Basilius and Prætextatus-who are charged with practising magical arts. They were handed over for trial to a board, on which Symmachus served with four others; and at this point we lose sight of them, for there is nothing to show how the trial went. One thing, however, is certain-that disgrace and withdrawal from public life would, in the existing state of the law, immediately have followed on a sentence of guilty. In our absolute ignorance of the issue, it would be dangerous to insist too strongly on the coincidence; but at least it is not without the bounds of possibility that this trial for magic gives us the key to Boethius's objection to his informer Basilius," olim regio ministerio depulsus." Dr. Hodgkin lays great stress on these letters of Cassiodorus, so flattering to the memory of the brothers Cyprian and Opilio; and he is inclined to attribute Boethius's passionate invective to the jaundiced mind of a student-statesman who, utterly unable to look upon things from any point of view but his own, would, when his vanity was affronted, sacrifice the cause of truth and the credit of his colleagues without a scruple. That Boethius was a man of harsh and hasty judgment, impatient of ignorance or dulness, unable to brook opposition in any form, I am prepared to admit. For instance, he calls his colleague

D

Decoratus, with whom he had been associated in some public office, "a wretched buffoon and informer "" nequissimus scurra delatorque" (Cons., iii. pr. 4); what is more, he puts the unkind words into the mouth of his heavenly mistress. Now the only Decoratus we hear of at this date was a young man of great promise as an advocate, who had risen to be quæstor, winning in that capacity Theodoric's highest esteem and confidence. The king sought to honour his memory, for he died young, by advancing his brother Honoratus to the office he had left vacant. (We may be sure that Cassiodorus, who is here again our informant, will not let slip the opportunity of inserting a sententious remark about unconscious prophecy when he lights on two such significant names.) These official encomiums are always to be received with a certain reserve, but in this instance it would seem that the praise was not unmerited. A letter of Ennodius (iv. 27) testifies to the value set upon the young man's friendship by that worthy but wearisome bishop of Pavia.

But I do not see that we are justified, knowing what we do of the character of Boethius of his high aims as a philosopher and a statesman, of his unshaken relations with Symmachus, the flower of

integrity and uprightness—in imputing to him such a gross and inexcusable misstatement of fact, to call it by its mildest name, as we are bound to do, if we believe Opilio's past career to have been spotless. It must be remembered that Cassiodorus is writing merely as the mouthpiece of a barbarian monarch, and that the letters of his Miscellany, for all their wealth of "wise saws and modern instances," do not carry much conviction with them on questions of moral character.

And if Theodoric, who, barbarian though he was, had an intimate knowledge of human nature, could be led away by the plausible representations of clever informers into an act of blind cruelty, such as the condemnation of Boethius and Symmachus undoubtedly was, it is not unnatural that his wellmeaning but not very discerning secretary should have fallen into the same mistake, and have recommended to Amalsuntha, the daughter of Theodoric and mother of the young Amal, those men who had won her father's approbation, as worthy to hold high office in the state.

The rigid silence, barring these hints in the letter to Opilio, which he guards on the question of the trial, and which Dr Hodgkin interprets as unfavourable to the king's decision, does not, to my mind,

indicate anything more than an unquestioning adherence to his royal master's verdict, which as a true servant he must regard as irrefragable.

Gibbon's extraordinary statement that "the characters of the two delatores, Basilius and Opilio, are illustrated not much to their honour in the epistles of Cassiodorus," is not borne out by the facts. The quaestor, speaking for the king, does unhesitatingly hold them up to the admiration of his countrymen; but malo cum Platone errare, and I for one would rather have to condone an error of judgment or an easily explicable piece of time-serving in Cassiodorus, than be driven to brand Boethius a liar with his last breath.

Whatever view we may take of the trial of Boethius, whatever value we may place on his apology, it must be freely acknowledged that failure was the end of his career as a practical statesman. The teller of the story of his life has no words with which to close it other than those with which he began it a real regret, that must be shared by all who even at this distance of time have learnt to know and admire "the last of the Romans," that he should ever have chosen to forsake the life of contemplation for which he was so excellently fitted, for

1 Op. cit., chap. xxxix. n. 95.

one of action in times when tact was more necessary to success than truthfulness, and at a court where the breath of suspicion was so quickly fanned into the desolating blast of hatred. And his was not that barren contemplation where the thought is of the inferior quality which finds its proper expression in action, but that kind which Wordsworth praised as producing works "which, both from their independence in their origin upon accident, their nature, their duration, and the wide spread of their influence, are entitled rightly to take place of the noblest and most beneficent deeds of heroes, statesmen, legislators, or warriors." For an insight into the man's personal character, with its excellent qualities of devotion to wife and children, of loyalty to his friends, and unselfish zeal in the cause of the oppressed, we are indebted to the letters of Cassiodorus and Ennodius and his own great work. But we may search the pages of the 'Consolation' in vain for the Christian virtues of humility and long-suffering.

He reproves

himself through the mouth of his divine consoler for petulance and impatience: the hints he lets fall in the course of this book and elsewhere lead us to suppose that he was fully aware of his intellectual superiority over his contemporaries. It is doubtless true that every honest and sincere worker always