The Medieval Mind. Henry Osborn Taylor
verses ad Hildebrandum archidiaconum Romanum, his stirring praise of that statesman is imbued with pagan sentiment.
“How great the glory which so often comes to those defending the republic, has not escaped thy knowledge, Hildebrand. The Via Sacra and the Via Latina recall the same, and the lofty crown of the Capitol, that mighty seat of empire. … The hidden poison of envy implants its infirmity in wretched affairs, and brings overthrow only to such. That thou shouldst be envied, and not envy, beseems thy skill. … How great the power of the anathema! Whatever Marius and Julius wrought with the slaughter of soldiers, thou dost with thy small voice. … What more does Rome owe to the Scipios and the other Quirites than to thee?”
Perhaps the glyconic metre of this poem was too much for Alphanus. His awkward constructions, however, constantly reflect classic phrases. And how naturally his mind reproduced the old pagan—or fundamental human—views of life, appears again in his admiring sapphics to Romuald, chief among Salerno’s lawyers:
“Dulcis orator, vehemens gravisque,
Inter omnes causidicos perennem
Gloriam juris tibi, Romoalde,
Prestitit usus.”
Further stanzas follow on Romuald’s wealth, station, and mundane felicity. Then comes the sudden turn, and Romuald is praised for having spurned them all:
“Cumque sic felix, ut in orbe sidus
Fulseris, mundum roseo jacentem
Flore sprevisti. …”
Apparently Romuald had become a monk:
“Rite fecisti, potiore vita
Perfruiturus.”[306]
This turn of sentiment curiously accorded with the poet’s own fortune and way of life; for Alphanus, with all his love of antique letters, was also a monk and an ascetic, of whom a contemporary chronicler tells that in Lent he ate but twice a week and never slept on a bed. Yet monk, and occasional ascetic, as he was, the ordinary antique-descended education and inherited strains of antique feeling made the substratum of his nature, and this although he could inveigh against the philosophic and grammatical studies flourishing in a neighbouring monastery, and advise one of its studious youths to turn from such:
“Si, Transmunde, mihi credis, amice,
His uti studiis desine tandem;
Fac cures monachi scire professum,
Ut vere sapiens esse puteris.”[307]
Eleventh-century Italian “versificatores” were interested in a variety of things. Some of them gave the story of a saint’s or bishop’s life, or were occupied with an ecclesiastic theme. Others sang the fierce struggle between rival cities, or some victory over Saracens, or made an idyl of very human love with mythological appurtenances. The verse-forms either followed the antique metres or were accentual deflections from them with the new added element of rhyme; the ways of expression copied antique phrase and simile, except when the matter and sentiment of the poem compelled another choice. In that case the Latin becomes freer, more mediaeval, ruder, if one will; and still antique turns of expression and bits of sentences show how naturally it came to these men to construct their verses out of ancient phrases. Yet borrowed phrases and the constraint of metre impeded spontaneity, and these feeble versifiers could hardly create in modes of the antique. A fresher spirit breathes in certain anonymous poems, which have broken with metre, while they give voice to sentiments quite after the feeling of the old Italian paganism. In one of these, from Ivrea, the poet meets a nymph by the banks of the Po, and in leonine elegiacs bespeaks her love, with all the paraphernalia of antique reference, assuring her that his verse shall make her immortal, a perfectly pagan sentiment—or affectation:
“Sum sum sum vates, musarum servo penates,
Subpeditante Clio queque futura scio.
Me minus extollo, quamvis mihi cedit Apollo,
Invidet et cedit, scire Minerva dedit.
Laude mea vivit mihi se dare queque cupivit,
Immortalis erit, ni mea Musa perit.”[308]
It is obvious that in the tenth and eleventh centuries there were Italians whose sentiments and intellectual interests were profane, humanistic in a word. These men might even be high ecclesiastics, like Liutprand, Bishop of Cremona (d. 972).[309] He was of Lombard stock, and yet a genuine Italian, bred in an atmosphere of classical reminiscence and contemporary gossip and misdeed. Politically, at least, the Italy of John XII. was not so much better than its pope; and the Antapodosis of Liutprand goes along in its easy, and often dramatic way, telling of crime and perfidy, and showing scant horror. It was a general history of the historian’s times, written while in exile in Germany; for Liutprand had been driven out of Italy by King Berengar, whom he had once served. He hated Berengar and his wife, and although well received at the Court of the great Otto, he did not love his place of exile.[310]
In exile Liutprand wrote his book to requite Berengar. The work had also a broader purpose, yet one just as consolatory to the writer. It should acknowledge and show the justice of the divine judgments exemplified in history. Herein lay a fuller, although less Italian, consolation for his exile than in Berengar’s requital. Liutprand keeps in mind Boëthius and his De consolatione, and regards his own work as a Consolation of History, as that of Boëthius was a Consolation of Philosophy. The paths of Liutprand’s Consolation are as broad as the justice and power of the Trinity, “which casts down these for their wicked deeds and raises up those for their merits’ sake.”[311]
Quite explicitly he explains the title and reason of his work at the opening of its third book:
“Since it will show the deeds of famous men, why call it Antapodosis? I reply: Its object is to set forth and cry aloud the acts of this Berengar who at this moment does not reign but tyrannize in Italy, and of his wife Willa, who for the boundlessness of her tyranny should be called a second Jezebel, and Lamia for her insatiate rapines. Me and my house, my family and kin, have they harassed with so many javelins of lies, so many spoliations, so many essays of wickedness, that neither tongue nor pen can avail to set them forth. May then these pages be to them an antapodosis, that is retribution, to make their wickedness naked before men living and unborn. None the less may it prove an antapodosis for the benefits conferred on me by holy and happy men.”[312]
Liutprand’s narrative is breezy and interspersed with ribald tales. The writer meant to amuse his readers and himself. These literary qualities give picturesqueness to his well-known Embassy to Constantinople, where he was sent by Otto the Great, for purposes of peace and to ask the hand of the Byzantine princess for Otto II. The highly coloured ceremonial life of the Greek Court, the chicane and contemptuous treatment met with, the spirited words of Liutprand, and the rancour of this same thwarted envoy, all appear vividly in his report.[313]
There were also many laymen occupied with Latin studies. Such a one was Gunzo of Novara, a curiously vain grammarian of the second half of the tenth century. According to his own story, the fame of his learning incited Otto the Great to implore his presence in Germany. So he condescended to cross the Alps, with all his books, perhaps in the year 965. On his way he stopped with the monks of St. Gall, themselves proud of their learning, and perhaps jealous of the southern scholar. As the weary Gunzo was lifted, half frozen, from his horse at the convent door, and the brethren stood about, a young monk caught at a slip in grammar, and made a skit on him—because, forsooth, he had used an accusative when it should have been an ablative.
Gunzo neither forgave nor forgot. Passing on to the rival congregation of Reichenau, he composed a long and angry epistle of pedantic excuse and satirical invective, addressed to his former hosts.[314] In it he parades his wide knowledge of classic authors, justifies what the monks of St. Gall had presumed to mock as a ridiculous barbarism, and closes with a prayer for them in hexameters. His letter contains the interesting avowal, that, although the monk of St. Gall had wrongly deemed him ignorant of grammar, his Latin sometimes was impeded by the “usu nostrae vulgaris linguae, quae latinitati vicina est.” So a slip would be due not to unfamiliarity with Latin, but to an excessive colloquial familiarity with