Boethius then sets a dramatic stage for us to contemplate. “You recall” (he tells the allegorical woman called Philosophy, his personification for wisdom itself visiting him in prison to hear and sanctify his lament) “the time the king was at Verona, hell-bent on destroying us all, and how he tried to take the accusation of a crime of maiestas leveled against Albinus and make it encompass the whole senate. And then you recall how I defended the innocence of the whole senate at great risk to myself.”
Apparently that is what has landed him, without trial, in prison, 500 miles from Rome and home, where he wrote his lament. The king suspected treason in his court and Boethius forthrightly defended the suspects—too forthrightly, too persuasively for his own good.
Worse is yet to come. Those who seek to destroy Boethius added a charge of sacrilege—that is, of having defiled himself with black magic “out of ambition for high office.” The simple meaning to his contemporaries would be that he had engaged in secret religious rites of the old order (as we saw some of his contemporaries in the senate doing a few years earlier) to advance his own career. Preposterous, he huffs; impossible to imagine the likes of me doing the likes of that!
Boethius’s own Consolation
What can be going on here? The answer is straightforward and not hard to see in Boethius’s own Consolation, although most readers pass right over it. “But you, [Philosophy], approved this remark from the mouth of Plato:32 ‘Republics would be happy if either the philosophers ruled them or if their rulers came to study philosophy.’ ” Boethius goes on to represent that precept as what led him to public life, and I think most readers assume that it justifies a modest entry into upper bureaucracy. The true meaning is too obvious.
Theoderic was not merely paranoid: he had a real enemy. Boethius wanted to be emperor himself—or, more precisely, he wanted to be Plato’s philosopher king bulgaria holidays.
Think of it this way. If you were Boethius, if you were a senior minister at the imperial court of Italy, if you had an impeccable pedigree and the very highest imaginable social standing, and if you saw that the reigning ruler (emperor or would-be emperor) was nearing his end without a satisfactory heir in place, what would you think should be done or could be done? Who was there that a Roman of this period would think better qualified or better positioned to succeed Theoderic?
And if your neighbors thought you were using black magic to advance your ambitions, what did they think you were aiming for? A one-step promotion to the highest civil office of praetorian prefect? Nonsense: patience and good behavior could get him that. Wouldn’t they assume he was looking at the big step, up to the throne itself?
If it then happened that this man and his colleagues were in correspondence with leading figures in Constantinople and if they were known to have supported reconciliation with Constantinople going back to the years of the Laurentian schism and then the years of bringing the Acacian schism to a halt, and if they had relatives and colleagues at court—then anything might be possible.
Theoderic or Boethius
To be fair, there is no direct evidence that either Theoderic or Boethius saw things this way, but we do have every reason to believe that this idea must have been in the air. It would not take much in the way of suspicion for what might now seem to be—might then have been—only a pipe dream to take the shape of a real possibility and threat. In that setting, Boethius’s remarks reported in the Consolation were at the very least astonishingly indiscreet and risky, and may have dug the hole deeper, especially once the accusations were abroad and Boethius himself was imprisoned. Whether or not the charges had merit, Theoderic would be a fool not to take them seriously by this point. When Pope Hormisdas—the pope who had made peace with Constantinople—died in August 523 and Pope John I, a friend of Boethius and a collaborator with him in theological debates, replaced Hormisdas, Theoderic had to react Anonymus Valesianus.
Boethius paid for his indiscretion—or his ambition—with his life. With Theoderic in residence at his palace in Pavia and Boethius there as court official, he was held in custody with his accused coconspirator Albinus in a baptistery. Theoderic summoned the prefect of the city of Rome, Eusebius, to Pavia and there condemned Boethius to death in absentia. Then they took him out for execution. The Anonymus Valesianus has it that a rope was tied so tightly around his head that his eyes bulged in their sockets, and then he was beaten to death.33 His sons, the child consuls of 522, were allowed to live.
