The Consolation of Philosophy

and donated grain to the Roman plebs. How great the celebrity of that act was can be known from the fact that the blessed Fulgentius, who had come to Rome from a deserted Africa, having been exhausted at that time by the new cruelty of Trasimund, seeing that procession, hearing the acclamations, and weighing the admirable order of things with himself, exclaimed:

'How beautiful that heavenly Jerusalem must be, if the earthly Rome shines so! And if in this age the dignity of such honor is given to those who love vanity, what honor and glory will be bestowed upon the saints contemplating the truth!'

But Boethius himself elegantly described the splendor of that act in the second book of this work, where he introduces Philosophy speaking thus:

'If any fruit of mortal things has any weight of beatitude, can the memory of that light be erased by any mass of evils pressing in, when you saw your two children being carried out from your house as Consuls at the same time, amidst a throng of fathers, and amidst the eagerness of the people? When, as they sat in their curule chairs in the Curia, you, as the orator of royal praise, earned the glory of talent and eloquence? When in the Circus, standing between your two sons, you satisfied the expectation of the surrounding multitude with consular triumphal largesse?'

The second consulship of our Boethius fell in the year of Christ 510, the eighteenth year of King Theodoric. In this year, Consul Boethius set out to illustrate the categories of Aristotle with commentaries. He himself testifies to this at the beginning of his Commentary.

'Although,' he says, 'the cares of consular office hinder us from consuming all our leisure and full effort in these studies, it nevertheless seems to pertain to some care of the Republic to instruct citizens in the doctrine of learned things; nor would I deserve ill of my citizens if, since the ancient virtue of men transferred the rule of other cities to this one Republic, I instruct the manners of our city, at least regarding what remains, with the arts of Greek wisdom. Therefore, not even this itself is devoid of the consul's duty; since it has always been the Roman custom to honor, more and more through imitation, whatever was most beautiful and praiseworthy among any of the nations.'

For the very grave man judged that the time he had free from the Republic could not be better spent...