The intellectual and social world of Martius Valerius

Abstract

The bucolic poems of Martius Valerius, first published in 1946, used to be dated to the twelfth century, but thanks to the work of François Dolbeau and Justin Stover, they are now securely dated to the sixth. In this article, I demonstrate that Martius’ fourth eclogue draws extensively on two of the logical works of Boethius, the introduction to the second edition of the commentary on Porphyry's Isagoge and the translation of Aristotle's Peri hermeneias, both from the mid 510s. These works were well known in the twelfth century, but I corroborate the sixth-century dating first by connecting Martius Valerius with Martius Novatus Renatus, editor of a corpus of Boethius’ logical monographs in the 520s, and secondly by arguing that Martius Valerius belonged to a circle of students in Rome who attached themselves to leading senators, including Boethius. I end by considering Martius’ career as quaestor and consul.

I INTRODUCTION

The four bucolic eclogues, with a prologue in elegiacs, of Martius Valerius are transmitted in only two manuscripts: a French codex from c. 1200, acquired in the decades around 1400 by Amplonius Ratinck and now in Gotha (with the inscription: Incipit prologus Bucolicorum Martii Valerii), and a sixteenth-century text in Erlangen which derives from the Gothanus (giving the poet's name as Marci Valerii Maximi).¹ The poems were first edited in 1946 by Paul Lehmann, who assigned them, with some hesitation, to the twelfth century.² This dating then became the orthodoxy, because it was supported in Franco Munari's two magisterial editions of Marcus Valerius (as he seemed to call the poet) of 1955 and 1970.³ But François Dolbeau, in a short article modestly entitled ‘Les “Bucoliques” de Marcus Valerius sont-elles une œuvre médiévale?’, pointed out that the materials on language, style, prosody and metre collected by Munari accord well, as Munari himself acknowledged, with a date in Late Antiquity.⁴ More decisively, Dolbeau brought to bear on the discussion two important pieces of external evidence. One had already been adduced by Michael Reeve in his survey of the transmission of Calpurnius Siculus, and consists in a note by the annotator of Berne, Burgerbibliothek 276, who has since been identified as Guido de Grana (thirteenth century), quoting a few lines (4.46–8) from Marc(us) Val(er)ius consul i(n) bucolicis.⁵ This already suggests that the poet was ancient, and the second testimony specifies the precise period: among the manuscripts of Thorney Abbey, near Ely, the early-sixteenth-century antiquary John Leland mentions ‘Eglogae aliquot Marci exquaestoris, qui floruit tempore Justiniani’.⁶ Although this evidence leaves no doubt that Dolbeau's question should be answered in the negative, an attempt to defend the medieval dating was undertaken by Christine Ratkowitsch.⁷ She has been refuted, however, by Justin Stover, who moreover expanded Dolbeau's arguments and added various new ones of his own, so that he could conclude: ‘the bucolics of Martius Valerius are not a medieval production, but a witness to the literary florescence of the fifth and sixth centuries’.⁸ The aim of the present article is to build on, but also occasionally to suggest alternatives to, Stover's argumentation, and to offer, together with a more precise dating, a first sketch of Martius Valerius’ intellectual and social world.⁹

But before I proceed, it is necessary to say a few words about the poet's names. As Munari already remarked, we may immediately discard the Maximus of the Erlangensis, which was probably taken from a table of contents at the lost beginning of the Gothanus, the source of Amplonius Ratinck's own table of contents, which reads liber 5 bucolicorum Marcii [sic] Valerii Maximi (counting the prologue as one of the eclogues) — but Maximi has no doubt been triggered by the name of the author of the immensely popular Facta et dicta memorabilia. ¹⁰ Marcus, too, cannot be correct, because in the time of Justinian, praenomina were no longer used: the last person of whom one is attested is Q. Aurelius Memmius Symmachus cos. 485, Boethius’ father-in-law.¹¹ Therefore, Marcus as written by Leland and probably implied by Guido de Grana must be a corruption of Marcius, probably by way of the genitive Marci(i) and possibly influenced by the name of the well-known Marcus Valerius Martialis. ‘Marcius’ could conceivably be correct, but since the Gothanus has Martii, and since corruption of Martii to Marcii is easy (we see it happening in Amplonius’ catalogue), I assume the name to have been ‘Martius’.¹²

‘Valerius’ likewise needs some thought. Although an old gentilicium, we find it used in this period as the diacritic cognomen, e.g. by the consul (West) of 521, whose full name probably was ‘Iobius Philippus Ymelcho Valerius’.¹³ This may have been the case with our poet, too, but it is not certain that the Gothanus and Guido de Grana have given his full name: he may have been ‘Martius Valerius X’ or ‘Martius Valerius X Y’ — and thus, he may even be attested, without our knowing it, as ‘X’ or ‘Y’. I will refrain from speculating on this, but in any case, it is not certain that the poet's diacritic was ‘Valerius’. For that reason (and also because ‘Valerius’ is already firmly associated with other authors), whenever I refer to the poet by one name only, I will use ‘Martius’.

