ished family of the Anicii,[276] which
had for some time before his birth been Christian. Early left an orphan,
the tradition is that he was taken to Athens at about the age of ten, and
that he remained there eighteen years.[277] He married Rusticiana, daughter
of the senator Symmachus, and this union of two such powerful families
allowed him to move in the highest circles.[278] Standing strictly for the
right, and against all iniquity at court, he became the object of hatred on
the part of all the unscrupulous element near the throne, and his bold
defense of the ex-consul Albinus, unjustly accused of treason, led to his
imprisonment at Pavia[279] and his execution in 524.[280] Not many
generations after his death, the period being one in which historical
criticism was at its lowest ebb, the church found it profitable to look
upon his execution as a martyrdom.[281] He was {72} accordingly looked upon
as a saint,[282] his bones were enshrined,[283] and as a natural
consequence his books were among the classics in the church schools for a
thousand years.[284] It is pathetic, however, to think of the medieval
student trying to extract mental nourishment from a work so abstract, so
meaningless, so unnecessarily complicated, as the arithmetic of Boethius.

He was looked upon by his contemporaries and immediate successors as a
master, for Cassiodorus[285] (c. 490-c. 585 A.D.) says to him: "Through
your translations the music of Pythagoras and the astronomy of Ptolemy are
read by those of Italy, and the arithmetic of Nicomachus and the geometry
of Euclid are known to those of the West."[286] Founder of the medieval
scholasticism, {73} distinguishing the trivium and quadrivium,[287] writing
the only classics of his time, Gibbon well called him "the last of the
Romans whom Cato or Tully could have acknowledged for their
countryman."[288]

The second question relating to Boethius is this: Could he possibly have
known the Hindu numerals? In view of the relations that will be shown to
have existed between the East and the West, there can only be an
affirmative answer to this question. The numerals had existed, without the
zero, for several centuries; they had been well known in India; there had
been a continued interchange of thought between the East and West; and
warriors, ambassadors, scholars, and the restless trader, all had gone back
and forth, by land or more frequently by sea, between the Mediterranean
lands and the centers