such as the herbs dictamnon, abrotonum, and libanotis, the gum storax,[2125] and the stone gagates. As his authorities in such matters Epiphanius states that he uses Nicander for the natures of beasts and reptiles, and for roots and plants Dioscorides, Pamphilus, Mithridates the king, Callisthenes and Philo, Iolaos the Bithynian, Heraclides of Tarentum, and a number of other names.[2126]
[Sidenote: Gems in the high priest’s breastplate.]
If in his Panarion Epiphanius makes use of ancient botany, medicine, and zoology for purposes of comparison, in his treatise on the twelve gems in the breastplate of the Hebrew high priest[2127] he perhaps gives an excuse and sets the fashion for the Christian medieval Lapidaries. This work was probably composed after the Panarion, and in the opinion of Fogginius even later than 392 A. D.[2128] This treatise probably was better known in the middle ages than the Panarion, since the fullest version of it extant is the old Latin one, while the Greek text which has survived seems only a very brief epitome. The Greek version, however, embodies a good deal of what is said concerning the gems themselves and their virtues, but omits entirely the long effort to identify each of the twelve stones with one of the twelve tribes of Israel, which is left unfinished even in the Latin version. Epiphanius shows himself rather chary in regard to such virtues attributed to gems as to calm storms, make men pacific, and confer the power of divination. He does not go so far as to omit them entirely, but he usually qualifies them as the assertion of “those who construct fables” or “those who believe fables.” It is without any such qualification, however, that he declares that the topaz,[2129] when ground on a physician’s grindstone, although red itself, emits a white milky fluid, and, moreover, that as many vessels as one wishes may be filled with this fluid without changing the appearance or shape or lessening the weight of the stone. Skilled physicians also attribute to this liquid a healing effect in eye troubles, in hydrophobia, and in the case of those who have gone mad from eating grape-fish.
[Sidenote: Some other gems.]
Epiphanius mentions a few other gems than those in the high priest’s breastplate. Among these is the stone hyacinth[2130] which, when placed upon live coals, extinguishes them without injury to itself and which is also beneficial to women in childbirth, and drives away phantasms. Certain varieties of it are found in the north among the barbarous Scythians. The gems lie at the bottom of a deep valley which is inaccessible to men because walled in completely by mountains, and moreover from the summits one cannot see into the valley because of a dark mist which covers it. How men ever became cognizant of the fact that there are gems there may well be wondered but is a point which Epiphanius does not take into consideration. He simply tells us that when men are sent to obtain some of these stones, they skin sheep and hurl the carcasses into the valley where some of the gems adhere to the flesh. The odor of the raw meat then attracts the eagles, whose keener sight is perhaps able to penetrate the mist, although Epiphanius does not say so, and they carry the carrion to their nests in the mountains. The men watch where the eagles have taken the meat and go there and find the gems which have been brought out with it. In the middle ages we find this same story in a slightly different form told of Alexander the Great on his expedition to India. Epiphanius has one thing to tell of India himself in connection with gems, which is that a temple of Father Liber (Bacchus) is located there which is said to have three hundred and sixty-five steps,—all of sapphire.[2131]
[Sidenote: The so-called Physiologus: problem of its origin.]
The problem of an early Christian work entitled Physiologus is no easy one, although much has been written concerning it[2132] and more has been taken for granted. For instance, one often meets such wild and sweeping statements as that “the name Physiologus” was “given to a cyclopedia of what was known and imagined about earth, sea, sky, birds, beasts, and fishes, which for a thousand years was the authoritative source of information on these matters and was translated into every European tongue.”[2133] My later treatment of medieval science will make patent the inaccuracy of such a statement. But to return to the problem of the origin of Physiologus. The original Greek text,[2134] which some would put back in the first half of the second century of our era, if it ever existed, is now lost, and its previous existence and character are inferred from numerous apparent citations of it, possible extracts from it, and what are taken to be imitations, abbreviations, amplifications, adaptations, and translations of it in other languages and of later date. Thus we have versions or fragments in Armenian,[2135] Syriac,[2136] Ethiopian,[2137] and Arabic;[2138] a Greek text from medieval manuscripts, mostly of late date;[2139] various Latin versions in numerous manuscripts from the eighth century on;[2140] in Old High German a prose translation of about 1000 A. D. and a poetical version later in the same language;[2141] and Bestiaries such as those of Philip of Thaon[2142] and William the Clerk[2143] in the Romance languages[2144] and other vernaculars.[2145] The Physiologus has been thought to have originated in Alexandria because of its use of the Egyptian names for the months and because Clement of Alexandria and Origen are supposed to have made use of it. But it is difficult to determine whether the church fathers drew passages concerning animals and nature from some such work or whether it was a collection of passages from their writings upon such themes. Ahrens, who thought he found the original form of the work in a Syriac Book of the Things of Nature,[2146] regarded Origen as its author. In a medical manuscript at Vienna is a Physiologus in Greek ascribed to Epiphanius of Cyprus,[2147] of whom we have just been treating, while we hear that Pope Gelasius at a synod of 496 condemned as apocryphal a Physiologus which was written by heretics and ascribed to Ambrose,[2148] who so closely duplicated the Hexaemeron of Basil. A work on the natures of animals is also attributed to John Chrysostom.[2149] I am not sure whether a Physiologus ascribed to John the Scot in a tenth century Latin manuscript is the same work.[2150]
[Sidenote: Does the title apply to any one particular treatise?]
The Physiologus is commonly described as a symbolic bestiary, in which the characteristics and properties of animals are accompanied by Christian allegories and instruction. Some have almost gone so far as to hold that any passages of this sort are evidence of an author’s having employed the Physiologus, which some have held influenced the middle ages more than any other book except the Bible. But Pitra’s point is well taken that the Physiologus is one thing and the allegorical interpretation thereof another. In the case of the discordant versions or fragments which he gathered and published from different manuscripts, centuries, and languages, he noted one common feature, that the allegorical interpretation was sharply separated from the extracts from Physiologus and sometimes omitted entirely. This is what one would naturally expect since a physiologus is a natural scientist on whose statements concerning this or that the allegorical interpretation is presumably based and added thereto. But this suggests another difficulty in identifying Physiologus as a single work. The abbreviations for the word in medieval manuscripts are very easily confused with those for philosophers or phisici (physical scientists), and just as medieval writers often cite what the philosophers say or the phisici say without having reference to any particular book, so may they not cite what physiologi or even physiologus says without having any particular writer in mind? In the De bestiis ascribed to Hugh of St. Victor of the twelfth century physici are cited[2151] as well as Physiologus. When Albertus Magnus states in the thirteenth century in his work on minerals that the physiologi have assigned very different causes for the marvelous occult virtue in stones, he evidently simply alludes to the opinions of scientists in general and has no such work or works as the so-called Physiologus in mind.[2152] This is also clearly the case in a fragment from the introduction to a Latin translation from the Arabic of some treatise on the astrolabe, in which we find phisiologi cited as astronomical authorities.[2153] Furthermore, even in works which deal with the natures of animals and which either have the word Physiologus in their titles or cite it now and then in the course of their texts, there exists such diversity that it becomes fairly evident not only that it is impossible to deduce from them the list of animals treated in the original Physiologus or the details which it gave concerning each, but also that it is highly probable that the title Physiologus has been applied to different treatises which did not necessarily have a common origin. Or at least the greatest liberties were taken with the original text and title,[2154] so that the word Physiologus came to apply less to any particular book, author, or authority than to almost any treatment of animals in a certain style.
[Sidenote: And to what sort of a treatise?]
But of what style? It has too often been assumed that theology dominated all medieval thought and that natural science was employed only for purposes of religious symbolism. Of this general assumption the Physiologus has been seized upon as an apt illustration and it has been represented as a symbolic bestiary which influenced the middle ages more than any other book except the Bible[2155] and whose allegories accounted for the animal sculpture of the Gothic cathedrals and the strange or familiar beasts in the borders of the Bayeux Tapestry, the margins of illuminated manuscripts, and so on and so forth.
[Sidenote: Medieval art shows almost no symbolic influence of the Physiologus.]
The more recent scientific study of medieval art has largely dissipated this latter notion. It has become evident that in the main medieval men represented animals in art because they were fond of animals, not because they were fond of allegories. Their art was natural, not symbolic. They were, says Mâle, “craftsmen who delighted in nature for its own sake, sometimes lovingly copying the living forms, sometimes playing with them, combining and contorting them as they were led by their own caprice.” St. Bernard, although “the prince of allegorists,” saw no sense in the animal sculptures in Romanesque cloisters and inveighed against them. In short, with the exception of the symbols of the four evangelists, “there are few cases in which it is permissible to assign symbolic meaning to animal forms,” and it is “evident that the fauna and flora of medieval art, natural or fantastic, have in most cases a value that is purely decorative.” “To sum up,” concludes Mâle, “we are of the opinion that the Bestiaries of which we hear so much from the archaeologists had no real influence on art until their substance passed into Honorius of Autun’s book (Speculum ecclesiae, c. 1090-1120) and from that book into sermons. I have searched in vain (with but two exceptions) for representations of the hedgehog, beaver, tiger, and other animals which figure in the Bestiaries but which are not mentioned by Honorius.”[2156]
[Sidenote: Physiologus was more natural scientist than allegorist.]
These assertions concerning medieval art hold true also to a large extent of medieval literature and medieval science, although they were perhaps less natural and original than it and more dependent on past tradition and authority. But medieval men, as we shall see, studied nature from scientific curiosity and not in search for spiritual allegories, and even Goldstaub recognizes that by the thirteenth century the scientific zoology of Aristotle submerged that of the Physiologus in writers like Thomas of Cantimpré and Albertus Magnus who, although they may still embody portions of the Physiologus, divest it of its characteristic religious elements.[2157] But were its characteristic elements ever religious? Were they not always scientific or pseudo-scientific? Ahrens holds that the title was taken from Aristotle in the first place, and that Pliny was the chief source for the contents. The allegories do not appear in such early texts as the Syriac version or the fragments preserved in the Latin Glossary of Ansileubus. Not even the introductory scriptural texts appear in the Greek version ascribed to Epiphanius. Moreover, in the Bestiaries where the allegorical applications are included, it is for the natures of the animals, the supposedly scientific facts on which the symbolism is based, and for these alone that Physiologus is cited in the text. Thus the symbolism would appear to be somewhat adventitious, while the pseudo-science is constant. It is obvious that the allegorical applications cannot do without the supposed facts concerning animals; on the other hand, the supposedly scientific information can and does frequently dispense with the allegories. We do not know who was responsible for the allegorical interpretations in the first instance. Hommel would carry the origin of their symbolism back of the Christian era to the animal worship of Persia, India, and Egypt.[2158] But we are assured over and over again that Natural Scientist or Physiologus vouches for the statements concerning the natures of animals. Thus the symbolic significance of the literature that has been grouped under the title Physiologus has been exaggerated, while the respect for and interest in natural science to which it testifies have too often been lost sight of.
XXII. AUGUSTINE ON MAGIC AND ASTROLOGY
Date and influence of Augustine—Christianity and magic—Censure of magic and theurgy as well as Goetia—Magic due to demons—Marvels wrought by magic—Cannot be equalled by most Christians—Miracles of heretics—Theory of demons—Limitations to the power of magic—Its fantastic character—Samuel and the witch of Endor—Natural marvels—Relation between magic and science—Superstitions akin to magic—Survival of pagan superstition among the laity—Augustine’s attack upon astrology—Fate and free will—Argument from twins—Defense of the astrologers—Elections—Are animals and plants under the stars?—Failure to disprove the control of nature by the stars—Natural divination and prophetic visions—The star at Christ’s birth—Nature of the stars—Orosius on the Priscillianists and Origenists—Augustine’s letter—Attitude toward astronomy—Perfect numbers.
[Sidenote: Date and influence of Augustine.]
The utterances of Augustine concerning magic and astrology have been reserved for separate treatment in this chapter, partly because of his late date, 354 to 430 A. D., partly because of the voluminousness of his writings, but especially because of his approach to and influence upon the thought of the middle ages. It is, moreover, in his epoch-making book, The City of God, which better than any other single event marks, or at least sums up, the transition from classical to medieval civilization, from the life of the ancient city to that of the medieval church, that he descants with especial fulness upon magic, demons, and astrology, although he often also refers to these themes in his other treatises, which we shall cite as well. I separate the words, magic and astrology, here because Augustine, like most of the fathers, does so. Of Augustine’s discussion of the Biblical account of creation in his Confessions and De Genesi ad litteram I shall not treat, having already presented Basil’s Hexaemeron as an example of this type of work and of the Christian attitude toward natural science.[2159] But later in treating of medieval writers on nature I may have occasion to point out certain passages in which they may have been influenced by Augustine.
[Sidenote: Christianity and magic.]
Even though writing in the fifth century Augustine still finds it necessary to defend Christ against those who imagine that He has converted peoples to Himself by means of the magic art.[2160] And he tells us of books of magic which are ascribed to Christ Himself or to the apostles Peter and Paul.[2161] In reply to such charges or assertions he insists that Christians have nothing to do with magic, and that their miracles “were wrought by simple confidence and devout faith, not by incantations and spells compounded by an art of depraved curiosity.”[2162] And he brings the counter-charge against Roman religion that King Numa, its founder, learned its secrets and sacred rites by means of hydromancy or necromancy.[2163] He admits, however, that condemnation of magic and legislation against it had begun before Christianity.[2164]
[Sidenote: Magic and theurgy censured as well as Goetia.]
Augustine uniformly speaks of magic with censure and several times adverts to “the crimes of magicians.”[2165] He speaks, however, of goetia or sorcery as “a more detestable name” than magia and of “theurgy” as “an honorable name.” He also states that some persons draw a distinction between the malefici or sorcerers or practitioners of goetia, whom they call truly guilty of illicit arts and deserving of condemnation, and those who practice theurgy, whom they call praiseworthy. Porphyry, for instance, had stated that theurgy was useful to purge the soul and prepare it to receive spirits and to see God. Augustine, however, holds that in other passages Porphyry condemned theurgy, and in any case he himself refuses to sanction it.[2166] He stoutly denies that “souls are purged and reconciled to God through sacrilegious likenesses and impious curiosity and magic consecrations.”[2167] Very possibly Augustine would have classed as improper theurgy some of the use of powerful names described by Origen.
[Sidenote: Magic due to demons.]
At any rate Augustine declares that theurgists and sorcerers alike “are entangled in the deceitful rites of demons who may masquerade under the names of angels.”[2168] For it is to demons that Augustine, like most of our Christian writers, attributes both the origin and the success of magic. The demons are enticed by men to work marvels, not by offerings of food, as if they were animals, but by symbols which conform to the individual taste of each as a spirit, namely, various stones, plants, trees, animals, incantations, and ceremonies,[2169]—a good brief summary of the materials and methods of magic. Augustine believes that the spirits had first to instruct men what rites to perform and by what names to call them in order to summon them.
[Sidenote: Marvels wrought by magic.]
But when once the demons have revealed their secrets, henceforth the charms of the magic art have efficacy. Of the marvels worked by means of magic Augustine has little doubt; to deny them would indeed in his opinion be to deny the truth of the Scriptures, to whose accounts of Pharaoh’s magicians,[2170] the witch of Endor, and the Magi and the star, he adverts many times in his various works. If actors in the theater and performers in spectacles are able by art and exercise to display astounding alterations in the appearance of their earthly bodies, why may not the demons with their aerial bodies produce marvelous changes in elementary substances or by occult influence construct phantom images to delude human senses?[2171] Augustine even grants that the magicians are able to terrify the inferior spirits into obedience to their commands by adjuring them by the names of superior spirits, and thereby with divine permission “to exhibit to the eye of sense certain results which seem great and marvelous to men who through weakness of the flesh are incapable of beholding things eternal.” He does not regard this as inconsistent with the assertion of Jesus that Satan cannot cast out Satan, since while it may be that thus demons are expelled from sick bodies, the evil one thereby only the more surely takes possession of the soul.[2172]
[Sidenote: Cannot be equalled by most Christians.]
Augustine further grants that magicians, although stained with crime, can at present work miracles which most Christians and even most saints cannot perform. For this, however, he finds Scriptural precedent. Pharaoh’s magicians performed feats which none of the Children of Israel could equal except Moses who excelled them by divine aid. Augustine, like earlier fathers, usually fails to mention Aaron in this connection.[2173] This superiority of magicians to most Christians in working marvels Augustine believes is divinely ordained so that Christians may remain humble and practice works of justice rather than seek to perform miracles. Magicians seek their own glory; the saints strive only for the glory of God. And the more marvelous are the feats of magic, the more Christians should shun them; the greater the power of the demons, the closer Christians should cling to that Mediator who alone can raise men from the lowest depths.[2174]
[Sidenote: Miracles of heretics.]
Like Origen, Augustine further distinguishes the miracles wrought by heretics both from magic and from the miracles of true Christians. He holds that every soul in part controls itself and exercises as it were a private jurisdiction, in part is subject to the laws of the universe just as any citizen is amenable to public jurisdiction. Therefore magicians perform their marvels by private contracts with demons; good Christians perform theirs by public justice; bad Christians perform theirs by the appearance or signs of public justice.[2175] This view would seem to indicate that God, like the demons, regards the signs alone and not the character and purpose of the performer, so that Christian miracles, if they can be duplicated by heretics, would appear to be largely a matter of procedure and art, like magic.
[Sidenote: Theory of demons.]
For his theory of demons and their characteristics Augustine seems largely indebted to Apuleius, whom he cites in several chapters of the eighth and ninth books of The City of God. In his separate treatise, The Divination of Demons,[2176] he explains their ability to predict the future and to perform marvels by the keenness of their sense, their rapidity of movement, their long experience of nature and life, and the subtlety of their aerial bodies. This last quality enables them to penetrate human bodies or affect the thoughts of men without men being aware of their presence. Augustine, however, of course does not believe that the world of nature is completely under the control of the demons. God alone created it and He still governs it, and the demons are able to do only as much as He permits.[2177]
[Sidenote: Limitations to the power of magic.]
There were, for example, some things which Pharaoh’s magicians could not do and in which Moses clearly excelled them. They were able to change their rods into snakes but his snake devoured theirs. How the magicians got their rods back, if at all, neither Augustine nor the Book of Exodus informs us. But whether with or without their magic wands, they were still able to duplicate one or two of the plagues sent upon Egypt. Augustine explains that neither they nor the demons who helped them really created snakes and frogs, but that there are certain seeds of life hidden away in the elemental bodies of this world of which they made use. But their magic failed them when it came to the reproduction of minute insects.[2178] Augustine furthermore has some hesitation about accepting the stories of magic transformations of men into animals, which he represents as current in his own day as well as in times past, so that certain female inn-keepers in Italy are said to transform travelers into beasts of burden by a magic potion administered in the cheese, just as Circe transformed the companions of Ulysses and as Apuleius says happened to himself in the book that he wrote under the title, The Golden Ass. These stories, in Augustine’s opinion, “are either false or such uncommon occurrences that they are justly discredited.”[2179] He does not believe that demons can truly transform the human body into the limbs and lineaments of beasts, but the strange personal experiences of reliable persons have convinced him that men are deceived by dreams, hallucinations, and fantastic images.
[Sidenote: Its fantastic character.]
Thus, as we have already seen over and over again, the fantastic and deceptive character of magic is dimly realized. Usually, however, when Augustine represents “the powers of the air” as deceiving men by magic, the deceit consists merely in the magicians’ imagining that they are working the marvels which are really performed by demons, or in men being lured into subjection to Satan and to their ultimate and eternal damnation through the attractions of the magic art.[2180]
[Sidenote: Samuel and the witch of Endor.]
Augustine twice responded to questions concerning the witch of Endor’s apparent invocation of the spirit of Samuel, repeating in his De octo Dulcitii quaestionibus[2181] what he had already said in De diversis quaestionibus ad Simplicianum.[2182] In certain respects Augustine’s treatment of the problem differs from those which we have previously examined. What, he asks, if the impure spirit which possessed the pythonissa was able to raise the very soul of Samuel from the dead? Is it not much more strange that Satan was allowed to converse personally with God concerning the tempting of Job, and to raise the very Christ aloft upon a pinnacle of the temple? Why then may not the soul of Samuel have appeared to Saul, not unwillingly and coerced by magic power but voluntarily under some hidden divine dispensation? Augustine, however, also thinks it possible that the soul of Samuel did not appear but was impersonated by some phantasm and imaginary illusion made by diabolical machinations. He can see no deceit in the Scripture’s calling such a phantom Samuel, since we are accustomed to call paintings, statues, and images seen in dreams by the names of the actual persons whom they represent. Nor does it trouble him that the spirit of Samuel or pretended spirit predicted truly to Saul, for demons have a limited power of that sort. Thus they recognized Christ when the Jews knew Him not, and the damsel possessed of a spirit of divination in The Acts testified to Paul’s divine mission. Augustine leaves, however, as beyond the limits of his time and strength the further problem whether the human soul after death can be so evoked by magic incantations that it is not only seen but recognized by the living. In his answer to Dulcitius he further calls attention to the passage in Ecclesiasticus (XLVI, 23) where Samuel is praised as prophesying from the dead. And if this passage be rejected because the book is not in the Hebrew canon, what shall we say of Moses who appeared to the living long after his death?