II APOLLO'S SONG AND BOETHIUS’ LOGICAL WORKS

Whereas Martius’ first three eclogues follow the first three of Virgil, his fourth does not follow Virgil's fourth — and it is not hard to think of reasons why — but his sixth.¹⁴ In Virgil, Silenus sings a song which begins with the creation of the cosmos and then continues with various mythological stories; at the end the poet writes: ‘omnia, quae Phoebo quondam meditante beatus / audiit Eurotas iussitque ediscere lauros, / ille canit’ (‘All, that once, while Phoebus practised it, the blessed Eurotas heard and told the laurels to learn by heart, he sings’, 82–4). This could be read to mean that Silenus’ entire song was a reproduction of an earlier song of Apollo, and indeed in Martius it is Phoebus who sings.¹⁵ But this is of course the bucolic Phoebus, the one who herded Admetus’ cattle in Thessaly: ‘Egerat Amphrysi pastos ad flumina tauros / Phoebus’ (‘Phoebus had driven the bulls, after grazing, to the streams of the Amphrysus’, 1–2).¹⁶ On that occasion, according to some accounts, Apollo invented bucolic poetry, to which the poet probably alludes in having Apollo compose a ‘nouum … carmen’ (4).¹⁷ The first part of this ‘carmen’ consists, as in Virgil, in a philosophical analysis of origins, but in this case not the origins of the cosmos, but of language and poetry (27–52). Apollo takes rather a roundabout way to arrive there: he begins by attributing to the human soul a three-fold ‘actus’: ‘uita’, shared with plants; ‘sensus’, shared also with animals; and ‘mens’ or ‘ratio’, shared only with the gods. Reason leads humans to ask ‘an’, ‘quid’, ‘quale’ and ‘cur’ something is, and to exercise the faculties of ‘inuentio’ and ‘iudicium’. Reason also provides the impulse to give names to absent things, and thus brings language into being, and, when language is bound by the laws of metre, poetry.

This passage has frequently been interpreted as belonging to twelfth-century philosophy,¹⁸ but in fact it almost literally reproduces a text that was indeed well-known in the medieval schools, but is not itself medieval: Boethius’ introduction to the second edition of his commentary on Porphyry's Isagoge (the traditional beginning of the study of logic, and thus of philosophy), written on the basis of his own translation (the first edition having been based on the translation of Marius Victorinus).¹⁹ The correspondences will be best brought out by presenting the texts in parallel columns.

It is obvious without further comment that Boethius’ introduction to the second edition of his commentary on Porphyry's Isagoge is a major immediate source of this part of Apollo's song. The three-fold division of time (which rather breaks the sequence and might be a secondary insertion) is not to be found in that work, or at most implicitly,²⁵ but the formulation ‘ut sint, ut fuerint, ut post ignota sequantur’ (40) is close to that in Boethius’ De consolatione philosophiae: ‘quae sint, quae fuerint ueniantque’, 5.m.2.11). However, since both verses derive from Virgil's Georgics: ‘quae sint, quae fuerint, quae mox uentura trahantur’ (4.393), which is quoted with ‘sequentur’ for ‘trahantur’ by Macrobius (Sat. 1.20.5), it would be rash to conclude that Martius Valerius must have known the Consolatio. ²⁶

