A few pages must be devoted to the MS. bearing the somewhat uncouth title of 'Anecdoton Holderi,' because it is the most recently opened source of information as to the life and works of Cassiodorus, and one which, if genuine, settles some questions which have been long and vigorously debated among scholars.

My information on the subject is derived from a pamphlet of 79 pages by Hermann Usener, printed at Bonn in 1877, and bearing the title 'Anecdoton Holderi: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte Roms in Ostgothischer Zeit.' I am indebted to Mr. Bywater, of Exeter College, Oxford, for my introduction to this pamphlet, which, while strikingly confirming some conclusions which I had come to from my own independent study of the 'Variae,' has been of the greatest possible service to me in studying the lives of Cassiodorus and Boethius.

The 'Anecdoton' (which loses its right to that name by Usener's publication of it) was discovered by Alfred Holder in a MS. known as Codex Augiensis, No. CVL, which came from the Monastery of Reichenau and is now in the Grand-Ducal Library at Carlsruhe. The monks of the fertile island of Reichenau (Augia Dives), in the Lake of Constance, were celebrated in the ninth and tenth centuries for their zeal in the collection and transcription of manuscripts. The well-known Codex Augiensis (an uncial MS. of the Greek text of the New Testament, with the Vulgate version in parallel columns) is referred by palaeographers to the ninth century[96]. The Codex Augiensis with which we are now concerned, and which is a copy of the 'Institutiones Humanarum Rerum' of Cassiodorus, is believed to have been written in the next succeeding century. On the last page of this MS. Holder discovered the fragment—not properly belonging to the 'Institutiones'—to which he has given his name, and which is as follows[97]:—

This memorandum, for it is hardly more, is a vestige, and the only vestige now remaining, of a short tract by Cassiodorus on the literary history of his family and kinsmen. The 'Excerpta' have been made by some later hand—perhaps that of a monk in the Vivarian convent. To him undoubtedly we owe the words 'monachi servi Dei' as a description of Cassiodorus; probably also the 'ex-Patricio,' which is perhaps an incorrect designation. 'Vir eruditissimus,' in the last paragraph, is probably due to the same hand, as, with all his willingness to do justice to his own good qualities, Cassiodorus would hardly have spoken thus of himself in a work avowedly proceeding from his own pen. The clause which is placed in brackets [et ... superposuit] is probably also due to the copyist, anxious to supply what he deemed the imperfections of his memorandum. In short, it must be admitted that the fragment cannot consist of the very words of Cassiodorus in however abbreviated a form. Still it contains so much that is valuable, and that could hardly have been invented by any writer of a post-Cassiodorian age, that it is well worthy of the careful and, so to speak, microscopical examination to which it has been subjected by Usener.

The work from which these 'Excerpta' are taken was composed, according to Usener, in the year 522. This is proved by the facts that the receiver of the letter is spoken of as Magister Officiorum, a post which he apparently held from Sept. 1, 521, to Sept. 1, 522; and that the Consulship of the two sons of Boethius, which began on Jan. 1, 522, is also referred to. Persons to whom addressed.The name of the person to whom the letter is addressed is given as Rufius Petronius Nicomachus. Usener, however, shows good reason for thinking that his final name, the name by which he was known in the consular lists, is omitted, and that his full designation was Rufius Petronius Nicomachus Cethegus, Consul in 504, Magister Officiorum (as above stated) in 521-522, and Patrician. He was probably the same Cethegus whom Procopius mentions[100] as Princeps Senatus, and as withdrawing from Rome to Centumcellae in the year 545 because he was accused of treachery to the Imperial cause[101].

The object of the little treatise referred to evidently was to give an account of those members of the family to which Cassiodorus belonged who had distinguished themselves in literature. The words 'Ex genere Cassiodororum' are perhaps a gloss of the transcribers. At least it does not appear that they would correctly describe the descent of Symmachus and Boethius, though they were relations of Cassiodorus, being descended from or allied to the great house of the Aurelii from which he also sprang. Probably several other names may have been noticed in the original treatise, but the only three as to which the 'Anecdoton' informs us are the three as to whom information is most acceptable—Symmachus, Boethius, and Cassiodorus himself.

I. The name of Q. Aurelius Memmius Symmachus was already known to us as that of the friend, guardian, and father-in-law of Boethius, and his fellow-sufferer from the outburst of suspicious rage which disgraced the last years of Theodoric. That he was Consul in 485 (under the dominion of Odovacar), and that he had at the time of his fall attained the honoured position of Father of the Senate[102], we also know from the 'Consular Fasti' and the 'Anonymus Valesii.' This extract tells us that he had attained the rank of Patricius, which may perhaps have been bestowed upon him when he laid down the Consulship. He was 'a philosopher, and a modern imitator of the ancient Cato; but surpassed the virtues of the men of old by [his devotion to] our most holy religion.' This sentence quite accords with all that we hear of the character of Symmachus from our other authorities—the 'Anonymus Valesii,' Procopius, and Boethius. The blending of old Roman gravity and Christian piety in such a man's disposition is happily indicated in the words before us. It would be an interesting commentary upon them if we were to contrast the career of the Christian Symmachus, who suffered in some sense as a martyr for the Nicene Creed under Theodoric, with that of his ancestor the Pagan Symmachus, who, 143 years before, incurred the anger of Gratian by his protests against the removal of the Altar of Victory from the Senate House, and the curtailment of the grant to the Vestal Virgins.

