The great work of Capella is composed in a medley of prose and various kinds of verse, after the fashion of the Satyra Menippea of Varro and the Satyricon of Petronius Arbiter; while, along with these, it probably suggested the form into which Boethus has thrown his . It is a voluminous compilation, forming a sort of encyclopaedia of the polite learning of the middle ages, and is divided into nine books. The first two, which may be regarded as a mystical introduction to the rest, consist of an elaborate and complicated allegory, entitled the Nuptials of Philology and Mercury, while in the remaining seven are expounded the principles of the seven liberal arts, which once were believed to embrace the whole circle of philosophy and science. Thus, the third book treats of Grammar; the fourth of Dialectics, divided into Metaphysics and Logic; the fifth of Rhetoric; the sixth of Geometry, consisting chiefly of an abstract of Geography, to which are appended a few simple propositions on lines, surfaces, and solids; the seventh of Arithmetic, devoted in a great measure to the properties of numbers; the eighth of Astronomy; and the last of Music, including Poetry. We find here an immense mass of learning, but the materials are ill-selected, ill-arranged, and ill-digested; though from amidst much that is dull and frivolous, we can occasionally extract curious and valuable information, derived without doubt from treatises which have long since perished.

Thus, for example, in one remarkable passage (8.857) we detect a hint of the true constitution of the solar system. It is here so distinctly maintained that the planets Mercury and Venus revolve round the sun, and not round the earth, and theirs position with regard to these bodies and to each other is so correctly described, that the historians of science have considered it not improbable that Copernicus, who quotes Martianus, may have derived the first germ of his theory from this source. The style is in the worst possible taste, and looks like a caricature of Apuleius and Tertullian. It is overloaded with far-fetched metaphors, and has all the sustained grandiloquence, the pompous pretension, and the striving after false sublimity, so characteristic of the African school, while the diction abounds in strange words, and is in the highest degree harsh, obscure, and barbarous. Some allowance must be made, however, for the circumstances under which the book has been transmitted to us. It was highly esteemed during the middle ages, and extensively employed as a manual for the purposes of education. Hence it was copied and re-copied by the monks, and being of course in many places quite unintelligible to them, corruptions crept in, and the text soon became involved in inextricable confusion.