MacrobiusBesprekingen

“May he who wants to speak, speak, and listen to him kindly, encouraging him to talk, let him who wants to preserve silence, preserve silence, and never force a single word out of him, least he decides otherwise”.

Book V. 13.8-13.11

10. At the same time he raises a chilling cry to the stars,
A bellowing just as when a wounded bull flees
The altar and shakes the errant axe from its neck. (A. 2.222-24)
Then he breathed out his spirit and roared, as when a bull
Roars as it is dragged around the lord of Helikon’s shrine
And the Earth-shaker delights in the youths who drag it (Il. 20.403-5)

As the fires swept the human spirit, the ash does not even sing.
In these days, did you ever notice humans singing? Out of joy or sadness?
Or composing in silence poems to the Gods, or uttering words, of anger
Or wrath, of pardon, nobility of filth, to
Emptiness if it must be, laying their woes and gladness upon them?
Even their incantations, invocations, prayers seem to be a thing of a shell
That they charm themselves more into blindness that they are captured by.

This is the second work of Macrobius Dedicated to his son, Eusthatius that I have read. It gives great astralistic-astronomical insights and virtue-driven pneumatological elucidations as well as virtue-derived commonwealth layouts on the example of Cicero's Scipio's Dream. Drawing on the Egypto-Hellenic, platonic and Neoplatonic schools I sieved it for necessary knowledge in my own development as well as engaged in minute research in the history of ideas. What I have affirmed is that metaphysical opinions voiced in ancient times hold true, ignoring errors in the early state of observational and speculative astronomy of these days and pursuing a reconciliation with the modern state of knowledge of physical astronomy. With these sets of knowledge in mind, I may rest and embark upon a new, literary journey that enhances my views and reaffirms the sojourns of my souls and spirit, as a mortal, a God, and a humble intellectual that refuses to lay his swords and wit to the grave prematurely.

Book V. 13.8-13.11

10. At the same time he raises a chilling cry to the stars,
A bellowing just as when a wounded bull flees
The altar and shakes the errant axe from its neck. (A. 2.222-24)
Then he breathed out his spirit and roared, as when a bull
Roars as it is dragged around the lord of Helikon’s shrine
And the Earth-shaker delights in the youths who drag it (Il. 20.403-5)

As the fires swept the human spirit, the ash does not even sing.
In these days, did you ever notice humans singing? Out of joy or sadness?
Or composing in silence poems to the Gods, or uttering words, of anger
Or wrath, of pardon, nobility of filth, to
Emptiness if it must be, laying their woes and gladness upon them?
Even their incantations, invocations, prayers seem to be a thing of a shell
That they charm themselves more into blindness that they are captured by.

This is the second work of Macrobius Dedicated to his son, Eusthatius that I have read. It gives great astralistic-astronomical insights and virtue-driven pneumatological elucidations as well as virtue-derived commonwealth layouts on the example of Cicero's Scipio's Dream. Drawing on the Egypto-Hellenic, platonic and Neoplatonic schools I sieved it for necessary knowledge in my own development as well as engaged in minute research in the history of ideas. What I have affirmed is that metaphysical opinions voiced in ancient times hold true, ignoring errors in the early state of observational and speculative astronomy of these days and pursuing a reconciliation with the modern state of knowledge of physical astronomy. With these sets of knowledge in mind, I may rest and embark upon a new, literary journey that enhances my views and reaffirms the sojourns of my souls and spirit, as a mortal, a God, and a humble intellectual that refuses to lay his swords and wit to the grave prematurely.

“May he who wants to speak, speak, and listen to him kindly, encouraging him to talk, let him who wants to preserve silence, preserve silence, and never force a single word out of him, least he decides otherwise”.

This is the second work of Macrobius Dedicated to his son, Eusthatius that I have read. It gives great astralistic-astronomical insights and virtue-driven pneumatological elucidations as well as virtue-derived commonwealth layouts on the example of Cicero's Scipio's Dream. Drawing on the Egypto-Hellenic, platonic and Neoplatonic schools I sieved it for necessary knowledge in my own development as well as engaged in minute research in the history of ideas. What I have affirmed is that metaphysical opinions voiced in ancient times hold true, ignoring errors in the early state of observational and speculative astronomy of these days and pursuing a reconciliation with the modern state of knowledge of physical astronomy. With these sets of knowledge in mind, I may rest and embark upon a new, literary journey that enhances my views and reaffirms the sojourns of my souls and spirit, as a mortal, a God, and a humble intellectual that refuses to lay his swords and wit to the grave prematurely.

