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Macrobius was a 5th-Century Latin writer from North Africa. He is considered as one of the main “bridge” authors whose works enabled the transmission of the cultural heritage of Antiquity to the following centuries, through the crises that shook the Roman world during his time.
Macrobius Ambrosius Theodosius was born around 400 and wrote at the beginning of the 5th Century. Almost nothing is known of his life, not even where he was born or where he lived during his career as a writer. He wrote that he was born “under a foreign sky”, that is, for the Romans, outside Italy. The fact that he was more familiar with Latin than Greek, as well as other internal clues in his work, led most specialists to believe he was probably from Roman Africa. Macrobius was a pagan, living in a Roman Empire that already had a large Christian majority. He was probably related to Symmachus, the prefect of Rome, who was the leader of the pagan resistance to the Empire’s Christianization. He had a son, Eustathius, to whom he dedicates his works.
Macrobius wrote two books that are still available today. His main work, Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, was one of the most-quoted books during the Middle Ages, and one of the main sources on Neoplatonic thought at this time. In Cicero’s Dream of Scipio, the great Roman general appears to his grandson Scipio Aemilianus, to reveal him his future destiny and that of his country, show him the rewards that await virtuous men after their death, and give him a description of how the universe functions and man’s role in this universe. Macrobius comments this dream, and exposes several Neoplatonic theories on the origins and the signification of dreams, the mystical properties of numbers, the nature of the soul, astronomy, and music. Among other things, he writes that the sun is twice as big as the earth. His main sources are the Neoplatonic philosophers Plotinus and Porphyry.
His other major work, the Saturnalia, are an account of the discussions in the house of a rich aristocrat, on a vast diversity of historical, mythological, and grammatical topics. He quotes the opinion of older authors, like Virgil and Cicero, on those topics.
Macrobius, together with the 6th-Century authors Boethius and Cassiodorus, is considered as one of the authors of Late Antiquity whose works enabled the transmission of the Greek-Roman cultural heritage into the Middle Ages.
