ivil war, dethronement, general anarchy; and so
Dietrich threw Pope John into prison. He had been in bad health before
he sailed to Constantinople, and in a few months he died, and was
worshipped as a saint.

As for the political conspiracy, we shall never know the truth of it. The
'Anonymus Valesii,' meanwhile says, that when Cyprian accused Albinus,
Boethius answered, 'It is false: but if Albinus has done it, so have I,
and the whole senate, with one consent. It is false, my Lord King!'
Whatever such words may prove, they prove at least this, that Boethius,
as he says himself, was the victim of his own chivalry. To save Albinus,
and the senate, he thrust himself into the fore-front of the battle, and
fell at least like a brave man. Whether Albinus, Boethius, and Symmachus
did plot to bring in Justin; whether the senate did send a letter to him,
I cannot tell. Boethius, in his De Consolatione, denies it all; and
Boethius was a good man. He says that the letters in which he hoped for
the liberty of Rome were forged; how could he hope for the impossible?
but he adds, 'would that any liberty could have been hoped for! I would
have answered the king as Cassius did, when falsely accused of conspiring
by Caligula: "If I had known of it, you should not."' One knows not
whether Dietrich ever saw those words: but they prove at least that all
his confidence, justice, kindness to the patrician philosopher, had not
won him from the pardonable conceit about the Romani nominis umbram.

Boethius' story is most probably true. One cannot think that that man
would die with a lie in his mouth. One cannot pass by, as the utterances
of a deliberate hypocrisy, those touching appeals to his guiding
mistress, that heavenly wisdom who has led him so long upon the paths of
truth and virtue, and who seems to him, in his miserable cell, to have
betrayed him in his hour of need. Heaven forbid. Better to believe that
Dietrich committed once in his life, a fearful crime, than that good
Boethius' famous book is such another as the Eikon Basilike.

Boethius, again, says that the Gothic courtiers hated him, and suborned
branded scoundrels to swear away his life and that of the senate, because
he had opposed 'the hounds of the palace,' Amigast, Trigulla, and other
greedy barbarians. There was, of course, a Gothic party and a Roman
party about the court; and each hated the other bitterly. Dietrich had
favoured the Romans. But the Goths c