The Letters of Cassiodorus
the elevation of the Emperor Maximin, and once as to his death[104].
Usener thinks that the 'Anecdoton Holderi' authorises us henceforward
to assign these quotations without doubt to the younger, Christian
Symmachus, not to his Pagan ancestor. To me the allusion to
_parentes_ (in the plural), whose industry as historians the Symmachus
there spoken of imitated, seems to make it at least as probable that
the earlier, not the later member of the family composed the history
which is here quoted by Jordanes.
[Footnote 104: Jordanes, Getica xv.: 'Nam, ut dicit Symmachus in
quinto suae historiae libro, Maximinus ... ab exercitus effectus est
imperator.' 'Occisus Aquileia a Puppione regnum reliquit Philippo;
quod nos huic nostro opusculo de Symmachi hystoria [sic] mutuavimus.']
[Sidenote: Information as to life of Boethius.]
II. We now pass on to consider the information furnished by this
fragment as to the illustrious son-in-law of Symmachus, Anicius
Manlius Severinus _Boethius_. Of the facts of his life we had already
pretty full information, from the autobiographical sections of the
'Consolation of Philosophy' and other sources. He does not indeed
mention the exact year of his birth, but the allusion to 'untimely
gray hairs' which he makes in that work, written in 523 or 524,
together with other indications[105] as to his age, entitle us to fix
it at about 480, certainly not earlier than that year. The death of
his father (who was Consul in 487) occurred while he was still a
child. Symmachus, as has been already said, was the guardian of his
youth and the friend of his manhood, and gave him his daughter
Rusticiana to wife. That he received the honour of the Consulship in
510 we know from the 'Fasti Consulares;' but it is perplexing to find
him even before that year spoken of[106] as Patricius, since this
honour was generally bestowed only on those who had already sat in the
curule chair of the Consul[107]. The high consideration in which he
was held at the Court of Theodoric, and the value placed upon his
scientific attainments, are sufficiently proved by the letters in the
following collection, especially by those in which he is consulted
about the frauds committed by the officers of the Mint, about the
water-clock which is to be sent to Gundobad King of the Burgundians,
and the harper who is to be provided for the King of the Franks[108].
In the year 522 his two sons, Symmachus and Boethius, though they had
but just attained to man's estate, received the honour of the
Consulship, upon which occasion the proud and happy father pronounced
a panegyric upon Theodoric before the assembled Senate. Some of these
facts in the life of Boethius are referred to in the extract before
us, which, as was before said, appears to be taken from a treatise
composed in this same year 522, the year of the Consulship of the
young Boethii. Of their father's investiture with the office of
_Magister Officiorum_ on September 1, 522, of his sudden fall from the
royal favour, of the charge of treason which was preferred against him
before the end of that year, of his imprisonment during 523 and
execution (probably in the early part of 524), we have of course no
trace in this extract; and the fact that we have none is a strong
argument for the genuineness and contemporary character of the
treatise from which it is taken.
[Footnote 105: Chiefly derived from the Paraenesis of Ennodius (Opusc.
vi.).]
[Footnote 106: In the Paraenesis.]
[Footnote 107: Usener's suggestion (pp. 38, 39) that he obtained this
honour in consequence of having filled the place of _Comes Sacrarum
Largitionum_ seems to me only to land us in the further difficulty
caused by the entire omission of all allusion to this fact both in the
Paraenesis and in the Anecdoton Holderi.]
[Footnote 108: See Var. i. 10 and 45; ii. 40.]
[Sidenote: His theological treatises.]
So far, then, we have in the 'Anecdoton Holderi' only a somewhat
meagre reiteration of facts already known to us. But when we come to
the statement of the literary labours of Boethius the case is entirely
altered. It is well known that in the Middle Ages certain treatises on
disputed points of Christian theology were attributed to him as their
author. They are:--
1. A treatise 'De Sancta Trinitate.'
2. 'Ad Johannem Diaconum: Utrum Pater et Filius et Spiritus Sanctus de
Divinitate substantialiter praedicentur.'
3. 'Ad eundem: Quomodo substantiae in eo quod sint bonae sint cum non
sint substantialia bona.'
4. 'De Fide Catholica.'
5. 'Contra Eutychen et Nestorium.'
It may be said at once that in the earlier MSS. the fourth treatise is
not attributed to Boethius. It seems to have been included with the
others by some mistake, and I shall therefore in the following remarks
assume that it is not his, and shall confine my attention to the first
three and the fifth.
[Sidenote: Difficulty as to religious position of Boethius.]
