An Enquiry into the Life and Legend of Michael Scot. J. Wood Brown
solemnly on to offer homage before their Prince and his bride. In the six great apartments of state the frescoed forms of Christian art: Patriarchs in their histories, Moses and David in their exploits, and the last wild charge of Barbarossa’s Crusade,[59] looked down upon a moving throng of nobles and commons who came to present their congratulations, while the plaintive music of lute, of pipe, and tabor, sighed upon the air, and skilful dancers swam before the delighted guests in all the fascination of the voluptuous East.
What part could Michael Scot, the grave ecclesiastic, and now doubly the ‘Master’ as Frederick’s trusted tutor, play in the gay scene of his pupil’s marriage? For many ages it has been the custom among Italian scholars, the attached dependants of a noble house, to offer on such occasions their homage to bride and bridegroom in the form of a learned treatise; any bookseller’s list of Nozze is enough to show that the habit exists even at the present day. This then was what Scot did; for there is every reason to think that the Physionomia, which he composed and dedicated to Frederick, was produced and presented at the time of the royal marriage. No date suits this publication so well as 1209, and nothing but the urgent desire of Court and people that the marriage should prove fruitful can explain, one might add excuse, some passages of almost fescennine licence which it contains.[60] We seem to find in the advice of the preface that Frederick should study man, encouraging the learned to dispute in his presence what may well have been the last word of a master who saw his pupil passing to scenes of larger and more active life at an unusually early age, and before he could be fully trusted to take his due place in the great world of European politics.
The Physionomia, however, is too important a work to be dismissed in a paragraph. Both the subject itself, and the sources from which Scot drew, deserve longer consideration. The science of physiognomy, as its name imports, was derived from the Greeks. Achinas, a contemporary of the Hippocratic school, and Philemon, who is mentioned in the introduction to Scot’s treatise, seem to have been the earliest writers in this department of philosophy. It was a spiritual medicine,[61] and formed part of the singular doctrine of signatures, teaching as it did that the inward dispositions of the soul might be read in visible characters upon the bodily frame. The Alexandrian school made a speciality of physiognomy. In Egypt it attained a further development, and various writings in Greek which expounded the system passed current during the early centuries of our era under the names of Aristotle and Polemon. Through the common channel of the Syriac schools and language it reached the Arabs, and in the ninth century had the fortune to be taken up warmly by Rases and his followers, who made it a characteristic part of their medical system. From this source then Scot drew largely; chapters xxiv.-xxv. in Book II. of his Physionomia correspond closely with the De Medicina ad Regem Al Mansorem[62] of Rases.[63]
Among ancient texts on physiognomy, however, perhaps the most famous was the Sirr-el-asrar, or Secreta Secretorum, which was ascribed to Aristotle. Its origin, like that of other pseudo-Aristotelic writings, seems to have been Egyptian. When the conquests of Alexander the Great had opened the way for a new relation between East and West, Egypt, and especially its capital, Alexandria, became the focus of a new philosophic influence. The sect of the Essenes, transported hither, had given rise to the school of the Therapeutae, where Greek theories developed in a startling direction under the power of Oriental speculation. The Therapeutae were sun-worshippers, and eager students of ancient and occult writings, as Josephus[64] tells us the Essenes had been. We find in the Abraxas gems, of which so large a number has been preserved, an enduring memorial of these people and their system of thought.[65]
The preface to the Sirr-el-asrar affords several matters which agree admirably with what we know of the Therapeutae. The precious volume was the prize of a scholar on his travels, who found it in the possession of an aged recluse dwelling in the penetralia of a sun-temple built by Æsculapius.[66] All this is characteristic enough, and when we examine the substance of the treatise it appears distinctly Therapeutic. Much of it is devoted to bodily disease, to the regimen of the health, and to that science of physiognomy which professed to reveal, as in a spiritual diagnosis, the infirmities of the soul. The ascription of the work to Aristotle, Alexander’s tutor, seems quite in accordance with this theory; in short, there is no reason to doubt that it first appeared in Egypt, where it probably formed one of the most cherished texts of the Therapeutae.
