The division of studies into seven liberal arts came to the middle age from Varro’s _Disciplina_ largely through Martianus Capella.[52] His _Marriage of Philology and Mercury_ was widely current for centuries. The allegory implied by his title is carried out in ornate verse and prose through two books. In the other seven books allegory is reduced to the conventional description introducing each of the arts in turn with appropriate costume, symbols, and speech. Thus the work divides sharply into a grandiose allegorical prelude of two books, with a similar prelude to each following book, and a sober, concise, pedestrian compend of _grammatica_ (III), _dialectica_ (IV), _rhetorica_ (V), _geometria_ (VI), _arithmetica_ (VII), _astronomia_ (VIII), and _harmonia_ (IX). _Grammatica_, the first of the language studies, claims its ancient territory, including the exposition of poetry. The subsequent treatment is conventional and incomplete.[53] The Lady _Dialectica_ is more assertive. I claim jurisdiction over whatsoever the other arts utter; for evidently neither _Grammatica_ herself, whom your ears have approved, nor the second sister, renowned for the skill of rich utterance, nor she who reduces to line varieties of forms ... can be explained without my theories. Nay, in my domain and jurisdiction abide six norms, to which the other disciplines conform. For the first concerns naming; the second, defining; the third, affirming; the fourth, concluding; the fifth, judging, which bears upon the interpretation of poets and their poems; the sixth, diction, which is adapted to rhetors.[54] The fifth _norma_ annexes that part of _grammatica_ which was most remote from logic; the sixth trenches on _rhetorica_. The actual extension of _dialectica_ into the ancient domain of rhetoric during the high middle age[55] may have found here some warrant. But Martianus himself does not include these items either in the prospectus immediately following or in the subsequent compend.[56] _Rhetorica_ enters Book V with such pomp and noise as to frighten some of the minor symbols. Interea sonuere tubæ raucusque per æthram Cantus, et ignoto cælum clangore remugit: Turbati expauere dii....