Surviving Works, Vol. I

If, therefore, he obtained the dignity of Praetorian Prefect in this year, his own birth must have fallen at the end of the 4th century, not a very extreme one. And for this reason, the age of Macrobius was referred by Saxius 26) to the year 410." If this is so, Macrobius was a contemporary of Symmachus, but younger in age. Regarding that other rescript given at Ravenna in 399, by which Arcadius and Honorius wrote to Macrobius, Praetorian Prefect of the Spains, that even though the sacrifices of the temples were forbidden, they nevertheless wished for the ornaments of public works to be preserved: perhaps someone might think it could not have been sent to a pagan Macrobius. But it could certainly have happened that one who was himself a pagan might, at his own request, obtain such a rescript from the emperors for the benefit of pagans.

8. Of the homeland of Macrobius, we know nothing except that he was not a Roman, but rather born in some distant land, as he himself says in the Saturnalia, Book I, preface, § 11: "Unless perhaps, where we were born under another sky, the vein of the Latin language does not aid us." Therefore, Gronovius correctly says (ad Comm. lib. I, c. 1): "Regarding the fatherland, he says, there is no lack of things to conjecture, but there is a lack of what to trust." That Fabricius (Bibl. Lat. ed. I, p. 620, and ed. Ern. vol. III, p. 180; cf. Funcc. l. c.) says that in his Ciceronianus, Erasmus seems to have taken Macrobius for a Greek (which Baehr recently repeated), that is not in the words of Erasmus, who says (p. 141): "You name me an Aesopic crow; he wove his patches from the rags of others. Thus he does not speak in his own tongue, and if he ever does speak, you would believe a little Greekling is stammering in Latin. Such a kind is that from the second commentary on the Dream of Scipio [c. 10, § 11]: And this is what they want, that Homer, the source and origin of all divine inventions, under the cloud of poetic fiction, gave the truth to be understood by the wise." I was thinking that Erasmus had written not Graeculus (little Greekling) but graculus (crow), as he says in Adag. I, 7, 22: "A crow among the Muses, an unlearned man among the most learned, a most infantile man among the most eloquent. It will rightly be said of men who boast with a display of false learning and impudently shout at learned men. For the crow is a bird not at all musical, but nevertheless odiously garrulous and clamorous" 27). But even in the Froben edition of the year 1529, Graeculus is read; therefore I believe that it should be retained now, nor do I grant that Erasmus took Macrobius for a Greek. For the words, you would believe a little Greekling is stammering in Latin, signify not so much a Greek origin as the perverse learning of a little Greekling 28), which is confirmed...

26) Onomast. vol. I, p. 478. Schoell (Table synoptique des écrivains Romains) assigns him the year 409. Baehr (Roem. Lit.-Gesch. vol. II, p. 600) reports that others (coll. Mahul l. c. and Graev. thes. antiqu. Rom. vol. V, p. 293) state that Macrobius flourished between the year 395 and the year 436, but E. Teuber (de Serv. vit. et comm.) thinks he was already born in the year 360. Others have assigned different ages to Macrobius. Thus Fabricius (Bibl. Lat. ed. I. suppl. p. 263, ed. Ern. vol. III, p. 181; cf. Funcc. l. c.) says that Riccioli in the Almagest criticizes Genebrard, Sansovino, and Thevet, who referred him to the second century after Christ, and the compilers of the index of the Vatican library, who referred him to the tenth.

27) Cf. Ch. A. Heumann’s Conspect. Reip. liter. cap. VII, § 38: "These (who gather whatever they write from the books of others, describers rather than writers) are like that Aesopic crow, how naked and ridiculous they are going to become if each peacock recovers its own feathers."

28) The same Heumann ibid. § 45: "Certainly, he says, as often as I read these letters (of Ignatius), I discovered that everything in them is cold, jejune, full of inept swelling and affected grandiloquence, and breathing too vividly the vain and transparent little Greekling."