“May he who wants to speak, speak, and listen to him kindly, encouraging him to talk, let him who wants to preserve silence, preserve silence, and never force a single word out of him, least he decides otherwise”.

Book V. 13.8-13.11

10. At the same time he raises a chilling cry to the stars,
A bellowing just as when a wounded bull flees
The altar and shakes the errant axe from its neck. (A. 2.222-24)
Then he breathed out his spirit and roared, as when a bull
Roars as it is dragged around the lord of Helikon’s shrine
And the Earth-shaker delights in the youths who drag it (Il. 20.403-5)

As the fires swept the human spirit, the ash does not even sing.
In these days, did you ever notice humans singing? Out of joy or sadness?
Or composing in silence poems to the Gods, or uttering words, of anger
Or wrath, of pardon, nobility of filth, to
Emptiness if it must be, laying their woes and gladness upon them?
Even their incantations, invocations, prayers seem to be a thing of a shell
That they charm themselves more into blindness that they are captured by.

“May he who wants to speak, speak, and listen to him kindly, encouraging him to talk, let him who wants to preserve silence, preserve silence, and never force a single word out of him, least he decides otherwise”.

Book V. 13.8-13.11

10. At the same time he raises a chilling cry to the stars,
A bellowing just as when a wounded bull flees
The altar and shakes the errant axe from its neck. (A. 2.222-24)
Then he breathed out his spirit and roared, as when a bull
Roars as it is dragged around the lord of Helikon’s shrine
And the Earth-shaker delights in the youths who drag it (Il. 20.403-5)

As the fires swept the human spirit, the ash does not even sing.
In these days, did you ever notice humans singing? Out of joy or sadness?
Or composing in silence poems to the Gods, or uttering words, of anger
Or wrath, of pardon, nobility of filth, to
Emptiness if it must be, laying their woes and gladness upon them?
Even their incantations, invocations, prayers seem to be a thing of a shell
That they charm themselves more into blindness that they are captured by.

Ex-lib. The Virginia Library, McCormick Theological Seminary of the Presbyterian Church, Chicago

Macrobius is one of the so-called encyclopedists. Calcidius and Cassiodorus are also often included in this list. Their works often dealt with an assortment of philosophical subjects. They were not often all that original and were dependent on works of other philosophical writers, but they did offer in rather concise form a broad analysis of popular philosophical topics.

Macrobius has two existing works: a commentary on Cicero's Dream Of Scipio and the Saturnalia. Both works are philosophical in nature and are compendious in subject matter. In the Commentary, his Neo-Platonist bent is evident and his familiarity with Platonist and Neo-Platonist thought is clear. His main dependence seems to be Plotinus and Porphyry. There seems to have been some scholarly debate as to which one Macrobius was more dependent on, but it is safe to say that he was well acquainted with both. The translator holds that Macrobius had probably never read the actual works of Plato, but I find this difficult to accept. Even though he was a Latin writer, he was certainly familiar with Greek and could read it. This is made pretty clear in this book. I can see no reason why he would have not been well read in Plato's writings.

Originally, the Dream Of Scipio was only a small section of Cicero's Republic. Cicero was evidently inspired by Plato's own dialogue of the same name. Like Plato, Cicero decried the abuses of democracy and the horrors of tyranny in his own Republic; and just like Plato, he ends his work with a mythic parable that dealt with cosmology, immortality and various other metaphysical subjects. Macrobius used this section of Cicero's Republic as a jumping off point to discuss an array of subjects that are Platonist in nature.

It is thanks to Macrobius that this section of Cicero's Republic is even extant. At a certain point, copyists started including this section of the Republic with Macrobius' commentary. This commentary was incredibly popular during the Middle Ages. For many scholars at that time, this was their main source for Neo-Platonist thought. With the dawning of the age of Christendom, came also the proliferation of the Latin language and it becoming the lingua franca of the Holy Roman empire. The encyclopedists not only wrote in Latin, but their works were broad in subject matter. Both of these factors contributed to them being very popular sources of knowledge to scholastics and others. The amount of copies and quotations attest to the popularity of the Commentary on Scipio's Dream.