[Sidenote: Natural marvels.]
Augustine had some acquaintance with ancient natural science and in one passage rehearses a number of natural marvels which are found in the pages of Pliny and Solinus in order to show pagans their inconsistency in accepting such wonders and yet remaining incredulous in regard to analogous phenomena mentioned in the Bible. So Augustine rehearses the strange properties of the magnet; asserts that adamant can be broken neither by steel nor fire but only by application of the blood of a goat; tells of Cappadocian mares who conceive from the wind; and hails the ability of the salamander to live in the midst of flames as a token that the bodies of sinners can subsist in hell fire. Augustine also admits “the virtue of stones and other objects and the craft of men who employ these in marvelous ways.”[2183] He denies, however, that the Marsi who charm snakes by their incantations are really understood by the serpents. There is some diabolical force behind their magic, as when Satan spoke to Eve through the serpent.[2184]
[Sidenote: Relation between magic and science.]
Once at least, however, Augustine associates science and magic. In his Confessions, after speaking of sensual pleasure he also censures “the vain and curious desire of investigation” through the senses, which is “palliated under the name of knowledge and science.” This is apt to lead one not only into scrutinizing secrets of nature which are beyond one and which it does one no good to know and which men want to know just for the sake of knowledge, but also “into searching through magic arts into the confines of perverse science.”[2185]
[Sidenote: Superstitions akin to magic.]
Of this dangerous borderland between magic and science Augustine has more to say in some chapters of his Christian Doctrine.[2186] After mentioning as prime instances of human superstition idolatry, other false religions, and the magic arts, he next lists the books of soothsayers (aruspices) and augurs as of the same class, “though seemingly a more permissible vanity.” In his Confessions,[2187] however, he tells of a soothsayer who offered not only to consult the future for him, but to insure him success in a poetical contest in which he was to engage in the theater. The incident is a good illustration of the fact that prediction of the future and attempting to influence events go naturally together, and that arts of divination cannot be separated either in theory or practice from magic arts. In the Christian Doctrine Augustine is inclined further to put in the same class all use of invocations, incantations, and characters, which he regards as signs implying pacts with evil spirits, and the use of which in working cures he asserts is condemned by the medical profession. He is also suspicious of ligatures and suspensions, and states that it is one thing to say, “If you drink the juice of this herb, your stomach will not ache,” and is another thing to say, “If you suspend this herb from the neck, your stomach will not ache. For in one case a healing application is worthy of approval, in the other a superstitious signification is to be censured.” Augustine recognizes, however, that such ligatures and suspensions are called “by the milder name of natural remedies (physica)”; and if they are applied without incantations or characters, possibly they may heal the body naturally by mere attachment, in which case it is lawful to employ them. But they may involve some signal to demons, in which case the more efficacious they are, the more a Christian should avoid them.
[Sidenote: Survival of pagan superstition among the laity.]
The same attitude toward superstitious medicine is shown in a sermon attributed to Augustine but probably spurious.[2188] Here a tempter is represented as coming to the sick man and saying, “If you had only employed that enchanter, you would be well now; if you would attach these characters to your body, you could recover your health.” Or another comes and says, “Send your girdle to that diviner; he will measure and scrutinize it and tell you what to do and whether you can recover.” Or a third visitor may recommend someone who is skilled in fumigation. The preacher warns his hearers not to succumb to such advice or they will be sacrificing to the devil; whereas if they refuse such treatment and die, it will be a glorious martyr’s death. The preacher, however, is not over-sanguine that his advice will be heeded, as he has often before admonished his hearers against pagan superstitions, and yet reports keep coming to him that some are continuing such practices. He therefore “warns them again and again” to forsake all diviners, aruspices, enchanters, phylacteries, augury, and observance of days, or they will lose all benefit of the sacrament of baptism and will be eternally damned unless they perform a vast amount of penance. The observance of days other than the Lord’s Day is here condemned on the ground that God made the other six days without distinction. In another supposititious sermon[2189] the practice of diligently observing on which day of the week to set out on a journey is censured as equivalent to worshiping the planets, or rather the pagan gods whose names they bear and who are said here to have originally been bad men and women who lived at the time that the Children of Israel were in Egypt. The preacher is even opposed to naming the days of the week after such persons or planets and exhorts his hearers to speak simply of the first day, second day, and so on.
[Sidenote: Augustine’s attack upon astrology.]
Nor will Augustine, to return to his remarks in the Christian Doctrine,[2190] exempt “from this genus of pernicious superstition those who are called genethliaci from their consideration of natal days and now are also popularly termed mathematici.” He holds that they enslave human free will by predicting a man’s character and life from the stars, and that their art is a presumptuous and fallacious human invention, and that if their predictions come true, this is due either to chance or to demons who wish to confirm mankind in its error.[2191] In his youth, when a follower of the Manichean sect, Augustine had been a believer in astrology and thereby “sacrificed himself to demons” at the same time that, owing to his Manichean scruples against animal sacrifice, he refused to employ a haruspex.[2192] Perhaps on this account he felt the more bound to warn his readers against astrology in his old age. He often attacks the casters of horoscopes in his works and especially in the opening chapters of the fifth book of The City of God, on which we may center our attention as being a rather more elaborate discussion than the other passages and including almost all the arguments which he advances elsewhere. These arguments are not original with him, but his presentation of them was perhaps better known in the middle ages than any other.[2193]
[Sidenote: Fate and free will.]
The objection to astrology as fatalistic does not come with the best grace from Augustine, the great advocate of divine prescience and of predestination, and in his discussion in The City of God he is forced to recognize this fact. He holds that the world is not governed by chance or by fate, a word which for most men means the force of the constellations, but by divine providence. He starts to accuse the astrologers of attributing to the spotless stars, or to the God whose orders the stars obediently execute, the causing of human sin and evil; but then recognizes that the astrologers will answer that the stars simply signify and in no way cause evil, just as God foresees but does not compel human sinfulness.
[Sidenote: Argument from twins.]
Thus thwarted in his attempt to show that the astrologers enslave the human will, although in other passages he still gives us to understand that they do,[2194] Augustine adopts another line of argument, that from twins, an old favorite, which he twists first one way and then another, proposing to the astrologers a series of dilemmas as he finds them likely to escape from each preceding one. He seems to have been much impressed by the thought that at the same instant and hence with the same horoscope persons were born whose subsequent lives and characters were different. He brings forward Esau and Jacob as examples, and states that he himself has known of twins of dissimilar sex and life. Moreover, he tells us in his Confessions that he was finally induced to abandon his study of the books of the astrologers, from which the arguments of “Vindicianus, a keen old man, and of Nebridius, a youth of remarkable intellect,” had failed to win him, by hearing from another youth that his father, a man of wealth and rank, had been born at precisely the same moment as a certain wretched slave on the estate.[2195]
[Sidenote: Defense of the astrologers.]
But the astrologers reply that even twins are not born at precisely the same instant and do not have the same horoscope, but are born under different constellations, so rapidly do the heavens revolve, as the astrologer Nigidius Figulus neatly illustrated by striking a rapidly revolving potter’s wheel two successive blows as quickly as he could in what appeared to be the same spot. But when the wheel was stopped and examined, the two marks were found to be far apart. Augustine’s counter argument is that if astrologers must take into account such small intervals of time, their observations and predictions can never attain sufficient accuracy to insure correct prediction; and that if so brief an instant of time is sufficient to alter the horoscope totally, then twins should not be as much alike as they are nor have as much in common as they do,—for instance, falling ill and recovering simultaneously. To this the astrologers are likely to respond that twins are alike because conceived at the same instant, but somewhat dissimilar in their life because of the difference in their times of birth. Augustine retorts that if two persons conceived simultaneously in the same womb may be born at different times and have different fates after birth, he sees no reason why persons who are born of different mothers at the same instant with the same horoscope may not die at different dates and lead different lives. But he does not recognize that very likely the astrologers would agree with him in this, since they often held that the influence of the stars was received variously by matter. He also asks why a certain sage is said to have selected a certain hour for intercourse with his wife in order to beget a marvelous son—possibly an inaccurate allusion to the story of Nectanebus[2196]—unless the hour of conception controls the hour of birth, and consequently twins conceived together must have the same horoscope. He also objects that if twins fall sick at the same time because of their simultaneous conception, they should not be of opposite sex as sometimes happens.
[Sidenote: Elections.]
With this Augustine turns from the case of twins to urge the inconsistency of the astrological doctrine of elections, suggested by the story of the sage who chose the favorable moment for intercourse with his wife. He holds that this practice of choosing favorable times is inconsistent with the belief in nativities which are supposed to have determined and predicted the individual’s fate already. He also inquires why men choose certain days for setting out trees and shrubs or breeding animals, if men alone are subject to the constellations.
[Sidenote: Are animals and plants under the stars]
This last clause indicates how exclusively Augustine’s attacks are directed against the prediction of man’s life from the stars, and how little he has to say regarding the stars’ control of the world of nature in general. He now goes on to consider this latter possibility, but interprets it too in the narrow sense of horoscope-casting, and as implying that every herb and beast must have its fate absolutely determined by the constellations at its moment of birth. This appears, however, to have been a widespread belief then, since he tells us that men are accustomed to test the skill of astrologers by submitting to them the horoscopes of dumb animals, and that the best astrologers are able not only to recognize that the reported constellations mark the birth of a beast rather than that of a human being, but also to state whether it was a horse, cow, dog, or sheep. Nevertheless, Augustine feels that he has reduced the art of casting horoscopes to an absurdity, as he feels sure that beasts and plants which are so numerous must frequently be born at precisely the same instant as human beings. Furthermore, it is plain that crops which are sown and ripen simultaneously meet with very diverse fates in the end. Augustine thinks that by this argument he will force the astrologers to say that men alone are subject to the stars, and then he will triumphantly ask how this can be, when God has endowed man alone of all creatures with free will. Having thus argued more or less in a circle, Augustine regains the point from which he had started, or rather, retreated.
[Sidenote: Failure to disprove the control of nature by the stars.]
Augustine cannot then be said to have advanced any telling arguments against some sort of control of inferior nature by the motions and influence of the heavenly bodies. He leaves the fundamental hypothesis of astrology unrebutted. His attention is concentrated upon genethlialogy, the superstition that the time and place of birth and nothing else determine with mathematical certainty and mechanical rigidity the entirety of one’s life. This seems nevertheless to have been a superstition which was very much alive in his time, which he felt he must take pains repeatedly to refute, and to which he himself had once been in bondage. But he could not have studied the books of the astrologers very deeply, as he ascribes views to them which many of them did not hold. Also he seems never to have read the Tetrabiblos of Ptolemy. His attack upon and criticism of astrology was therefore narrow, partial, and inadequate, and did not prevent medieval men from devoting themselves to that subject, although they might cite his objections against ascribing to the constellations an influence subversive of human free will. But he cannot be said to have admitted the control of the stars over the world of nature. Apparently the most that he was willing to concede was that it was not absurd to say that the influence of the stars might produce changes in material things, as in the varying seasons of the year caused by the sun’s course and the alternating augmentation and diminution of tides and shell-fish due, as he supposed, to the moon’s phases. He concludes his discussion of the subject in The City of God by saying that, all things considered, if the astrologers make many marvelously true predictions, they do so by the aid and inspiration of the demons and not by the art of noting and inspecting horoscopes, which has no sound basis.
[Sidenote: Natural divination and prophetic visions.]
In another work Augustine tells of some young men who, while traveling, as a boyish prank pretended to be astrologers and either by mere chance or by natural and innate power of divination hit upon the truth in the predictions which they supposed that they were inventing. In the same context he proceeds to discuss in a credulous way the possibility of marvelous prophetic visions, concerning which he tells one or two other tall tales from his personal experience. He is, however, doubtful how far the human soul itself possesses the power of divination, which he is inclined to attribute rather to spirits, good or bad. But owing to Satan’s ability in disguising himself as an angel of light it is often very difficult to tell to which sort of spirit to ascribe the vision in question.[2197]
[Sidenote: The star at Christ’s birth.]
In Augustine’s time there were those who held that Christ Himself had been “born under the decree of the stars,” because of the statement in the Gospel according to Matthew that the Magi had seen His star in the east. Of this matter Augustine treats in several of his works.[2198] He denies that this would be true even if other men were subject to the fatal influence of the stars, which he denies as usual on the ground of free will. He contends that the star was not one of the planets or constellations but a special creation, since it did not keep to a regular course or orbit, but came to where the child lay. But how did the Magi know that it was the star of Christ when they saw it in the east, unless by astrology? Augustine can only suggest that this was revealed to them by spirits, whether good or bad he does not know.[2199] Augustine further affirms that the star did not cause Christ to live a marvelous life, but Christ caused the star to make its marvelous appearance. “For, when born of a mother, He showed earth a new star in the sky, Who, when born of the Father, formed both heaven and earth.” And, “when He is born, new light is revealed in a star; when He dies, old light is veiled in the sun.” But these rhetorical flourishes and antitheses seem to attest rather than dispute the significance of celestial phenomena, so that Augustine cannot be said to have answered the astrological contention anent Christ’s birth very satisfactorily.
[Sidenote: Nature of the stars.]
The problem of the nature of the stars is one which Augustine prefers to leave unsolved, although it comes up several times in his writings.[2200] Whether they are simply lucid bodies without sense or intelligence, as some think; or have happy intellectual souls of their own, as Plato taught; whether they are to be classed with the Seats, Dominions, Principalities, and Powers of whom the apostle speaks; and whether they are ruled and animated by spirits: all these are questions which Augustine puts, but concerning whose answers he feels uncertain. His fullest discussion of the matter is in a letter against the Priscillianists to which we now come.
[Sidenote: Orosius on the Priscillianists and Origenists.]
An interchange of letters between Augustine and his Spanish disciple Orosius deals with the error of the Priscillianists and Origenists.[2201] Nothing is said to convict them of magic, which was, however, the charge on which Priscillian was put to death, but astrological tenets are ascribed to them. Orosius states that Priscillian taught that the soul was born of God and instructed by angels, but that it descended through certain circles of the heavens and was caught by evil principalities and thrust into different bodies; and that it remained subject to Mathesis or the laws of astrology until Christ set it free by His passion on the cross. Like the astrologers, continues Orosius, Priscillian associated the signs of the zodiac with the different members of the human body, Aries and the head, Taurus and the neck, and so on;[2202] and he also taught that the names of the patriarchs of the twelve tribes were “members of the soul,” Reuben in the head, Judah in the breast, Levi in the heart, and so on. Orosius adds that the Origenists regard the sun, moon, and stars not as elemental luminaries but as rational powers; and we have seen that Origen himself did so.
[Sidenote: Augustine’s letter.]
Augustine in his reply states that we can see that the sun, moon, and stars are celestial bodies, but not that they are animated. He agrees firmly with Paul that there are Seats, Dominions, Principalities, and Powers in the heavens, “but I do not know what they are or what the difference is between them.” On the whole, Augustine is inclined to regard this state of ignorance as a blissful one. He is somewhat troubled by the verses in the Book of Job, “How shall man be just in the sight of God, or how shall one born of woman purify himself? If He commands the moon and it does not shine, and if the stars are not pure before Him, how much more is man rottenness and the son of man a worm?” From this passage the Priscillianists infer that the stars have a rational spirit and are not free from sin, yet are placed in the heaven because their fault is less than that of sinful mankind. Origen too had argued, “If the stars are living and rational beings, there will undoubtedly appear among them both an advance and a falling back. For the language of Job, ‘the stars are not clean in His sight,’ seems to me to convey some such idea.”[2203] Augustine evades this difficulty by questioning whether this passage is to be received as of divine authority, since it is uttered by one of Job’s comforters and not by Job himself, of whom alone it is said that he had not sinned with his lips against God.
[Sidenote: Attitude towards astronomy.]
So set is Augustine against astrology that he even holds that Christians may well leave the subject of astronomy alone, “because it is related to the most pernicious error of those who utter a fatuous fatalism,” although he recognizes that there is nothing superstitious in predicting the future positions of the stars themselves from knowledge of their past movements. But except that to know the course of the moon is useful in determining the date of Easter, knowledge of the stars is of little or no help in interpreting the divine Scriptures.[2204] In another passage Augustine is somewhat perturbed by the assertion of astronomers that there are many stars equal to or greater than the sun in size, but which seem smaller because they are farther off,—an assertion which seems to conflict with the statement of Genesis that in creating the sun and moon “God made two great lights.” Augustine, however, does not stop to contest the point at length but leaves it with the excuse that Christians have many better and more serious matters to occupy their time than such subtle investigations concerning the relative magnitude of the stars and the intervals of space between them.[2205]
[Sidenote: Perfect numbers.]
Augustine himself, however, was not above occupying his readers’ time with discussion of the occult significance of numbers, towards belief in which he shows himself inclined. Six was a perfect number in his estimation, since God had created the world in six days, although He might have taken less or more time; and the Psalmist made no idle remark in saying that the Deity had ordered all things according to measure, number, and weight. Also six is the first number which can be obtained from adding together its factors: one, two, and three. Augustine was going on to say that seven was also a perfect number, when he checked himself lest he digress at too great length and seem “too eager to display his smattering of science.” Hence he merely added that one indication of seven’s perfection was its composition of the first complete odd number, three, and the first complete even number, four.[2206] It is therefore not surprising to find ascribed to Augustine a sermon on the correspondence between the ten plagues of Egypt and the ten commandments which opens by remarking that it is not without cause that the number of precepts in God’s law is the same as the number of plagues with which Egypt was afflicted.[2207]
Chapter XXIII
THE FUSION OF PAGAN AND CHRISTIAN THOUGHT IN THE FOURTH AND FIFTH CENTURIES
Need of qualifying the patristic attitude—Plan of this chapter—Julius Firmicus Maternus—Date of the Mathesis—Are the attitudes in Firmicus’ two works incompatible?—De errore is not unfavorable to astrology—Attitude of both works to the emperors—Religious attitude of the Mathesis—An astrologer’s prayer—Christian objections to astrology met—Astrology proved experimentally—Information to be gained from the third and fourth books—Religion and magic; exorcists—Divination—Magic as a branch of learning—Interest in science—Diseases in antiquity—Place of Firmicus in the history of astrology—Libanius accused of magic—Declamation against a magician—Faith of Libanius in divination—Magic and astrology in Pseudo-Quintilian declamations—Fusion of Christianity and paganism in Synesius of Cyrene—His career—His interest in science—Belief in occult sympathy between natural objects—Synesius on divination and astrology—Synesius as an alchemist—Macrobius on number, dreams, and stars—Martianus Capella—Absence of astrology—Orders of spirits—The Celestial Hierarchy of Dionysius the Areopagite.
[Sidenote: Need of qualifying the patristic attitude.]
In reading the writings of the Christian fathers one is impressed by the fact that their tone is almost invariably that of the preacher. In estimating therefore the practical effect of their utterances it is well to remember that these are counsels of perfection which were probably often not realized even by those who gave utterance to them. This is not to accuse the fathers of being pharisaical, but to suggest that as both clerics and apologists they were professionally bound to take up an irreproachable position morally and dogmatically. Basil has shown us that the audience who listened to his sermons were still under the spell of Roman amusements, dice, theater, and arena. And the average lay Christian mind was probably more easy-going in its attitude toward magic and superstition than Augustine. Not merely laymen, moreover, but Christian clergy and apologists of the declining Roman Empire might still hold to divination and astrology. It was a time, as has often been remarked, of religious syncretism, of fusion of pagan and Christian thought, when it is not always easy to tell whether the author of an extant writing is Christian or Neo-Platonist or both. Mr. Gwatkin states that “the surface thought” of Constantine’s time, “Christian as well as heathen, tended to a vague monotheism which looked on Christ and the sun as almost equally good symbols of the Supreme.”[2208] Others believed that astrology was the truth back of all religions.[2209]
[Sidenote: Plan of this chapter.]
