Patricida accordingly summons all the Romans together, and, after inducing them by an eloquent rehearsal of his great services in their behalf to grant him any boon that he may ask, says that his wish is to die; and at this point the poem ends, leaving us uninformed whether the last part of the astrologer’s prediction remained unfulfilled, or whether Patricida’s suicide caused his father’s death, or whether possibly some solution was found in a play upon the word Patricida. Hauréau, however, believed that the poem is complete as it stands.
Different interpretations put upon the Mathematicus.
The purpose of the poet and his attitude towards astrology have been interpreted in diametrically opposite ways by different scholars. Before Hauréau it was customary to attribute the poem to Hildebert, archbishop of Tours, and to regard it as an attack upon astrology. The early editors of the Histoire Littéraire de la France supported their assertion that the most judicious men of letters in the eleventh and twelfth centuries had only a sovereign scorn for the widely current astrological superstition of their time by citing Hildebert as ridiculing the art in his Mathematicus.[292] A century later Charles Jourdain again represented Hildebert as turning to ridicule the vain speculations of the astrologers.[293] Bourassé, the editor of Hildebert’s works as they appear in Migne’s Patrologia Latina, seems to have felt that the poem was scarcely an outspoken attack upon astrology and tried to explain it as an academic exercise which was not to be taken seriously, but regarded as satire upon judicial astrology. Hauréau not only denied Archbishop Hildebert’s authorship, but took the common sense view that the poet believes fully in astrology. It would, indeed, be difficult to detect any suggestion of ridicule or satire about the poem. Its plot is a tragic one and it seems written in all seriousness. Even Patricida, despite his assertion that “man is not subject to the stars,” does not doubt that he will kill his father conformably to the learned astrologer’s prediction, if he himself continues to live. It is only by the tour de force of self-slaughter that he hopes to cheat fate.
Hildebert’s Hermaphrodite’s horoscope.
Even Archbishop Hildebert shows a tendency towards astrology in other poems attributed to him; for example, in his Nativity of Christ and in a short poem, The Hermaphrodite, which reads as follows, representing the fulfillment of a horoscope:
“While my pregnant mother bore me in the womb, ’tis said the gods deliberated what she should bring forth. Phoebus said, ‘It is a boy’; Mars, ‘A girl’; Juno, ‘Neither.’ So when I was born, I was a hermaphrodite. When I seek to die, the goddess says, ‘He shall be slain by a weapon’; Mars, ‘By crucifixion’; Phoebus, ‘By drowning.’ So it turned out. A tree shades the water; I climb it; the sword I carry by chance slips from its scabbard; I myself fall upon it; my trunk is impaled in the branches; my head falls into the river. Thus I, man, woman, and neither, suffered flood, sword, and cross.”[294]
This poem has always been greatly admired by students of Latin literature for its epigrammatic neatness and conciseness, and has been thought too good to be the work of a medieval writer, and has been even attributed to Petronius. Another version, by the medieval poet, Peter Riga, entitled De ortu et morte pueri monstruosi, is longer and far less elegant. Hauréau, however, regarded the Hermaphrodite as a medieval composition, since there are no manuscripts of it earlier than the twelfth century; but he was in doubt whether to ascribe it to Hildebert or to Matthew of Vendôme, who in listing his own poems mentions hic et haec hermaphroditus homo.[295]
The art of geomancy.
We turn to the association of the name of Bernard Silvester with the superstitious art of geomancy. It may be briefly defined as a method of divination in which, by marking down a number of points at random and then connecting or cancelling them by lines, a number or figure is obtained which is used as a key to sets of tables or to astrological constellations. The only reason for calling this geomancy, that is, divination by means of the element earth, would seem to be that at first the marks were made and figures drawn in the sand or dust, like those of Archimedes during the siege of Syracuse. But by the middle ages, at least, any kind of writing material would do as well. Although a somewhat more abstruse form of superstition than the ouija board, it seems to have been nearly as popular in the medieval period as the ouija board is now.
Prologue of the Experimentarius.