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Martianus Capella, fl. 420s
Roman African Neo-Platonist author, about whom nothing is known, active around 410-20s (some speculate as early as 330s, others as late as the 490s). His renown rests on his single work, where Capella tries to condense and summarize the learning of Classical antiquity into a single book. Capella's identified the "Seven Liberal Arts' (artes liberales) - the four 'factual' arts (quadrivium: geometry, arithmetic, astronomy and harmony (music)) and the three 'interpretive' arts (the trivium: grammar, rhetoric and dialectic (logic)). Capella's book, discovered in the 6th C., became the basic textbook of Medieval schools and framework of all learning in western Europe for centuries to come.
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Major Works of Martianus Capella
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