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Updated: May 23, 2025
Poggio, as I have said, writes in a disappointed tone of his researches here, but these were neither long nor exhaustive. We have better testimony from John of Salisbury, who in the twelfth century quotes parts of the Saturnalia of Macrobius which have dropped out of all the MSS. we now have.
"To read MACROBIUS explaining the propriety and elegancy of many words in VIRGIL, which I had before passed over without consideration as common things, is enough to assure me that I ought to think the same of TERENCE; and that, in the purity of his style, which TULLY so much valued that he ever carried his Works about him, there is yet left in him great room for admiration, if I knew but where to place it.
We are not told, however, that such a nature was ascribed to Aphrodite, or that a beard was attached to her statue; and, if this was done, it is difficult to suppose that a popular belief in the bisexuality of a deity could have arisen from such a procedure. Some better ground for the statements of Servius and Macrobius there seems to have been, though we do not know their authorities.
These are the criticisms of most moment which have been made against the "AEneis" by the ancients or moderns. As for the particular exceptions against this or that passage, Macrobius and Pontanus have answered them already.
Without the commentary of Macrobius it would probably have perished like the rest of the second part of the work; it was now diffused in countless manuscript copies, and, after the discovery of typography, in a printed form and edited afresh by various commentatOrs. It is the description of a transfigured hereafter for great men, pervaded by the harmony of the spheres.
On the first day of his residence he surprised his teachers by quoting Macrobius; and one of the most learned among them declared, that he had never known a freshman of equal attainments. At Oxford Johnson resided during about three years. He was poor, even to raggedness; and his appearance excited a mirth and a pity which were equally intolerable to his haughty spirit.
Many similar sayings of great men and philosophers are recorded in the Saturnalia of Macrobius. When Cicero saw his son-in-law, Lentulus, a man of small stature, with a long sword by his side: "Who," says he, "has girded my son-in-law to that sword?" thus changing the accessary into the principal.
These sombre, tortuous, gamy verses, crammed with terms of ordinary speech, with words diverted from their primitive meaning, claimed and interested him even more than the soft and already green style of the historians, Ammianus Marcellinus and Aurelius Victorus, Symmachus the letter writer, and Macrobius the grammarian and compiler.
"The golden ass of Apuleius," as the eleven books of Metamorphoses are called by their admirers, was by no means thought so well of in antiquity as it is now. Macrobius expresses his wonder that a serious philosopher should have spent time on such trifles. St Augustine seems to think it possible the story may be a true one: "aut indicavit aut finxit."
On the whole he is a very interesting writer, and the last that can be called in anyway classical. He is well spoken of by Augustine; and Macrobius, though he scarcely mentions him, pillages his works without reserve. His eighth book is lost, but the table of contents is fortunately preserved. His nomen is not known; whence some have supposed that he never came to Rome.
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