Page 223 - Envoys and Political Communication in the Late Antique West 411 - 533

Cassiodorus and Senarius

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qui quondam gracili modulatus avena/carmen. Another technical witticism
is the choice of metre, hexameter. Senarius’ name is an adjectival form
of sex, six; Latin writers conventionally referred to verses with six feet as
versus senarii. 69
The final line invokes not only the Platonist belief in the astral ori-
gin of the soul, but more specifically the topos of eternal life in the
heavenly sphere as the reward for those who serve the state well.
The locus classicus in Latin literature for this belief is Cicero’s myth of
the dream of Scipio at the end of his De re publica, one of the favoured
texts of fourth- and fifth-century Roman paganism. 70 The vitality of
this theme in the late empire is demonstrated by the commentaries on
Scipio’s dream written by Favonius Eulogius and Macrobius in the late
fourth and early fifth centuries. 71 Cicero’s myth and its commentaries
circulated in Italy in the time of Senarius, and formed an important part
of the intellectual background of Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy.The
imagery of elevation ad astra after death had long since been comfortably
incorporated into both Neoplatonic philosophy and Christian discourse;

68
The quatrain, possibly of first-century origin, is first attested in the late fourth and early fifth
centuries; R. G. Austin, ‘Ille ego qui quondam . . . ’, Classical Quarterly n.s. 18 (1968), 107–15.
Other allusions to the quatrain, contemporary to Senarius, include Dracontius, De laudibus Dei,
ed. Frideric Vollmer, MGH AA 14.iii, 654; and, less closely, the opening line of Boethius,
Philosophiae consolatio, ed. Ludwig Bieler (CCSL 94; Turnhout, 1967), i carm. 1, line 1: Carmina
qui quondam . . ., conflated with the closing lines of Virgil, Georgics iv, lines 564–5; cf. Bieler’s
note to Boethius, ibid.
69 E.g. Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, ed. Jean Cousin, v (Paris, 1978), ix 4.73, 125, 140.
70 Cicero, De re publica, ed. and trans. Esther Br´ eguet, 2 vols. (Paris, 1980), vi, esp. 13, 16, 23–4, 26.
Late paganism: H. Bloch, ‘The Pagan Revival in the West at the End of the Fourth Century’,
in Arnaldo Momigliano (ed.), The Conflict Between Paganism and Christianity in the Fourth Century
(Oxford, 1963), 207–17; Philip Levine, ‘The Continuity and Preservation of the Latin Tradition’,
in Lynn White Jr. (ed.), The Transformation of the Roman World: Gibbon’s Problem after Two Centuries
(Berkeley, 1966), 210–14.
71 Macrobius: Macrobius, Commentarii in somnium Scipionis, ed. J. Willis (Leipzig, 1963). Date: Alan
Cameron, ‘The Date and Identity of Macrobius’, Journal of Roman Studies 56 (1961), 1–11. Mac-
robius’ concern with the topos of divine reward for service to the state is revealed particularly
by his schema of the virtues. The Neoplatonists viewed virtues as the means to a philosophical
release from worldly impurities and thence to a divine state. Macrobius summarises this view
but discreetly subverts it to a more Ciceronian concept, seeing beatitude as the due reward for
the ‘civic virtues’, primarily service to the state; Macrobius, Comm. i, 8, esp. 2–4, 12;P.M.
Schedler, Die Philosophie des Macrobius und ihr Einfluss auf die Wissenschaft des christlichen Mittelalters
(M¨ unster, 1916), 89–90; Clemens Zintzen, ‘R¨ omisches und Neuplatonisches bei Macrobius’, in
P. Steinmetz (ed.), Politeia und Res Publica: Beitr¨ age zum Verst¨ andnis von Politik,Recht und Staat in
der Antike (Wiesbaden, 1969), 366–70; cf. Jacques Flamant, Macrobe et le n´ eo-platonisme latin ` ala
fin du IVe si` ecle (Leiden, 1977), 609–14.
Eulogius: Favonius Eulogius, Disputatio de somnio Scipionis, ed. and trans. Roger-E. van Wed-
dington (Collectio Latomus 27; Brussels, 1957), especially i, 2,p. 13, lines 14–16: bene meritis de re
publica patriaeque custodibus lactei circuli lucida ac candens habitatio deberetur. Date: PLRE i, ‘Favonius
Eulogius 3’, 294.

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