...by what follows. Moreover, a man born in Greece could hardly say at Rome that he was born under another sky, by which words those who thought Macrobius was born in Cisalpine Gaul are refuted even more 29. Mahul thinks he was a Greek because of his name and because in that age only two languages, Greek and Latin, flourished, and because Macrobius admitted many Greek idioms and cited many Greek writers. How futile these arguments are, no one fails to see. For all these things apply no less to one who was not born in Greece, but who came to Rome having been educated in some Greek school, such as in Alexandria. We have already mentioned above (§ 2, b) that the same learned man concluded that the name of Macrobius’s fatherland lay in that corrupt SICETINI. He thinks now of the island of Sicinus, one of the Sporades, now of Sicca, a town of Numidia. But if we look at the elements themselves, that conjecture is attractive, since SICETINI could be born from SICINITE, i.e., of Sicinus: but that it is not true, from what we argued above, sufficiently shines forth. The other conjecture, if we look at that SICETINI, is less likely, but perhaps approaches the truth more closely. Certainly, I would not deny that Macrobius was born in Africa, from which so many learned men proceeded in those times, although I neither can nor wish to affirm it for certain: for a man born in Africa could certainly say at Rome that he was born under another sky, and that an African, although imbued with Greek literature, preferred to write in Latin rather than Greek at Rome, is clearly less surprising than for a man born in Greece itself, whose native speech was sufficiently known to all those Romans whom he could hope would read his writings: finally, I would think a Greek would have turned to Greek writers rather than to Cicero and Virgil.

CHAPTER TWO.

I. Two books of Commentaries on Cicero’s Dream of Scipio. 1. This single work of Macrobius has reached us complete, and with it there has been preserved for us the Dream of Scipio itself, excerpted from the sixth book of Marcus Tullius Cicero’s On the Republic, which was almost the only thing left of that famous work of Cicero, until Angelo Mai most fortunately extracted much ampler remnants of the earlier books from a palimpsest Vatican codex. The discourse on the same Dream of Scipio that exists by Favonius Eulogius, accepted by I. C. Orellius in the fifth volume, first part of Cicero’s works, is much shorter, and it looks almost only to the numbers, nor is Cicero’s Dream of Scipio itself preserved with it; that it is preserved, that there is no one who doubts that Macrobius’s commentaries have contributed infinitely more to Roman letters. Finally, this work is not...

29) Fabricius and Funccius (loc. cit.) report that Riccioli wrote in the Almagest that he was from Parma. Mahul (loc. cit. p. 2) revealed that Gaudentius Merula, in On the Antiquity and Discipline of the Cisalpine Gauls (Lugd. Bat. 1538, 8, lib. II, c. 2), refuted this error, but that Coelius Rhodiginus in Lectiones Antiquae (lib. XIV, c. 5) says that the Veronese contend Macrobius was born in their city.