In this chapter we shall therefore consider some writers of the fourth and fifth century who attest the existence of magic and astrology then, the influence of paganism on Christianity and of Christianity on paganism, and the fusion of Neo-Platonism, Christianity, and astrological theory. This, indeed, we have already done to some extent, as our previous chapters on Neo-Platonism and on the Christian fathers have carried us more or less into those centuries. But now as an offset to Augustine we take up other writers who have not yet been treated: Firmicus, the Latin Christian apologist and the astrologer of the mid-fourth century; Libanius, the Greek sophist of the same century; Macrobius and Synesius, Neo-Platonists writing respectively in Latin and Greek at the beginning of the fifth century, and of whom one was a Christian bishop; and probably in the same century the discussion of spirits by Martianus Capella in Latin and the Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite in Greek. Except for Libanius and Synesius, these authors were very influential in medieval Latin learning and might serve as well for an introduction to our following book on The Early Middle Ages as for a conclusion to this.
[Sidenote: Julius Firmicus Maternus]
Julius Firmicus Maternus[2210] flourished during the reigns of Constantine the Great and his sons. Sicily was his native land; he was of senatorial rank and very well educated for his time, showing interest in natural philosophy, literature, and rhetoric. Two works are extant under his name: one, On the Error of Profane Religions,[2211] is addressed to Constantius and Constans, 340-350 A. D., and urges them to eradicate pagan cults. The other, Mathesis,[2212] is a work of astrology written at the request of a similarly cultured friend, Lollianus or Mavortius, who is spoken of in the preface as ordinario consuli designato,[2213] an office which we know that he held in 355 A. D. The writing of two such works by one man has long given critics pause, and is a splendid warning against taking anything for granted in our study of the past. Not long ago the general opinion was that there must have been two different authors by the name of Firmicus. This very unlikely theory has now been universally abandoned, as unmistakable similarities in style and wording have been noted in the two works. But it is still maintained that “there is no question but that he was a pagan when he wrote his astrological book.”[2214] This involves two considerations, whether the attitude expressed in the two works is really incompatible and whether the Mathesis was written before or after the De errore.
[Sidenote: Date of the Mathesis.]
Mommsen contended that “it is beyond doubt”[2215] that the Mathesis was written between 334 and 337 A. D., relying chiefly upon several apparent mentions of Constantine the Great as still living. The names, Constantine and Constantius are frequently confused in the sources, however,[2216] and even while the words, “Constantinum maximum principem et huius invictissimos liberos, domines et Caesares nostros,” seem to refer unmistakably to Constantine, it must be remembered that they occur in a prayer to the planets and to the supreme God that Constantine and his children may “rule over our posterity and the posterity of our posterity through infinite succession of ages.” As this is simply equivalent to expressing a hope that the dynasty may never become extinct, it is scarcely proof positive that Constantine the Great was still living when Firmicus published his book. On the other hand, to maintain the early date Mommsen was forced to treat the mention of Lollianus as ordinario consuli designato as mere prophetic flattery or as an appointment held up by Constantius for eighteen years. We know that Firmicus addressed the De errore to Constantius and Constans, probably between 345 and 350; we know that Lollianus was city prefect of Rome in 342, consul ordinarius in 355, and praetorian prefect in the following year; whereas we know nothing certainly of either of them before 337. Furthermore Firmicus explicitly states that the writing of the Mathesis has been long delayed,[2217] and when the promise to compose it was first made, it is evident that neither he nor Lollianus was a young man. Lollianus was already consularis of Campania and according to inscriptions had previously held a number of other offices; while still in this position Lollianus had frequently to spur his friend on to the task which Firmicus as frequently “gave up in despair.” Then Lollianus became Count of all the Orient and continued his importunities. Finally, after Lollianus has become proconsul and ordinary consul elect, Firmicus completes the work and presents it to him. Meanwhile Firmicus himself—who had formerly “resisted with unbending confidence and firmness” factious and wicked and avaricious men, “who from fear of law-suits seemed terrible to the unfortunate”; and who “with liberal mind, despising forensic gains, to men in trouble ... displayed a pure and faithful defense in the courts of law,” by which upright conduct he incurred much enmity and danger;[2218]—has retired from the sordid sphere of law courts and forum to spend his leisure with the divine men of old of Egypt and Babylon and to purify his spirit by contemplation of the everlasting stars and of the God who works through them. Yet we are asked to believe—if we accept a date before 337 for the Mathesis—not merely that he writes a vehement invective against “profane religions” a decade later, but also that twenty years after Lollianus is still a vigorous administrator.[2219] It is possible, but seems unlikely.
[Sidenote: Are the attitudes in Firmicus’ two works incompatible?]
Certainly the date of the Mathesis should be determined without any assumption as to what Firmicus’ religion was when he wrote it. For, if we regard his attitudes in Mathesis and De errore as incompatible, it will be as difficult to explain how he could write the De errore after having composed the Mathesis as vice versa. After the steadfast affirmation of astrological principles in the Mathesis it is no easier to explain the fierce spirit of intolerance toward paganism in the De errore than it is after the mention of Christ in the De errore to explain the omission of that name in the Mathesis. But are the two works really incompatible? My answer is, No. The divergences are such as may be explained by the different character of the two works and the different circumstances under which they were written. De errore is an impassioned polemic very possibly delivered as an oration before the emperors; Mathesis is a learned compilation on a pseudo-scientific subject composed at leisure for a friend with the help of previous treatises on the subject. Why should Firmicus mention Christ in the Mathesis? Does Boethius, after nearly two centuries more of Christian growth and although he wrote a work on the Trinity, mention Christ in The Consolation of Philosophy? Some apparent petty inconsistencies there may be between Firmicus’ two works, but if we accept a host of contradictions in Constantine the Great, the first Christian emperor, why balk at some inconsistency in a writer who urges Constantine’s children against profane cults? On the other hand, there are some striking correspondences between the De errore and Mathesis.
[Sidenote: De errore is not unfavorable to astrology.]
It is noteworthy in the first place that in the De errore Firmicus does not attack astrology. But if he had been converted to Christianity since writing the Mathesis and had abandoned the astrological doctrine there expounded, would he have failed to attack the error of that art like Augustine who testified that he had once believed in nativities? It is therefore obvious that Firmicus does not regard astrology as an error even at the time when he is penning the De errore as a Christian apologist. Moreover, his view of nature in the De errore is quite in accord with that of the astrologer, and he manifests the respect for natural science or physica ratio which one would expect from the author of the Mathesis. Thus we find him criticizing certain pagan cults as sharply for their incorrect physical notions as he does others for travestying Christian mysteries. In its opening chapters certain oriental religions are criticized for exalting each some one of the four elements above the others, and for neglecting that superior control of the world of terrestrial nature in which both Christian and astrologer confided. Another argument against pagan worships is that they include human and immoral elements which cannot be explained as based upon natural law[2220] and the rule of that supreme God or “God the fabricator,” “who composed all things by the orderly method of divine workmanship,”—phrases which, as Ziegler has shown,[2221] occur both in the De errore and Mathesis. Furthermore, in the De errore Firmicus’ allusions to the planets, which include a representation of the Sun making a reproachful address to certain pagans,[2222] indicate that he regarded the stars as of immense importance in the administration of the universe.
[Sidenote: Attitude of both works to the emperors.]
It is also worth remarking that in both works Firmicus sets the emperors above the rest of mankind and closely associates them with the celestial bodies and “the supreme God.” If in Mathesis he prays for the perpetuation of the line of Constantine and forbids astrologers to make predictions concerning the emperor on the ground that his fate is not subject to the stars but directly to the supreme God, “and inasmuch as the whole surface of the earth is subject to the emperor, he too is reckoned in the number of those gods whom the principal divinity has established to perform and preserve all things”:[2223]—if he says this in Mathesis, in De errore he repeatedly addresses the emperors as “most holy”[2224] and in one passage says, “You now, O Constantius and Constans, most holy emperors, and the virtue of your venerated faith must be implored. It is erected above men and, separated from earthly frailty, joins in alliance with things celestial and in all its acts so far as it can follows the will of the supreme God.... Your felicity is joined with God’s virtue, with Christ fighting at your side you have triumphed on behalf of human safety.”[2225]
[Sidenote: Religious attitude of the Mathesis.]
If the author of De errore is not unfavorable to astrology the author of the Mathesis is strongly inclined towards monotheism and decidedly religious. He indignantly repels the accusation that astrology, which teaches that “all our acts are arranged by the divine courses of the stars,” draws men away “from the cult of the gods and of religions.” “We cause the gods to be feared and worshiped, we demonstrate their might and majesty.”[2226] The passage just quoted and some others are suggestive of polytheism, and Firmicus frequently speaks of the planets as “gods.” Probably in this he is reproducing the phraseology and reflecting the attitude of the astrological works which he uses as his authorities and which belong to the period of the pagan past. His apotelesmata, too, or predictions of nativities for various horoscopes, give little or no indication of being especially adapted to a Christian society, although in some other respects they fit his own age.[2227] But while the work contains a considerable residue of paganism, its prevailing conception of deity is one supreme God, the rector of the planets, “who composed all things by the arrangement of everlasting law,”[2228] and who made man the microcosm from the four elements.[2229] He is prayed to thus:
[Sidenote: An astrologer’s prayer.]
“But lest my words be bereft of divine aid and the envy of some hateful man impugn them by hostile attacks, whoever thou art, God, who continuest day after day the course of the heavens in rapid rotation, who perpetuatest the mobile agitation of ocean’s tides, who strengthenest earth’s solidity in the immovable strength of its foundations, who refreshest with night’s sleep the toil of our earthly bodies, who when our strength is renewed returnest the grace of sweetest light, who stirrest all the substance of thy work by the salutary breath of the winds, who pourest forth the waves of streams and fountains in tireless force, who revolvest the varied seasons by sure periods of days: sole Governor and Prince of all, sole Emperor and Lord, whom all the celestial forces serve, whose will is the substance of perfect work, by whose faultless laws all nature is forever adorned and regulated; thou Father alike and Mother of every thing, thou bound to thyself, Father and Son, by one bond of relationship; to Thee we extend suppliant hands, Thee with trembling supplication we venerate; grant us grace to attempt the explanation of the courses of thy stars; thine is the power that somehow impels us to that interpretation. With a mind pure and separated from all earthly thoughts and purged from every stain of sin we have written these books for thy Romans.”[2230] Doubtless these words might have been written by a Neo-Platonist or a pagan, but it also seems likely that they were penned by a Christian astrologer.
[Sidenote: Christian objections to astrology met.]
Firmicus provides not only for divine government of the universe and creation of the world and man, but also for prayer to God and for human free will,[2231] since by the divinity of the soul we are able to resist in some measure the decrees of the stars. He also holds that human laws and moral standards are not rendered of no avail by the force of the stars but are very useful to the soul in its struggle by the power of the divine mind against the vices of the body.[2232] Indeed, not only is the astrologer himself urged at considerable length to lead a pure, upright, and unselfish life, but “to show the right way of living to sinful men, so that, reformed by your teaching, they may be freed from the errors of their past life.”[2233] The human soul is also immortal, a spark of that same divine mind which through the stars exerts its influence upon terrestrial bodies.[2234] All this may be consistent or not both with itself and with the art of astrology, but it meets the chief objections that Christians might make and had made to the art.
[Sidenote: Astrology proved experimentally.]
These and other objections to the art of nativities are the theme to which the first of the eight books of the Mathesis is devoted. Firmicus points out that some of the other objections to astrology do not correctly state the doctrines of that art; others he admits are ingenious arguments which sound well on paper but he insists that if the opponents of astrology, instead of protesting that the influence of the stars at a given instant is incalculable, would put the matter to the test experimentally,[2235] they would soon be convinced of the truth of astrologers’ predictions, although he grants that unskilful astrologers sometimes give wrong responses. But he insists that persons who have not tested astrology experimentally are unfit to pass upon its merits.[2236] He affirms that the human spirit which has discovered so many other sciences and to which so much of divinity and religion has been revealed is capable also of casting horoscopes, and that astrological prediction is a relatively easy task compared to the mapping out of the whole heavens and courses of the stars which the mathematici have already performed so successfully.[2237] And he does not see why anyone persists in denying the power of fate in human affairs when all about him he can see the innocent suffering and the guilty escaping; the best men such as Socrates, Plato, and Pythagoras meeting an ill fate; and unprincipled persons like Alcibiades and Sulla prospering.[2238]
[Sidenote: Information to be gained from the third and fourth books.]
The remaining seven books of the Mathesis are given over to the art of horoscope casting. The second book consists chiefly of preliminary directions, but the others state what men will be born under various constellations. Of these the last four books are extant only in manuscripts of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, while the first four are found in manuscripts going back to the eleventh century. Moreover, although books five to eight cover more pages than books three and four, they do not supply so many details or so satisfactory a picture of human society in their predictions. These divergences, which are mainly ones of omission, do not invalidate the results which we gain from an analysis of the third and fourth books, but do raise the question whether the later books, especially the fifth and sixth, are genuine. In them the wording becomes vaguer, little knowledge is shown of conditions at the time that Firmicus wrote, the predictions are more sensational and rhetorical. Only the latter part of the eighth book carries the conviction of reality that books three and four do. These two books are both independent units and through their predictions of the future supply a general picture of human society, presumably that of Firmicus’ own time or not long before. One naturally assumes that those matters to which Firmicus devotes most space and emphasis are the prominent features of his age. Let us see what his picture is of religion, divination, the occult science and magic, natural science and medicine.[2239]
[Sidenote: Religion and magic; exorcists.]
To religion Firmicus gives less space than to politics. There are no clear references to Christianity, but there are few allusions to any particular cults. Firmicus, however, indicates the existence of many cults, speaking five times of the heads of religions, and characterizing men as “those who regard all religions and gods with a certain trepidation,” “those devoted to certain religions,” “those who cherish the greatest religions,” and so on. Temples,[2240] priests, and divination[2241] are the three features of religion that he mentions most. Magic and religion are closely associated in his predictions, for instance, “temple priests ever famed in magic lore.” Sacred or religious literatures and persons devoted to them are mentioned thrice, while in a fourth passage we hear of men “investigating the secrets of all religions and of heaven itself.” Other interesting descriptions[2242] are of those who “stay in temples in an unkempt state and always walk abroad thus, and never cut their hair, and who would announce something to men as if said by the gods, such as are wont to be in temples, who are accustomed to predict the future”; and of “men terrible to the gods and who despise all kinds of perjuries. Moreover, they will be terrible to all demons, and at their approach the wicked spirits of demons flee; and they free men who are thus troubled, not by force of words but by their mere appearing; and however violent the demon may be who shakes the body and spirit of man, whether he be aerial or terrestrial or infernal, he flees at the bidding of this sort of man and fears his precepts with a certain veneration. These are they who are called exorcists by the people.” Religious games and contests are mentioned four times: the carving, consecrating, adoring, and clothing of images of the gods, twice each; porters at religious ceremonies, thrice; hymn singers, twice; pipe-players once. Five passages represent persons professionally engaged in religion as growing rich thereby.
[Sidenote: Divination.]
We are told that men “predict the future either by the divinity of their own minds or by the admonition of the gods or from oracles or by the venerable discipline of some art.”[2243] Augurs, aruspices, interpreters of dreams, mathematici (astrologers), diviners, and prophets are mentioned. Once Firmicus alludes to false divination but he usually implies that it is a valid art.
[Sidenote: Magic as a branch of learning.]
From religion and divination we easily pass to the occult arts and sciences, and thence to learning and literature in general, from which occult learning is scarcely distinguished in the Mathesis. Magicians or magic arts are mentioned no less than seven times in varied relations with religion, philosophy, medicine, and astronomy or astrology, showing that magic was not invariably regarded as evil in that age, and that it was confused and intermingled with the arts and philosophy as well as with the religion of the times.[2244] There are a number of other allusions to secret and illicit arts or writings; these, however, appear to be more unfavorably regarded and probably largely consist of witchcraft and poisoning.
[Sidenote: Interest in science.]
The evidence of the Mathesis suggests that the civilization of declining Rome was at least not conscious of the intellectual decadence and lack of scientific interest so generally imputed to it. We find three descriptions of intellectual pioneers who learn what no master has ever taught them, and one other instance of men who pretend to do so. We also hear of “those learning much and knowing all, also inventors,” and of those “learning everything,” and “desiring to learn the secrets of all arts.” This curiosity, it is true, seems to be largely devoted to occult science, but it also seems plain that mathematics and medicine were important factors in fourth-century culture as well as the rhetorical studies whose rôle has perhaps been overestimated. Let us compare the statistics. Oratory is mentioned eighteen times, and it is to be noted that literary attainments and learning as well as mere eloquence are regarded as essential in an orator. Men of letters other than orators are found in six passages, and poets in only three. A passage reading “philologists or those skilled in laborious letters” suggests that four instances of the phrase difficiles litterae should perhaps be classed under linguistic rather than occult studies. There are four allusions to grammarians and two to masters of grammar, as against one description of “contentious, contradictory dialecticians, professing that they know what no teaching has acquainted them with, mischievous fellows, but unable to do any effective thinking.”[2245] On the other hand, there are fourteen allusions to astronomy and astrology (not including the mathematici already listed under divination), three to geometry, and six to other varieties of mathematics.[2246] Philosophers are mentioned five times; practitioners of medicine, eleven times;[2247] surgeons, once; and botanists, twice. These professions seem to be well paid and are spoken of in complimentary terms.
[Sidenote: Diseases in antiquity.]
Death, injury, and disease loom up large in Firmicus’ prospectus for the human race, making us realize the benefits of nineteenth-century medicine as well as of modern peace.[2248] No less than 174 passages deal with disease and many of them list two or more ills. Mental disorders are mentioned in 37 places;[2249] physical deformities in six. Other specific ailments mentioned are as follows: blindness and eye troubles, 10; deafness and ear troubles, 5; impediments of speech, 4; baldness, 1; foul odors, 1; dyspeptics, 4; other stomach complaints, 7; dysentery, 2; liver trouble, 1; jaundice, 1; dropsy, 5; spleen disorders, 1; gonorrhoea, 2; other diseases of the urinary bladder and private parts, 6; consumption and lung troubles, 6; hemorrhages, 6; apoplexy, 3; spasms, 5; ills attributed to bad or excessive humors, 12; leprosy and other skin diseases, 6; ague, 1; fever, 1; pains in various parts of the body, 6; internal pains and hidden diseases, 9; diseases of women, 5. There remain a large number of vague allusions to ill-health: 21 to debility, 12 to languor, 3 to invalids, and 49 other passages. Only eight passages allude to the cure of disease. Among the methods suggested are cauterizing, incantations, ordinary remedies, and seeking divine aid, which last is mentioned most often. The eleven references to medical practitioners should, however, be recalled here. The predictions as to length of life are inadequate to the drawing of conclusions on that point.
[Sidenote: Place of Firmicus in the history of astrology.]
Firmicus regards his work as a new contribution so far as the Latin-speaking world is concerned.[2250] Not that there had not been previous writing in Latin on the subject. Fronto “had written predictions very accurately,” but “as if he were addressing persons already perfect and skilled in the art, and without first instructing in the elements and practice of the art.”[2251] Firmicus supplies this essential preliminary instruction, which hardly anyone of the Latins had given, and corrects Fronto’s faulty presentation of antiscia, in which he followed Hipparchus, by the correcter method of Navigius (Nigidius?) and Ptolemy.[2252] Firmicus gives no systematic account of his authorities[2253] but occasionally cites them for some particular point and in general professes to follow not only the Greeks but the divine men of Egypt and Babylon, chief among whom seem to be Nechepso and Petosiris and the Hermetic works to or by Aesculapius and Hanubius. An Abram or Abraham is also cited several times. But Firmicus also gives the Sphaera Barbarica, “unknown to all the Romans and to many Greeks,” and which escaped the notice even of Petosiris and Nechepso.[2254] Firmicus himself is named by no ancient author[2255] but was well known in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, as we shall see. In the Mathesis he cites two previous astrological treatises of his own[2256] and expresses his intention of composing another work in twelve books on the subject of Myriogenesis.[2257] The astrologer Hephaestion of Thebes, who wrote later in the fourth century, seems also to have been a Christian, so that Firmicus was not a solitary case or an anomaly.[2258]
[Sidenote: Libanius accused of magic.]
