t all
desire of worldly greatness, and under the eyes of her who had daily
instilled into my mind the Pythagorean maxim 'Follow God,' there was no
place for sacrilege. Nor was it likely that I should seek the
guardianship of the meanest of spirits when Divine Philosophy had formed
and moulded me into the likeness of God. The friendship of my
father-in-law, the venerable Symmachus, ought alone to have shielded me
from the suspicion of such a crime. But alas! it was my very love for
Philosophy that exposed me to this accusation, and they thought that I
was of kin to sorcerers because I was steeped in philosophic teachings".

The only reasonable explanation that we can offer of these words is that
mediaeval superstition was already beginning to cast her shadow over
Europe, that already great mechanical skill, such as Boethius was
reputed to possess when his king asked him to manufacture the
water-clock and the sun-dial, caused its possessor to be suspected of
unholy familiarity with the Evil One; perhaps also that astronomy, which
was evidently the favourite study of Boethius, was perilously near to
astrology, and that his zeal in its pursuit may have exposed him to some
of the penalties which the Theodosian code itself, the law-book of
Imperial Rome, denounced against "the mathematicians".

This seems to be all that can now be done towards re-writing the lost
indictment under which Boethius was accused. The trial was conducted
with an outrageous disregard of the forms of justice. It took place in
the Senate-house at Rome; Boethius was apparently languishing in prison
at Pavia, where he had been arrested along with Albinus.[131] Thus at a
distance of more than four hundred miles from his accusers and his
judges was the life of this noble Roman, unheard and undefended, sworn
away on obscure and preposterous charges by a process which was the mere
mockery of a trial. He was sentenced to death and the confiscation of
his property; and the judges whose trembling lips pronounced the
monstrous sentence were the very senators whose cause he had tried to
serve. This thought, the remembrance of this base ingratitude, planted
the sharpest sting of all in the breast of the condemned patriot. It is
evident that the Senate themselves were in desperate fear of the newly
awakened wrath of Theodoric, and the fact that they found Boethius
guilty cannot be considered as in any degree increasing the probability
of the truth of the charges m