It is certain, however, that he knew another work (or set of works) by Boethius — or at least its beginning: the translation of and commentaries on Aristotle's De interpretatione (Περὶ ἑρμηνείας), which in the curriculum came after the Isagoge and the Categories.²⁷ Apollo's phrase ‘ad placitum’ (46), said of the giving of ‘nomina’, reproduces a variant in Boethius’ translation of the definition of ὄνομα at the beginning of De interpretatione: ὄνομα μὲν οὖν ἐστὶ φωνὴ σημαντικὴ κατὰ συνθήκην κτλ. (16^a19) becomes in Boethius: ‘nomen ergo est uox significatiua secundum placitum eqs.’ (‘a name is a spoken sound significative by convention’, p. 6.4–5). Boethius, when explaining this definition in his commentaries, sometimes uses Martius’ phrase ‘ad placitum’ by variation for ‘secundum placitum’ (which in any case would not have fitted into Martius’ hexameters).²⁸ He discusses the definition also in some of his logical monographs, again sometimes using ‘ad placitum’ alongside ‘secundum placitum’,²⁹ but it must be De interpretatione which was Martius’ source. This appears most clearly from Apollo's statement that human language expresses the movement of the soul: ‘oratio … / … animi dissoluit libera motum (50)’.³⁰ This corresponds to the second sentence of De interpretatione: ἔστι μὲν οὖν τὰ ἐν τῇ φωνῇ τῶν ἐν τῇ ψυχῇ παθημάτων σύμβολα (16^a3–4), which in Boethius becomes: ‘sunt ergo quae sunt in uoce earum quae sunt in anima passionum notae’ (‘what is in spoken sound is an indication of the passions in the soul’, p. 5.4–6); the word ‘passio’ does not fit into the hexameter, and ‘motus’ is its synonym.³¹ Thus, Martius’ imitation is limited to the beginning of Boethius’ translation of De interpretatione, just as his imitation of the second commentary on the Isagoge is limited to its introduction.

If Martius knew these works, or at least their beginnings, it is possible that he also knew the ‘bucolicum carmen’ which is attested as a work by Boethius in the so-called Anecdoton Holderi, an excerpt from an otherwise lost near-contemporary source, the Ordo generis Cassiodororum.³² Unfortunately, nothing has been preserved of this ‘carmen’, and circumstantial evidence is limited and uncertain. Boethius doubtless evokes his bucolic poetry in the very first words of the Consolatio: ‘Carmina qui quondam studio florente peregi’ (‘I who once in flourishing studies brought poems to completion’), because he there alludes to the mention of Virgil's Bucolics both at the end of the Georgics (4.564–5 ‘studiis florentem … / carmina qui lusi’) and at the spurious beginning of the Aeneid (‘Ille ego qui quondam gracili modulatus auena / carmen’).³³ The plural ‘carmina’ confirms what would otherwise already have been a plausible assumption, that the ‘carmen bucolicum’ was a collection rather than a single poem.³⁴ Also interesting in this respect is an example adduced by Boethius in the context of the discussion of future contingents in the second commentary on De interpretatione: ‘cum dico me hodie esse Theocriti Bucolica relecturum’ (‘when I say that today I am going to re-read Theocritus’ Bucolica’, p. 234.12–13).³⁵ Boethius is here reporting the theory of Philo (‘the Dialectician’), who lived earlier than Theocritus, so the example is likely to be his own.³⁶ If we combine this with Boethius’ activity as a prolific translator from Greek (if only, as far as we know, of prose), we may speculate — but no more — that his ‘carmen bucolicum’ contained, perhaps even exclusively consisted of, translations or at least close imitations of Theocritus. If that were to be the case, the allusions to Theocritus (and pseudo-Theocritus) that Stover has identified in Martius might in fact be allusions to the Latin versions of Boethius.³⁷ But this is adding speculation to speculation, and we must be content to admit that we cannot say anything specific about Martius’ use of Boethius’ ‘carmen bucolicum’. His use of two of the logical works, however, is certain.

III BOETHIUS’ LOGICAL WORKS AND ANOTHER MARTIUS

Because not only the commentary on the Isagoge, but also the translation of and commentaries on De interpretatione were widely known in the Middle Ages (and especially in the twelfth century, where Martius Valerius used to be dated), the dependence that I have demonstrated will not at first sight corroborate the sixth-century dating of the poet: a twelfth-century student could very well have been familiar with these works.³⁸ But so could a sixth-century student, who might have read the introduction to the second edition of the commentary on the Isagoge as soon as it was written (shortly after 510) and the translation of and/or a commentary on De interpretatione a few years later (or might have known the texts even earlier from personal teaching).³⁹ An argument for such a reconstruction is that we know of an editor of the logical works of Boethius, active in the 520s, who shared with our poet the name of ‘Martius’. This is Martius Novatus Renatus, a uir spectabilis, whose full names are known from a subscription found at the beginning of De divisione (and occasionally elsewhere); in a few manuscripts the name is given as Marcius or Marcus or abbreviated as M., but in most manuscripts, including the oldest and most authoritative, Orléans, Bibl. mun., 267 (X², Fleury), as Martius.⁴⁰ This state of affairs is reminiscent of the transmission of the name of the poet, and here, too, the correct form must have been ‘Martius’. Because that name is exceedingly rare in this period (as is ‘Marcius’), it is likely that Valerius and Renatus were related, perhaps closely.⁴¹

