Sailing from Byzantium Read Online Free Page B

found this explanation lame. One intriguing possibility is that the Gothic king executed Boethius quite deliberately, having learned that the Roman had taken part in a political conspiracy to reunite East and West under Byzantine rule by ending the schism. According to this scenario, Boethius’ theological writings played a key part in the plot. Without religious rapprochement there wasn't a hope of political unity, and Boethius’ theological tractates pushed reconciliation of the schism along exactly the lines proposed by Justinian, who was negotiating for the Byzantines. In effect, they were imperial propaganda written as part of a deliberate program to overthrow Gothic rule in Italy. Theoderic executed Boethius because Boethius, acting as a Byzantine agent, had betrayed the Gothic king.
    As East and West drifted apart in succeeding centuries, in different ways each would be haunted by the uneasy ghost of Boethius. The loss of Greek came naturally, as Western Europe began to realign itself on a new axis, one that ran from north to south rather than east to west. The very fact that Boethius would be celebrated for knowing Greek (among the many other things he was celebrated for) is telling, as is his judgment that the most useful thing he coulddo vis-à-vis Greek philosophy was to translate it into Latin, which wouldn't have been as necessary in an earlier age.
    If Boethius had lived long enough to carry out his plan of translating Aristotle and Plato, Western intellectual history would have been startlingly different. He never got to Plato at all. Of Aristotle's vast body of work, Boethius managed to render into Latin only the six pieces on logic known as the
Organon,
or the “Instrument.” Essentially a set of rules for systematic thinking, the
Organon
lies at the heart of Aristotelian rationalism. It is here that Aristotle lays out for his readers such intellectual methods as the syllogism, which proceeds in careful steps from premise to conclusion: Socrates is a philosopher; all philosophers are human; therefore Socrates is human.
    These translations, however, would be ignored for centuries. It was Boethius’ other work that went a long way toward single-handedly fixing the educational curriculum that the West would follow throughout the Middle Ages: dense technical tracts on arithmetic, music theory, astronomy, rhetoric, philosophy, and theology. In contrast with the translations from Greek, these works of synthesis stayed in the mainstream and would become standard reading, the last word on their subjects up to and into the Renaissance.
    Hidden in the work that fell by the wayside was the overarching concern that Boethius shared with the great thinker who would resume his work seven centuries later, Thomas Aquinas:
conjungere rationem fidemque,
to join faith and reason. Like the idea of reconciling Plato and Aristotle, in some ways parallel to it (for Plato's writings have strongly mystical elements), this need to harmonize cosmic epistemological opposites was an appetite that the West would lose and then rediscover in the centuries to come.
    To replace Boethius as master of offices, Theodericpromoted his court rhetorician Cassiodorus, who had written the fulsome letters requesting Boethius’ services mentioned earlier. Writing such letters in the king's name was part of his job as royal rhetorician, a role he gracefully fulfilled while holding a number of political offices in the first decades of the sixth century. A collection of these urbane missives, carefully edited for publication by Cassiodorus later, survives and is one of the major sources for our picture of Italy in the age of Theoderic.
    Boethius had sailed close to the wind, but Cassiodorus, a careful survivor if ever there was one, sailed squarely with it. All along Cassiodorus had endorsed the ruling Goths, concocting a
History of the Goths
meant to show how Roman they really were underneath it all. He lived and worked in Ravenna, breathing its