The writings of Libanius, 314-391 A. D., the sophist and rhetorician, throw some light on the relations between magic and learning in the fourth century, show that sorcery and divination were actually practiced, and largely duplicate impressions already received from Apuleius, Apollonius, and Galen, and a Christian like John Chrysostom as well as just now from Firmicus. Libanius tells us how Bemarchius, a rival of his at Athens, who would have poisoned him if he could, instead circulated reports that he (Bemarchius) was the victim of enchantments, and that Libanius had consulted against him an astrologer who was able to control the stars, so that he could confer benefits upon one man and work sorcery against another. This incidentally is another good illustration of how easily astrology passed from mere prediction of the future to operative magic, and of the essential unity of all magic arts. The mob was aroused against Libanius and a praetor who tried to protect him was ousted and another installed at daybreak who was ready to put Libanius to death. Torture was prepared and Libanius was advised to leave Athens, if he did not wish to die there, and took the advice and left.[2259]
[Sidenote: Declamation against a magician.]
Among the declamations of Libanius is one against a magician,[2260] supposed to have been delivered under the following circumstances. The city was afflicted with a pestilence and finally sent an embassy to the Delphic oracle to learn how to escape the scourge. Apollo replied that they must sacrifice the son of one of the inhabitants who should be determined by lot, and the lot fell to the son of a magician. The father then offered to stay the plague by means of his magic art, if they would agree to spare his son. Against this proposal Libanius argues, urging the people to carry out their original decision and not to anger the Delphic god by violating his oracle, whose reliability is attested by “long time and much experience and common testimony.” He declares that magic is an evil art, and that magicians make no one happy but many wretched, ruining homes, bringing disaster to persons who have never harmed them, and disturbing even the spirits of the dead. He also censures the magician for not having offered to save the city from the plague before, and expresses some scepticism as to his magic power, asking why he did not prevent the fatal lot from falling to his son, or why he does not save him now by causing him to vanish from sight, or vouchsafe some other unmistakable sign of his magic power. It appears that the magician had asked a delay, saying that he must wait for the moon before he could operate against the plague. Libanius points out that meanwhile the citizens are perishing and that fulfillment of Apollo’s oracle will bring instant relief. It would seem, however, that some of the citizens had more faith in the magician than in the god, which supports the oft-made general assertion that the magic arts waxed as pagan religion and its superstitious observances waned. Libanius concludes his oration or imaginary oration with the cutting and heartless witticism that the magician can lose his son more easily than can anyone else, since he will of course still be able to invoke his spirit from the dead.
[Sidenote: Faith of Libanius in divination.]
Libanius’ own faith in divination is not only suggested by the attitude toward the Delphic oracle in the foregoing declamation but is attested by two passages in his autobiography. His great-great-grandfather had so excelled in mantike that he foresaw that his children would die by steel, although they would be handsome and great and good speakers. It also was rumored that a celebrated sophist had predicted many things concerning Libanius himself, which Libanius assures us had since come to pass.[2261]
[Sidenote: Magic and astrology in the pseudo-Quintilian declamations.]
Of the same type as Libanius’ declamation against the magician is the fourth pseudo-Quintilian declamation in Latin concerning an astrologer’s prediction, which we shall later in the twelfth century find Bernard Silvester enlarging upon in his poem entitled Mathematicus. In another of the pseudo-Quintilian declamations the word experimentum is used of a magician’s feat. “O harsh and cruel magician, O manufacturer of our tears, I would that you had not given so great an experiment! We are angry at you, yet we must cajole you. While you imprison the ghost, we know that you alone can evoke it.”[2262]
[Sidenote: Fusion of Christianity and paganism in Synesius of Cyrene.]
That more than fifty years after Firmicus adherence to Christianity might be combined with trust in divination of the future, occult science, and magical invocation of spirits, and with various other pagan and Neo-Platonic beliefs, is well illustrated by the case of Synesius of Cyrene,[2263] a fellow-African and contemporary of Augustine. Synesius, however, traced his descent from the Heracleidae, wrote in Greek, and displayed a Hellenism unusual for his time,[2264] and, while he did not find the Athens of his day entirely to his taste, continued the philosophical and rhetorical traditions of the sophists of the Roman Empire, like Libanius of whom we have just spoken. His extant letters show that Hypatia was numbered among his friends and had been his teacher at the Neo-Platonic and mathematical school of Alexandria. Hypatia was murdered by the fanatical Christian mob of that city in 415. But very different was the attitude of the people of Ptolemais to the like-minded Synesius. A few years before they had elected him bishop![2265] Moreover, he distinctly stipulated[2266] that he should not renounce his wife and family nor his philosophical opinions, which seem to have involved a sceptical attitude towards miracles and the resurrection, and a belief in the eternity of the world and pre-existence of the soul rather than in creation,[2267] in addition to the views which we are about to set forth. It has been observed also that his doctrine of the Trinity is more Neo-Platonic than Christian.[2268]
[Sidenote: Career of Synesius.]
The dates of Synesius’ birth and death are uncertain. He seems to have been born about 370. His last dateable letter appears to be written in 412, but some give the date of his death as late as 430. Others contend that he did not live to hear of Hypatia’s murder. Before he was made bishop he had been to Constantinople on a mission to the emperor to secure alleviation of the oppressive taxation in Cyrene. He had lived in Athens and Alexandria as a student, and in Cyrene on his country estate. Here, if in his fondness for books and philosophy he constituted a survival of the past, in his fondness for the chase and dogs and horses and his repulsion of an invasion of Libyan marauders he was the forerunner of many a medieval feudal bishop. And after he became bishop, he launched an excommunication against the tyrannical prefect Andronicus.
[Sidenote: His interest in science.]
But our particular interest is less in his political and more purely literary activities than in his taste for mathematics and science. He knew some medicine and was well acquainted with geometry and astronomy. He believed himself to be the inventor of an astrolabe and of a hydroscope.
[Sidenote: Belief in occult sympathies between natural objects.]
With this interest in natural and mathematical science went an interest in occult science and divination. His belief that the universe was a unit and all its parts closely correlated not only led him to maintain, like Seneca, that whatever had a cause was a sign of some future event, or to hold with Plotinus that in any and every object the sage might discern the future of every other, and that the birds themselves, if endowed with sufficient intelligence, would be able to predict the future by observing the movements of human bipeds.[2269] It led him also to the conclusion that the various parts of the universe were more than passive mirrors in which one might see the future of the other parts; that they further exerted, by virtue of the magic sympathy which united all parts of the universe, a potent active influence over other objects and occurrences. The wise man might not only predict the future; he might, to a great extent, control it. “For it must be, I think, that of this whole, so joined in sympathy and in agreement, the parts are closely connected as if members of a single body. And does not this explain the spells of the magi? For things, besides being signs of each other, have magic power over each other. The wise man, then, is he who knows the relationships of the parts of the universe. For he draws one object under his control by means of another object, holding what is at hand as a pledge for what is far away, and working through sounds and material substances and forms.”[2270] Synesius explained that plants and stones are related by bonds of occult sympathy to the gods who are within the universe and who form a part of it, that plants and stones have magic power over these gods, and that one may by means of such material substances attract those deities.[2271] He evidently believed that it was quite legitimate to control the processes of nature by invoking demons.
[Sidenote: Synesius on divination and astrology.]
The devotion of Synesius to divination has been already implied. He regarded it as among the noblest of human pursuits.[2272] Dreams, on which he wrote a treatise, he viewed as significant and very useful events. They aided him, he wrote, in his every-day life, and had upon one occasion saved him from magic devices against his life.[2273] Warned by a dream that he would have a son, he wrote a treatise for the child before it was born.[2274] Of course, he had faith in astrology. The stars were well-nigh ever present in his thought. In his Praise of Baldness he characterized comets as fatal omens, as harbingers of the worst public disasters.[2275] In On Providence he explained the supposed fact that history repeats itself by the periodical return to their former positions of the stars which govern our life.[2276] In On the Gift of an Astrolabe he declared that “astronomy” besides being itself a noble science, prepared men for the diviner mysteries of theology.[2277]
[Sidenote: Synesius as an alchemist.]
Finally, he held the view common among students of magic that knowledge should be esoteric; that its mysteries and marvels should be confined to the few fitted to receive them and that they should be expressed in language incomprehensible to the vulgar crowd.[2278] It is perhaps on this account that one of the oldest extant treatises of Greek alchemy is ascribed to him. Berthelot, however, accepted it as his, stating that “there is nothing surprising in Synesius’ having really written on alchemy.”[2279]
[Sidenote: Macrobius on number, dreams, and stars.]
Synesius influenced the Byzantine period but probably not the western medieval world. But the Commentary of Macrobius on The Dream of Scipio by Cicero is one of the treatises most frequently encountered in early medieval Latin manuscripts. In the twelfth century Abelard made frequent reference to Macrobius and called him “no mean philosopher”; in the thirteenth Aquinas cited him as an authority for the doctrines of Neo-Platonism.[2280] Macrobius himself affirmed that Vergil contained practically all necessary knowledge[2281] and that Cicero’s Dream of Scipio was a work second to none and contained the entire substance of philosophy.[2282] Macrobius believed that numbers possess occult power. He dilated at considerable length upon every number from one to eight, emphasizing the perfection and far-reaching significance of each. He held the Pythagorean doctrine that the world-soul consists of number, that number rules the harmony of the celestial bodies, and that from the music of the spheres we derive the numerical values proper to musical consonance.[2283] His opinion was that dreams and other striking occurrences will reveal an occult meaning to the careful investigator.[2284] As for astrology, he regarded the stars as signs but not causes of future events, just as birds by their flight or song reveal matters of which they themselves are ignorant.[2285] So the sun and other planets, though in a way divine, are but material bodies, and it is not from them but from the world-soul (pure mind), whence they too come, that the human spirit takes its origin.[2286] In his sole other extant work, the Saturnalia, Macrobius displays some belief in occult virtues in natural objects, as when Disaurius the physician answers such questions as why a copper knife stuck in game prevents decay.[2287]
[Sidenote: Martianus Capella.]
The medieval vogue of the fifth century work of Martianus Capella, The Nuptials of Philology and Mercury, and the Seven Liberal Arts,[2288] has been too frequently demonstrated to require further emphasis here, although it is still a puzzle just why a monastic Christian world should have selected for a text book in the liberal arts a work which contained so much pagan mythology, to say nothing of a marriage ceremony. Nor need we repeat its fulsome allegorical plot and meager learned content. Cassiodorus tells us that the author was a native of Madaura, the birthplace of Apuleius, in North Africa, and he appears to be a Neo-Platonist who has much to say of the sky, stars, and old pagan gods, often, however, by way of brief and vague poetical allusion.
[Sidenote: Absence of astrology.]
Of astrology there is very little trace in Capella’s work. In a discussion of perfect numbers in the second book the number seven evokes allusion to the fatal courses of the stars and their influence upon the formation of the child in the womb; but the eighth book, which is devoted to the theme of astronomy as one of the liberal arts, is limited to a purely astronomical description of the heavens.
[Sidenote: Orders of spirits.]
The chief thing for us to note in the work is the account of the various orders of spiritual beings and their respective location in reference to the heavenly bodies.[2289] Juno leads the virgin Philology to the aerial citadels and there instructs her in the multiplicity of diverse powers. From highest ether to the solar circle are beings of a fiery and flaming substance. These are the celestial gods who prepare the secrets of occult causes. They are pure and impassive and immortal and have little or no direct relation with mankind. Between sun and moon come spirits who have especial charge of soothsaying, dreams, prodigies, omens, and divination from entrails and auguries. They often utter warning voices or admonish those who consult their oracles by the course of the stars or the hurling of thunderbolts. To this class belong the Genii associated with individual mortals and angels “who announce secret thoughts to the superior power.” All these the Greeks call demons. Their splendor is less lucid than that of the celestials, but their bodies are not sufficiently corporeal to enable men to see them. Lares and purer human souls after death also come under this category. Between moon and earth the spirits subdivide into three classes. In the upper atmosphere are demi-gods. “These have celestial souls and holy minds and are begotten in human form to the profit of the whole world.” Such were Hercules, Ammon, Dionysus, Osiris, Isis, Triptolemus, and Asclepius. Others of this class become sibyls and seers. From mid-air to the mountain-tops are found heroes and Manes. Finally the earth itself is inhabited by a long-lived race of dwellers in woods and groves, in fountains and lakes and streams, called Pans, Fauns, satyrs, Silvani, nymphs, and by other names. They finally die as men do, but possess great power of foresight and of inflicting injury.[2290] It is evident that Capella’s spiritual world is one well fitted for astrology, divination, and magic.
[Sidenote: The Celestial Hierarchy of Dionysius the Areopagite.]
Very different are the orders of spirits described in The Celestial Hierarchy, supposed to be the work of Dionysius the Areopagite, where are set forth nine orders of spirits in three groups of three each: Seraphim, Cherubim, and Thrones; Dominions, Virtues, and Powers; Princes, Archangels, and Angels. The threefold division reminds us of Capella, but there the resemblance ceases. The pseudo-Dionysius takes all his suggestions from the Old and New Testaments, rather than from classical mythology and such previous classifications of spirits as that of Apuleius. And while his starting from such verses of the Bible as “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, descending from the Father of lights,” and “Jesus Christ the true light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world,” and his using such phrases as “archifotic Father” and “thearchic ray,” lead us to expect some Gnostic-like scheme of association of the spirits with the various heavens and celestial bodies, in fact he throughout speaks of the spirits solely as celestial and deiform and hypercosmic minds, and unspeakable and sacred enigmas of whose invisibility, transcendence, infinity, and incomprehensibility any description can be merely symbolic and figurative. Their functions seem to consist chiefly in contemplation of the deity or their superior orders and illumination of man and their inferior orders. They are not specifically associated by Dionysius with the celestial bodies, much less with any terrestrial objects, and so his account lays no foundation for magic and astrology, unless as its transcendent mysticism might pique some curious person to attempt some very immaterial variety of theurgy and sublimated theosophy. Although the Pseudo-Dionysius wrote in Greek,[2291] his work was made available for the Latin middle ages by the translation of John the Scot in the ninth century.[2292]
24. The Story of Nectanebus
” 25. Post-Classical Medicine.
” 26. Pseudo-Literature in Natural Science of the Early Middle Ages.
” 27. Other Early Medieval Learning.
” 28. Arabic Occult Science of the Ninth Century.
” 29. Latin Astrology and Divination, Especially in the Ninth, Tenth, and Eleventh Centuries.
” 30. Gerbert and the Introduction of Arabic Astrology.
” 31. Anglo-Saxon, Salernitan, and other Latin Medicine in Manuscripts from the Ninth to the Twelfth Century.
” 32. Constantinus Africanus.
” 33. Treatises on the Arts before the Introduction of Arabic Alchemy.
” 34. Marbod.
Chapter XXIV
THE STORY OF NECTANEBUS OR THE ALEXANDER LEGEND IN THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES[2293]
The Pseudo-Callisthenes—Its unhistoric character—Julius Valerius—Oriental versions—Medieval epitomes of Julius Valerius—Letters of Alexander—Leo’s Historia de praeliis—Medieval metamorphosis of ancient tradition—Survival of magical and scientific features—Who was Nectanebus?—A scientific key-note—Magic of Nectanebus—Nectanebus as an astrologer—A magic dream—Lucian on Olympias and the serpent—More dream-sending; magic transformation—An omen interpreted—The birth of Alexander—The death of Nectanebus—The Amazons and Gymnosophists—The Letter to Aristotle.
[Sidenote: The Pseudo-Callisthenes.]
The oldest version of the legend or romance of Alexander is naturally believed to have been written in the Greek language but is thought to have been produced in Egypt at Alexandria. But the Greek manuscripts of the story are all of the medieval or Renaissance period; indeed, none of them antedates the eleventh or twelfth century. Furthermore, they differ very considerably in content and arrangement, so that the problem of distinguishing or recovering the original text of the Pseudo-Callisthenes, as the work is commonly called, and of dating it, is one with which various scholars have grappled. It has been held that the original Greek text which lies back of the later versions was written not later than 200 A. D. But Basil, writing in Greek in the fourth century and well-versed in Greek culture, is apparently unfamiliar with the story of Nectanebus, since he says, “Without doubt there has never been a king who has taken measures to have his son born under the star of royalty.”[2294] Fortunately we are less interested in the original version than in the medieval development of the tradition. It should, however, perhaps be premised that certain features of the Alexander legend may be detected in embryo in Plutarch’s Life of him.
The true Callisthenes was a historian who accompanied Alexander upon his Asiatic campaigns but then offended the conqueror by opposing his adoption of oriental dress, absolutism, and deification, and was therefore cast into prison on a charge of treason, and there died in 328 B. C. either from ill treatment or disease.[2295] Since Callisthenes was also a relative and pupil of Aristotle, his name was an excellent one upon which to father the romance. However, the oldest Latin version of it professes to employ a Greek text by one Aesopus, possibly because Aesop’s fables accompany the story of Alexander in some of the manuscripts. Yet other versions cite an Onesicritus,[2296] and the Pseudo-Callisthenes has also been attributed to Antisthenes, Aristotle, and Arrian.
[Sidenote: Its unhistoric character.]
Perhaps no better single illustration of the totally unhistorical and romantic character of the Pseudo-Callisthenes can be given than the perversion of Alexander’s line of march in most of the Greek and all of the Latin versions. He is represented as first proceeding to Italy and receiving royal honors at Rome; then he goes to Carthage and reaches the shrine of Ammon by traversing Libya; next he passes through Egypt into Syria and destroys Tyre, after which he crosses Arabia and has his first battle with Darius. Presently he is found back in Greece sacking Thebes and dealing with Corinth, Athens, and Sparta. Then his Asiatic conquests are resumed.
[Sidenote: Julius Valerius.]
The oldest Latin version of the Alexander romance is the Res gestae Alexandri Macedonis of Julius Valerius. Who he was and when he lived are matters still veiled in obscurity; but it is customary to place him in the early fourth century on the basis of Zacher’s contention that the Res gestae is copied in certain portions of the Itinerarium Alexandri, which was written during the years 340-345 A. D. This dating would also serve to explain why Basil, writing in Greek before 379, had never heard of a king who had taken steps to have his son born under the star of royalty, while Augustine, writing in Latin between 413 and 426, mentions the story of a sage who selected a certain hour for intercourse with his wife in order that he might beget a marvelous son. This would also suggest that the Latin version was older than the Greek, as in fact the extant manuscripts of it are. The oldest manuscript of Valerius, however, is a badly damaged palimpsest of the seventh century at Turin. Other manuscripts are one at Milan of the tenth century and another at Paris dating about 1200.[2297] The text of Valerius differs considerably from the Greek Pseudo-Callisthenes and was to undergo further alteration in later medieval Latin versions.
[Sidenote: Oriental versions.]
Before speaking of these we may mention other oriental versions of the story. An Armenian text dates from the fifth century. A Syriac version, which dates from the seventh or eighth century and was “much read by the Nestorians,” was itself derived from an earlier Persian rendering. It seems to make use of both the Greek Pseudo-Callisthenes and Julius Valerius since it includes incidents from either which are not found in the other. And it omits a considerable section of the Greek version besides adding episodes which are not found in it, although contained in Julius Valerius. We hear further of Arabic and Hebrew versions of the romance, while manuscripts of recent date supply an Ethiopic version of the Pseudo-Callisthenes of unknown authorship and date, together with other Ethiopic histories and romances of Alexander. These are based partly upon Arabic and Jewish works but take great liberties with their sources in making alterations to suit a Christian audience, omitting for example, as Budge points out, Alexander’s victory in the chariot race, and transforming Philip and Alexander into Christian martyrs, or the Greek gods into patriarchs and prophets like Enoch and Elijah. Even the Greek version did not remain unaltered in the Byzantine period when two recensions in prose and two more in verse are distinguished. Indeed, none of the Greek manuscripts of the work antedates the eleventh or twelfth century, they differ greatly, and some of them ascribe the romance to Alexander himself.
[Sidenote: Medieval epitomes of Julius Valerius.]
Such variations in the eastern versions of the story of Alexander illustrate how the middle ages made the classical heritage their own and prepare us for similar alterations in the Latin account current in western Europe. The work of Julius Valerius, though written in the rhetorical style characteristic of the declining Roman Empire and composed almost on the verge of the middle ages, was to undergo further alterations to adapt it more closely to medieval taste and use. By the ninth century, if not earlier, two epitomes of it had been made, and, beginning with that century, manuscripts of the shorter of these epitomes become far more numerous than those of the original Valerius.[2298]
[Sidenote: Letters of Alexander.]