Even as to these, notwithstanding the nearly unanimous voice of the
early Middle Ages (as represented by MSS. of the Ninth, Tenth, and
Eleventh Centuries) assigning them to Boethius as their author,
scholars, especially recent scholars, have felt the gravest possible
doubts of their being really his, doubts which have of late ripened
into an almost complete certainty that he was not their author. The
difficulty does not arise from anything in the diction or in the
theology which points to a later age as the time of their composition,
but from the startling contrast which they present to the religious
atmosphere of the 'Consolation of Philosophy.' Here, in these
theological treatises, we have the author entering cheerfully into the
most abstruse points of the controversy concerning the Nature of
Christ, without apparently one wavering thought as to the Deity of the
Son of Mary. There, in the 'Consolation,' a book written in prison and
in disgrace, with death at the executioner's hands impending over
him--a book in which above all others we should have expected a man
possessing the Christian faith to dwell upon the promises of
Christianity--the name of Christ is never once mentioned, the tone,
though religious and reverential, is that of a Theist only; and from
beginning to end, except one or two sentences in which an obscure
allusion may possibly be detected to the Christian revelation, there
is nothing which might not have been written by a Greek philosopher
ignorant of the very name of Christianity. Of the various attempts
which have been made to solve this riddle perhaps the most ingenious
is that of M. Charles Jourdain, who, in a monograph devoted to the
subject[109], seeks to prove that the author of the theological
treatises referred to was a certain Boethus, an African Bishop of the
Byzacene Province, who was banished to Sardinia about the year 504 by
the Vandal King Thrasamond.
[Footnote 109: De l'Origine des Traditions sur le Christianisme de
Boece (Paris, 1861.)]
Not thus, however, as it now appears, is the knot to be cut. And after
all, M. Jourdain, in arguing, as he seems disposed to argue, against
any external profession of Christianity on the part of Boethius,
introduces contradictions greater than any that his theory would
remove. To any person acquainted with the thoughts and words of the
little coterie of Roman nobles to which Boethius belonged, it will
seem absolutely impossible that the son-in-law of Symmachus, the
receiver of the praises of Ennodius and Cassiodorus, should have been
a professed votary of the old Paganism. It is not the theological
treatises coming from a man in his position which are hard to account
for; it is the apparently non-Christian tone of the 'Consolation.'
The fragment now before us shows that the old-fashioned belief in
Boethius as a theologian was well founded. 'He wrote a book concerning
the Holy Trinity, and certain dogmatic chapters, and a book against
Nestorius.' That is a sufficiently accurate _resume_ of the four
theological treatises enumerated above. Here Usener also observes--and
I am inclined to agree with him--that there is a certain resemblance
between the style of thought of these treatises and that of the
'Consolation' itself. They are, after all, philosophical rather than
religious; one of the earliest samples of that kind of logical
discussion of theological dogmas which the Schoolmen of the Middle
Ages so delighted to indulge in. The young philosopher, hearing at his
father-in-law's table the discussions between Chalcedonian and
Monophysite with which all Rome resounded, on account of the prolonged
strife with the Church of Constantinople, set himself down to discuss
the same topics which they were wrangling over by the light--to him so
clear and precious--of the Greek philosophy. There was perhaps in this
employment neither reverence nor irreverence. He had not St.
Augustine's intense and almost passionate conviction of the truth of
Christianity; but he was quite willing to accept it and to discourse
upon it, as he discoursed on Arithmetic, Music, and Geometry.
But when premature old age, solitude, and the loss of liberty befell
him, it was not to the highly elaborated Christian theology of the
Sixth Century that he turned for support and consolation. Probably
enough the very fact that he knew some of the pitfalls in the way
deterred him from that dangerous journey, where the slightest
deviation on either side landed him in some detested heresy, the
heresy of Nestorius or of Eutyches. 'On revient toujours a ses
premiers amours;' and even so Boethius, though undoubtedly professing
himself a Christian, and about to die in full communion with the
Catholic Church, turned for comfort in his dungeon to the
philosophical studies of his youth, especially to the ethical writings
of Plato and Aristotle.
After all, the title of the treatise is '_Philosophiae_ Consolatio;'
and however vigorous a literature of philosophy may in the course of
centuries have grown up in the Christian domain, in the sixth century
the remembrance of the old opposition between Christianity and
Philosophy was perhaps still too strong for a writer to do anything
more than stand neutral as to the distinctive claims of Christianity,
when he had for the time donned the cloak of the philosopher.
[Sidenote: The Bucolic Poem of Boethius.]
We learn from the fragment before us that Boethius also wrote a
'Bucolic Poem.' This is an interesting fact, and helps to explain the
facility with which he breaks into song in the midst of the
'Consolation.' It may have been to this effort of the imagination that
he alluded when he said at the beginning of that work--
'Carmina qui quondam studio florente peregi
Flebilis, heu, moestos cogor inire modos.'
We would gladly know something more of this 'Bucolic Poem' indited by
the universal genius, Boethius.
[Sidenote: Cassiodorus.]
III. As for _Cassiodorus_ himself, the additional information
furnished by this fragment has been already discussed in the foregoing
chapter. That he was _Consilarius_ to his father during his
Praefecture, and that in that capacity he recited an eloquent
panegyric on Theodoric, which was rewarded by his promotion to the
high office of the Quaestorship, are facts which we learn from this
fragment only; and they are of high importance, not only for the life
of Cassiodorus but for the history of Europe at the beginning of the
Sixth Century, because they make it impossible to assign to any letter
in the 'Variae' an earlier date than 500.
CHAPTER III.
THE GRADATIONS OF OFFICIAL RANK IN THE LATER EMPIRE.
[Sidenote: Official Hierarchy introduced by Diocletian.]
It is well known that Diocletian introduced and Constantine perfected
an elaborate system of administration under which the titles,