GERMAN KINGDOMS IN THE WEST 125 which does not mention Christ or the hope of immortality, as one would expect a Christian facing death to do. Virtue and philosophy are its main themes. But if the book shows the difficulty of distinguishing Christian and pagan as late as the early sixth century, its reception later shows that medieval Christianity was broad enough to embrace such a work as its own. Boethius was a great name in the Middle Ages for another reason, his Latin translations of Aristotle's treatises on logic and his own writings in such fields as arithmetic and music. He may be considered, then, the last great writer and the last prominent scholar of the ancient world in the West, as well as a last representative of the dignity of the Roman senate and the rights of the Roman people. On through the sixth and seventh centuries literature and learning continued their decline in Gaul under the Merovingian kings, as the successors of Clovis Isidore of were called, and in Spain under the Visigoths. Sevllle Gregory of Tours, whose history has already been de-, scribed, was the leading writer of this period in the one country and Isidore of Seville in the other. Isidore's chief work is his Etymologies (622-623), a jejune encyclopaedia in one volume. It is a list of Latin words, with far-fetched and usually incorrect guesses at their etymology, and then some elaboration of their meaning, which generally takes the form of a stringing together of excerpts from earlier authors. For instance, Isidore says that the vulture gets its name from its slow flight (a volatu tardo), and that horses are called equine (equi) because those harnessed together in spans are equal, being a pair and maintaining the same gait. Dry and ridiculous by turns as this meager display of knowl- edge seems to the modern reader, it was superior to Cassio- dorus' manuals and was the leading work of erudition produced for some centuries in the West. Almost every monastic library contained a copy of it. There seems to have been little art in these German states except for armor, jewelry, and the work of the goldsmith. Nothing in a historical museum is more tedious
