FIRMICO MATERNO. — Latin writer of the fifth century A.D., under whose name there are a treatise on astrology, of pagan character, and a Christian apologetic work.
Of senatorial rank and originally from Sicily, after abandoning the forensic career he became a writer, compiling between 334 and 337, at the suggestion of the Campanian proconsul Lollianus Mavorcius, a vast treatise on astrology (Matheis), in which he set forth all his knowledge of Greek and Asian astrology, deriving it chiefly from Manilius. It consists of eight books, the first serving as an introduction; in laying down here the foundations of the science, F. strives, despite sensing the difficulty of doing so, to give astrology a more securely human significance by linking it with morality. With the extinction of astrological science, the practical interest that for many centuries, and especially in the Middle Ages, had led people to seek out the treatise has ceased; it remains of interest only for the references it contains to the morality of the period and as a historical document. In the other work, De errore profanorum religionum, the Christian content gave rise to a lengthy controversy because of the difficulty—now overcome—of supposing that, in the ten years separating the two works, the author of the astrological treatise had been converted. In De errore, published in 346–50, the customary arguments of apologetics are not augmented by original polemical ideas, but instead blaze with a tone of violence hitherto unknown. The author does not seek the extinction of paganism through teaching and conversion, but through the intervention of secular powers, the emperors Constantius and Constans, to whom the work is addressed, in the name of the mission entrusted to them by God, which will be rewarded with heavenly blessing and with the confiscation of the precious pagan images. The book is divided into two parts: in the first, the religions of nature and the mysteries are attacked; in the
second, more particularly the symbola, that is, the signs by which participants in the mysteries of Dionysus, Mithra, etc., were recognized.
The polemic is therefore directed rather against the Egyptians and other Eastern peoples than against the Romans, perhaps because of the greater dangers posed by the possible confusion between Christian practices and those of the mysteries. The work provides scholarship with useful information concerning the ancient mysteries.