Renatus occurs again in the subscription to De hypotheticis syllogismis. Here the manuscript Paris, BNL, nouv. acq. lat. 1611, which originally was the second half of the Aurelianensis, has (f. 51r):

Contra codicem Renati u(iri) s(pectabilis) correxi, qui confectus ab eo est Theodoro antiquario qui nunc palatinus est.

I corrected this against the codex of Renatus, uir spectabilis, which was produced by that scribe Theodorus who now is a palatine official.

It is generally accepted that this codex Renati contained a corpus of the logical monographs of Boethius, of which a table of contents is found in the Aurelianensis and elsewhere, beginning with De topicis differentiis (chronologically the last work, written c. 522) and having De hypotheticis syllogismis as its last item; this table of contents was in all probability drawn up by the corrector of the codex Renati, who has been identified with Cassiodorus or at least someone from his environment, because the codex was used in compiling the ΦΔ-recension of the Institutiones humanarum litterarum (book 2 of the Institutiones).⁴² The corrector, whoever he was, in any case knew that the scribe Theodorus ‘now’ worked at the palace.⁴³ This makes it likely that he is to identified with the Theodorus who was adiutor to the quaestor sacri palatii in Constantinople and there made a copy of the Ars grammatica of his teacher Priscian in the years 525–526, as is apparent from a number of subscriptions.⁴⁴ If the word ‘now’ is pressed, we might conclude that Theodorus was not yet at the palace when he wrote the codex Renati. Also, it has been observed that some manuscripts going back to the codex Renati (including the Aurelianensis) call Boethius magister officiorum (and not, as in some of the manuscripts of the Consolatio, ex mag. off.), which would date the compilation of the codex to 522–523.⁴⁵ Neither argument is very strong, but a date somewhere in the 520s (but not earlier than 522) fits well with our other information about Renatus.

There are only three further attestations of a Renatus in this period, which are all likely to concern the same man.⁴⁶ The first is in a letter, written in the years 507/511 by Cassiodorus in the name of Theoderic to Theodagunda, a woman of royal blood, in which it appears that a Renatus has complained to the king about the settling of a legal dispute; this suggests that this Renatus was close to the court at Ravenna.⁴⁷ Ravenna is explicitly mentioned in the second attestation, a passage in which Severus of Antioch reports that when he lived in Constantinople (508–511), he debated in Greek about the Theopaschite problem with two men from the West, a Petronius from Rome and a Renatus from Ravenna, who defended the Chalcedonian position.⁴⁸ Finally, there is the opening of the letter of John the Deacon on baptism to Senarius, which begins ‘Sublimitatis uestrae paginam filio nostro spectabili uiro Renato deferente suscepimus’ (‘We have received the writing of Your Sublimity, transmitted by our son, the uir spectabilis Renatus’); because Senarius had a long career at the court in Ravenna, it is likely that Renatus had brought his letter from there.⁴⁹ The Roman ‘Iohannes diaconus’ writing the letter is with certainty the Roman ‘Iohannes diaconus’ to whom Boethius dedicated three of his theological treatises and whose spiritual ‘filius’ he proclaimed himself to be.⁵⁰ So we have a Renatus who shared both theological concerns and a spiritual father with Boethius and who lived in Ravenna, where Boethius worked after his appointment as magister officiorum in 522.⁵¹ It is therefore a reasonable hypothesis that this is the same Renatus as the one who was responsible for the codex Renati, and that he brought manuscripts of Boethius’ works from Ravenna to Constantinople when Boethius came under pressure (in 523) or was already executed (in 524 or 525), or perhaps already earlier, if we admit the date of 522–523 for the codex Renati.