Two sections of the Alexander legend were omitted in the Epitome, not because medieval men had lost interest in them but because they had become so fond of them as to enlarge upon them and issue them as distinct works. They often, however, accompany the Epitome in the manuscripts. One of these was the Letter of Alexander to Aristotle on the Marvels of India.[2299] It is longer than the corresponding chapter of Valerius[2300] where a letter of Alexander to Aristotle is quoted and also differs from any known Greek text. The fact that reference is made to it in the longer Epitome leads to the conclusion that the Letter is older. This would also seem to be the case with the other work, a short series of letters interchanged between Alexander and Dindimus, the king of the Brahmans, since the Epitome omits the two chapters of Valerius which tell of Alexander’s interview with the Brahmans. It is believed that Alcuin, who died in 804, in one of his letters to Charlemagne speaks of sending these epistles exchanged between Alexander and Dindimus along with the equally apocryphal correspondence of the apostle Paul and the philosopher Seneca. No such letters are found in the Pseudo-Callisthenes, for the ten chapters on the Brahmans found in one Greek codex are interpolated from the treatise of Palladius, likewise in the form of a correspondence.[2301] Julius Valerius does not even mention Dindimus, but a third epistolary discussion of the Brahmans exists in Latin, De moribus Brachmannorum, ascribed to St. Ambrose.[2302]
[Sidenote: Leo’s Historia de praeliis.]
Leo, an archpriest of Naples, who went to Constantinople about 941-944 on an embassy for two dukes of Campania, John and Marinus, brought back with him a History containing the conflicts and victories of Alexander the Great, King of Macedon. Later Duke John, who was fond of science, had Leo translate this work from Greek into Latin, in which tongue it is entitled Historia de praeliis. We learn these facts from its prologue which is found only in the oldest extant manuscript, a Bamberg codex of the eleventh century,[2303] and in a manuscript of the twelfth or thirteenth century at Munich. The location of these two manuscripts suggests that the work was early carried from Italy to Germany, lands then connected in the Holy Roman Empire. Of the De praeliis apart from the prologue there came to be many copies, but most of them date from the later middle ages, and the importance of the work as a source for the vernacular romances of Alexander has been somewhat overestimated, since Meyer has shown that no manuscript of it is found in France until the thirteenth century and since the manuscripts of the Epitome are far more numerous.[2304]
[Sidenote: Medieval metamorphosis of ancient tradition.]
In the foregoing observations we may seem to have digressed too far from our main theme of science and magic into the domain of literary history. But the development of the Alexander legend, which happens to have been traced more thoroughly than perhaps any other one thread in the medieval metamorphosis of ancient tradition, throws light at least by analogy upon many matters in which we are interested: the state of medieval manuscript material, the continuity and yet the alteration of ancient culture during the early middle ages, the process of translation from the Greek which went on even then, and the varying rapidity or slowness with which books circulated and ideas permeated.
[Sidenote: Survival of magical and scientific features.]
Moreover, the story of Alexander, especially as adapted by the middle ages, contained a large amount of magic and science, more especially the former. The Epitome might omit a great deal else, but it kept intact the opening portion of the Pseudo-Callisthenes and of Julius Valerius concerning the adventures of Nectanebus, the sage and magician from Egypt, the astrologer and the natural father of Alexander. Indeed, the titles in some manuscripts suggest that Nectanebus came to rival Alexander for medieval readers as the hero of the story. Thus we find a History of Alexander, King of Macedon, and of Nectanebo, King of Egypt,[2305] or an account Of the Life and Deeds of Neptanabus, astronomer of Egypt,[2306] or a Latin metrical version by “Uilikinus” or Aretinus Quilichinus of Spoleto in 1236 entitled, The History of the Science of the Egyptians and of Neptanabus their king who afterwards was the true father of Alexander.[2307]
[Sidenote: Who was Nectanebus?]
Pliny in the Natural History describes the obelisk of Necthebis, king of Egypt, whom he places five centuries before Alexander the Great.[2308] Plutarch, however, in his life of Agesilaus and Nepos in his life of Chabrias mention a Nectanebus II who struggled against Persia for the throne of Egypt about 361 B. C. and later was forced to flee to Ethiopia. In the Alexander romance, however, it is to Macedon that Nectanebus retreats. A Nectabis is listed as a magician along with Ostanes, Typhon, Dardanus, Damigeron, and Berenice, by Tertullian, writing about 200 A. D.[2309] As a matter of fact, in the Thirtieth Dynasty were two kings named respectively Nektanebes or Nekht-Har-ehbēt, who ruled 378 to 361 B. C., and Nektanebos or Nekhte-nebof, who ruled 358 to 341 B. C. Both have left considerable buildings.[2310] It is the latter who was forced by the Persians to flee to Ethiopia nine years before Alexander conquered Egypt and who is the hero of our story. The stele of Metternich is covered with magical formulae ascribed to Nectanebo.[2311]
[Sidenote: A scientific key-note.]
A note suggestive of both natural science and occult science is struck by the opening passage of the Latin epitomes and of the oldest Greek manuscript; the first page of Julius Valerius is missing and has to be supplied from the epitomes. The first words are “The Egyptian sages,” and the first sentence describes their scientific ability in measuring the earth and in tracing the revolutions of the heavens and numbering the stars. “And of them all Nectanabus is recognized to have been the most prudent ... for the elements of the universe obeyed him.” In the opening sentences of the oldest Greek version and of the Ethiopic version even more emphasis is laid than in the Epitomes upon the learning of the Egyptians in general and of Nectanebus in particular, and of the close connection of that learning with astrology and magic.[2312] We read, “Now there lived in the land of Egypt a king who was called Bektanis, and he was a famous magician and a sage, and he was deeply learned in the wisdom of the Egyptians. And he had more knowledge than all the wise men who knew what was in the depths of the Nile and in the abysses, and who were skilled in the knowledge of the stars and of their seasons and in the knowledge of the astrolabe and in the casting of nativities.... And by his learning and by his observations of the stars Nectanebus was able to predict what would befall anyone who was about to be born.”[2313] In one Latin manuscript of the fifteenth century the History of Alexander the Great begins with the
5 sentence, “Books tell us how powerful the race of the Egyptians were in mathematics and the magic art.”[2314]
[Sidenote: Magic of Nectanebus.]
Next we are told, and the account is practically the same in all the versions of the story, how by means of his basin filled with water, his wax images of ships and men, his rod or wand of ebony, and the incantations with which he addressed the gods above and below, Nectanebus had been hitherto able to destroy all the armies and to sink all the fleets that had come against him. But when one day he found his magic unavailing to save him, he shaved his head and beard and fled to Macedon, where in linen garb he plied the trade of an astrologer.
[Sidenote: Nectanebus as an astrologer.]
In this he soon became so celebrated that the fame of his predictions reached the ears of the queen Olympias, who consulted him during an absence of Philip. When she asked Nectanebus by means of what art he divined the future so truthfully, he answered that there were many varieties of divination. Julius Valerius and the Latin epitomes mention specifically only interpreters of dreams and astrologers, but the Greek, Syriac, and Ethiopic versions give more elaborate lists of various kinds of diviners.[2315] Nectanebus next produced an astrological tablet adorned with gold and ivory and with each planet and the horoscope represented by a different stone or metal. With the aid of this he read the queen’s horoscope and told her that she would have a son by the God Ammon and would be forewarned soon to that effect in a dream. Olympias replied that if such a dream came to her, she would no longer employ Nectanebus as a magus but honor him as a god.
[Sidenote: A magic dream.]
Nectanebus thereupon sought for herbs useful to command dreams, plucked them, and pressed a syrup out of them. He placed a wax image of the queen inscribed with her name upon a little couch, lighted lamps, and poured his syrup over the wax figure, muttering a secret and efficacious incantation the while. By this means he brought it about that the queen would dream or think she dreamed whatever he said to the wax image of her. Later Nectanebus himself played the part of the god Ammon, announcing his coming beforehand to Olympias by making by his “science” a dragon which glided into her presence.
[Sidenote: Lucian on Olympias and the serpent.]
Lucian of Samosata in the second century tells us that it was a common story in his time that Olympias had lain with a serpent before giving birth to Alexander. He suggests as the explanation of how this tale originated the fact that at Pella in Macedonia there is a breed of large serpents, “so tame and gentle that women make pets of them, children take them to bed, they will let you tread on them, have no objection to being squeezed, and will draw milk from the breasts like infants.... It was doubtless one of these that was her bedfellow.”[2316] As is apt to be the case in ancient efforts to give a natural explanation of what purports to be miraculous or supernatural, Lucian’s biology is only slightly less incredible than Nectanebus’s magic transformations.
[Sidenote: More dream-sending: magic transformation.]
As the queen became pregnant, “Nectanebus consecrated a hawk and told it to go to Philip,” who was still absent, “to stand by him through the night and to instruct him in a dream as it was ordered.”[2317] The vision in question was explained by an interpreter of dreams to Philip as signifying that his wife would have a son by the god Ammon. Nevertheless Philip was somewhat suspicious and hastened to bring his wars to a close and hurry home. Nectanebus, however, rendering himself invisible by means of the magic art, continued to deceive both king and queen. Once he terrified the court by appearing again in the form of a huge hissing serpent, but put his head in Olympias’s lap and then kissed her. Thereupon he turned from a serpent into an eagle and flew away. Philip was then really convinced that his wife’s lover was the god Ammon.
[Sidenote: An omen interpreted.]
Before the birth of Alexander the following omen befell Philip. As he sat absorbed in thought in a place where there were many birds flying about, one of them laid an egg in his lap. It rolled to the ground, the shell broke, and a snake issued forth. It circled about the egg-shell but when it tried to re-enter the shell was prevented by death. When Antiphon, the interpreter of omens, was consulted concerning this portent, he said that it signified that a son should be born who would conquer the world but die before he could regain his native land.
[Sidenote: The birth of Alexander.]
The day of Olympias’s delivery now approached and Nectanebus, in his office of astrologer, stood by her side to tell her when the favorable moment had arrived for the birth of her child. Once he urged her to wait, since a child born at that moment would be a slave and a captive. Again he bade her restrain herself, for at that moment an effeminate would be born. At last the favorable instant came for the birth of a world conqueror, and Alexander was born amid an earthquake, thunder, and lightning. In this case, therefore, the moment of birth is regarded as controlling the destiny. Many astrologers, however, considered the moment of conception as of greater importance; we have already heard Augustine tell of the sage who chose a certain hour for intercourse with his wife in order to beget a marvelous son; and in the thirteenth century Albertus Magnus, in his treatise on animals, informs us that “Nectanebus, the natural father of Alexander, in having intercourse with his mother Olympias, observed the time when the sun was entering Leo and Saturn was in Taurus, since he wished his son to receive the form and power of those planets.”[2318]
[Sidenote: The death of Nectanebus.]
The death of Nectanebus was as closely in accord with the stars as was the birth of Alexander. At the age of twelve Alexander found Nectanebus in consultation with Olympias and, attracted by his astrological tablet, made him promise to show him the stars at night. Then as Nectanebus walked along star-gazing, Alexander pushed him into a steep pit which they chanced to pass, and Nectanebus lay there with a broken neck. When he asked Alexander the reason for his act, the boy replied that it was in order to convince him of the futility of his art, since he gazed at the stars unmindful of what threatened him from the ground. But Nectanebus rebuts this revised version of the maid servant’s taunt to Thales by telling Alexander that he had been forewarned by the stars that he should be killed by his own son, and by revealing to Alexander the secret of his birth.[2319]
In concluding the story of Nectanebus it is perhaps worth while to emphasize the fact that the epitomes and Julius Valerius often use the word magus of Nectanebus as an astrologer and that in general magic, astrology, and divination are indissolubly connected.
[Sidenote: The Amazons and Gymnosophists.]
Some account is given both in Julius Valerius and the longer epitome of Alexander’s exchange of letters with the Amazons and of questions which he put to the Gymnosophists of India (i. e. the Brahmans) and their replies. Neither of these promising themes, however, results in the introduction of any magic or occult science. We also find in the Stromata of Clement of Alexandria[2320] a list of ten questions which Alexander propounded to ten of the Gymnosophists of India and their ingenious answers given under pain of death if their responses proved unsatisfactory.
[Sidenote: The letter to Aristotle.]
Nor does Alexander’s letter to Aristotle on the marvels of India reveal many specific instances of superstition that are at all interesting. For the most part it recounts his marches, the sufferings of his army from thirst, combats with wild beasts, serpents, and hippopotamuses, and the treasures which he captured. Alexander states that “in former letters I informed you about the eclipse of the sun and moon and the constancy of the stars and the signs of the air.”[2321] He tells now, however, of a place where there are two trees of the sun and moon, speaking Indian and Greek, one masculine and the other feminine, from which one may learn what the future has in store for good or evil. As to this Alexander was inclined to be incredulous, but the natives swore that it was true, and his companions urged him “not to be defrauded of the experience of so great a thing.” Accordingly he made his way to the spot despite the innumerable beasts and snakes which beset his path. Chastity was essential in order to approach the trees, and he also had to lay aside his rings, royal robes, and shoes. The sun tree then told him at dawn that he would never see home or his mother and sisters again. At eventide the moon tree added that he would die at Babylon.[2322] The third and final response, vouchsafed by the sun tree, was that his death would be from poison, but the name of the poisoner the oracular tree refused to divulge lest Alexander try to kill him first and thus cheat the three Fates. Alexander has consequently had to content himself, as he informs Aristotle in the closing sentence of his letter, with building a monument to perpetuate his name among all mortals.[2323]
Of other spurious treatises ascribed to Alexander in the middle ages, works of alchemy and works of astrology, we shall treat in a later chapter on the Pseudo-Aristotle.
XXV. POST-CLASSICAL MEDICINE
Three representatives of post-classical medicine—Bibliographical note—Medical compendiums: Oribasius and Paul of Aegina—Aëtius of Amida—How superstitious are Aëtius and Alexander of Tralles?—Compound medicines—Aëtius merely reproduces the superstition of Galen—Occult science mixed with some scepticism—Alexander of Tralles—Originality of his work—His medieval influence—His personal experience—Extent of his superstition—Physica—Occult virtue of substances applied externally—Other things used as ligatures and amulets—Astrology and sculpture of rings—Incantations—Conjuration of an herb—Medieval version seems less superstitious than the original text—Marcellus: date and identity—“Marcellus Empiricus”—Superstitious character of his medicine—Preparation of goat’s blood—A rabbit’s foot—Magic transfer of disease—Pliny and Marcellus compared on green lizards as eye-cures—More lizardry—Use of stones and an herb—Right and left: number—Incantations and characters—The art of medicine survives the barbarian invasions.
[Sidenote: Three representatives of post-classical medicine.]
In this chapter as representatives of post-classical medicine and its influence upon medieval Latin medicine we shall consider three writers whose works date from the close of the fourth to the middle of the sixth century, Marcellus of Bordeaux or Marcellus Empiricus, Aëtius of Amida in Mesopotamia, and Alexander of Tralles in Asia Minor.[2324] They have just been mentioned in their chronological order, but although Marcellus antedates the other two by a full century, we shall consider him last, since he wrote in Latin while they wrote in Greek, and since he includes Celtic words and probably Celtic folk-lore, and since he seems to have been a native of Gaul, if not of Bordeaux,[2325] and thus is geographically closer to the scene of medieval Latin learning. Aëtius and Alexander have the closer connection not only with the eastern and Greek world but also with the past classical medicine of Galen and so will provide a better point of departure. Presumably from the places and periods in which they lived, all three of our authors were Christians, but it must be said that the chief evidence of Christianity in their works is the use of Christian or Hebrew proper names in incantations, and there are some analogous relics of pagan superstition.
[Sidenote: Medical compendiums: Oribasius and Paul of Aegina.]
As Tribonian and Justinian boiled down the voluminous legal literature of Rome into one Digest, so there was a similar tendency to reduce the past medical writings of the Greeks into one compendious work. Paul of Aegina, writing in the seventh century, observes in his preface[2326] that it is not right, when lawyers who usually have plenty of time to reflect over their cases have handy summaries of their subject to which they can refer, that physicians whose cases often require immediate action should not also have some convenient handbook, and the more so since many of them are called upon to exercise their profession not in large cities with easy access to libraries, but in the country, in desert places, or on shipboard. Oribasius, friend and physician of the emperor Julian, 361-363 A. D., had made such a compendium by that emperor’s order. In this he embodied so much of Galen’s teachings that he became known as “the ape of Galen,”[2327] although he also used more recent writers. But Paul of Aegina regarded this work of Oribasius as too bulky, since it originally comprised seventy-two books although only twenty-five are now extant, and so essayed a briefer compilation of his own. Two centuries ago, however, Friend and Milward protested against regarding Paul, Aëtius, and Alexander as mere compilers and maintained that they “were really men of great learning and experience”[2328] who “have described distempers which were omitted before; taught a new method of treating old ones; given an account of new medicines, both simple and compound; and made large additions to the practice of surgery.”[2329] Puschmann more recently states that Paul’s compendium was “composed with great originality and independence” and is of great value “particularly in its surgical sections.”[2330] After Paul, however, the Byzantine medical writers, such as Palladius, Theophilus, Stephen of Alexandria, Nonus, and Psellus, were of an inferior caliber.[2331] With Paul’s work, however, we are not now further concerned, nor with that of Oribasius, but with the somewhat similar compendiums of Aëtius and Alexander which lie chronologically between these other two. It is Aëtius and Alexander whom Payne accuses of “introducing into classical medicine the magical elements derived from the East”[2332] and whom we might therefore expect to possess an especial interest for our investigation.
[Sidenote: Aëtius of Amida.]
Of the life and personality of Aëtius we know very little, but inasmuch as he mentions St. Cyril, archbishop of Alexandria, and Peter the Archiater, a physician of Theodoric, while he himself is cited by Alexander of Tralles, he seems to have lived at the end of the fifth and beginning of the sixth century.[2333] And since Alexander cites him only in his book on fevers which seems to have been composed after the rest of his work, it seems probable that Aëtius was almost contemporary with him and wrote in the sixth rather than the fifth century. His Tetrabiblos—each of the four books subdivides into four sections and often these are spoken of as sixteen books—occupies a middle position not only in time but in length between the works of Oribasius and Paul, and resembles the latter in making a great deal of use of the former. Aëtius’ extracts from the older writers are shorter than those of Oribasius, however, and he also differs from him in combining several authorities in a single chapter, the method usually adopted by the medieval Latin encyclopedists. It has been noted that the wording of the original authorities was often preserved in the oldest medieval manuscripts of Aëtius, until the copyists of the time of the Italian Renaissance began to touch up the style in accordance with their erroneous notions of what constituted classical Greek.[2334] It may also be said that these systematically arranged handbooks of Oribasius, Aëtius, and the rest, where one could find what one was looking after, were far superior in systematic and orderly presentation to the discursive works of Galen which, like many other classical writings, often seem rambling and without any particular plan.[2335] This more logical, if somewhat cut-and-dried method, was also to be a virtue of medieval Latin learning. Whether Aëtius directly influenced the Latin middle ages is doubtful, since no early Latin translation of him seems to be known.[2336] The work of Oribasius, however, exists in Latin translation in manuscripts of the seventh century as well as in others of the ninth and twelfth.[2337]
[Sidenote: How superstitious are Aëtius and Alexander?]
The works of Aëtius and Alexander of Tralles do not impress me as containing an unusually large amount of superstitious medicine. Much less am I inclined to agree with Payne that they are responsible for the introduction into classical medicine of magical elements derived from the east. These elements, whether derived from the orient any more than any other feature of classical civilization or not, at any rate had been a prominent feature of classical medicine long before the days of Aëtius and Alexander, as Pliny’s review of medicine before his time abundantly proved and as is also shown by the extraordinary virtues which Pliny himself, his contemporary Dioscorides, and even the great Galen attributed to medicinal simples.
[Sidenote: Compound medicines.]
It is true that Aëtius and Alexander abound in recipes for elaborate medical compounds composed of numerous ingredients. Of such concoctions one example must suffice, a plaster which Aëtius recommends for tumors, hard lumps, and gout. “Of the terebinth-tree, of the stone of Asia, of bitumen three hundred and sixty drams each; of washing-soda (spumae nitri), calf-fat, wax, laurel berries, ammonia, and thyme three hundred and forty drams each; of the stone pyrites and quick-lime one hundred and twenty drams each; of the ashes of asps which have been burned alive one hundred and forty drams; of old oil two pounds. First liquefy the oil and wax, then the bitumen, which should have first been pulverized. Add to these the fat, and presently the ammonia and terebinth; and when these are taken off the fire mix in the lime and stone of Asia, then the laurel berries and washing-soda, and finally after the medicament has cooled sprinkle the ashes of asps upon it.”[2338] Such concoctions are to a large extent borrowed by Aëtius, Alexander, and Marcellus from earlier writers. Moreover, while Pliny had excluded such compounds from the pages of his Natural History, he had also made it abundantly evident that they were already in general use by his time, and they are to be found in great numbers in the works of Galen who cites many from preceding writers.
