The most important of his works is the Conviviorum Saturnaliorum-Libri Septem, containing an account of the discussions held at the house of Vettius Praetextatus during the holiday of the Saturnalia. The latter part of the second book and the beginning of the third, the second half of the fourth book, and the end of the seventh havebeen lost; otherwise the work is in fairly good preservation. It was written by the author for the benefit of his son Eustachius, and contains a great variety of curious historical, mythological, critical, and grammatical disquisitions, the value of which is much increased by the frequent quotations from earlier writers. The machinery is somewhat cumbrous; for, as in some of Plato’s dialogues, the discussions are not .directly reported, but a certain Postumianus reproduces, for his friend Decius, the account which he had received from a rhetorician Eusebius, who had been present at them. There is but little attempt to give any dramatic character to the dialogue; in each book some one of the personages takes the leading part, and the remarks of the others serve only as occasions for calling forth fresh displays of erudition. The first book is devoted to an inquiry as to the origin of the Saturnalia and the festivals of Janus, which leads to a history and discussion of the Roman calendar, and to an attempt to derive all forms of worship from that of the sun. The second book begins with a collection of bons mots, to which all present make their contributions, many of them being ascribed to Cicero and Augustus; it then appears to have passed into a discussion of various pleasures, especially of the senses; but almost the whole of this is lost. The third, fourth, fifth, and sixth books are devoted to Virgil, dwelling respectively on his learning in religious matters, his rhetorical skill, his debt to Homer (with a comparison of the art of the two) and to other Greek writers, and the nature and extent of his borrowings from the earlier Latin poets. The latter part of the third book is taken up with a dissertation upon luxury and the sumptuary laws intended to check it, which is probably a dislocated portion of the second book, being entirely out of place where it stands. The seventh book is of a more miscellaneous character, consisting largely of the discussion of various physiological questions. The value of the work consists solely in the facts and opinions quoted from earlier writers, for it is purely a compilation, and has little in its literary form to recommend it.

We have also two books of a commentary on the Somnium Scipionis narrated by Cicero in his De RepubUca. The nature of the dream, in which the elder Scipio appears to his (adopted) grandson, and describes the life of the good after death and the constitution of the universe from the Stoic point of view, gives occasion for Macrobius to discourse upon many points of physics in a series of essays interesting as showing the astronomical notions then current. The moral elevation of the fragment of Cicero thus preserved to us gave the work a popularity in the Middle Ages to which its own merits have little claim.

There is a good critical edition of Macrobius, with a commentary by I.. van Jan (2 vols., Leipsic, 1848-52), and a convenient and excellent edition of the text by F. Eyssenhardt (Leipsic, 1868).