C ⇒ M
C ⇒ (1) A T; (2) L
Campestris (or Campester) (100 BCE – 400 CE)
Wrote a lost work on astral omens, known, at least by reputation, to several late antique
Greek and Latin authors. The most substantial reports of its contents are in I
“L,” De Ostentis (pp. 24 and 35 Wu.). These passages concern the appearance of the
Sun and, especially, comets as omens relating to forthcoming events on a national scale.
Campestris held the number of comets small and each associated with a planet. His doctrines
were supposed to follow pseudo-P.
BNP 2 (2003) 1027, Klaus Sallmann.
Alexander Jones
Candidus (30 BCE – 80 CE)
G quotes A’ record and approval of Candidus’ recipe for a diaphor-
e ̄tike ̄ based on terebinth: CMGen 6.14 (13.926 K.), cf. Fabricius (1972) 174–179. A
A, 7.117 (CMG 8.2, p. 393), records his collyrium, containing calamine, psimuthion,
antimony, saffron, myrrh, opium, etc. The non-Republican cognomen is attested from the
mid-1st c. CE: PIR2 C-1257 (ca 45 CE), cf. BNP 2 (2003) 1047.
Fabricius (1726) 107.
PTK
Martianus Minneius Felix Capella of Carthage (ca 430 CE?)
Everything concerning the life of Capella is a matter of conjecture; some date him to the
last decades of the 5th c. He may have been a rhetor, and wrote a curious work entitled De
nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii. When the god Mercury wished to marry, Jupiter approved the
choice of Philology as bride. The marriage ceremony is the subject of the nine books of
De nuptiis. After the first two books have dealt with the mythos, depicting Philology’s apothe-
osis, a necessary condition for her union with a god to be made possible, seven books are
devoted to the three literary disciplines (i.e. Book III: Grammar; Book IV: Dialectic; Book V:
Rhetoric) and to the four mathematical ones (i.e. Book VI: Geometry; Book VII: Arithmetic;
Book VIII: Astronomy; Book IX: Harmony).
Every one of these is personified as a maiden who will attend the new bride. Capella’s
originality lies in his uniting Roman encyclopedism, going back to V, with the Neo-
Platonic doctrine that knowledge, mainly mathematical, can save the soul. The technical
contents of the books dealing with the four sciences can be traced back in large part to ancient
sources known to the author through school compendia written during the preceding centur-
ies. His Geometry is made up of a geography derived mostly from P with borrowings
from I S, and in fine of Euclidian fundamentals, mostly definitions. The book on
Arithmetic starts with an arithmology, goes through elements present in N
G’s Introduction to Arithmetic, and ends with a statement of several E’s arithmetical
propositions: these last are valuable evidence of the translation of part of the Elements into
Latin, even before B. The originality of Capella’s book on astronomy is twofold: first
MARTIANUS MINNEIUS FELIX CAPELLA OF CARTHAGE