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MARTIANUS CAPELLA, De Nuptiis Phylologiae et Mercurii libri VIII. Franciscus Eyssenhardt recensuit. Accedunt scholia in Caesaris Germanici Aratea. Teubner, Leipzig, 1886. LXVII,490p. Half cloth. Spine loosening. Mart.Cap. hand written on vignette glued to tail spine. Corners bit bumped. Edges cover scratched. Name and date on free endpaper. Name stamp on inside free endpaper. Pages yellowed. Series: Bibliotheca Teubneriana. (Rare thus). 'Martianus Minneus Felix Capella composed in Vandalic Carthage, probably in the last quarter of the 5th cent. AD, a prosimetrical Latin encyclopaedia of the seven Liberal Arts (grammar, dialectic, rhetoric - the medieval 'trivium'- and the 'quadrivius', geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, music). He subsequently composed a short metrical treatise. Both works were addressed to his son. The ecncyclopaedia, usually known as the 'De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii' (...) composes a two-book introductory myth describing the ascent to heaven, apotheosis, and marriage of Philology to Mercury, as well as a seven-book introduction to the Liberal Arts, in which each subject is presented by an elaborately described female personification. The encyclopaedic books are pedestrian compilations, mostly from Latin sources. (...) The myth is fantastic, imaginative, and curiously learned: while strongly influenced by Neoplatonic sources and doctrines on the ascent of the soul (...), it owes to the parodistic tradition of Menippean satire such features as councils of the gods, heavenly voyages, and wrangling philosophers. (... ) His baroque and intentionally abstruse periodic Latin proved extremely liable to corruption in the extensive and contaminated later manuscript tradition. The 'Philologia' was very influential during the Carolingian period and the 12th.cent. Platonic revival, both as a textbook and as a literary source of mystic cosmology and images of the seven Liberal Arts.' (DANUTA R. SHANZER in The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 3rd rev.ed., 2003, p.932). 'It is to the same class of mythological allegory that I would assign the work of another writer, if I felt sure that any classification could hold him; for this universe, which has produced the bee-orchid and the giraffe, has produced nothing stranger than Martianus Capella.’ (C.S. LEWIS in The Allegory of Love, 1963, p.78). From the library of the late Professor Doktor Nikolaus Himmelmann. € 115.00 (Antiquarian)