The Symmachus with whom we are now concerned was also an orator; and we learn from this extract that he delivered a speech, evidently of some importance, in the Senate, 'pro allecticiis.' There seems much probability in Usener's contention that these 'allecticii' were men who had been 'allecti,' or admitted by co-optation into the Senate during the reign of Odovacar, and whom, on the downfall of that ruler, it had been proposed to strip of their recently acquired dignity—a proposal which seems to have been successfully resisted by Symmachus and his friends.

Lastly, we learn that Symmachus, 'in imitation of his ancestors,' put forth a Roman History in seven books. The expression for ancestors (parentes) here used is thought by Usener to refer chiefly to Virius Nicomachus Flavianus (Consul in 394[103]), whose granddaughter married Q. Fabius Memmius Symmachus, and was the grandmother of our Symmachus. This Flavianus, who was in his time one of the chief leaders of the heathen party in the Senate, is spoken of in one inscription as 'historicus disertissimus;' and in another, mention is made of the fact that he dedicated his annals to Theodosius.

Whether the elder Symmachus, the Pagan champion, was a historian as well as an orator is a matter about which there is a good deal of doubt. Jordanes twice quotes 'The History of Symmachus,' once as to the elevation of the Emperor Maximin, and once as to his death[104]. Usener thinks that the 'Anecdoton Holderi' authorises us henceforward to assign these quotations without doubt to the younger, Christian Symmachus, not to his Pagan ancestor. To me the allusion to parentes (in the plural), whose industry as historians the Symmachus there spoken of imitated, seems to make it at least as probable that the earlier, not the later member of the family composed the history which is here quoted by Jordanes.

II. We now pass on to consider the information furnished by this fragment as to the illustrious son-in-law of Symmachus, Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius. Of the facts of his life we had already pretty full information, from the autobiographical sections of the 'Consolation of Philosophy' and other sources. He does not indeed mention the exact year of his birth, but the allusion to 'untimely gray hairs' which he makes in that work, written in 523 or 524, together with other indications[105] as to his age, entitle us to fix it at about 480, certainly not earlier than that year. The death of his father (who was Consul in 487) occurred while he was still a child. Symmachus, as has been already said, was the guardian of his youth and the friend of his manhood, and gave him his daughter Rusticiana to wife. That he received the honour of the Consulship in 510 we know from the 'Fasti Consulares;' but it is perplexing to find him even before that year spoken of[106] as Patricius, since this honour was generally bestowed only on those who had already sat in the curule chair of the Consul[107]. The high consideration in which he was held at the Court of Theodoric, and the value placed upon his scientific attainments, are sufficiently proved by the letters in the following collection, especially by those in which he is consulted about the frauds committed by the officers of the Mint, about the water-clock which is to be sent to Gundobad King of the Burgundians, and the harper who is to be provided for the King of the Franks[108]. In the year 522 his two sons, Symmachus and Boethius, though they had but just attained to man's estate, received the honour of the Consulship, upon which occasion the proud and happy father pronounced a panegyric upon Theodoric before the assembled Senate. Some of these facts in the life of Boethius are referred to in the extract before us, which, as was before said, appears to be taken from a treatise composed in this same year 522, the year of the Consulship of the young Boethii. Of their father's investiture with the office of Magister Officiorum on September 1, 522, of his sudden fall from the royal favour, of the charge of treason which was preferred against him before the end of that year, of his imprisonment during 523 and execution (probably in the early part of 524), we have of course no trace in this extract; and the fact that we have none is a strong argument for the genuineness and contemporary character of the treatise from which it is taken.

So far, then, we have in the 'Anecdoton Holderi' only a somewhat meagre reiteration of facts already known to us. But when we come to the statement of the literary labours of Boethius the case is entirely altered. It is well known that in the Middle Ages certain treatises on disputed points of Christian theology were attributed to him as their author. They are:—

1. A treatise 'De Sancta Trinitate.'

2. 'Ad Johannem Diaconum: Utrum Pater et Filius et Spiritus Sanctus de Divinitate substantialiter praedicentur.'

3. 'Ad eundem: Quomodo substantiae in eo quod sint bonae sint cum non sint substantialia bona.'

4. 'De Fide Catholica.'

5. 'Contra Eutychen et Nestorium.'

It may be said at once that in the earlier MSS. the fourth treatise is not attributed to Boethius. It seems to have been included with the others by some mistake, and I shall therefore in the following remarks assume that it is not his, and shall confine my attention to the first three and the fifth.

