Publication details
Martianus Capella quaestionable relation to the Vandals
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| Year of publication | 2009 |
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| Citation | |
| Description | The work De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii by Martianus Capella has raised a number or controversial questions in the scientific discourse. The author gave his primarily educational work the frame of a narrative about the marriage of Philology and the Roman god Mercury, i.e. combined an allegory with the witty Menippean Satire, whereby he eased the seriousness of his textbook, but also made his text difficult to interpret. In the presented paper, we examine the assumption that Martianus was not only a mediator of "septem artes liberales" to the Middle Ages, but perhaps also a mediator between the Roman and Vandal worlds, that De nuptiis was written later than it is traditionally acknowledged: in Vandals' Carthago. To be able to prove this assumption, we reexamine several sources of dating the work and consider whether the shift in dating can give us the reason to believe that Martianus wrote his work intentionally for Vandals, and thus to explain some exceptional features of the plot. |
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