But perhaps they are destitute of arms and have no arsenals and ammunition? What, then, are all these books of medicine dating from the seventh to the tenth century, "accumulated in all the convents"? [Footnote 199]—the celebrated libraries of Ferrière and Bobbio, which owned Aristotle and Demosthenes; of Reichnau, which in 850 possessed four hundred volumes catalogued; the Greek manuscripts of the tenth and eleventh centuries discovered at Rome, Verona, Monte Casino, [Footnote 200] and at Tournay:[Footnote 201] the copies of ancient authors, made in the ninth and tenth centuries by the monks of St. Gall? [Footnote 202] Do you not hear resounding the most illustrious names—of poets, historians, philosophers, and orators—Homer, Seneca, Ovid, Sallust, and Pliny? [Footnote 203] This one, like a watchman who calls for help from the mountain-heights, (Lupus, abbot of Ferrière to Pope Benedict III.,) requests the loan of the Orator of Cicero, the Institutions of Quintilian, and a commentary of Terence; another (see Life of St. Columba) quotes Titus Livius; others (see Acts of the Saints) quote Horace; treaties are fortified with passages from Cicero; [Footnote 204] and there is not a barbarous chronicle in which there are not lightning-like flashes from the inspired lines of Virgil. [Footnote 205]
[Footnote 199: Dander, Missions scientifiques.]
[Footnote 200: Renan, Missions scientifiques.]
[Footnote 201: Dom Pitra, ibid.]
[Footnote 202: Dander, ibid.]
[Footnote 203: There are proofs, says Daremberg, that the Franks of the age of Charlemagne read Pliny. These books were not lost, but preserved in the convents.]
[Footnote 204: Dom Pitra, Missions scientifiques.]
[Footnote 205: See Villemain, Histoire de la Littérature du Moyen Age, lesson x.]
They do not lack arms, and they make use of them. They have captains—leaders who are capable, learned, and indefatigable. They are well known: Abbo, abbot of Fleury-sur-Loire, who is called the "Alcuin of the tenth century," who wrote a history of the popes, on philosophy, physics, and astronomy, and the commander of a numerous corps of more than five thousand students, among whom is one who translated Euclid; [Footnote 206] Flodoard, author of La Chronique de France; the thirty-two professors of belles-lettres at Salernum; St. Fulbert and Henry of Auxerre, in France; Elphege at Monte Casino; in Spain, Petrus Alphonsus, who compares the literature of France with that of his own country; [Footnote 207] in England, Odo and St. Dunstan, a geometrician, musician, painter, and sculptor;[Footnote 208] and finally, that wonderful man, who made the tour of the world of learning and was familiar with every part of it—mathematics, mechanics, astronomy, literature, and philosophy—at once a prince of the church and of science— Gerbert. [Footnote 209]
[Footnote 206: There is a second Abbo in the tenth century— a monk also, and a poet.]