It has been suggested that the manuscripts that Renatus caused to be copied included not only the logical monographs, but also the two commentaries on Porphyry's Isagoge. The editor of these commentaries, Samuel Brandt, argued that the mention of a ‘prima’ and a ‘secunda editio’ in the inscriptions of some manuscripts must go back to an ancient recension in which the two commentaries were combined; he also noticed that in these same manuscripts Boethius is styled ‘magister officiorum’, as he seems to have been in the codex Renati.⁵² For these reasons he proposed that here, too, Renatus was responsible, although he also admitted that such a reconstruction could never be more than conjectural. In this context it becomes relevant that the poems of the other Martius may have been transmitted in immediate proximity to the commentaries on the Isagoge. When John Leland listed the noteworthy manuscripts that he had seen at Thorney Abbey, he mentioned, immediately following the ‘Eglogae aliquot Marci exquaestoris, qui floruit tempore Justiniani’, the ‘Isagoge Porphirii Victorino interprete’.⁵³ Victorinus’ translation is known only in so far as it was quoted in Boethius’ first commentary, but Leland may have seen a manuscript with an inscription like that of Cologne, Erzbischöfliche Diözesan- und Dombibliothek, Cod. 187 (s. XI): Isagogae Porphyrii translatae de Greco in Latinum a Victorino oratore; what this manuscript contains, however, is Boethius’ translation, but ascribed to Victorinus, and then the first and after that the second commentary.⁵⁴ So there is a possibility that not only Martius Novatus Renatus, but also Martius Valerius was associated with the transmission of the two commentaries. The five poems with their 451 verses would nicely fit into a quire (16 pages with around 28 lines to the page), which might have travelled as a stowaway, so to speak, in a manuscript of the commentaries.⁵⁵ But it is of course also possible that the two works were combined by someone who recognised the imitation, or even that the juxtaposition in Leland does not go back to juxtaposition in a single codex or corpus, and is due to mere coincidence. But in any case, the association of both Martii with the logical works of Boethius makes it worthwhile to look for Martius Valerius in the same environment as Martius Novatus Renatus. That could be Constantinople, where the codex Renati was written, or Ravenna, where Renatus is variously attested, but also Rome, where Boethius lived and worked until he was called to Ravenna to become magister officiorum in 522. In the next section I will attempt to show that all the evidence converges on the last-mentioned alternative.

IV STUDENTS AND THEIR MENTORS IN EARLY-SIXTH-CENTURY ROME

In Martius’ first eclogue the herdsman Cydnus is introduced as resting in the shade, but not, like Virgil's Tityrus, happily singing of his love, but on the contrary, being tormented by it. When his interlocutor Ladon asks him about the cause of his ‘dolor’ (49), he begins (50–4):

Scis, reor, hunc collem, ‘Lauros’ ubi dicimus ‘Altas’,

unde forum et celsas securi cernimus arces,

lactea cum turbae portamus dona molestae:

hoc domus in colle est nostra, puto, non minor urbe,

et tamen hoc melius, domina quod Xystide⁵⁶ gaudet.

You know, I think, this hill, where we speak of the ‘High Laurels’, whence securely we discern the forum and the high citadels, when we bring our milky gifts to the troublesome crowd: on this hill there is a house not smaller, I believe, than our town,⁵⁷ and what is even better: it enjoys Xystis as its mistress.

Many different localisations for this hill were proposed when the poem was still thought to be medieval, and ‘it was even suggested that the referent was Rome itself’, writes Stover, apparently considering this suggestion to be quite absurd (he himself argues for Daphne near Antioch).⁵⁸ Indeed, the scholar who originally proposed Rome gave a misleading reference (Suet., Galba 2.1, which is about a laurel grove in the villa of Livia at Primaporta), but a great number of sources attest an area called ‘Lauretum’ or ‘Loretum’ in the north-west corner of the Aventine, from where one may indeed see the forum (in any case the Forum Boarium and the Forum Holitorium), as well as the ‘celsas … arces’, i.e. the Capitol.⁵⁹ Admittedly, the nomenclature does not include the word ‘altus’, although the hill itself is high and modern scholarship has called the road leading into the Lauretum the ‘Vicus Altus’ — unfortunately without ancient warrant.⁶⁰ This part of the Aventine was traditionally an affluent residential quarter, but precisely for that reason it was heavily pillaged by the troops of Alaric in 410 and doubtless also by the Vandals in 455 and by Ricimer in 472.⁶¹ Yet we know that Caecina Decius Maximus Basilius cos. 480, one of the leading men of the age, lived there (in what was apparently an ancestral home of the Decii), and by the beginning of the sixth century, the area may still (or again) have been distinguished by large mansions such as the domus that so impressed Cydnus.⁶²

