Macrobius' Saturnalia Book One

The devices employed by the poet to depict or evoke emotions (πάθη original: "passions" or "emotions").39 By way of illustration, a speech is analyzed (4. 2. 4-8),40 and examples are given of rhetorical “figures” (4. 6. 9-24).

From the opening words of the fifth book, it appears that Symmachus was followed by Eusebius, and it is probable, therefore, that the fourth book ended with the discourse which the latter had undertaken to give on Vergil as an orator (1. 24. 14). At any rate, at the beginning of the fifth book, Eusebius is represented as having just ceased from speaking and, after refusing to be drawn into making a comparison between Vergil and Cicero41 as models for an orator, goes on to refer to four kinds of oratorical style. He maintains that all of these are to be found in the poems of Vergil, who may be said to unite in himself the distinctive eloquence of each of the ten Attic orators (5. 1. 20). Evangelus, however, scoffingly takes leave to doubt whether Vergil, “a Venetian of peasant parentage,” could have had any acquaintance with the literature of Greece (5. 2. 1) and so enables Macrobius, in the rest of the fifth book and in the sixth, to illustrate at some length Vergil’s knowledge of both Greek and Latin authors and the use which he made of it. The contents of these two books will be considered below, in the section dealing with the Vergilian criticism in the Saturnalia.

The seventh and last book of the Saturnalia, like the second book and chapters thirteen to twenty of the third, purports to record the after-dinner conversation of the company, and many of the topics discussed are taken from the Quaestiones Convivales original: "Table Talk" of Plutarch.42 The first question posed is whether philosophy is suited to a convivial gathering (7. 1), and this is followed by a talk, by Eustathius, on tact at table (7. 2-3). The rest of the book is devoted to the consideration of a wide variety of subjects, many of a nature which may be described, loosely, as “scientific”: for example, whether a simple or a mixed diet is more easily digested.

39. Compare Quintilian 6. 2. 8: pathos, which we, by translating it, rightly and properly call emotion.
40. The speech of Juno in Aeneid 7. 293-320.
41. Cicero was to be considered on some future occasion (1. 24. 5)—possibly an indication that the Saturnalia is an earlier work than the Commentary.
42. According to Archbishop Trench in Plutarch: His Life, His Lives, and His Morals, etc. (London, 1873), these “questions” record actual conversations. See Glover, p. 173n.