Having surveyed Mythology from the point of view of the most grovelling allegory, etymologically assisted by such fancies as that Teiresias (Teresias in his spelling) is derived |The Super Thebaiden and Expositio Virgiliana.| from theros and æon, meaning “eternal summer,” and that Ulixes Græce (it will go near to be thought shortly that Fulgentius knew less Greek than Shakespeare) is “quasi-olon xenos id est omnium peregrinus,” Fulgentius seems to have turned to literature. If he also wrote the note on the Thebaid attributed to the Sainted Bishop (and it is very much in the same style), he confined himself to a brief argument of the story, with a few etymologies, such as “Creon quasi cremens omnia,” and a short preface. In this he tells us that he “can never without grand ammiration[[499]] retract the ininvestigable prudence of the poets, and the immarcescible vein of their genius”: and having thus prepared rejoicing for the heart of the Limousin scholar nine hundred years ahead, he sets the fashion to Lyly by observing “Diligit puer nucem ad ludum integram: sapiens autem et adultus frangit ad gustum.” But this, though not insignificant, is a slight thing.

The Expositio Virgiliana or Virgiliana Continentia (this word being late Latin for “contents”) is itself not long: it fills, with apparatus criticus, some five-and-twenty pages. If it were not written in a most detestable style, combining the presence of more than the affectation and barbarism of Martianus with a complete absence of his quaintness and full-blooded savour, it would be rather agreeable to read: even as it is, it is full of interest. We catch Virgil in mid-flight through the void, from that position of universal exponent of sober literary art which we have seen him occupy with Macrobius, to his rank as beneficent enchanter a few centuries later. The Bucolics and Georgics are full of such Phisica secreta, such misticæ rationes, that they are actually dangerous to touch. He has passed over the interna viscera nullius pæne artis in these books. In the first Eclogue he has physically summed up the three lives (active, contemplative, and enjoying); in the fourth, he is a prophet; in the fifth, a priest; in the sixth, partly a musician, partly a physiologist; in the seventh, botanicen dinamin tetigit, he has touched the power of botany;[[500]] in the eighth he has pointed out magic and the apotelesmatic of the musician; combining this with euphemesis,[[501]] in the ninth.

In the first Georgic he is throughout an astrologer and then a “eufemetic”; in the second, a physiologist and medical man; in the third, wholly an aruspex; and in the fourth, is to the fullest musical. But Fulgentius will not meddle further with the details of these books; and, after a breathless and intricate prologue, attacks the Æneid in a manner easily to be conjectured from what has been said. Every word, every syllable almost, of the first line, is tortured to yield an allegory; the account being thrown into the form, first of a dialogue between poet and interpreter, and then of a long speech from the former. Achates is “Græce quasi aconetos id est tristitiæ consuetudo.” Iopas is “quasi siopas id est taciturnitas puerilis.” The progress of the story is the growth of human life. The wanderings of the first three books are the tales that amuse youth; the fourth shows how love distracts early manhood; the fifth displays it turning to generous exercises; the sixth is deep study of nature and things; the rest active life. And if anybody wishes to know why Turnus’ charioteer was called Metiscus, “Metiscos enim Græce est ebriosus.”

It cannot be necessary to say much of this, which speaks for itself; it is, as we said at first, the intellectus (or rather the want of intellect) sibi permissus and expatiating unchecked. Qui l’aime le suive!

Venantius Honorius Clementianus Fortunatus[[502]] (for a plethora of names was as characteristic of the Latin as of other decadences) is a much more interesting figure, and his |Venantius Fortunatus.| critical importance, if less direct, is not really inferior. He goes in the general literary memory with Sidonius, as the twin-light of not yet wholly barbaric Gaul; and he had probably more original poetic gift than his predecessor. At least, I can find nowhere in Sidonius anything approaching the throb and thrill of his two great and universally known hymns, Pange Lingua and Vexilla Regis—the earliest, perhaps, to attain that ineffable word-music of hymn-Latin, which is entirely independent of mere tune, mere setting, and which is not only equal to, but independent of, the choicest sound-music of either ancient or modern verse. He was also a livelier writer; and though he has made even further progress in the direction of affectation and bombast, these things rather add a piquancy, if not to his painful official praises of Queen Brunehault, at any rate to his expression of his half-pious, half-human affection for Radegund the Queen and Agnes the Abbess, his account of the sad results when the hospitable Mummolenus[[503]] would make him eat too many peaches, and his admirable description of his sail on the Moselle.

Moreover, he was certainly accomplished in all the learning of his time. He could even write very fair, if not delightful, sapphics. And he is not to be treated with the scornful contempt which some have heaped upon him, merely because he composed (with an amount of labour which makes one’s brain and eyes ache to think of) acrostics and cross-poems of various degrees of artificiality. He has one marvellous structure of the latter kind,[[504]] in which not only do the frame-letters of the scheme make sense, but correspondences, interwoven in the text trace out, also in sense, a sort of cross patée, as thus:—

Here the dots represent (though they are fewer) letters doing double duty, as part of sentences straight across, and in the lines of the figure itself. “The grace and liberty of the composition,” as some one says, may indeed be lost in such intricacies, yet are they not in themselves unliterary as a pastime.

It must, however, be most frankly confessed that the literary expressions and references which we find in Fortunatus are (in the sense in which the word has so often to be used in this part of our work) “tell-tales.”

The Preface of his Poems,[[505]] addressed to Pope Gregory, opens with a somewhat emphatic and inflated laudation of the great men of letters of old, who were, we learn, "provident in invention, serious in partition, balanced in distribution, pleasant with the heel of epilogues, fluent with the fount of bile, beautiful with succise terseness, adorned from head to foot [literally "alike crowned and buskined">[ with tropes, paradigms, periods, epicheiremes," which gives us a pretty clear idea of what seemed to Fortunatus to be literature. It contains also some touches of the “Italic”[[506]] writer’s contempt of those who “make no distinction between the shriek of the goose and the song of the swan,” who love “the harp buzzing barbarous leods.” But far fewer direct references to literature occur in these poems than in those of Sidonius. In II. ix.,[[507]] to the Parisian clergy who bade him resume his long-abandoned lyre, he takes it up purely as the hymn-writer, not the man of letters. There is more of the attitude of the latter in the prose epistle (III. iv.)[[508]] to Bishop Felix, but it does not come to very much. In the tenth of the same book,[[509]] the same bishop (who had, it seems, turned a river from its course) receives a complimentary reference to Homer, but none to Herodotus. Yet another bishop (of the undeniably Frankish name of Bertechramnus) is complimented, in the eighteenth, on his epigrams.[[510]] But Fortunatus, after much applause, does not fear (let us hope that the Frank was more placable than his brother prelate of Granada later) to add—