One of the more popular aspects of this work during the dark ages was the astrological/astronomical discussions. I found the various treatments of Zodiacal lore and traditions quite interesting. It was something that also caught my attention in Porphyry's Cave of The Nymphs. I included a cosmological diagram found in here. It is supposedly the original layout of the planets and zodiac at the creation of the universe. This tradition certainly predates Macrobius.

I have to say that reading the introduction reminded me of what is often said of Plutarch. I feel they are both unfairly maligned as being unoriginal. I think that really does their merits as philosophical writers a disservice and it trivializes and marginalizes them. Like Plutarch, Macrobius was a Platonist that helped keep Platonism current during a seminal and paradigmatic period and also provided his own contributions to it's literature. I found this commentary incredibly engaging. How quickly I read it should attest to my interest. I didn't read Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics anywhere near as quickly.

I can honestly say that this book is to be recommended as an important work of Neo-Platonism. Macrobius is not devoid of errors, but his strengths are more notable than his weaknesses. I think a book like this does serve as a good introduction to Neo-Platonism. One should, of course, read Plotinus, but Macrobius' language is not as prolix as other Neo-Platonists and can be more readily understood by the average reader.

Readers familiar with the early Middle Ages will know that many scholars were engaged in efforts to preserve the wisdom of the Classical world while at the same time others were destroying the ancient pagan sources at the behest of the Church. A number of people were compiling "encyclopedias" (in the sense of detailed accumulations of information and quoted material) which epitomized especially the philosophical writings of the ancients, and by the fifth century hardly any of the popular "encyclopedists" of the day were still using primary sources. Instead they were dealing with copies of copies of the work of other epitomizers and after a while they were often quoting each other without attribution. This practice has made it very difficult for scholars to assign attribution to any one of the late Latin sources because much of it had entered what we would term the public domain. This effort toward epitomizing, summarizing and synthesizing while staying under the radar of the Church led to the permanent loss of many Classical works, notably those of Cicero and the Greek philosophers, and many others as well. Virgil, who was considered — along with Plato and Cicero — a giant among the wise, seems to have survived, not so much because of the beauty of his poetry but because of its susceptibility to writers taking flowery but ambiguous phrases from his works and turning them to their own uses.

One of the most influential early Medieval compilers was Macrobius, who had glommed onto an episode from the final book of Cicero's De re publica, which was reminiscent of the Vision of Er that concludes Plato's Republic. During the next thousand years, the selection from Cicero was almost the only part of De re publica that had survived, and thanks to Macrobius it has come down to us under the rubric of Somnium Scipionis, or The Dream of Scipio. Macrobius wrote a so-called Commentary on the Somnium which turned out to provide a pretext for performing a mind dump of encyclopedic proportions that expounded on every conceivable topic even remotely suggested by Scipio's dream as originally recorded by Cicero.

If The Dream of Scipio seems familiar, it was discussed by C.S. Lewis in The Discarded Image, which develops an extensive and detailed discussion of the Medieval world view of which the Somnium Scipionis provided a succinct summary. It is only 288 lines of Latin prose but it is packed and pithy — hardly a word is wasted. Lewis was attempting to construct a model of that world view through a review of the literature, and one could shorten the learning curve regarding the materials in Lewis's book by absorbing the Somnium Scipionis and by at least perusing Macrobius's Commentary and William Harris Stahl's sixty-page introduction in particular. It presents a useful roadmap to the Commentary and the outlines of Medieval learning.

Readers of Chaucer's dream visions such as The House of Fame or The Parliament of Fowls, Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy or even Dante's Divine Comedy will have noted multiple references to Macrobius and the "dream of Scipioun" and will recognize the pattern established by Scipio's dream.

Additionally and as an aside, Iain Pears, author of An Instance of the Fingerpost (1997) also wrote a novel called The Dream of Scipio (2002) that I have been meaning to read, but I understand it has nothing to do with Cicero's work.

