Julius Firmicus Maternus

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Julius Firmicus Maternus was a

Christian apologist.[1]
The
lunar crater Firmicus
was named in his honour.

The Matheseos was dedicated to the governor of Campania,

Neoplatonist astrological work was first printed by Aldus Manutius
in 1499, and has often been reprinted.

About the year 346

mysteries, with particular attention and animus toward alleged homosexual practices,[10]
recovering in a certain way the contempt that the senators had at the time of the Republic to the Hellenization of the Roman religion and culture.

For 19th-century readers, De errore profanarum religionum provided such a sharp contrast with Firmicus' book on astrology (commonly referred to as the Matheseos) that the two works were generally attributed to different writers. However, Clifford Herschel Moore soundly identified the single authorship of the two works, by idiosyncratic choices of vocabulary and syntax, in a dissertation overseen by Eduard Wölfflin (1897).[11] Theodor Mommsen[12] has shown that the Matheseos was composed in the year 336 and not in 354 as was formerly held, thus making it an earlier work than De errore profanarum religionum; modern readers who find astrology incompatible with Early Christianity[13] argue that it would have been written prior to Firmicus' conversion to Christianity.

The Christian work is preserved in a single manuscript from the Bibliotheca Palatina. It was first printed at Strasbourg in 1562, and has been reprinted several times, both separately and combined with the polemical writings of Minucius Felix, Cyprian or Arnobius.[14]

Bibliography

Editions

  • Matheseos libri VIII, 2 vols, edited by W. Kroll and F. Skutsch, Stuttgart, Teubner, 1968.

Translations

References

  1. ^ Johannes Quasten, Walter J. Burghardt, and Thomas Comerford Lawlor, eds. Firmicus Maternus: The Error of the Pagan Religions, Issue 37 (1970): "Life of Firmicus" p3.
  2. ^ Internal evidence summarized by Quasten et al. 1970: "Life of Firmicus" p. 4.
  3. ^ Firmicus states explicitly that he was of Sicilian birth (oriundo) in Matheseos I, proemium, 4.
  4. ^ The text by Paulus Alexandrinus of 378 is an introduction to the subject.
  5. ^ Quasten et al. 1970:6.
  6. ^ Confessions: "“These impostors, whom they designate astrologers, I consulted without hesitation, because they used no sacrifices and invoked the aid of no spirit for their divination.”.
  7. ^ Confessions: "Why, in the life of twins—in their actions, the events that befall them, their professions, arts, honors and other things pertaining to human life, as well as in their very deaths—is there often so great a difference that, as far as these things are concerned, many entire strangers are more like them than they are like each other, though separated at birth by the smallest interval of time but at conception generated by the same act and at the same moment?”
  8. ^ There is a clear reference to Constans' expedition in Britain in 343.
  9. ^ Patrick J. Healy, "Firmicus Maternus", Catholic Encyclopedia (1909),
  10. ^ Louis Crompton, Homosexuality and Civilization, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003, p. 132; the passage is in De errore 12.2.
  11. ^ Johannes Quasten, Walter J. Burghardt, and Thomas Comerford Lawlor, eds. Firmicus Maternus: The Error of the Pagan Religions, Issue 37 (1970): "Life of Firmicus".
  12. JSTOR 4472455
    .
  13. ^ Such as the editors of the Catholic Encyclopedia: "This theory of course supposes that the author wrote one work before, the other after, his conversion.".
  14. ^ Editions by Conrad Bursian (1856), and by Karl Felix Halm, in his Minucius Felix (Corpus Scrip. Eccles. Lat. ii, 1867)

Further reading

  • Adolf Ebert, Geschichte der christlich-lateinischen Literatur, ed. 1889; p. 129 ff.
  • Otto Bardenhewer, Patrologie, ed. 1901, p. 354.
  • Béatrice Caseau, "Firmicus Maternus: Un astrologue converti au christianisme ou la rhétorique du rejet sans appel," in La religion que j'ai quittée, éd. D. Tollet, Paris, Presses de la Sorbonne, 2007, 39–63.

External links

Wikisource has the text of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica article "Firmicus, Maternus Julius".
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