the background

Among Thierry of Chartres' friends and pupils was a scholar much like Alan in his interests and in his cast of mind. Bernard Silvestris has been credited with commentaries on Plato's Timaeus, on Martianus Capella, on the first six books of Virgil's Aeneid, and with the translation of an Arabic astrological treatise. He was a poet and teacher of rhetoric, too. Matthew of Vendôme, his pupil, calls him ‘the glory of Tours, the gem of scholarship, the pride of the schools’. Bernard's Cosmographia and his Mathematicus, a tale of the fate of a perfect man and his sorry experiences in the world, provided Alan with models for his own De Planctu Naturae and the Anticlaudianus, and showed him what might be done by a latter-day Martianus Capella. Calcidius on the Timaeus, the Asclepius, the Mathesis of Firmeus Maternus, all went into the composition of the Cosmographia or De Mundi Universitate, which was dedicated to Thierry and read before Pope Eugenius III in 1147.

The Mathematicus tells of a splendid, upright Roman soldier, with a wife of uncommon beauty and breeding, modest and virtuous, who, blessed in everything, except that he is childless, goes to seek the advice of an astrologer. He learns that he is to have a son, but that his son will kill his father. He tells his wife that she must make sure that no child of hers is allowed to grow up, but the child which is born to her is of such beauty and has such winning ways, that he demands to be loved. He is sent away to be nursed, unknown to his father.