[Sidenote: Aëtius merely reproduces the superstition of Galen.]
Indeed, it was from Galen himself and not from the east that Aëtius at least derived his most strikingly superstitious passages. This was accidentally and convincingly proven by my own experience. It so happened that I wrote an account of the passages in the Tetrabiblos of Aëtius before I had read extensively in Galen’s works. When I came to do so, I found that almost every passage that I had selected to illustrate the superstitious side of Aëtius was contained in Galen: for example, the use as an amulet of a green jasper suspended from the neck by a thread so as to touch the abdomen;[2339] the story of the reapers who found the dead viper in their wine and cured instead of killing the sufferer from elephantiasis to whom they gave the wine to drink;[2340] the tale of his preceptor who roasted river crabs to an ash in a red copper dish in August during dog-days on the eighteenth day of the moon, and administered the powder daily for forty days to persons bitten by mad dogs.[2341] Such passages are usually repeated by Aëtius in such a way as to lead the reader to think them his own experiences, a fact which warns us not to accept the assertions of ancient and medieval authors that they have experienced this or that at their face value, and which makes us wonder if Friend and Milward were not too generous in regarding Aëtius at least as more than a compiler. He also repeats some of Galen’s general observations anent experience as that the virtues of simples are best discovered thus, and that he will not discuss all plants but only those “of which we have information by experience.”[2342] He further reproduces Galen’s attitude of mingled credulity and scepticism concerning the basilisk, combining the two passages into one;[2343] also Galen’s questioning the efficacy of incantations and telling of having seen a scorpion killed by the mere spittle of a fasting man without any incantation.[2344] Like Galen again, he omits all injurious medicaments and expresses the opinion that men who spread the knowledge of such drugs do more harm than actual poisoners who perhaps cause but a single death.[2345] Like Galen he announces his intention to omit all “abominable and detestable recipes and those which are prohibited by law,” mentioning as instances the eating of human flesh and drinking urine or menses muliebres.[2346] But also like Galen, he devotes several chapters to the virtues of human and animal excrement, especially recommending that of dogs after they have been fed on bones for two days.[2347] Somewhat similar to Galen’s recommendation to fill cavities in the teeth with roasted earthworms is the recipe of Aëtius for painless extraction of teeth “without iron.” The tooth must first be thoroughly scraped or the gum cut loose about it, and then sprinkled with the ashes of earthworms. “Therefore use this remedy with confidence, for it has already often been celebrated as a mystery.”[2348] Such use of earthworms continued a feature of medieval dentistry.
[Sidenote: Occult science mixed with some scepticism.]
Of my original selections from Aëtius very few are now left, and it is not unlikely that they too might be found somewhere in Galen’s works if one looked long enough. Aëtius asserts that drinking bitumen or asphalt in water will prevent hydrophobia from developing,[2349] and recommends for wounds inflicted by sea serpents an application of lead with a slice of the serpent itself.[2350] He takes the following prescription from Oribasius. To cure impotency anoint the big toe of the right foot with oil in which the pulverized ashes of a lizard have been mixed. To check the operation of this powerful stimulant one has merely to wash off the ointment from the toe.[2351] On the other hand, an instance of a sceptical tendency is the citation of the view of Posidonius that the so-called incubus is not a demon but a disease akin to epilepsy and insanity and marked by suffocation, loss of voice, heaviness, and immobility.[2352] It may also be noted that in discussing the medicinal virtues of the beaver’s testicles Aëtius does not include the story of its biting them off in order to escape its hunters.[2353] He does, however, cite several authorities, Piso, Menelbus, Simonides, Aristodemus, and Pherecydes for instances of the remarkable powers of certain animals in discovering the presence of poisons and preserving themselves and their owners from this danger: a partridge who made a great noise and fuss whenever any medicament or poison was being prepared in the house; a pet eagle who would attack anyone in the house who even plotted such a thing; a peacock who would go to the place where the dose had been prepared and raise a clamor, or upset the receptacle containing the potion, or dig up a charm, if it had been buried underground; and a pet ichneumon and parrot who were endowed with very similar gifts.[2354] Aëtius shows a slight tendency in the direction of astrological medicine, giving a list of “times ordained by God” for the risings and settings of various stars, since these affect the air and winds, and since “the bodies of persons in good health, and much more so those of the sick, are altered according to the state of the air.”[2355] But on the whole, of our three authors, Aëtius seems to contain the smallest proportional amount of superstitious medicine and occult science.
[Sidenote: Alexander of Tralles.]
Alexander of Tralles was the son of a physician and, according to the Byzantine historian, Agathias,[2356] the youngest of a group of five distinguished brothers, including Anthemius of Tralles, architect of St. Sophia at Constantinople, and Metrodorus the grammarian, whom Justinian summoned also to his court. Alexander had visited Italy, Gaul, and Spain as well as all parts of Greece[2357] before settling down in old age, when he could no longer engage in active medical practice,[2358] to the composition of his magnum opus in twelve books beginning with the head, eyes, and ears, and ending with gout and fever. Aside from his citation of Aëtius in the book on fevers, the latest writer named by Alexander is Jacobus Psychrestus, physician to Leo the Great about 474.[2359] It seems rather strange that Alexander says nothing of the pestilence of 542.[2360]
[Sidenote: Originality of his work.]
Alexander embodied the results of his own practice to a much greater extent than Oribasius and Aëtius. His book is more a record of his own medical observations and experiences than a compilation from past writings, a fact recognized in the first edition which entitled it Practica, and “though he pays a due deference to the ancients, yet he is so far from putting an implicit faith in what they have advanced that he very often dissents from their doctrines.”[2361] Puschmann regarded him as the first doctor for a long time who had done any original thinking,[2362] and esteemed his pathology as highly as his therapeutics had been esteemed by his sixteenth century translator, Guinther of Andernach.[2363] Friend wrote of him in the early eighteenth century, “His method is extremely rational and just and after all our discoveries and improvements in physick scarce anything can be added to it.”[2364] Alexander seems to have been a practitioner of much resource and ingenuity, stopping hemorrhage of the nose by blowing down or fuzz up the nostrils through a hollow reed, and directing patients, a thousand years before the discovery of the Eustachian tube, to sneeze with mouth and nose stopped up in order to dislodge a foreign object from the ear.[2365] According to Milward, Alexander was the first Greek medical writer to mention rhubarb and tape-worms, and the first practitioner to open the jugular veins.[2366] Indeed, Alexander advises blood-letting a great deal, but Milward, whose age still approved of that practice, notes that he was “no ways addicted to those superstitious rules of opening this or that vein in particular cases which several of the ancients and some even among the moderns have been so very fond of.”[2367] Finally, Alexander’s concise and orderly method of presentation compares favorably with that of the classical medical writers.
[Sidenote: His medieval influence.]
Alexander’s book traveled west, as its author had done, and was current in a free and abbreviated Latin translation from an early date.[2368] In fact, it was from the Latin version that the work was translated into Hebrew and Syriac.[2369] Not only are Latin manuscripts of Alexander’s work as a whole or of extracts from it[2370] found from the ninth century on, while printed editions in Latin were numerous through the sixteenth century, but it was much used and cited by medieval writers such as Constantinus Africanus, Gariopontus,[2371] and Gilbert of England.[2372] It is not, however, always safe to assume that citations of Alexander medicus, encountered in thirteenth century writers on the nature of things like Thomas of Cantimpré and Bartholomew of England, have reference to Alexander of Tralles, since a treatise on fevers is also ascribed to Alexander of Aphrodisias,[2373] while a work on the pulse and urine in fevers is thought to be by some medieval Alexander.[2374] And medical treatises are sometimes ascribed even to Alexander the Great of Macedon in the medieval manuscripts.[2375]
[Sidenote: His personal experience.]
We have already said that Alexander is no mere compiler but embodies the results of his own observation and experience during a long period of travel and medical practice. He frequently asserts that he has tested this or that for himself, or that the prescription in question has been “approved by long use and experience,”[2376] so that it is not surprising that we find the name Alexander still associated with medical “experiments” in manuscripts dating from the twelfth to fifteenth centuries.[2377] One of his cures for epilepsy he learned “from a rustic in Tuscany” (Thuscia?) but afterwards often employed with success himself.[2378] “It is a marvelous and exceptional medicine which you will communicate to no one,” concludes Alexander, a rather surprising prohibition in view of the fact that it was a popular remedy to begin with. Folk-lore, however, is often supposed to be kept secret. Another general rule which holds true in Alexander’s case is that these empirical remedies are apt to be the most superstitious, and conversely that marvels are apt to be supported by solemn assurance of their experimental testing.
[Sidenote: Extent of his superstition.]
Two centuries ago Milward wrote of Alexander of Tralles, “But there is another objection to our author’s character which I cannot pretend to say much in defence of, and that is, his being addicted to charms and amulets. It is very surprising that one who discovers so much judgment in other matters should show so much weakness in this.”[2379] Alexander certainly devotes more space to superstition relatively to the length of his book than Aëtius does and also is hospitable to a wider range of more or less magical notions and practices. One notices, however, in his book that the treatment of certain diseases, such as epilepsy, colic, gout, and quartan fever, is more likely to involve magical and astrological procedure than that of other ailments such as earache and disorder of the spleen. This is also apt to be the case with other ancient and medieval medical works. But it is doubtful if the distinction can be sharply drawn that magic was resorted to more in those diseases which seemed most mysterious and incurable.
[Sidenote: Physica.]
The chief circumstance which renders some parts of Alexander’s work more superstitious than others is that he sometimes, after concluding the usual medical description of the disease and prescriptions for it, adds a list of what he calls physical or natural medicines (φυσικά), which are for the most part ligatures and suspensions but involve also the employment of incantations and engraved images or characters. Apparently he calls these remedies physica, because they supposedly act by some peculiar property or occult virtue of the substance which is bound on or suspended and constitute a sort of natural magic. Alexander explains that “since some cannot observe a diet nor endure medicine, they compel us in the case of gout to employ physical remedies and ligatures; and in order that the well-trained physician may be instructed in every side of his art and able to help all sick persons in every way, I come to this subject.”[2380] This rather apologetic tone and the fact that he separates the physica from his other remedies show that he regards them as not quite on the same level with normal medical procedure. He goes on to say, however, that although there are many of these “physical” remedies which are efficacious, he will write down only those proved true by long use. In discussing fevers he again justifies the inclusion of physica in much the same way and says that those now mentioned were learned by him during a long-extended practice and experience.[2381] It is to be noted that some of these chapters on physical ligatures do not appear in the Latin version in three books, at least as it was printed in 1504.
[Sidenote: Occult virtue of substances applied externally.]
One ligature which is “quite celebrated and approved by many” and which instantly lessens the pain of ulcers in the feet, makes use of muscles from a wild ass, a wild boar, and a stork, binding the right muscles about the patient’s right foot and the left muscles about the left foot. Some persons, however, do not intertwine the muscles of the stork with the others but put them separately into the skin of a sea-calf. Also they take care to bind the other muscles about the patient’s feet when the moon is in the west or in a sterile sign and approaching Saturn. Others bind on the tendons and claws of a vulture, or the feet of a hare who should remain alive.[2382] Alexander seems to regard the carcass of the ass as especially remedial in the case of epilepsy. In Spain he learned to use the skull of an ass reduced to ashes and he recommends employing the forehead and brain of an ass as amulets.[2383] A suspension for quartan fever consists of a live beetle firmly fastened on the outside of a red linen cloth and hung about the neck. “This is true and often tested by experience,” Alexander assures us. Also excellent for this purpose are hairs from a goat’s cheek or a green lizard combined with clippings of the patient’s finger nails and toe nails. It is confirmed by the testimony of all “natural” physicians that the blood qui primus a virgine fuerit excretus is naturally hostile to quartan fever. Even if the girl is not chaste, the blood will be efficacious, if applied to the patient’s right hand or arm.[2384] Alexander knew a man who treated quartan fever by giving an undergarment of the patient to a woman in childbirth to wear, after which the patient wore it again and was cured “miraculously by some antipathy and occult influence.”[2385]
[Sidenote: Other things used as ligatures and in amulets.]
The materials employed in Alexander’s therapeutics are sometimes those which we associate especially with magic arts, such as the hair and nail-parings already mentioned. Against epilepsy he employs nails from a cross or wrecked ship, or the blood-stained shirt of a gladiator or criminal who has been slain. The nails are bound to the patient’s arm; the shirt is burned and the patient given the ashes in wine seven times. The use of a nail from a cross is a method ascribed to Asclepiades. Other materials recommended by Alexander against gout and epilepsy include the herb night-shade, the stones magnet and aetites, blood of a swallow and urine of a boy, chameleons in varied forms, and the stones found in dissected swallows of which we have heard before and shall hear yet again. For Alexander these stones are black and white, but he states that they are not found in all young swallows but are said to appear only in the first-born, so that one often has to dissect a great many birds before one finds any. In these passages on Physica Alexander cites such authors of magical reputation as Ostanes and Democritus, and tells how the latter suffered in youth from epilepsy until an oracle from Delphi instructed him to make use of the worms in goats’ brains. When a goat sneezes violently, some of these worms are expelled into his nostrils, whence they should be carefully extracted in a cloth without allowing them to touch the ground. Either one or three of them should then be worn about the epileptic’s neck wrapped in the thin skin of a black sheep.[2386]
[Sidenote: Astrology and sculpture of rings.]
One passage has already been cited where astrological conditions were observed. Alexander sometimes prescribes the day of the month upon which things shall be done; an oil, for instance, is to be prepared on the fifth of March.[2387] In one place Alexander advises engraving upon a copper die a lion, a half-moon, a star, and the name of the beast. This is to be worn enclosed in a gold ring upon the fourth finger.[2388] That the lion may not stand for a sign of the zodiac is suggested by another instruction concerning an engraved stone to be set in a gold ring, and which is to be carved with a figure of Hercules suffocating a lion.[2389] For gout, however, one writes a verse of Homer on a copper plate when the moon is in Libra or Leo.[2390] For colic one inscribes upon an iron ring with an octangular circumference a charm beginning, “Flee, flee, colic.”[2391]
[Sidenote: Incantations.]
The employment of such incantations is expressly justified by Alexander, who maintains that even “the most divine” Galen, who once thought that incantations were of no avail, came after a long time and much experience to be convinced that they were of great efficacy. Alexander then quotes from a treatise which is not extant but which he asserts is a work by Galen entitled, On medical treatment in Homer.[2392] “So some think that incantations are like old-wives’ tales and so I thought for a long while, but in process of time from perfectly plain instances I have become persuaded that there is force in them, for I have experienced their aid in the case of persons stung by scorpions. And no less in the case of bones stuck in the throat, which were straightway expelled by an incantation.” Alexander himself thereupon continues, “If such is the testimony of divinest Galen and many other ancients, what prevents us too from communicating to you those which we have learned from experience and which we have received from trustworthy friends?”
[Sidenote: Conjuration of an herb.]
Both incantations and observance of astrological conditions play an important part in the instructions given by Alexander for digging and plucking with imprecations an herb to be used in the treatment of fluxions of hands or feet. “When the moon is in Aquarius under Pisces, dig before sunset, not touching the root. After digging with two fingers of the left hand, namely, the thumb and middle finger, say, ‘I address you, I address you, sacred herb. I summon you to-morrow to the house of Philia to stay the fluxion of feet and hands of this man or this woman. But I adjure you by the great name, Iaoth, Sabaoth, God who established the earth and fixed the sea abounding in fluid floods, who desiccated Lot’s wife and made her a statue of salt, receive the spirit of thy mother earth and its powers, and dry up this fluxion of feet or of hands of this man or woman.’ On the morrow ere sunrise, taking the bone of some dead animal, dig up the root, and holding it say, ‘I adjure you by the sacred names, Iaoth, Sabaoth, Adonai, Eloi,’ and sprinkle a pinch of salt on that root, saying, ‘As this salt is not increased, so be not the ailment of this man or of this woman.’ Then bind one end of the root to the patient, taking care that it is not moist, and suspend the rest of it over the fire for 360 days.”[2393] The mention of mother earth in this charm perhaps indicates an ultimate pagan origin, but the allusions to one God, and to incidents in the Old Testament, and the use of names of spirits show Jewish or Christian influence, while the number 360 perhaps points to the Gnostics.
[Sidenote: Medieval version seems less superstitious than the original text.]
While in conformity with the character of our investigation we have emphasized those passages in Alexander which are suggestive of magic and its methods, it should be said that many of the passages which we have cited are apparently[2394] not found in the medieval Latin versions which seem to omit many, although not all, of the chapters devoted to physical ligatures. Here then apparently is a case where the early medieval translator and adapter, instead of retaining and emphasizing the superstition of the past, has largely purged his text of it. But we have next to consider a Latin work, written apparently about the year 400 A. D. and known to us through two manuscripts of the ninth century, in which magic is far more rampant than in any version of Alexander of Tralles. Judging, however, from the small number of extant manuscripts, it was less influential through the medieval period than was Alexander’s book.
[Sidenote: Marcellus: date and identity.]
The De medicamentis opens in one of the two extant manuscripts with a dedicatory letter from “Marcellus, an illustrious man of the main office of Theodosius the Elder (?)” to his sons.[2395] This ascription is generally accepted as genuine, and Grimm believed this to be the same Marcellus as the physician who is gratefully mentioned, together with his sons, then mere infants, in the letters of Libanius, whose severe headaches Marcellus had alleviated, and as the Marcellus magister officiorum who is mentioned twice in the Theodosian Code under the year 395. The date of the De medicamentis may be further fixed from its including “a singular remedy for spleen which the patriarch Gamaliel recently revealed from proved experiments.” This Gamaliel was Jewish patriarch at Constantinople from some time before 395 on to 415 or later. The question, however, of Marcellus’ authorship is complicated by the fact that he is twice cited in the work itself. One of these passages concerns an “oxyporium which Nero used for the digestion, which Marcellus the eminent physician revealed, which we too have tested in practice.”[2396] This sounds as if some later person had had a hand in the work as it has reached us, since Marcellus himself would scarcely have cited another person of the same name without some distinguishing epithet. Furthermore Aëtius cites a Marcellus for a passage which does not appear in the De medicamentis concerning wolfish or canine insanity, in which men imagine themselves to be wolves or dogs and act like them during the night in the month of February. But the De medicamentis as a whole is of the character promised by Marcellus in the introductory letter to his sons and so may be taken as his work.
[Sidenote: “Marcellus Empiricus.”]
The empiricism which we have already noted in Alexander of Tralles becomes most pronounced and most extreme in Marcellus, who indeed is often called Marcellus Empiricus on this account, and many of whose chapter and other headings[2397] terminate with these words descriptive of their contents, “various rational and natural remedies learned by experience” (remedia rationabilia et physica diversa de experimentis). In his preface, too, he speaks of his book not as De medicamentis but as De empiricis. He has, it is true, utilized “the old authorities of the medical art set down in the Latin language,” and likewise more recent writers and “the works of studious men” who were not especially trained in medicine; but he also includes what he has learned from hearsay or from personal experience, and “even remedies chanced upon by rustics and the populace and simples which they have tested by experience.” One prescription, which he characterizes as efficacious beyond human hope and incapable of being satisfactorily lauded, he purchased from an old-wife of Africa who cured many at Rome by it, while the author himself has employed it in the cure of “several persons neither of humble rank nor unknown, whose names it is superfluous to mention.” This remedy is a concoction of such things as ashes of deer-horn, nine grains of white pepper, a little myrrh, and an African snail pounded shell and all while still alive in a mortar and then mixed with Falernian wine. Very detailed and explicit directions are given as to its preparation and administration, including an instruction to drink the dose facing towards the east.[2398] In another passage Marcellus says of certain compounds, “If there is any faith, both I myself have always found them by experience to be useful remedies and I can state that others are of the same mind; and I will add this, that other medicines can not compare to this liniment, which in similar cases several of my friends, whom I trust as I do myself, have affirmed on oath they have found by experience a remarkable cure.”[2399] Of an eye-remedy he remarks, “And that we may believe the author of this remedy from experience, he states that after he had been blind for twelve years it restored his sight within twenty days.”[2400] Marcellus also frequently couples marvelousness with experimentation, saying, “You will experience a wonderful remedy.” In one passage he uses the word “experiment” as a verb rather than as a noun, coining a new expression, experimentatum remedium,[2401] but his commonest expressions are de experimento or de experimentis, expertum, and experieris or experietur.[2402] Some of his “experiences” really are purposive experiments, as where one discovers whether a tumor is scrofulous by applying an earthworm to it. Then put the worm on a leaf and if the tumor was scrofulous, the worm will turn into earth.[2403] The following experiment indicates that sufferers from spleen should drink in vinegar the root or dried leaves of the tamarisk. Give tamarisk to a pig to eat for nine days, then kill the animal and you will find it without a spleen.[2404]
[Sidenote: Superstitious character of his medicine.]
