“Scribit enim caelum stellis totumque figurat Quod de fatali lege venire potest, Praesignat qualique modo qualique tenore Omnia sidereus saecula motus agat. Praejacet in stellis series quam longior aetas Explicet et spatiis temporis ordo suis: Sceptra Phoronei, fratrum discordia Thebae, Flammae Phaëthonis, Deucalionis aquae. In stellis Codri paupertas, copia Croesi, Incestus Paridis, Hippolytique pudor; In stellis Priami species, audacia Turni, Sensus Ulixeus, Herculeusque vigor. In stellis pugil est Pollux, et navita Typhis, Et Cicero rhetor, et geometra Thales; In stellis lepidus dictat Maro, Milo figurat, Fulgurat in latia nobilitate Nero. Astra notat Persis, Aegyptus parturit artes, Graecia docta legit, praelia Roma gerit. Exemplar specimenque Dei virguncula Christum Parturit, et verum saecula numen habent.”[289] Yet Bernard urges man to model his life after the stars,[290] and once speaks of “what is free in the will and what is of necessity.” He thus appears, like the author of the treatise on fate ascribed to Plutarch, like Boethius, and like a host of other theologians, philosophers, and astrologers, to believe in the co-existence of free will, inevitable fate, and “variable fortune.”[291] [Sidenote: Plot of the _Mathematicus_.] Bernard Silvester’s interest and faith in the art of astrology is further exemplified by his poem _Mathematicus_, a narrative which throughout assumes the truth of astrological prediction concerning human fortune. Hauréau showed that it had been incorrectly included among the works of Hildebert of Tours and Le Mans, and that the theme is suggested in the fourth Pseudo-Quintillian declamation, but that Bernard has added largely to the plot there briefly outlined. A Roman knight and lady were in every respect well endowed both by nature and fortune except that their marriage had up to the moment when the story opens been a childless one. At last the wife consulted an astrologer or _mathematicus_, “who could learn from the stars,” we are told, “the intentions of the gods, the mind of the fates, and the plan of Jove, and discover the hidden causes and secrets of nature.” He informed her that she would bear a son who would become a great genius and the ruler of Rome, but who would one day kill his father. When the wife told her husband of this prediction, he made her promise to kill the child in infancy. But when the time came, her mother love prevailed and she secretly sent the boy away to be reared, while she assured her husband that he was dead. She named her son _Patricida_ in order that he might abhor the crime of patricide the more. The boy early gave signs of great intellectual capacity. Among other studies he learned “the orbits of the stars and how human fate is under the stars,” and he “clasped divine Aristotle to his breast.” Later on, when Rome was hard