The Hindu-Arabic Numerals c9.43

c9.43

First, who was Boethius, — Divus¹ Boethius as he was called in the Middle Ages? Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius² was born at Rome *c.* 475. He was a member of the distinguished family of the Anicii,³ 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.⁴ He married Rusticiana, daughter of the senator Symmachus, and this union of two such powerful families allowed him to move in the highest circles.⁵ 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 Pavia⁶ and his execution in 524.⁷ 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.⁸ He was accordingly looked upon as a saint,¹ his bones were enshrined,² and as a natural consequence his books were among the classics in the church schools for a thousand years.³ 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.