Cicero's De re publica — of which a large section was discovered in the Vatican library in 1820 as a palimpsest concealed under a fourth or fifth century manuscript commentary on the Psalms by St. Augustine — was modeled after Plato's Republic. Where Plato outlined an ideal state, Cicero was concerned with the ideal operation of the Roman Republic. Plato concluded his work with the Vision of Er which speaks of the afterlife and the heavenly spheres. Apparently the Epicureans ridiculed Plato's use of visionary materials, and Macrobius tells us that Cicero, in a desire to avoid such criticism, chose the form of a dream to speak of the rewards of an afterlife for virtuous statesmen (and others who were pure in heart) and to describe the path the soul takes going to and from the heavenly spheres.

So what exactly was this dream? Scipio the Younger dreamed that he had been carried away into the heavens to the sphere of the fixed stars by his grandfather Scipio the Elder where he also met his deceased father, and looking down saw the earth and Rome and how small they were in relation to all of creation. Scipio was advised by his elders to lead a virtuous life and was shown the path souls take going to and from heaven via the nine planetary spheres.

The point of Cicero's Somnium Scipionis is to promote principles of justice in the government of a state:

"Nothing that occurs on earth, indeed, is more gratifying to that supreme God who rules the whole universe than the establishment of associations and federations of men bound together by principles of justice, which are called commonwealths. The governors and protectors of these proceed from here [i.e., the heavens] and return hither after death."

* * * * *

"Scipio, [said his father] cherish justice and your obligations to duty, as your grandfather here, and I, your father, have done; this is important where parents and relatives are concerned, but is of utmost importance in matters concerning the commonwealth. This sort of life is your passport into the sky, to a union with those who have finished their lives on earth and who, upon being released from their bodies, inhabit lives on earth and who, upon being released from their bodies, inhabit that place at which you are now looking (it was a circle of surpassing brilliance gleaming out amidst the blazing stars), which takes its name, the Milky Way, from the Greek word."

Thus, this dream vision is undoubtedly the culmination of Cicero's excursus on leadership in Rome and concerns the welfare of the commonwealth as well as the individual.

The point of Macrobius's Commentary, which is surprisingly lucid and informative compared to other similar works from the early Middle Ages, is to present a thorough and critical explanation of the important elements in the Somnium Scipionis. It provides the beginnings of an understanding of the early epitomizers and how they operated.

Modern critics have praised Cicero's Somnium Scipionis for its poetry despite its being entirely in Latin prose — Ciceronian prose to be sure: "Hardly from the lips of Virgil himself does the noble Latin speech issue with a purer or more majestic flow." (J.W. Mackail) The fact that The Dream of Scipio formed a complete episode combined with the unusually suggestive content lent encouragement to its being excerpted and published as a stand-alone subject worthy of commentary.

Most people today are probably unaware of the extent of Macrobius's influence across at least a millennium in the West. One of the most popular and interesting chapters in the Commentary is concerned with the five categories of dreams. While this classification as well as many other parts of the work are apparently not original with Macrobius, he is credited with conveying this and other elements of Classical lore through the long Dark Ages.

Not only is this an almost sentence-by-sentence commentary on The Dream of Scipio and an encyclopedic compendium of medieval and classical "knowledge" regarding astronomy, astrology, physiology, Pythagorean number theory, the harmony of the spheres, the five geographic zones of Earth, a classification of the virtues and much, much more, but it is also a summary of Neoplatonic philosophy as interpreted by Macrobius based on Plotinus and Porphyry. Cicero, who was indeed a Platonist, would have been surprised to know that his Somnium Scipionis was a Neoplatonic tract!

Anyone who is interested in the underpinnings of Medieval and Renaissance thought, philosophy and literature will find this book to be surprisingly readable and even entertaining to some degree. Where Macrobius gets into the esoteric doctrines of Pythagorean numbers, harmony or geocentric descriptions of the planetary spheres, one can become lost in the weeds because so much is primitive when compared with modern understandings. But this is a small detraction from an otherwise excellent and eye-opening book. Despite Macrobius's obvious goal of clarity, some of his "scientific" explanations are difficult to follow because they are based on outdated science or esoteric theories that in some cases seem outlandish in the twenty-first century.