40 - Learning and the past

Summary

SCHOLARS

Macrobius Ambrosius Theodosius, apparently an African, is probably to be identified with the Theodosius who was Praetorian Prefect of Italy in 430. He seems to have been related to the family of the Symmachi. Nothing more is known of his life. But he was evidently an aristocrat rather than a professional scholar. Three works of his survive: the Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, the Saturnalia, and a treatise De differentiis et societatibus graeci latinique uerbi, which is preserved only in excerpts from excerpts made in the Middle Ages. The two former works are dedicated to the writer's son Eustachius.

The Commentary is a loose and discursive discussion of the famous dream recounted in Cicero's De re publica, in which Scipio Africanus the Elder appears to his grandson, reveals to him his own future destiny and that of his country, expounds the rewards awaiting virtue in the after-life, and describes with impressive majesty the universe and the place of the earth and of man in it. Macrobius does not provide an exhaustive commentary on his text, but launches into a series of expositions in Neoplatonic vein on dreams, on the mystic properties of numbers, on the nature of the soul, on astronomy, on music. He quotes many authorities but it is unlikely that he had read all or even most of them. Plotinus and Porphyry are probably his principal proximate sources, and Virgil is quoted frequently by way of adornment. However the work does embody Neoplatonic thinking which is not directly preserved elsewhere.