Rome was the place where the Italian elite sent their sons to study,⁶³ and it is very likely that Martius Valerius was a youth when he wrote his Bucolics (no longer, of course, when the manuscript to which our text goes back was written, because he was then ex-quaestor and consul or ex-consul). Not only was bucolic a young man's genre (as we have seen with Boethius), but such features as the imitation of introductory scholastic matter that I have demonstrated or the alphabetical catalogue of mythological exempla in the fourth eclogue⁶⁴ suggest an author who has not long ago quitted the school of the grammaticus and may still have been under the tutelage of the rhetor.⁶⁵ Moreover, he refers to himself as a ‘puer’ in a passage that is of central importance for situating the poet into his milieu and time. In the third eclogue, in the course of their amoebaeon, the two competing herdsmen address their respective patrons (107–10):

Moeris   Parua, sed excelso placuit mea fistula Fausto:⁶⁶

‘i, puer, et propriam’ dixit ‘ne neglige Musam!’

Mopsus   Nos Auxentius amat uiuoque tuetur amore,

deque suo tenuis mihi nomine crescit auena.

Moeris   Small is my reed pipe, but it has pleased the exalted Faustus: ‘Go, boy’, he said, ‘and don't neglect the Muse you have made your own!’⁶⁷

Mopsus   Me Auxentius loves and regards with lively love, and from his name grows my slender reed.

As is usual with Martius, the passage is a conflation of Virgil with Calpurnius and Nemesianus.⁶⁸ Some of the diction is derived from a comparable scene in Calpurnius, where the herdsmen mention that they are loved by the gods Silvanus and Flora respectively; there we find the address to the ‘puer’ and the idea that the reed pipe ‘grows’ (‘crescit’) — although the pun on the patron's name (‘deque suo … nomine’) is Martius’ own.⁶⁹ The precise wording of the address to the ‘puer’, however, is taken from Nemesianus: ‘Perge puer, coeptumque tibi ne desere carmen.’ (‘Go on, boy, and don't abandon the poetry you have begun’, 1.81). These parallels might at first sight be taken to show that the ‘puer’ is a merely conventional figure, but the further parallel with Virgil's third eclogue (which is imitated throughout in Martius’ third), where the herdsmen address Virgil's patron Pollio (84–7), strongly suggests that the ‘puer’ stands for the poet himself. Such an interpretation is consonant with the very first lines of the prologue to the collection:⁷⁰

Parua quidem arbitrio committo carmina magno:

spes uenit ista mihi de pietate patrum.

Small though they be, I commit my poems to the judgement of the great: this hope comes to me from the pietas of my fathers.

Stover has interpreted the word ‘patres’ to mean ‘senators’,⁷¹ but a consideration of the discourse about Roman students in this period may suggest a somewhat different interpretation (and explain my translation ‘my fathers’ rather than ‘the fathers’).

In the large archive of the works of Ennodius, dating from his time as a deacon in Milan in the period 503–513, there are a number of letters recommending young Milanese protégés to high-ranking Romans on the occasion of their move to Rome for the benefit of further study.⁷² Striking in these letters is the use of ‘pater’ and ‘pietas’ to describe the role of both Ennodius himself and that of the prospective mentors with respect to the adolescents entrusted to their care.⁷³ This is best seen in two passages where both terms occur in combination. The first is the only letter of recommendation that is not written to a Roman aristocrat (or pope or future pope) with the request to act as a mentor, but to someone who seems to have been a teacher (425). In the inscription of the letter his name is given (in the dative) as ‘Meribaudo’, but this is almost certainly a copying error for ‘Merobaudi’; the Merobaudes in question may be the ‘rhetor’ whose work Boethius quotes in his commentary on Cicero's Topica.⁷⁴ In recommending Ambrosius to him, Ennodius concludes: ‘petitioni meae paterna, sicut praeceptores uocauit antiquitas, pietate respondete.’ (‘Respond to my petition with the pietas of a father — as teachers were called of old.’). The words ‘uocauit antiquitas’ are meant to evoke a famous passage from Juvenal's seventh satire, where in the section on the ‘rhetores’ the poet writes of the ‘maiores’ ‘qui praeceptorem sancti uoluere parentis / esse loco’ (‘who wanted the teacher to be in the position of the holy parent’, 209–10).⁷⁵ This passage is quoted verbatim in the second text to be considered, a long prosimetric letter of instruction to Ambrosius and Beatus, usually called by the name Paraenesis didascalica given to it by the early-seventeenth-century editor Sirmond (452). Ennodius glosses the quotation from Juvenal with the sententia ‘generare etenim et libidinis testimonium est, erudisse pietatis’ (‘indeed, begetting shows proof also of lust, educating of pietas’, 4–5).⁷⁶ At the end of the letter (18–25) he praises a number of Roman aristocrats, whom the boys, he suggests, should seek out as mentors: Faustus and his son Avienus are at the court in Ravenna, but Rome still has Festus and Symmachus, Probinus and his son Cethegus, Agapitus and Probus, as well as the matronae Barbara and Stefania.⁷⁷ But not to forget Boethius, ‘in quo uix discendi annos respicis et intellegis peritiam sufficere iam docendi’ (‘in whom you hardly notice the years of learning and understand that he already has sufficient expertise in teaching’, 21).⁷⁸

