by so serious and unusual a subject as Freewill and its compatibility with Providence. Indeed, he has told us as much himself in a previous passage (Cons. iv., pr. 6), where-the question under discussion being the relations between Fate and Providence he puts these words into Philosophy's mouth: "However much you may delight in the attractions of music and poetry, you must put off that pleasure for a little time while I weave a chain of orderly connected arguments."

The peculiar form of mingled prose and verse in which the Consolation' is cast is known to scholars as the Satura Menippaa, and takes its name from the Cynic Menippus of Gadara (fl. 60 B.C.)

Terentius Varro, the herald of the Ciceronian age, was the first among Latin authors to turn to account Menippus's method, which was excellently suited to his purpose-namely, a merciless and indiscriminate exposure, from a cynical standpoint, of all existing systems of philosophy. Varro's example was followed nearly a century later by the younger Seneca, who employed the Satura Menippæa, not much to his credit, for his scurrilous lampoon on the dead emperor Claudius. In his 'Apokolakuntosis Claudii ’ (the "Gourdification" of Claudius) the ungrateful philosopher does his best to vilify the memory of a

benefactor for whom, when living, he had no words to express his admiration.

The satire seems to have had some vogue during the reign of Nero, for besides this diatribe of Seneca's, we meet with it in Petronius Arbiter's great farrago of wit, wisdom, and obscenity, of which the principal fragment remaining to us is the Cena Trimalchionis.'

Boethius borrowed nothing from these works beyond the hint for the literary form in which to clothe his moral and philosophical maxims. Nor was his debt considerable to his immediate predecessor in the Satura Menippæa, Martianus Capella (fl. 430?), whose extraordinary book 'De Nuptiis Mercurii et Philologia '-which, by the way, enjoyed an almost equal popularity with the 'Consolation' during the early middle ages-is marked by an extravagance and pedantry to which the later writer offers no parallel even in his least happy moments. It may, therefore, be safely claimed for our author that he was the first to apply the form of the old Greek medley to the serious treatment of philosophical questions, that he was the first to invest it with any sort of dignity.1

1 This account of the Satura Menippæa is mainly taken from Teuffel, Geschichte der Römische Literatur (1875), §§ 28, 3; 165, 3; 289, 7; 452.

X

Whereas his forerunners had heedlessly jumbled prose and verse, falling into the latter sometimes in the very middle of a sentence, he is careful to balance

X nicely the one against the other, choosing the moment

with consummate art for the insertion of a song which shall carry on, and give emphasis to, the thoughts on which he has already exercised the full force of his pedestrian rhetoric and logical argument.

The regular appearance of poetry in the midst of a prose that (to us at least) is always difficult and sometimes dry, was doubtless intended to serve a double purpose: in the first place, to relieve the strain on the writer, without sensibly lowering the tone of the dialogue; and secondly, to refresh the reader with a constant and agreeable variety. My excuse for dwelling at such length on the Menippaan Satire must be my conviction that the Consolation' owed much of the popularity it afterwards enjoyed to the form in which its hard sayings were presented. Most men, when they are for reading philosophy, like to have it conveyed to them in as easy and intelligible a shape as possible.

No one will question the inferiority of Capella's work to that of Boethius, both in point of subjectmatter and execution. And what is true of him is equally true of the other writers of the time, one

and all. There is no doubt that Boethius brings us nearer to the Augustan age than any other Latin for three hundred years. To take his prose first. For all its affectation and excess of ornament,-I am here concerned with the Consolation' alone-it is temperate and simple in comparison with the bombast of Cassiodorus, which, in its turn, is infinitely preferable to the intolerable effusions of Ennodius. And yet these writers were reputed models of style, and on them fell the burden of the correspondence and literature of the court; while even Priscian, the famous Byzantine grammarian, betrays a strange unfamiliarity with good Latin.

If, then, we bear in mind how the intellectual vigour of the Latin race had been drained by three centuries of internal strife and corruption and deadly struggle with the barbarian; if we take into consideration the influence wrought by theological controversy, with its incessant demands for fresh terms with which to express thoughts that no writer of the golden age could ever have entertained—we shall be ready to forgive Boethius his occasional aberrations from the style of Cicero.

1

Obbarius has sagaciously remarked 1 that most of the expressions which offend an ear accustomed to

1 Op. cit., Proleg., i. 21.

A

the language of the Augustan period can be traced back to præ-classical authors. This tendency is not by any means peculiar to late Latin writers. certain pedantry and archaic affectation is one of the commonest characteristics of every unspontaneous literature and art, and often follows as a natural reaction from the over-refinement and prejudice of a classical age. When we come to Boethius's verses, we feel at once that we are standing on surer ground. He displays an exceptional ingenuity and versatility in the employment of the various metres which he presses into the service of his Muse, and writes elegiacs, hexameters, asclepiads, sapphics, hendecasyllabics, and iambics, with equal address and correctness. His skill in this province of literature won the warm admiration of critics as fastidious as Casaubon and Julius Cæsar Scaliger, the latter of whom declared "quæ libuit ludere in poesi, divina sane sunt; nihil illis cultius, nihil gravius, neque densitas sententiarum venerem, neque acumen abstulit candorem. Equidem censeo paucos cum illo comparari posse." 1

I do not suppose that the modern reader will be prepared to give an unqualified assent to this opinion of the great scholar of the Renaissance. But on the

1 Poetices liber vi.