(fl Carthage, ?early 5th century). Latin writer. His only known work, De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii (formerly often called Satyricon because of its affinity to Menippean satire) in nine books, is a fantasy in which seven bridesmaids, one for each of the artes, decribe the arts they personify. From his own remarks it seems that he was a resident of Carthage and perhaps a lawyer by vocation, to judge from some idiosyncrasies of vocabulary and statements made in two separate places in his book. He is generally assumed to have lived before 439 ce, when Carthage was sacked by the Vandals.
Martianus’s main interest was to compile information on each of the liberal arts, couched in terms of an elaborate allegory. The direct sources for his discussions of grammar, dialectic and rhetoric are not known, but those for the quadrivial sciences are less obscure. His treatment of geometry is a geographic exercise drawn from Pliny and Solinus; that of arithmetic relies on Nicomachus and Euclid, although it is unlikely he consulted these sources directly; for astronomy, he is thought to have transmitted Posidonius through a Latin intermediary; as for music, the greater part of book 9 (Willis, §§936–95) is, with some rearrangements, deliberate or accidental omissions, and insertions of passages from other Greek or Latin sources, virtually a translation of On Music, i.4–19, of Aristides Quintilianus. The possibility remains that Martianus relied on a single encyclopedic source no longer extant for the entire corpus of his information.
Like all late classical music theorists, Martianus avoids giving details of contemporary musical practice, preferring instead to concentrate on music as a fundamentally mathematical phenomenon. It is not possible to say whether his decision was based on a lack of knowledge about such practice, or whether he considered that a discussion of contemporary performance was inappropriate in a manual on the verbal and mathematical arts. The opening allegory of book 9 gives way to Harmonia reciting common stories about the ethical powers of music, followed by a proposal to discuss melodic composition. The resulting discussion, which is not based on Aristides, is simply a description of the Greek musical system (complete with Greek pitch names) and a mention of 15 ‘tropi’ – five principal, each with two subsidiaries. The focus then shifts to Aristides, whom Martianus follows in his division and subdivision of the discipline ‘harmonia’ into descending triads. The subject of harmonics receives a sevenfold subdivision, including pitches, intervals, systems, genera, tonoi, change of systems, and melodic construction. As a natural result of discrepancies in detail between his sources, Martianus ennumerates 28 separate pitches here where earlier he had listed only 18. Finally, a similar division and subdivision of rhythm, continuing the transmission of Aristides, concludes book 9 and consists of substantive remarks on rhythm from the point of view of Greco-Latin metrics.
Perhaps the most important thing about De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii as a whole is that it was widely read from the 9th century onwards. Not only was it the object of four Carolingian commentaries (by Johannes Scottus Eriugena, Martin of Laon – the latter formerly attributed to Dunchad – Remigius of Auxerre and an anonymous author) and a 10th-century German translation of books 1 and 2 by Notker Labeo, but its allegory, images and vocabulary were adopted by many later writers, such as John of Salisbury, Alain de Lille and Thierry of Chartres. It is not, however, much drawn on by medieval specialist writers on music, perhaps because its merit is primarily literary, not informative or philosophical. There are at least three literary points of interest: the fundamental allegory with its rich cast of characters and baroque imagery; the mixing of verse (often metrically abstruse) and prose throughout the nine books, except in the encyclopedic or technical sections of books 3 to 9; and the bizarre style and vocabulary, with startlingly many hapax legomena. None of these points applies to the core of book 9, which is straightforward in its reliance on Aristides. The popularity of the work in the medieval schools may have rested on its usefulness as a handbook of the liberal arts intermediate in scope and difficulty between Cassiodorus’s compilation and the more elaborate monographs, such as Boethius’s on music and arithmetic.
J. Willis, ed.: Martianus Capella: De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii (Leipzig, 1983)
H. Deiters: Über das Verhältnis des Martianus Capella zu Aristides Quintilianus (Poznań, 1881)
J. Willis: Martianus Capella and his Early Commentators (diss., U. of London, 1959)
W.H. Stahl: Martianus Capella and the Seven Liberal Arts (New York, 1971)
S. Corbin: ‘The Neumes of the Martianus Capella Manuscripts’,Essays on Opera and English Music in Honour of Sir Jack Westrup, ed. F.W. Sternfeld and E. Olleson (Oxford, 1975), 1–7
T.J. Mathiesen: Aristides Quintilianus on Music in Three Books (New Haven, CT,1983)
LAWRENCE GUSHEE/BRADLEY JON TUCKER