close of a glorious life, the king of Italy discovered that he had excited the hatred of a people whose happiness he had so assiduously laboured to promote ; and his mind was soured by indignation, jealousy, and the bitterness of unrequited love. The Gothic conqueror condescended to disarm the unwarlike natives of Italy, interdicting all weapons of offence, and excepting only a small knife for domestic use. The deliverer of Rome was accused of conspiring with the vilest informers against the lives of senators whom he suspected of a secret and treasonable correspondence with the Byzantine court.[1] After [518 A.D.] the death of Anastasius, the diadem had been placed on the head of a feeble old man; but the powers of government were assumed by his nephew Justinian, who already meditated the extirpation of heresy, and the conquest of Italy and Africa. A rigorous law which was published at Constantinople, to reduce the Arians by the dread of punishment within the pale of the church, awakened the just resentment of Theodoric, who claimed for his distressed brethren of the East the same indulgence which he had so long granted to the Catholics of his dominions. [Pope John I. sent to Constantinople. A.D. 525] At his stern command, the Roman pontiff, with four illustrious senators, embarked on an embassy, of which he must have alike dreaded the failure or the success. The singular veneration shewn to the first pope who had visited Constantinople was punished as a crime by his jealous monarch; the artful or peremptory refusal of the Byzantine court might excuse an equal, and would provoke a larger, measure of retaliation; and a mandate was prepared in Italy, to prohibit, after a stated day, the exercise of the Catholic worship. By the bigotry of his subjects and enemies, the most tolerant of princes was driven to the brink of persecution; and the life of Theodoric was too long, since he lived to condemn the virtue of Boethius and Symmachus.[2]
Character, studies, and honours of Boethius The senator Boethius[3] is the last of the Romans whom Cato- ↑ Rex avidus communis exitii, &c. (Boethius, l. i. p. 59): rex dolum Romanis tendebat (Anonym. Vales. p. 723 [§ 86; the Mss. have tenebat]). These are hard words: they speak the passions of the Italians, and those (I fear) of Theodoric himself.
- ↑ I have laboured to extract a rational narrative from the dark, concise, and various hints of the Valesian Fragment (p. 722, 723, 724), Theophanes (p, 145), Anastasius (in Johanne, p. 35), and the Hist. Miscella (p. 103, edit. Muratori). A gentle pressure and paraphrase of their words is no violence. Consult likewise Muratori (Annali d'Italia, tom. iv. p. 471-478), with the Annals and Breviary (tom. i. 259-263) of the two Pagis, the uncle and the nephew.
- ↑ Le Clerc has composed a critical and philosophical life of Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius (Bibliot. Choisie, tom. xvi. p. 168-275); and both Tiraboschi
