Astra notat Persis, Aegyptus parturit artes,
Graecia docta legit, praelia Roma gerit.
Exemplar specimenque Dei virguncula Christum
Parturit, et verum saecula numen habent.”[289]
Yet Bernard urges man to model his life after the stars,[290] and once speaks of “what is free in the will and what is of necessity.” He thus appears, like the author of the treatise on fate ascribed to Plutarch, like Boethius, and like a host of other theologians, philosophers, and astrologers, to believe in the co-existence of free will, inevitable fate, and “variable fortune.”[291]
Plot of the Mathematicus.
Bernard Silvester’s interest and faith in the art of astrology is further exemplified by his poem Mathematicus, a narrative which throughout assumes the truth of astrological prediction concerning human fortune. Hauréau showed that it had been incorrectly included among the works of Hildebert of Tours and Le Mans, and that the theme is suggested in the fourth Pseudo-Quintillian declamation, but that Bernard has added largely to the plot there briefly outlined. A Roman knight and lady were in every respect well endowed both by nature and fortune except that their marriage had up to the moment when the story opens been a childless one. At last the wife consulted an astrologer or mathematicus, “who could learn from the stars,” we are told, “the intentions of the gods, the mind of the fates, and the plan of Jove, and discover the hidden causes and secrets of nature.” He informed her that she would bear a son who would become a great genius and the ruler of Rome, but who would one day kill his father. When the wife told her husband of this prediction, he made her promise to kill the child in infancy. But when the time came, her mother love prevailed and she secretly sent the boy away to be reared, while she assured her husband that he was dead. She named her son Patricida in order that he might abhor the crime of patricide the more. The boy early gave signs of great intellectual capacity. Among other studies he learned “the orbits of the stars and how human fate is under the stars,” and he “clasped divine Aristotle to his breast.” Later on, when Rome was hard pressed by the Carthaginians and her king was in captivity, he rallied her defeated forces and ended the war in triumph.
“And because the fatal order demands it so shall be,
The fates gave him this path to dominion....
Blind chance sways the silly toiling of men;