The preface to the Sirr-el-asrar throws light not only upon the origin of the treatise but also upon its subsequent fortunes. It is said to have been rendered from the Greek into Chaldee or Syriac,[67] and thence into Arabic, the usual channel by which the remains of ancient learning have reached the modern world. The translator’s name is given as Johannes filius Bitricii, but this can hardly have been the well-known Ibn-el-Bitriq, the freedman of Mamoun. To this latter author indeed, the Fihrist, composed in 987, ascribes the Arabic version of Aristotle’s De Cœlo et Mundo, and of Plato’s Timaeus, so that his literary faculty would seem to accord very well with the task of translating the Sirr-el-asrar. But Foerster has observed[68] that we find no trace of this book in Arabian literature before the eleventh century. Now the famous Ibn-el-Bitriq lived in the ninth, as appears from several considerations. His works were revised by Honain ibn Ishaq (873), and, if we believe in the authenticity of the El Hawi, where he is mentioned by name, then he must have belonged to an age at least as early as that of Rases who wrote it. In these perplexing circumstances, Foerster gives up the attempt to determine who may have been the translator of the Sirr-el-asrar, contenting himself with the conjecture that some unknown scholar had assumed the name of El Bitriq to give importance to the production of his pen. We may be excused, however, if we direct attention to two manuscripts of the British Museum[69] which do not seem to have been noticed by those who have devoted attention to this obscure subject. One of these, which is written in a hand of the thirteenth century, informs us that the man who transcribed it was a certain Said Ibn Butrus ibn Mansur, a Maronite priest of Lebanon in the diocese of Tripolis, a prisoner for twelve years in the place where the royal standards were kept (? at Cairo), who was released from that confinement in the time of al Malik an Nazir. The other—a mere fragment—contains a notice of the priest Yahyā, or Yuhannā, ibn Butrus, who died in the year 1217 A.D. It is not unlikely that some confusion might arise between the names Patrick and Peter, often used interchangeably. ‘Filius Patricii’ then may have been no assumed designation, but the equivalent of Ibn Butrus, the real name of this priest of Tripoli, who was perhaps the translator of the Sirr-el-asrar at the close of the twelfth century.
Those chapters of the Sirr-el-asrar which relate to regimen were translated into Latin by Johannes Hispalensis. Jourdain identifies this author with John Avendeath, who worked for the Archbishop of Toledo between the years 1130 and 1150.[70] But Foerster shows that caution is needed here.[71] The Latin version was dedicated to Tarasia, Queen of Spain. A queen of this name certainly lived contemporaneously with John Avendeath, but she was Queen of Portugal. Another Tarasia, however, was Queen of Leon from 1176 to 1180. We may observe that this latter epoch agrees well enough with the lifetime of Ibn Butrus, who died in 1217, and we find trace of another Johannes Hispanus, who was a monk of Mount Tabor in 1175. Such a man, who from his situation in Syria could scarcely have been ignorant of Arabic, and whose nationality agrees so well with a dedication to the Queen of Spain, and who was a contemporary of Tarasia of Leon, may well have translated the Sirr-el-asrar into Latin. That part of the book thus made public in the West appeared under the following title: ‘De conservatione corporis humani, ad Alexandrum.’ It is found in several manuscripts of the Laurentian Library in Florence.[72]
Soon afterwards, and probably in the opening years of the thirteenth century, the whole book was published in a Latin version by the same Philippus Clericus, with whom we have already become acquainted. We may recall the fact that he belonged to the diocese of Tripoli, as Ibn Butrus also did, and as Johannes Hispanus was also a monk of Syria, these three scholars are seen to be joined by a link of locality highly increasing the probability that they actually co-operated in the publication of this hitherto unknown text. In his preface, Philip speaks of the Arabic manuscript as a precious pearl, discovered while he was still in Syria. This leads us to think that his work in translating it was done after he had left the East, and possibly in the course of his voyage westward. We know that the Hebrew version of Aristotle’s Meteora was produced in similar circumstances. Samuel ben Juda ben Tibbun says he completed that translation in