In such an atmosphere classical culture could survive and even be transmitted to future generations. The major intellectual figure of Theodoric’s Italy was Anicus Manlius Severinus Boethius. Boethius was from an aristocratic family that had links to at least two emperors and one bishop of Rome. He showed great intellectual promise from an early age and his life was divided between service of Theodoric and philosophical study. Among his achievements was a translation into Latin of all Aristotle’s works on logic that kept Aristotle’s name alive in the medieval west when all knowledge of Greek had disappeared. Boethius had hoped to go on to translating the Dialogues of Plato and then show how the works of the two philosophers could be reconciled, but in 524 he was arrested on a charge of treason and bludgeoned to death after Theodoric confirmed the death sentence passed by a court in Rome. The affair is normally regarded as a black stain on Theodoric’s otherwise tolerant treatment of Roman aristocrats although it is difficult to sort out the background to the accusations against Boethius and exactly what they consisted of.
It was while awaiting his death in prison that Boethius composed the work for which he is most famous, The Consolation of Philosophy. It is a purely classical work that, despite being religious in tone, has not a single mention of Christ or Christianity. (In fact, in one of the poems that break up the prose text Boethius praises the achievements of Agamemnon, Odysseus, and Hercules.) Boethius as he lies in prison is visited by a shadowy woman, old in years but still vigorous in spirit, who engages with him in a dialogue reminiscent of those of Plato. The background of the Consolation is Platonic too. Boethius is led towards an appreciation that there is a higher ‘Good’ which transcends his present suffering. One of the major themes explored in the Consolation is the apparent contradiction between the existence of an ultimate ‘Good’ and the everyday vagaries of fate. The individual has to lift himself above the injustices of everyday life so that he can be united with the stability of ‘the Good’. (There are shades of Plotinus here.) The Consolation of Philosophy became one of the most read books of medieval Europe, its comparative simplicity providing an attractive contrast to the intricate quarrels of the medieval schools of philosophy. Dante claimed that it provided him with consolation after the death of his beloved Beatrice.
A century before, Augustine had argued, in his De Doctrina Christiana, that a training in the classics, particularly in grammar and rhetoric, was essential for any Christian, primarily to help them better understand the scriptures. The most distinguished of Theodoric’s ‘Roman’ civil servants, Cassiodorus, agreed. Cassiodorus (48o-c.585) drew on Greek models for his argument that the best training for higher studies in Christian theology was provided by the seven liberal arts, grammar, logic, rhetoric, music, geometry, arithmetic, and astronomy. When in retirement in his fifties, he founded his own monastery at Vivarium on his family estates in southern Italy. Here he collected manuscripts both Christian and pagan and encouraged the monks to copy them, even providing a manual, De Orthographia, to help them resolve textual difficulties. A large number of Latin authors were preserved in this way and even some Greek texts such as Eusebius’ History of the Church and the medical works of Galen and Hippocrates. It was partly thanks to Cassiodorus that an education in pagan classical texts survived as part of the church’s own education system at a time when secular schooling was in decline.
After Cassiodorus horizons narrowed so that eventually only the works of the Latin church fathers were collected. The library of the venerable Bede (672-735) in Northumbria, for instance, one that was considered important for its age, had
Map 19
Virtually no classical authors, perhaps not even a copy of Virgil’s Aeneid. Among the 415 codices listed in the library catalogue of 821 of the monastery at Reichenau, on Lake Constance, almost none are of classical authors, although the De Architectura of Vitruvius and the Georgies and Aeneid of Virgil are among them (as are the works of Boethius). Many of the secular works were on Roman law. By the twelfth century no more than one work by Plato, the Timaeus, was available, while Aristotle was only known through one or two of his works of logic—his Politics reappeared in a Latin translation about 1260. The old view that monks were busily preserving the classical heritage is hard to sustain in view of the tiny proportion of classical literature that survives. Most that does appears to have originated in the court of Charlemagne (see below, p. 672).
World History
