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had been fighting for the primacy with the see of Constantinople. This estrangement of the pontiffs could not fail to extend to the political relations of the two capitals, especially after Odovacar's assertion of his right to control the papal election, which, even if it were scornfully repudiated after the tyrant had disappeared, indicates significantly enough how closely connected were the interests of the bishop and the ruler of Rome.

And although Theodoric shrank from meddling in Church disputes-arbitration in the rivalry between the popes Symmachus and Laurentius was not courted but most unwillingly accepted by him— yet he was fully aware of this identity of interests, and saw clearly how essential it was to his own political supremacy that the Church of Rome should maintain the ascendancy which was hers by right of apostolic succession and all the great traditions that still surrounded her name.1 Thus there was every inducement for a politician to win the favour of both his royal master and ghostly father by throwing in his lot with the Roman Church in her strenuous

1 I regret that the space and time at my disposal forbid me to go further into this most interesting question. For a full account of Odovacar's decree, and Theodoric's dilemma, the reader should go to Hehle, Conciliengeschichte, Bd. ii. 164, and Hodgkin, op. cit., vol. iii., chaps. iv. and xi.

endeavour to get Acacius anathematised and the council of Chalcedon restored to honour; while the very subtlety of the points at issue would add zest to the task, if the politician were one who knew his intellectual superiority over the mass of his contemporaries, whose whole leisure was devoted to science, and who would be glad to profit by any opportunity to keep the weapons of his dialectic free from rust.

Let me not be misunderstood. I would not for one moment disparage the zeal which marks the tract before us, or impugn the conviction of its writer; only it seems to me that he would probably take a more lively interest in a question that bore so directly on the liberty of Rome than in those which exercised his learning and ingenuity, and nothing more.

Those who believe that Boethius's faith was not strong enough to bear the ordeal of desertion by his friends and an unjust condemnation, will doubtless trace some of his later coolness towards Christianity to the very fervour of this tract. For if, as I believe, he had the welfare of his city as much at heart as anything else when he wrote the 'De Persona,' the mere thought of it, as he lay in prison at Pavia, must have added poison to the cup of his suffering.

He may be imagined arguing to himself something after this fashion. "Rome has wrung from Constantinople the confession of her primacy, only to fall a victim to a tyranny at home which has crushed out of life the little there was left of her ancient spirit. Theodoric has only had to let his suspicion be awakened by the growing intimacy between Justin and our Church, to let her feel how little he really cares for orthodoxy or heterodoxy, so long as the land enjoys peace and justice, and he has the administering of both. Of what avail, then, that earnest attempt to raise the Faith above the mire of heresy? of what avail that double stroke for old Rome and the Church? Surely it were better, now that death is so near, to put away the memory of such wasted efforts and misdirected energy, and return to the consolation of her who has never failed me, whose methods I was wrong to apply to questions both dangerous to attempt and profitless when mastered. Come then, Philosophy, be once more my guide and my teacher! Show me once again how man in his miserable strivings after partial happiness misses the whole, the only Good."

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CHAPTER VI.

ON SOME ANCIENT TRANSLATIONS OF BOETHIUS'S

LAST WORK.

BOETHIUS wrote long and bitterly on the fickleness of Fortune, and quoted the stories of Croesus and Paulus Æmilius as examples of it. There could be no better instance given than the way in which the star of his own renown has paled and set. From being the favourite author of our ancestors, he has passed into the limbo of exploded philosophers. Of ten educated men, you shall not find one to-day who knows more than his mere name, and perhaps the title of his great book; ninety-nine in a hundred would be unable to give the smallest detail of his life and work. But if he wins no applause from us now, he once enjoyed a meed of fame such as falls to the lot of few writers of antiquity. Of the part he played in the middle ages as the preserver of

Greek philosophy, and especially of Aristotelianism, I hope to speak in the next chapter. My present object is to trace something of the influence of the 'Consolation of Philosophy -" that golden volume," as Gibbon calls it-on one side of medieval literature, that of vernacular translation.

The causes of this influence are not far to seek. As I have already said, Boethius stood illumined by the last glories of the old world, ere it sank into what we are pleased to call the darkness of medievalism, and men would bear the vivid impress of that noble figure in their minds long after his masters and teachers, and the sources from which he drew his inspiration, had been allowed to fall into oblivion, not to be revealed before the dawn of the new learning.

Then the subject of his book-steadfastness under stress of misfortune, and the transient nature of all human happiness-is one which is always latent in the thoughtful mind, and only needs the kindling touch of sympathy to start into life; and this, the last utterance of a steadfast race, could not fail to find an echo in the hearts of all those who knew

what injustice and misfortune meant. There is, besides, in the Consolation of Philosophy' a remarkable medieval note, an anticipation of thought

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