What is certain is that the treatise is written in a very late and not a little barbarous Latin style, and that it was popular in the Middle Ages, with that peculiar popularity which seems to have settled itself upon Boethius, Orosius, and other writers of the last age before chaos—the age to which those who kept up education in chaos itself would be most likely to look back, as connecting them with the greater past yet not too far off.
Further, while we find in Martianus a firm outline of the exact scheme of Humaner Letters which prevailed from 500 to 1500, we find in his frame and setting, slightly preposterous and more than slightly fantastic as it is, just that touch of romance—of youth, with its promise as well as its foolishness—which is wanting in Byzantine work, and which has Future in it. On both these characteristics of the whole book we must say something, before coming to its rhetorical part.
The title of the book (to observe Servian formality) has been already given. Its form is that of the Varronian satura, or mingle-mangle of prose and verse; and it is divided into nine books. The first two of these serve as an introduction, containing a wonderful rigmarole, in more wonderful jargon,[[446]] about things in general, divine and human, the old mythology and physics, with abstract philosophical personifications, Sophia, Phronesis, and so forth, coming in. At last it settles down to the real plan of the treatise, which is that the Seven Liberal Arts, as adopted (very mainly from this book) by the Middle Ages, being estated as bridesmaids (or something like it) to Philology, each Art has a book to herself, and, in the flowery fantastic fashion of the Introduction, gives a summary of her teaching to the assembled gods. This summary is of the most precise and business-like character, despite its “trimmings,” so that Grammar is not ashamed to inform the gods that “Ulcus makes ulceris, but pecus pecoris,” and Logic rattles off things like Primæ formæ primus modus est in quo conficitur ex duobus universalibus, and so forth, after a fashion which suggests that the marriage itself might have been celebrated by Dean Aldrich with great propriety. The beginnings and ends of the books are generally decorated with verse, and with fancy prosopopœiæ of different kinds: but the stuff of the text is exactly what it was intended to be—solid schoolbook matter.
The book devoted to Rhetoric is the fifth, being preceded by those of Grammar and Logic, in the usual and indeed natural order of the Trivium:—
“Gram. loquitur, Dia. vera docet, Rhet. verba colorat,”
though Martianus does not arrange the Quadrivium exactly according to the second line of the mnemonic—
“Mus. canit, Ar. numerat, Geo. ponderat, Ast. colit Astra,”
his order being Geometry, or rather Geography, Arithmetic, Astronomy, Music.
The book on Rhetoric opens literally with a flourish of trumpets,—
“Interea sonuere tubæ,”—