As Marcellus appeals the most to experience, so he is by far the most given to superstition and folk-lore of our three authors. Practically his entire work is of the character of the passages devoted to Physica by Alexander of Tralles. He indulges in no medical theory, he does not diagnose diseases, nor prescribe a regimen of health in the form of bathing, diet, and exercise. His work is wholly composed of medicaments and for the most part empirical ones. Besides the elaborate compounds which were so frequent in Aëtius and Alexander, he is extremely addicted to absurd rigmarole and all sorts of superstitious practices in the application or administration of medicinal simples. His pharmacy includes not only herbs and gems, to which he attributes occult virtue and which he sometimes directs to have engraven with characters and figures, such as SSS or a dragon surrounded with seven rays[2405]—the emblem of the Agathodaemon, but also all kinds of animals, reptiles, and parts of the same, after the fashion of Pliny’s medicine. He is constantly calling into requisition such things as the ashes of a mole, the blood of a bat, the brains of a mouse, the gall of a hyena, the hoofs of a live ass, the liver of a wolf, woman’s milk, sea-hares, a white spider with very long legs, and centipedes or multipedes, especially the variety that rolls up into a ball when touched. But it is scarcely feasible to separate Marcellus’ materials from his procedure, so we will begin to consider them together in some prescriptions where animals play the leading part.
[Sidenote: Preparation of goat’s blood.]
For those suffering from stone is recommended a remedy prepared in the following fashion. In August shut up in a dry place for three days a goat, preferably a wild one who is one year old, and feed him on nothing but laurel and give him no water to drink; finally on the third day, which should fall on a Thursday or Sunday, kill him. Both the person who kills the goat and the patient should be chaste and pure. Cut the goat’s throat and collect his blood—it is best if the blood is collected by naked boys—and burn it to an ash in an earthen pot. After combining it with various herbs and drugs, there are further directions to follow as to how it may best be administered to the patient. Marcellus, by the way, affirms that adamant can be broken only by goat’s blood.[2406]
[Sidenote: A rabbit’s foot.]
The following prescription involves the familiar superstition that a rabbit’s foot is lucky: “Cut off the foot of a live rabbit and take hairs from under its belly and let it go. Of those hairs or wool make a strong thread and with it bind the rabbit’s foot to the body of the patient and you will find a marvelous remedy. But the remedy will be even more efficacious, so that it is hardly credible, if by chance you find that bone, namely, the rabbit’s ankle-bone, in the dung of a wolf, which you should guard so that it neither touches the earth nor is touched by woman. Nor should any woman touch that thread made of the rabbit’s wool.” Marcellus further recommends that in releasing the rabbit after taking its wool you should say, “Flee, flee, little rabbit, and take the pain away with you.”[2407]
[Sidenote: Magic transfer of disease.]
Of such magical transfer of disease to other animals or objects there are a number of examples. Toothache may be stopped by standing on the ground under the open sky and spitting in a frog’s mouth and asking it to take the toothache away with it and then releasing it.[2408] Even consumptives who seem certain to die and who labor continually with an unbearable cough, may be cured by giving them to drink for three days the saliva or foam of a horse. “You will indeed cure the patient without delay, but the horse will die suddenly.”[2409] Splenetic persons are benefited by imposing any one of three kinds of fish upon the spleen and then replacing the fish alive in the sea.[2410] Warts may be got rid of by rubbing them with something the moment you see a star falling in the sky; but if you rub them with your bare hand, you will simply transfer them to it.[2411] Another superstition connected with falling stars which Marcellus records is that one will be free from sore eyes for as many years as he can count numbers while a star is falling.[2412] The first time you hear or see a swallow, hasten silently to a spring or well and anoint your eyes with the water and pray God that you may not have sore eyes that year, and the swallows will bear away all pain from your eyes.[2413] With slight variations the same procedure may be employed to prevent toothache. In this case you fill your mouth with water, rub your teeth with the middle fingers of both hands, and say, “Swallow, I say to you, as this will not again be in my beak, so may my teeth not ache all year long.”[2414] Marcellus advises anyone whose nose is stuffed up to blow it on a piece of parchment, and, folding this up like a letter, cast it into the public way,[2415]—which would very likely spread the germs, if not take away the cold.
[Sidenote: Pliny and Marcellus compared on green lizards as eye cures.]
In his preface Marcellus refers to Pliny as one of his authorities and many of his quaint animal remedies will be found substantially duplicated in the Natural History. Both, for example, state that one can stop one’s nose from running by kissing a mule.[2416] Marcellus, however, adds much from other sources or of his own. This may be illustrated by comparing their accounts of the use of lizards to cure eye diseases.[2417] Marcellus omits the following portion of Pliny’s account: “Some shut up a green lizard in a new earthen pot, and they mark the little stones called cinaedia, which are bound on for tumors of the groin, with nine signs and take out one daily. On the ninth day they let the lizard go, and keep the pebbles for pains of the eyes.” Pliny next proceeds: “Others put earth under a green lizard that has been blinded and shut it up in a glass vase with rings of solid iron or gold. When through the glass the lizard is seen to have recovered its sight, it is released and the rings are used for sore eyes.” This recipe is in Marcellus who, however, words it differently and adds that the lizard must be blinded with a copper needle, that the rings may be of silver, electrum, or copper, that the vase must be carefully sealed and opened on the fifth or seventh day following, and that one should not only wear the rings afterwards on one’s fingers but also frequently apply them to one’s eyes and strengthen the sight by looking through them. He further cautions to leave the vase in a clean grassy spot, to collect the rings only after the lizard has departed, to catch the lizard in the first place on a Thursday in September between the nineteenth and twenty-fifth day of the moon, and to have the operation performed by a very pure and chaste man. Marcellus also states that an amulet made either of the eyes of the said lizard enclosed in a lead bull or gold coin, or of its blood caught on clean wool and wrapped in purple cloth will effectually prevent eye diseases. Meanwhile Pliny for his part has gone on to tell how efficacious the ashes of green lizards are.
[Sidenote: More lizardry.]
Marcellus employs green lizards in other connections which are not paralleled in Pliny. To stay colic one binds about the patient three times with an incantation a string with which a copper needle has been threaded and drawn through a lizard’s eyes, after which the reptile is released at the same point where it was captured.[2418] In another passage Marcellus recommends the drawing by a silver needle of threads of nine different colors other than black or white through the eyes of a new-born puppy before they open and ita ut per anum eius exeant, after which the puppy is to be thrown into the river.[2419] But to return to our lizards. For those suffering from liver complaint the liver of a lizard is to be extracted with the point of a reed and bound in purple or black cloth to the patient’s right side or suspended from his arm, while the lizard is to be dismissed alive with these words, “Lo, I send you away alive; see to it that no one whom I touch henceforth has liver complaint.”[2420] To insure a wife’s fidelity one touches her with the tip of a lizard’s tail which has been cut off by the left hand.[2421] Here again the lizard is released but apparently is not expected to survive for long, since one is instructed to “hold the tail shut in the palm of the same hand until it dies.” In a fourth example the lizard is neither mutilated nor released but hung in the doorway of a splenetic’s bedroom where it will touch his head and left hand as he comes and goes.[2422]
[Sidenote: Use of stones and an herb.]
One or two other prescriptions may be added where the procedure is connected with herbs or stones rather than with animals. On entering a city one is advised to pick up some of the pebbles lying in the road before the city gate, stating that they are being collected for headache. Then bind one of them on the head and throw the others behind your back without looking around.[2423] A certain herb must be gathered on Thursday in a waning moon. When it is administered in drink, the recipient must take it standing and facing the east. He receives the cup from the right hand and then, in order not to look back, returns it to the left to him who gave it. Only these two persons should touch the drink.[2424]
[Sidenote: Right and left number.]
Right and left, as just illustrated, are much observed in Marcellus’ medicine. When a tooth aches on the left side of the mouth, a hot cooked dried bean is applied to the right elbow for three days, a process which is reversed if the tooth is on the right side.[2425] The following exercise recommended for a stiff neck would seem to stand more chance of success than most of Marcellus’ prescriptions. While fasting the patient should spit on his right hand and rub his right thigh, and then do the same with his left hand and thigh. Thrice repeated this is warranted to work an immediate cure.[2426] A ring worn on the middle finger of the left hand is said to stop hiccough.[2427] The power of the planets or of mere number is indicated in the advice, given several times, to make seven knots in a string.[2428] Once instructions are given to make as many knots as there are letters in the patient’s name.[2429]
[Sidenote: Incantations and characters.]
Incantations and characters, as has already been incidentally illustrated, abound in Marcellus’ pages. Some are in Greek, some in Latin, some perhaps in Celtic; many, as we have seen, are coherent statements, commands, or requests; many others are to all appearance a jargon of meaningless words, like the jingle, Argidam, margidam, sturgidam,[2430] which is to be repeated seven times on Tuesday and Thursday in a waning moon to cure toothache. Marcellus well calls one of these carmen idioticum.[2431] For stomach and intestinal troubles he recommends pressing the abdomen with the left thumb and saying, “Adam, bedam, alam, betur, alem, botum.” This is to be repeated nine times, then one touches the earth with the same thumb and spits, then says the charm nine more times, and again for a third series of nine, touching the ground and spitting nine times also. Alabanda, alabandi, alambo is another incantation, variously repeated thrice with hands clasped above and below the abdomen. Yet another consists in rubbing the abdomen with the left thumb and two little fingers and saying, “A tree stood in the middle of the sea and there hung an urn full of human intestines; three virgins went around it, two make it fast, one revolves it.” As you repeat this thrice, you touch the ground thrice and spit, but if the charm is for veterinary purposes, for the words “human intestines” should be substituted “the intestines of mules” or horses or asses as the case may be.[2432] The following is a specimen of the characters prescribed by Marcellus:[2433]
ΛΨΜΘΚΙΑ ΛΨΜΘΚΙΑ ΛΨΜΘΚΙΑ
[Sidenote: The art of medicine survives the barbarian invasions.]
It is perhaps worth while to point out in concluding this chapter that apparently at no time during the period of barbarian invasions and early medieval centuries did medical practice or literature cease entirely in the west. We have seen that there is reason to suspect that portions of the work ascribed to Marcellus may be contributions of the centuries following him, and that there were early medieval Latin translations of the works of Oribasius and Alexander of Tralles. Furthermore, the laws of the German kingdoms, the allusions of contemporary chroniclers and men of letters, the advice of Gregory the Great to a sick archbishop to seek medical assistance, and many other bits of evidence[2434] show that physicians were fairly numerous and in good repute, and that medieval Christians at no time depended entirely upon the healing virtues of relics of the saints or other miraculous powers credited to the church or divine answer to prayer.
Chapter XXVI
PSEUDO-LITERATURE IN NATURAL SCIENCE OF THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES
General character—Medicine of Pliny—Herbarium of Apuleius—Specimens of its occult science—A “Precantation of all herbs”—Other treatises accompanying the Herbarium—Cosmography of Aethicus—Its medieval influence—Character of the work—Its attitude to marvels—The Geoponica—Magic and astrology therein—Dioscorides—Textual history of the De materia medica—Alterations made in the Greek text—Dioscorides little known to Latins before the middle ages—Partial versions in Latin—De herbis femininis—The fuller Latin versions—Peter of Abano’s account of the medieval versions—Pseudo-Dioscorides on stones—Conclusions from the textual history of Dioscorides—Macer on herbs; its great currency—Problem of date and author—Virtues ascribed to herbs—Experiments of Macer.
[Sidenote: General character.]
A class of writings which seems to have been very characteristic of the waning culture of the declining Roman Empire and the scanty erudition of the early medieval period were the brief epitomes of, or disorderly collections of fragments from, the writers of the classical period. Such works often passed under the name of some famous author of the previous period and sometimes are more or less based upon his writings. Most of the works in the field of natural science are of such derivative or pseudo-authorship: the Medicine of the Pseudo-Pliny, the Herbarium of the Pseudo-Apuleius, the geographical work ascribed to Aethicus, the Geoponica, the treatises on herbs attributed to Macer and Dioscorides. Indeed, the whole textual history of the latter’s De materia medica is so full of vicissitudes and uncertainties that I have postponed its treatment until this chapter. The names of the actual compilers or abbreviators of these works are usually unknown and it is also usually impossible to date them with any approach to accuracy. Roughly speaking of them as a whole, they may be said to have gradually taken on their present form at almost any time between the third and tenth centuries. In the case of these works of natural science at least, it is not quite fair to class them all as brief epitomes or disorderly collections. In some we see an obvious attempt to rearrange the old materials in a form more convenient for present use. In others to the stage of abbreviation from ancient authors has succeeded another stage of later additions from other sources.
[Sidenote: Medicine of Pliny.]
The Medicina, or Art of Medicine, of the Pseudo-Pliny[2435] consists of three books in which medical passages, drawn from Pliny’s Natural History, are rearranged according to diseases instead of, as in the genuine Pliny, by simples. The first two books deal with diseases of the human body in descending order from top to toe and from headache to gout, a favorite arrangement throughout the course of medieval medicine. The last book then considers afflictions which are not necessarily connected with any particular part of the body, such as wounds and fevers. Thus this compilation attests Pliny’s medieval influence and the practical use made of his work, while it of course continues much of his medical magic and superstition. The compiler’s rearrangement is an essential one, if the medical recommendations of the Natural History were to be made available for ready reference. In this case, therefore, the epitomizer has rather improved upon than disordered the arrangement of the original. This compilation is believed to have been used by Marcellus Empiricus, and a Letter of Plinius Secundus to his friends about medicine, which Marcellus gives along with other medical epistles, is thought to be the preface of the abbreviator, who in that case depicts himself as composing his volume so that his friends and himself when traveling may avoid the payment of exorbitant fees asked by strange physicians. If we can regard everything in the work of Marcellus as we have it as having been written by 400, the Medicine of Pliny must have been written during the declining Roman Empire. The manuscripts used by Rose in his edition were of the tenth and twelfth centuries. There is also a later version of the Medicine of Pliny in five books,[2436] of which the two last are entirely new additions, the fifth being an extract from the old Latin translation of Alexander of Tralles. And in the first three books the earlier Pseudo-Pliny has been worked over with additions. The Pseudo-Pliny is also embodied with alterations and accompanied by some prayers and incantations in a tenth century manuscript at St. Gall.[2437]
[Sidenote: The Herbarium of Apuleius.]
Several works besides the six commonly regarded as genuine[2438] were attributed to Apuleius in the middle ages, grammatical[2439] and rhetorical[2440] treatises, the Hermetic Asclepius,[2441] a treatise on physiognomy,[2442] and the very widespread Sphere of Life and Death, of which we shall treat in another chapter.[2443] We shall now consider the Herbarium of Apuleius,[2444] the one of his spurious works, which has most to do with the world of nature, and, with the exception of the brief Sphere, the one which occurs most often in the manuscripts. The Herbarium was first printed about 1480 by the physician of Pope Sixtus IV from a manuscript at Monte Cassino, and then, after various other editions, was included in 1547 in the collection of ancient Latin medical writers issued by the Aldine Press. We are told, however, that with the close of the fifteenth century the Apuleius began to be superseded by German herbals. The medieval manuscripts of the Herbarium are often noteworthy for their illuminations of the herbs in vivid colors. Those of the mandragora root are especially interesting, showing it as a man standing on the back of a dog or a human form with leaves growing on the head and led by a dog chained to his waist.[2445] The oldest manuscripts are of the sixth century, and there are some in Anglo-Saxon, but as one would expect, the work underwent many additions and alterations, and different manuscripts of it vary considerably. The author is usually spoken of as Apuleius the Platonist and is sometimes said to have received his work from the centaur Chiron, the master of Achilles, and from Esculapius.[2446]
[Sidenote: Specimens of its occult science.]
In the Herbarium the plants are listed and described and their virtues, especially medicinal, stated. Usually the names for each herb in several languages or regions are given—Latin, Greek, Punic, Biblical (by the Prophets), Egyptian, Syrian, Gallic, Dacian, Spanish, Phrygian, Tuscan. By no means all of these are listed in every case, however. The virtues of the herbs often operate in an occult manner, or procedure suggestive of magic is involved in collecting or applying them. Often diseases are cured merely by holding an herb in the hand, wearing it with a string about the neck, or placing it behind one ear, or wearing it in a ring. Lunatics, for example, are treated by binding an herb about the neck with red cloth when the moon is waxing in the sign of the bull or the first part of the scorpion. Not only does observance of astrology assist the medicinal application of herbs; plants are in turn of assistance in the pursuit of astrology. To learn under the rule of what star you are, be in a state of purity, pluck the herb Montaster, keep it in a bit of clean linen until you find a whole grain of wheat in a loaf of bread, then place this with the herb under your pillow and pray to the seven planets to reveal your guardian star to you in your sleep. Indeed prayers and incantations are frequently employed and in one case must be repeated nine times. Sometimes the herb itself is addressed, as in the conjuration, “Herb Erystion, I implore you to aid me and cheerfully afford me all your virtues and cure and make whole all those ills which Aesculapius and Chiron the centaur, masters of medicine, healed by means of you.” Sometimes the earth is conjured as in the prayer beginning, “Holy goddess Earth.” Such prayers are scarcely consonant with Christianity and in some manuscripts have been omitted and replaced by the Lord’s Prayer or other Christian forms, or left in with their wording slightly altered to avoid paganism.[2447] Personal purity and clean clothing are often enjoined upon those gathering the herbs and such instructions are added as to mark the circle about the plant with gold, silver, ivory, the tooth of a wild boar, and the horn of a bull, or to fill the hole with honeyed fruits. Some herbs protect their bearers from all serpents or even from all evils. Others, like asparagus if you use a dry root of it to sprinkle the patient with spring water, break the spell of witchcraft. Asparagus is also beneficial for toothache and wonderfully relieves a tumor or bladder trouble, if it is boiled in water and drunk by the patient fasting for seven days and also used in bathing for a number of days. But one must be careful not to go out in the cold during this time nor to take cold drinks.[2448]
[Sidenote: A “Precantation of All Herbs.”]
In some manuscripts a “Precantation of all herbs” is placed at the beginning of the treatise.[2449] It prescribes such procedure as holding a mirror over the herb before plucking it before sunrise under a waning moon. The person plucking the herb and uttering the incantation must be barefoot, ungirded, chaste, and wear no ring. The plant is adjured not only “by the living God” and “the holy name of God, Sabaoth,” but also by Seia, the Roman goddess of sowing, and by “GS,” which presumably stands for Gaia Seia, an expression which is once written out in full. Some meaningless words are also repeated.
[Sidenote: Other treatises accompanying the Herbarium.]
The Herbarium is often accompanied in the manuscripts by other treatises on herbs ascribed to Dioscorides and Macer, of which we shall speak presently; by a work on the medicinal properties of animals, or more particularly of quadrupeds, by Sextus Papirius Placidus[2450] Actor[2451]—an otherwise quite unknown personage;[2452] by a “letter concerning a little beast” from the king of Egypt or Aesculapius to the emperor Octavian Augustus;[2453] and by introductory letters, such as we find prefaced to the De medicamentis of Marcellus Empiricus, of “Hippocrates to his Moecenas”[2454] and “Antonius Musus to Moecenas Agrippa.” The epistle of the Egyptian king or Aesculapius to Augustus, however, really forms the introduction or opening chapter to the treatise of Sextus Papirius Placidus on the medicinal properties of animals, and after the little beast or quadruped called mela or taxo[2455] follow fast the stag, serpent, fox, hare, scorpion, and so forth. As for the taxo, Augustus is told that by means of it he can protect himself from sorcerers, avoid defections in his army, and preserve his troops from the pestilence which the barbarians bring, and the city of Rome from both pestilences and fires. To this end a lustration should be performed with its flesh, and it should then be buried at the city gates. One way to appropriate its virtue is to extract its large teeth, repeating a jargon of strange words the while.
