This viceroy was not done yet. We will see him again in later chapters more than once in military and civilian roles spanning the Mediterranean. Liberius is the authentic Theoderician man in many ways: Roman, pragmatic, tough, loyal up to a point, churchly enough to get by, and effective in establishing and maintaining Roman order in any setting.
Consider, by contrast, Boethius—Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius— a man with a fine name and a family, the Anicii, almost as fine. Though we have no trace of anyone who read it in his century, Boethius wrote what later became the best-selling book, other than the Bible, throughout the Latin middle ages, the Consolation of Philosophy. That book, with its apologia for a life well lived that ended badly, is a precious source, corrobo¬rated and supplemented by other views, for the place of one man and his family in the Italy of his time.
Boethius was a small boy
Boethius began well and soon improved his lot. His father was consul in 487, when Boethius was a small boy, but died not long afterward, and so Boethius was brought up in the household of the greatest senator of the age, his kinsman Symmachus, who had been consul in 485. Quintus Aurelius Memmius Symmachus (the claim to antiquity here is in the name Memmius, which recalls the wealthy patron the poet Lucretius had flat¬tered 500 years earlier) was a man too lofty to spend much time in public office, preferring to devote himself to writing the history of Rome. We cannot follow the money in Boethius’s life as closely as we might wish, but by the time he had married Symmachus’s daughter, he was as wealthy as any man could be who was not emperor tailor-made bulgaria tours.
To the advantages of wealth, Boethius added real talent and an education unmatched by any native Latin-speaker in at least a century, and unmatched by anyone in Italy or the west for hundreds of years afterward. “You attended the schools of Athens from afar,”3 one contemporary wrote to him, leading scholars to debate whether this means he never left Italy or, on a more sophistic reading, that he actually pursued his studies in Alexandria, where the Platonism had a Christian flair. But philosophy was his metier; a comprehensive interpretation of all ancient Platonic and Aristotelian thought was his goal.
Plato and Aristotle
This was the last age that could easily believe Plato and Aristotle had really been of one mind, and Boethius attempted—in a series of books that are now not much or easily read—to persuade his contemporaries of this truth and give it full expression. A handful of his short theological treatises, written in the 510s, survive as well. In these he took definite and intellectually sophisticated positions on the church controversies of his time, seeking peaceful solutions to the quarrels that separated Constantinople from Rome.
By now Theoderic was the self-assured and supreme master of the Roman empire’s Italian domains, with secure control of the approaches to Italy from all land directions—from the Balkans, from across the Alps to the north, and from Gaul. He had to watch for threats from Clovis in Gaul and from the Vandals in Africa, but neither truly unsettled him, and Theoderic had the diplomacy to manage both. Constantinople was still the 900-pound gorilla of the Roman world. Occasional brushes with the empire’s raiders and hints of rapprochement between Anastasius and Clovis would hold Theoderic’s attention, but he was at least certain of the loyalty of his own citizens—mostly.
He earned that loyalty by governing well, by settling his forces in Italy without gross disruption, and by convincing both the senatorial classes and the high churchmen that order and tradition were on his side. Could anyone else have persuaded them that perhaps another way existed to ensure their dignity and future ? Perhaps, but from the time of his arrival in Italy, Theoderic had one particular assurance that Italy’s aristocracy would not be looking eastward for such persuasion: ecclesiastical animosity Leading Catholic Christian clergyman of Provence.
In 484, the bishop of Rome formally broke off relations with the bishops of Constantinople over points of theology and imperial interference. A sympathetic member of the community of “sleepless monks” in Constantinople pinned the decree of excommunication from Rome to the back of the patriarch Acacius’s vestments while Acacius celebrated the Eucharist. The Acacian schism gave the Roman church the serene confidence that it knew the true religion and that Constantinople fell short. Constantinople might again come to its senses, but for the moment, Romans who traveled there were instructed not to share communion with any of those so-called Christians.
