Sailing from Byzantium Read Online Free

have distinguished themselves in this office from the beginning.”
    Procopius’ description hints at a few of the intriguing ambiguities that characterize this shifting world. What made a barbarian? A tyrant? A king? Indeed, an emperor? Byzantines and Italians would soon begin to come up with conflicting answers to such questions as they slowly went their separate ways. The long divergence—marked by tiny, imperceptible steps rather than huge, irrevocable ones—stretched over the whole thousand-year history of Byzantium.
Boethius and Cassiodorus
    To start us on the path to this parting of the ways, we shall call on two learned Roman gentlemen of Theoderic's day, Boethius and Cassiodorus. Like double-faced Janus, the Roman god of arrivals and departures, each looks in two directions at once, harkening back to the fading world of antiquity and beckoning us forward into the emerging world of the Middle Ages.
    Modern scholars invariably introduce Boethius as “the last of the Romans and the first of the Scholastics.” ∗ What this comes down to is that Boethius was the last Western European of cultural consequence to know Greek and Greek philosophy for a very long time. He wasn't the absolute last— there were a number of stragglers, certainly more than used to be thought—but he was the last heavyweight, at the very least until Thomas Aquinas and other Scholastics rediscovered Aristotle starting in the twelfth century, some seven centuries later. Even then few if any Scholastics had Boethius’ knowledge of ancient Greek; knowledge on that level in the West would have to wait nearly a thousand years, for the Renaissance scholars of quattrocento Florence. †
    It isn't certain how Boethius learned his Greek, or where he learned it, though it's possible from hints in the sources that he studied in Athens or Alexandria, or both, as a young man. If so, it wasn't much longer that such sojourns, once standard practice for a vanishing Mediterranean-wideupper class, would be possible. Boethius’ father died when he was still a boy, and he was adopted by an older relative, Symmachus, a leading figure in Rome who also had strong ties to the literary culture of the Greek East. The refined Symmachus, it turns out, nursed an ambitious plan for restoring Italian familiarity with the Greek classics, and this may have been among his reasons for sponsoring his brilliant younger relative. Under Symmachus’ guidance, Boethius undertook the almost unbelievably audacious project not only of translating into Latin the entire works of Plato and Aristotle, with commentary, but also of reconciling their often divergent philosophical views. And he planned to do this in his spare time, since from the age of about twenty he was writing prodigiously as well as filling increasingly important political positions for Theoderic.
    Theoderic clearly valued Boethius’ wide-ranging intellect, making it part of plans he had for revitalizing higher Roman culture and fixing in place its Gothic veneer. But he also had worldly reasons for promoting Greek learning in Italy. Boethius’ learning had a practical side, and the king took full advantage of it in promoting his domestic and foreign prestige agendas: fulsomely flattering letters exist in which he asks Boethius to devise a tamper-proof system of weights and measures, to find a skilled harpist to send to Clovis, king of the Franks, and to come up with two timepieces, one a sundial and the other a water clock, as impressive gifts for Gundobad, king of the Burgundians. The letters present a pretty picture of peaceful coexistence, cooperation even, between the Roman senatorial class—of which Boethius was a member—and its new Gothic masters in Ravenna.
    There was, however, a dark side to this happy kingdom. Modern scholars have generally followed Procopius in portraying Theoderic as an enlightened and liberal ruler, at leastuntil the last few years of his reign. In particular, they point to his