Even as to these, notwithstanding the nearly unanimous voice of the early Middle Ages (as represented by MSS. of the Ninth, Tenth, and Eleventh Centuries) assigning them to Boethius as their author, scholars, especially recent scholars, have felt the gravest possible doubts of their being really his, doubts which have of late ripened into an almost complete certainty that he was not their author. The difficulty does not arise from anything in the diction or in the theology which points to a later age as the time of their composition, but from the startling contrast which they present to the religious atmosphere of the 'Consolation of Philosophy.' Here, in these theological treatises, we have the author entering cheerfully into the most abstruse points of the controversy concerning the Nature of Christ, without apparently one wavering thought as to the Deity of the Son of Mary. There, in the 'Consolation,' a book written in prison and in disgrace, with death at the executioner's hands impending over him—a book in which above all others we should have expected a man possessing the Christian faith to dwell upon the promises of Christianity—the name of Christ is never once mentioned, the tone, though religious and reverential, is that of a Theist only; and from beginning to end, except one or two sentences in which an obscure allusion may possibly be detected to the Christian revelation, there is nothing which might not have been written by a Greek philosopher ignorant of the very name of Christianity. Of the various attempts which have been made to solve this riddle perhaps the most ingenious is that of M. Charles Jourdain, who, in a monograph devoted to the subject[109], seeks to prove that the author of the theological treatises referred to was a certain Boethus, an African Bishop of the Byzacene Province, who was banished to Sardinia about the year 504 by the Vandal King Thrasamond.

Not thus, however, as it now appears, is the knot to be cut. And after all, M. Jourdain, in arguing, as he seems disposed to argue, against any external profession of Christianity on the part of Boethius, introduces contradictions greater than any that his theory would remove. To any person acquainted with the thoughts and words of the little coterie of Roman nobles to which Boethius belonged, it will seem absolutely impossible that the son-in-law of Symmachus, the receiver of the praises of Ennodius and Cassiodorus, should have been a professed votary of the old Paganism. It is not the theological treatises coming from a man in his position which are hard to account for; it is the apparently non-Christian tone of the 'Consolation.'

The fragment now before us shows that the old-fashioned belief in Boethius as a theologian was well founded. 'He wrote a book concerning the Holy Trinity, and certain dogmatic chapters, and a book against Nestorius.' That is a sufficiently accurate resumÉ of the four theological treatises enumerated above. Here Usener also observes—and I am inclined to agree with him—that there is a certain resemblance between the style of thought of these treatises and that of the 'Consolation' itself. They are, after all, philosophical rather than religious; one of the earliest samples of that kind of logical discussion of theological dogmas which the Schoolmen of the Middle Ages so delighted to indulge in. The young philosopher, hearing at his father-in-law's table the discussions between Chalcedonian and Monophysite with which all Rome resounded, on account of the prolonged strife with the Church of Constantinople, set himself down to discuss the same topics which they were wrangling over by the light—to him so clear and precious—of the Greek philosophy. There was perhaps in this employment neither reverence nor irreverence. He had not St. Augustine's intense and almost passionate conviction of the truth of Christianity; but he was quite willing to accept it and to discourse upon it, as he discoursed on Arithmetic, Music, and Geometry.

But when premature old age, solitude, and the loss of liberty befell him, it was not to the highly elaborated Christian theology of the Sixth Century that he turned for support and consolation. Probably enough the very fact that he knew some of the pitfalls in the way deterred him from that dangerous journey, where the slightest deviation on either side landed him in some detested heresy, the heresy of Nestorius or of Eutyches. 'On revient toujours À ses premiers amours;' and even so Boethius, though undoubtedly professing himself a Christian, and about to die in full communion with the Catholic Church, turned for comfort in his dungeon to the philosophical studies of his youth, especially to the ethical writings of Plato and Aristotle.

After all, the title of the treatise is 'Philosophiae Consolatio;' and however vigorous a literature of philosophy may in the course of centuries have grown up in the Christian domain, in the sixth century the remembrance of the old opposition between Christianity and Philosophy was perhaps still too strong for a writer to do anything more than stand neutral as to the distinctive claims of Christianity, when he had for the time donned the cloak of the philosopher.

We learn from the fragment before us that Boethius also wrote a 'Bucolic Poem.' This is an interesting fact, and helps to explain the facility with which he breaks into song in the midst of the 'Consolation.' It may have been to this effort of the imagination that he alluded when he said at the beginning of that work—

We would gladly know something more of this 'Bucolic Poem' indited by the universal genius, Boethius.

III. As for Cassiodorus himself, the additional information furnished by this fragment has been already discussed in the foregoing chapter. That he was Consilarius to his father during his Praefecture, and that in that capacity he recited an eloquent panegyric on Theodoric, which was rewarded by his promotion to the high office of the Quaestorship, are facts which we learn from this fragment only; and they are of high importance, not only for the life of Cassiodorus but for the history of Europe at the beginning of the Sixth Century, because they make it impossible to assign to any letter in the 'Variae' an earlier date than 500.