These texts suggest that the ‘patres’, on whose ‘pietas’ Martius counts, are precisely such mentors, in any case including Boethius, whom he imitates, and the Auxentius and Faustus he mentions in the third eclogue. Auxentius cannot be identified, but he may well have been Martius’ teacher.⁷⁹ Faustus, on the other hand, is quite likely to be the Faustus mentioned by Ennodius, i.e. Anicius Probus Faustus cos. 490.⁸⁰ Martius calls him ‘excelsus’ (3.107, as quoted above), for which the only parallels are in the Corpus Iuris Civilis, where the epithet is given to the highest officials of the state, including the magister officiorum, the quaestor sacri palatii and the praefectus praetorio; it would thus well fit Faustus, who held all three offices.⁸¹ Faustus is the addressee of many of the letters of recommendation mentioned above, and on various occasions Ennodius praises his literary output, including poetry; one epigram by Faustus has even been preserved in the Ennodian archive.⁸² But there is another reason to connect him with Martius Valerius, and this has to do with a surprising allusion to be found at a prominent place in the eclogues.

The first line of the first eclogue reads: ‘Cydne, sub algenti recubas dum molliter umbra’ (‘Cydnus, while you recline softly under the cool shade’). This of course alludes to the beginning of Virgil's first eclogue ‘Tityre, tu patulae recubans sub tegmine fagi / … / … lentus in umbra’ (‘Tityrus, you, reclining under the cover of a spreading beech, … relaxed in the shade’), but the word ‘molliter’ may evoke another imitation of Virgil's first line, in the pseudo-Virgilian Catalepton 9, a panegyric on M. Valerius Messala Corvinus, which among other things praises his bucolic poetry: ‘molliter hic uiridi patulae sub tegmine querci / Moeris pastores et Meliboeus erant’ (‘here, softly under the green cover of a spreading oak, were the herdsmen Moeris and Meliboeus’, 17–18).⁸³ The case for imitation is perhaps not very strong, but it may be reinforced by the similarity between the first line of the prologue ‘Parua quidem arbitrio committo carmina magna’ with the line in which the poet of Catalepton 9 characterises Messala's poetry: ‘pauca tua in nostras uenerunt carmina chartas’ (‘a few of your poems have found a place in my manuscripts’, 13), even although here the case for imitation is not very strong either.⁸⁴ But the very first word of the first eclogue, ‘Cydne’ may also be relevant, because the river Cydnus, from which Martius’ herdsman takes his name, occurs at the beginning of the list of Messala's eastern victories in Tibullus’ birthday poem for his patron: ‘an te, Cydne, canam, tacitis qui leniter undis / …?’ (‘Or Cydnus, shall I sing of you, who gently with your silent waves …?’, 1.7.13), and may well have been mentioned in Messala's own poetry.⁸⁵ What gives point to all this is not only that Martius bears the name ‘Valerius’, but also that the family of Faustus traced its descendance to the poet, whose full name was M. Valerius Messal(l)a Corvinus: Faustus called one of his sons Messala, while his father, Gennadius Avienus, was reckoned by Sidonius Apollinaris to belong to the ‘Coruinorum familia’ (Epist. 1.9.4).⁸⁶ So it is possible that Martius Valerius also belonged (or counted himself as belonging) to this family, constructing its reputed ancestor as his predecessor in bucolic poetry. In any case, the letters of Ennodius, and especially those concerning Faustus, even if they date from a few years before the terminus post quem provided by Martius’ imitation of Boethius, suggest a plausible environment for Martius Valerius. That plausibility is increased when, to conclude this article, the evidence about his career, that he was consul and quaestor, is connected with what has been argued thus far.