[Sidenote: Cosmography of Aethicus.]
Another characteristic product of declining antique learning and of early medieval effort is found in the field of geography in the Cosmography of Aethicus Istricus, translated into Latin by the priest Jerome (Hieronymus Presbyter). The oldest manuscript is one of the eighth century in the British Museum,[2456] where it is also found in several other fairly early manuscripts[2457] in the respectable company of Vitruvius, Vegetius, Sallust, and Suetonius,[2458] as well as with the more congenial work of Solinus. This Cosmographia was not printed until 1852, when it was edited at Paris by M. d’Avezac and again in 1854 at Leipzig by M. H. Wuttke. It is an entirely different work from what had hitherto been repeatedly printed as the Cosmography of Aethicus but is really to be identified with fragments of Julian Honorius and Orosius. The Latin translator of our treatise had been identified in the middle ages with St. Jerome, the church father, and Wuttke still ascribed it to him, but Bunbury protested against this,[2459] and Mommsen placed our treatise not earlier than the seventh century.[2460]
[Sidenote: Its medieval influence]
Bunbury added, however, that the Cosmography “appears to have been much read in the middle ages, and is therefore not without literary interest.” The apparent greatness of the names on the title page seems to have given the middle ages an exaggerated notion of the work’s importance. Aethicus himself is spoken of as from Istria and according to the Explicit of at least one manuscript[2461] was a Scythian, but this does not mean that his attitude towards learning was that of a Hun, for the same Explicit goes on to inform us that he was of noble lineage and, if I correctly interpret the faulty syntax of its Latin, that from him the ethical philosophy of other sages drew its origins. Somewhat later Roger Bacon said in discussing faults in the study of theology in his day, “From the authorities of the philosophers whom the saints cite I shall abstain, except that I will strengthen the utterances of Ethicus the astronomer and Alchimus the philosopher by the authority of the blessed Jerome, since no one could credit that they had said so many marvelous things about Christ and the angels and demons and men who are to be glorified or damned unless Jerome or some other saint proved that they had said so.”[2462]
[Sidenote: Character of the work.]
As Bacon’s words indicate, Christian influence is manifest in the Cosmography, although, as they also indicate, the original Aethicus is not supposed to have been a Christian, but, as one manuscript informs us, an Academic philosopher.[2463] Oriental influence, too, is perhaps shown in flights of poetical language and unrestrained imagination, in a number of allusions to Alexander the Great, and in an extraordinary ignorance of early Roman history which leads the author to tell how Romulus invaded Pannonia and fought against the Lacedaemonians. “How great carnage,” he exclaims, “in Lacedaemonia, Noricum and Pannonia, Istria and Albania, northern regions near my home, first at the hands of the Romans and the tyrant Numitor, then under the brothers Romulus and Remus, and later under the first Tarquin, the Proud.” The author eulogizes Athens as well as Alexander, and mentions a people called Turchi, but whether or not he has Turks in mind would be hard to say.
[Sidenote: Its attitude to marvels.]
As we have it, the Cosmography cites both the Ethicus and the Alchimus to whom Roger Bacon referred. Indeed, our treatise does not pretend to be the original work of Aethicus, which it repeatedly cites, but is apparently the work of some epitomizer or abbreviator who intersperses remarks and comments of his own, and, according to one manuscript, makes the statements of Aethicus conform to Christian Scripture. From the volumes of the original work he makes only a few excerpts, professing to omit what is unheard of or unknown or seems too formidable, and including only with hesitancy a few bits concerning unknown races on the testimony of hearsay. The enigmas of Aethicus and other philosophers often give our abbreviator pause, and he regards as incredible the story of Aethicus that the Amazons nurse young minotaurs and centaurs who fight for them in return. Aethicus also tells of the wonderful armor of the Amazons which they treat with bitumen and the blood of their own offspring. In Crete Aethicus found herbs unknown in other lands which ward off famine. Very beautiful gems are mentioned, including those extracted from the brains of immense dragons and basilisks, but little is said of their virtues, occult or otherwise. Indeed, the amount either of specific information or specific misinformation in the book is very scanty. It deals largely in uncouth rhetoric, glittering generalities, and obscure allusion anent the wanderings of Aethicus over the face of the earth and the strange marvels which he encountered in distant lands. He is described as well versed in astrology and as reproving the astrologers of Scythia(?) and Mantua(?), and one passage vaguely speaks of the stars as signs of the present and future; but otherwise the abbreviator gives little evidence of knowledge of the subject, although Roger Bacon[2464] cited Ethicus Astronomicus in Cosmographia as one of his authorities when discussing the question of Jesus Christ’s nativity and its relation to the stars, and although Pico della Mirandola ranked the Cosmography as one of the most absurd of astrological works.[2465] As for magic, in one passage malefici and magi are censured along with idolaters, and the author presently speaks of vain characters and superstitious doctrines. But elsewhere a magician (Pirronius magus) is named as the inventor of ships and discoverer of purple. On the whole, in its loose and hazy way the Cosmography not only is romantic and religious enough to appeal to medieval readers, it also is of a character to offer encouragement, if not data, to a later and more detailed interest in alchemy, occult virtues, astrology, and magic.
[Sidenote: The Geoponica.]
Upon the subject of agriculture in the early middle ages we have the collection known as the Geoponica. It properly belongs to Byzantine literature and perhaps had little direct influence upon western Europe. Nevertheless at least a portion of it upon vineyards was translated into Latin by Burgundio of Pisa in the twelfth century.[2466] In any case as the “only formal treatise on Greek agriculture” extant it is a rather important historical source; it also is a good specimen of early medieval compilations from classical works; and in its inclusion of superstitious and magical details it is probably roughly representative of the period, whether in east or west. In the form which we now possess it was published about 950 A. D. and dedicated to the Byzantine emperor, Constantine VII or Porphyrygennetos. But this issue was perhaps little more than an abbreviated revision of the work of Cassianus Bassus of the sixth century, whose introductory words to his son are still given at the beginning of the seventh book. Cassianus is believed in his turn to have been especially indebted to two fourth century writers, Vindanius Anatolius of Beirut, whose agricultural teaching was of a sober and rational sort, and Didymus of Alexandria, who was more given to superstition and magic.[2467]
[Sidenote: Magic and astrology therein.]
Nevertheless, magic and astrology find no place in the index to the most recent edition of the work.[2468] A survey, however, of the text itself reveals some indications of the presence of both. The very first of its twenty books deals with astrological prediction of the weather and cites some spurious work or works by Zoroaster a great deal. In later books, too, Zoroaster is sometimes cited for semi-astrological advice, such as guarding wine jars against sun or moon-beams when opening them, or testing seed by exposing it to the rays of the dog-star.[2469] Zoroaster is also used as an authority on the sympathy and antipathy existing between natural objects.[2470] Damigeron and Democritus are other names cited which are suggestive of the occult and magical.[2471] There are not, however, many cases of extreme superstition in the Geoponica. Something is said of the marvelous properties of gems, of the effect of a hyena’s shadow falling upon a dog by moonlight, and how dogs will not attack a person who holds a hyena’s tongue in his hand.[2472] Incantations of a sort are occasionally recommended.[2473] To keep wine from turning sour one is directed to write the divine words, “Taste and see that the Lord is good” upon the wine-jar.[2474] Another passage advises a person who finds himself in a place full of fleas to cry, “Ouch! Ouch!” and then they will not bite him.[2475]
[Sidenote: Dioscorides.]
Perhaps the chief ancient work on pharmacology was the De materia medica or Περὶ ὕλης ἰατρικῆς of Pedanius Dioscorides of Anazarba. Galen, as we have seen, found things to criticize in it but nevertheless made great use of it in his own work on medicinal simples. Dioscorides of course had his previous sources but seems to have surpassed them in fulness and orderliness of arrangement. Of the man himself his preface tells us all that we know, and his dedication shows that he probably wrote during the reign of Nero. He was born in Cilicia near Tarsus, he had traveled in many lands as a soldier, and his work was based partly upon personal observation and experience as well as previous books.
[Sidenote: Textual history of the De materia medica.]
Dioscorides’ influence continued and even increased as time went on; but if future centuries were deeply influenced by his book, it was also seriously affected by them, for it seems to have been subjected to a long series of repeated abbreviations and omissions, additions and interpolations, changes in form and in order. Thus all sorts of versions of what was called Dioscorides came into being, but which in some cases can hardly be regarded as more than compilations from all the favorite pharmacies of the time, in which the genuine Dioscorides constituted but a remnant or a core. Thus most early printed editions of what purports to be the De materia medica must be handled with great caution, and it may perhaps be doubted if even the latest effort of Max Wellmann to recover the original Greek text has been entirely successful.[2476] Of the five books regarded as genuine and original the first dealt with spices, salves, and oils; the second, with parts of animals and animal products like milk and honey, with grains, vegetables, and pot-herbs. Other plants and roots were considered in the third and fourth books, while the last dealt with wines and minerals.[2477]
[Sidenote: Alterations made in the Greek text.]
Whether we now possess Dioscorides’ original text or not, at any rate the oldest Greek manuscripts do not contain it, but only that portion dealing with herbs. Moreover, this has been rearranged in alphabetical order and has been adapted to fit a set of pictures of plants which were perhaps taken over from the work of Crateuas, one of Dioscorides’ chief sources. Such is the famous early sixth century illuminated manuscript made for Juliana Anicia, daughter of the emperor Olybrius (472 A. D.) and wife of the consul Areobindus (about 512 A. D.).[2478] The alphabetical rearrangement of the Greek text of Dioscorides was made at some time between Galen and Oribasius, who cites from it in the fourth century. Not only were the five books of the genuine De materia medica interpolated, but additional spurious books were added “On Harmful Drugs” and “On Poisons.”[2479] The work on medicinal simples attributed to Dioscorides is extant in no manuscript earlier than the fourteenth century and some versions of it are much more interpolated than others. As Galen does not cite it while Oribasius and Aëtius do use it, it is assumed that it was composed in the third or early fourth century with a forged dedication to a contemporary of Dioscorides, but that it made considerable use of the genuine Dioscorides, to which it bore much the same relation as the Medicina Plinii did to the Historia Naturalis. Later, however, some Byzantine compiler of the eleventh, twelfth, or thirteenth century introduced a great deal of new material from Galen’s genuine and spurious works in that field and from John of Damascus.[2480]
[Sidenote: Dioscorides little known to Latins before the middle ages.]
What more especially concern us are the medieval Latin versions of Dioscorides. As a matter of fact, although the De materia medica was from the start highly regarded and widely used by Greek physicians, it seems to have been little known to Latin writers until the verge of the medieval period. Gargilius Martialis, a Roman writer on agriculture in the third century of our era, was the only old Latin author to cite Dioscorides, which he did, however, no less than eighteen times in his Medicinae ex oleribus et pomis. This has led to the suggestion that he was perhaps responsible for the first Latin translation or version of Dioscorides; but it seems unlikely that the work had been put into Latin as early as his time, since it is not cited again by a Latin writer until the sixth century and is not used by such medical authors as Serenus Sammonicus, Cassius Felix, Theodorus Priscianus, and Marcellus Empiricus.
[Sidenote: Partial versions in Latin.]
But at least a portion of Dioscorides seems to have been translated into Latin by the time of Cassiodorus, who, writing in the first half of the sixth century, states that those who cannot read Greek may consult the Herbarium Dioscoridis.[2481] This naturally suggests a version limited to medicinal plants like the early Greek text in the manuscript of Juliana Anicia. This impression is confirmed by the preface to some early Latin version of Dioscorides, which Rose discovered in one of the manuscripts of the Herbarium of Apuleius in the British Museum.[2482] This preface implies that the translation which it introduced was limited to the botanical books of Dioscorides and states that it was accompanied by illustrations of herbs.
[Sidenote: De herbis femininis.]
Based upon this partial translation rather than identical with it is believed to have been the De herbis femininis,[2483] which was ascribed to Dioscorides in the middle ages and which often accompanies the Herbarium of the Pseudo-Apuleius in the manuscripts. In this case the herbs of the Pseudo-Apuleius are sometimes called masculine, but as a matter of fact only a minority of those in the Pseudo-Dioscorides seem to be distinctly feminine. Of seventy-one plants Kaestner classed fifteen or sixteen as feminine, while in only thirty cases are they prescribed for female complaints. Rose dated this work before Isidore of Seville by whom he believed it was used.[2484] It seems to combine a free Latin translation of excerpts from the genuine Dioscorides with numerous additions from other sources.
[Sidenote: The fuller Latin versions.]
Besides such abbreviated and interpolated Latin versions or perversions of Dioscorides, there was also in existence in the early middle ages a literal translation of all five books of the De materia medica. It is full of Latinisms and barbarisms but otherwise reproduces the complete and genuine Dioscorides, or is supposed to do so. Rose and Wellmann[2485] say that it was current from the sixth century on, and the few extant manuscripts of it date from the early medieval period.[2486] One reason for this seems to be that this literal translation was replaced by another Latin version which in a Bamberg manuscript[2487] is ascribed to Constantinus Africanus, the medical translator and writer of the eleventh century. In this version the items are arranged alphabetically, and additions are embodied from other sources. This version apparently became much better known than the earlier literal translation and has been called “the most widely disseminated handbook of pharmacy of the whole later middle ages.”[2488] It is stated by Rose to be identical with the “Dyascorides,” upon which Peter of Abano lectured and commented about 1300 and which was printed at Colle in 1478 and again at Lyons in 1512.[2489]
[Sidenote: Peter of Abano’s account of the medieval versions.]
Peter of Abano tells us in his preface[2490] that in his time there were current two different versions, although both had the same preface. One of these was in five books with a great many short chapters, so short in fact that often the treatment of a single thing was scattered over several chapters. This version was rare in Latin. The other version contained fewer but longer chapters with material added from Galen, Pliny, and other writers. This version was arranged alphabetically. It was this version which Aggregator[2491] had followed and imitated, but sometimes there were chapters in either “Dyascorides” which were missing in Aggregator. Peter had also seen an alphabetical version of Dioscorides in Greek.
[Sidenote: Pseudo-Dioscorides on stones.]
There seems also to have been current, at least in the later middle ages, a Pseudo-Dioscorides on stones, drawn in part, like the Feminine Herbs, from the genuine De materia medica, whose discussion of the virtues of stones is incredible enough.[2492] This Dioscorides on Stones is cited by Arnold of Saxony and Bartholomew of England in the thirteenth century, and portions at least of the work are extant in manuscripts at Erfurt and Montpellier.[2493] A work on physical ligatures is ascribed to Dioscorides in a late manuscript,[2494] but is really a collection of items from various authors since Dioscorides on the marvelous virtues of animals, herbs, and stones, especially when bound on the body, held in the hand, or worn around the neck.
[Sidenote: Conclusions from the textual history of Dioscorides.]
The history of the medieval versions of Dioscorides, even in the brief and incomplete outline given here, is instructive, showing us in general the vicissitudes to which the transmission of the text of any ancient author may have been subjected, but more especially proving that the middle ages, whether Latin or Byzantine, were ready to take great liberties with ancient authorities and to adapt them to their own taste and requirements. And indeed, why should they not rearrange and make additions to their Dioscorides? After all it was a compilation to begin with. But the case of Dioscorides has also taught us that we do not have to wait until the medieval period for the appearance of new versions of an ancient author.
[Sidenote: Macer on herbs; its great currency.]
With the possible exception of the Herbarium of the Pseudo-Apuleius, probably the best known single and distinct treatment of the virtues of herbs produced during the middle ages was the poem De viribus herbarum which circulated under the name of Macer Floridus.[2495] It was often cited by the medieval encyclopedists and other writers on nature and medicine in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.[2496] It is found in an Anglo-Saxon version[2497] and was even translated into Danish in the early thirteenth century.[2498] Manuscripts of it are very numerous[2499] and there are many early printed editions.[2500] Even as recently as the first half of the nineteenth century a historian of medicine and natural science, in the preface of his edition of Macer, stated as one argument for the modern study of medieval medicine that much might be learned from writings of that period concerning the virtues of herbs.[2501]
[Sidenote: Problem of date and author]
The poem was certainly not written by the classical poet, Aemilius Macer, who was a friend of Vergil and Ovid, and whose descriptions of plants, birds, and reptiles are cited by Pliny in his Natural History and also preserved in some extracts by the grammarians. Proof of this is that our poem cites Pliny; in fact, it cites him more frequently than any other author. It also cites Galen six times, Dioscorides four, and as late an author as Oribasius twice.[2502] But Oribasius is not the latest author cited since Walafrid Strabo is also used.[2503] Strabo was born about 806, became abbot of Reichenau in 842, and died in 849. In his Hortulus, a poem dedicated to Grimoald, the abbot of St. Gall, he described twenty-three herbs in 444 hexameters.[2504] Indeed Stadler holds that the Pseudo-Macer uses the De gradibus of Constantinus Africanus who did not die until 1087.[2505] The true author of our poem ascribed to Macer is said on the authority of certain manuscripts to have been an Odo of Meung on the Loire, apparently the same town as the birthplace of Jean Clopinel or de Meun, the learned author of the latter portion of The Romance of the Rose. Choulant, however, did not regard this as sufficiently proved, and Stadler has recently noted that some manuscripts ascribe the poem to a physician, Odo of Verona; and others to the Cistercian, Odo of Morimont, who died in 1161.[2506] In any case, unless the mentions of Strabo are later interpolations, the author must be regarded as post-Carolingian, while he cannot be later than the eleventh century in view of a remark of Sigebertus Gemblacensis in 1112,[2507] the Anglo-Saxon version, the many twelfth century manuscripts, and the frequent use of his poem in the Regimen Salernitanum.[2508] Although Macer seems a pseudonym to begin with, the original poem, consisting of 2269 lines in which 77 herbs are discussed, is sometimes accompanied by additional lines regarded as spurious.[2509]
[Sidenote: Virtues ascribed to herbs.]
Our poet does not appear to have much of his own to offer on the subject of the virtues of herbs. When he does not cite his authority by name, he usually qualifies the statement made by a vaguer “they say” or “it is said.” He does not connect certain herbs with certain stars or otherwise introduce anything that can be called astrological. He repeats Pliny’s statement of the powers ascribed to vervain by the magi, such as to gain one’s desires, win the friendship of the powerful, and dispel disease and fever. Pliny had spoken of the magi as “raving about this herb”; our poet says:
“Although potent Nature can grant such virtues, Yet they really seem to us idle old-wives’ tales.”[2510]
Nevertheless he himself about fifteen lines before had said of the vervain:
“If, holding this herb in the hand, you ask the patient, ‘Say, brother, how are you?’ and the patient answers, ‘Well,’ He will live; but if he says ‘Ill,’ there is no hope of safety.”[2511]
Our poet not only thus associates with herbs the virtue of divination, but is guilty of sympathetic magic when he believes that the ancients learned by experience that Dragontea or snake-weed dispels poisons, wards off snakes, and is good for snake-bite from observing the similarity between the spotted rind of the herb and the skin of a snake.[2512] Odo or Macer repeats Galen’s story of curing an epileptic boy by suspending a root of peony about his neck,[2513] and later asserts the same virtue for the herb pyrethrum.[2514] Even more magical is the ceremony for curing toothache which he takes from Pliny and which consists in digging up the herb Senecion without use of iron, touching the aching tooth with it three times, and then replacing the plant in the place where it came from so that it will grow again.[2515] Pliny is also cited concerning the swallow’s restoring the sight of its young by swallow-wort.[2516] Our poet also repeats such beliefs as that the herb Buglossa preserves the memory,[2517] or that the smoke of Aristochia dispels demons and exhilarates infants.[2518] If the hives are anointed with the juice of the herb Barrocus, the bees will not desert them; while carrying that plant with one is a protection against the stings of bees, wasps, and spiders.[2519] Among the virtues most frequently attributed to herbs are expelling or killing worms, curing pestiferous bites or poisons, and provoking urine or vomiting. On the whole, “Macer” contains only a moderate amount of superstition, although rather more proportionally than Walafrid Strabo.
[Sidenote: Experiments of Macer.]
Although Odo or Macer seems to make no original contribution to botany, cites authorities frequently, and speaks often of the ancients or men of old, he also at least once cites “experts”[2520] and we have also seen his belief that the ancients had tested the virtues of plants by experience. This rather slight experimental character of the work is further emphasized in some manuscripts of it, where the title is “Experiments of Macer” and the matter seems to have been rearranged under diseases instead of by herbs.[2521]