V MARTIUS VALERIUS QUAESTOR AND CONSUL

Among the protégés of Ennodius studying in Rome, at least two became quaestor: Ambrosius, already repeatedly mentioned above, in 526–527 and Fidelis as his successor in 527–528.⁸⁷ The quaestor was the ghost-writer of the emperor in the East and of the Gothic king in the West, but in the East the stress was strongly on jurisprudence, and the position was filled with eminent jurists, who remained in office over a number of years (and whose hand may often be recognised in the Corpus Iuris Civilis).⁸⁸ In the West, on the other hand, oratorical reputation took precedence over juridical training, and the men chosen were often young (such as Ambrosius and Fidelis), and usually, it seems, remained in office for one indiction only (i.e. the period from 1 September to 31 August).⁸⁹ All of our evidence for this period comes from Cassiodorus’ Variae, which covers the years 507–511 (when Cassiodorus himself was quaestor, he too at a young age), 523–527 (when he was magister officiorum) and 533–537 (when he was praetorian prefect). For most of the years concerned he included the letters of appointment to the candidates and the announcements to the senate of the new incumbents, and thus we know of four western quaestors in 523–527 and one in 534–535.⁹⁰ This leaves enough space to fit in Martius Valerius, but it is worthwhile to take a closer look at the year 526. In his letter of appointment to Ambrosius, Cassiodorus intimates that he had already been acting quaestor before September, ‘cum sit offensionibus alter expulsus’ (‘the other having been expelled because of wrongdoings’, 8.13.3). Doubtless for that reason, Cassiodorus has not included the appointment letter for the quaestor of 525–526 in the Variae, and therefore we do not know his name.⁹¹ But it requires little imagination to suspect that the ‘offensiones’ had something to do with the disgrace and execution of Boethius and Symmachus in precisely this period, and that the offending quaestor belonged to their camp. It is also perfectly conceivable that a person thus disgraced would move to Constantinople, just as we saw that Martius Novatus Renatus moved there from Ravenna after Boethius’ death (or somewhat earlier). It is therefore an attractive hypothesis — if no more than that — that the quaestor whom Cassiodorus nearly blotted out of the record is none other than Martius Valerius, and that his consulate was later awarded to him in Constantinople, where honorary consulates were rather freely distributed — and he cannot have been an ordinary consul, because in our period the fasti are full.⁹²

The reconstruction I have proposed assumes that Martius was quaestor in the West, not in the East. In fact, all quaestors in the East in this period are known, and if Martius was an eastern quaestor, he must have been an honorary one. This title was given only to eminent jurists,⁹³ and there is no evidence that Martius attained to this distinction (in any case he was not on one of Justinian's law commissions, unlike the only known honorary quaestor in the 520s and 530s, Dorotheus⁹⁴). Moreover, there is no known example of someone who was both honorary consul and honorary quaestor.⁹⁵ In this context, we should also ask what could have been Leland's source for calling the poet ‘Marci exquaestoris, qui floruit tempore Justiniani’. The wording does not need to be his own, but may be that of his manuscript, as we find, in the famous Tours codex of Boethius’ Institutio arithmetica (c. 845), following Boethius’ own inscription domino suo patricio Simmacho Boecius the explanation Manilius [sic] Seuerinus floruit temporibus Teoderici regis Italorum.⁹⁶ This may go back to a brief biography of Boethius, such as we find in many manuscripts of the Consolatio, and something similar may have been the case for Martius.⁹⁷ Another possibility is that it goes back to a subscription specifying the date of correcting the copy as one of the consulates of Justinian (521, 528, 533, 534).⁹⁸ Whatever Leland's source, a notice qui floruit tempore Justiniani would have nothing surprising if, as I have suggested, Martius Valerius, like Martius Novatus Renatus, moved at some point to Constantinople, and there received an honorary consulate.⁹⁹

But in conclusion, it is good to stress the uncertainties surrounding the time, place and even the name of our poet. The dependence on some of Boethius’ logical works provides an unassailable terminus post quem, but this in itself does not tell us how long after the composition of these works the poet wrote. I have tried to make a case for the hypothesis that it was more or less immediately afterwards, in the mid 510s or early 520s, and that Martius belonged to a circle of students at Rome who attached themselves to leading senators, including Boethius. And although I believe that this hypothesis fits all the evidence, I am aware that I cannot at all points exclude alternative reconstructions. At least I hope that this article testifies that ‘the slow work of dating and contextualizing’, as Stover puts it at the end of his article, ‘continues’.¹⁰⁰