Sailing from Byzantium

by Colin Wells

  It was against this background—the successful resolution of the schism—that Theoderic decided to arrest, try, imprison, torture, and eventually execute his magister officio-rum, his master of offices, the highest-ranking and most honored minister in his civil administration, his learned and versatile subject Boethius. The charge was treason, Procopius tells us, “setting about a revolution,” a false accusation that Procopius claims was trumped up by other Romans, jealous of Boethius’ wealth and standing, who managed to hoodwink the otherwise perspicacious Theoderic.

  It's a typically vague reference, for Procopius tends to be long on action and short on insight. Boethius himself gives a fuller account in The Consolation of Philosophy, which he composed in prison as he awaited execution. Soon after Boethius wrote this influential masterpiece—a complex and poignant mix of poetry and prose that would be second only to the Bible in its influence in the West during the Middle Ages—the sentence was carried out. Boethius, we're told, was first tortured by having a rope tightened around his forehead until his eyes began to pop out, and then he was clubbed to death.

  As Procopius observes, the torture and execution of Boethius are difficult to square with Theoderic's reputation for enlightened liberality. While Procopius implies that Theoderic was manipulated by Boethius’ enemies in the senate, many observers have found this explanation lame. One intriguing possibility is that the Gothic king executed Boethius quite deliberately, having learned that the Roman had taken part in a political conspiracy to reunite East and West under Byzantine rule by ending the schism. According to this scenario, Boethius’ theological writings played a key part in the plot. Without religious rapprochement there wasn't a hope of political unity, and Boethius’ theological tractates pushed reconciliation of the schism along exactly the lines proposed by Justinian, who was negotiating for the Byzantines. In effect, they were imperial propaganda written as part of a deliberate program to overthrow Gothic rule in Italy. Theoderic executed Boethius because Boethius, acting as a Byzantine agent, had betrayed the Gothic king.

  As East and West drifted apart in succeeding centuries, in different ways each would be haunted by the uneasy ghost of Boethius. The loss of Greek came naturally, as Western Europe began to realign itself on a new axis, one that ran from north to south rather than east to west. The very fact that Boethius would be celebrated for knowing Greek (among the many other things he was celebrated for) is telling, as is his judgment that the most useful thing he could do vis-à-vis Greek philosophy was to translate it into Latin, which wouldn't have been as necessary in an earlier age.

  If Boethius had lived long enough to carry out his plan of translating Aristotle and Plato, Western intellectual history would have been startlingly different. He never got to Plato at all. Of Aristotle's vast body of work, Boethius managed to render into Latin only the six pieces on logic known as the Organon, or the “Instrument.” Essentially a set of rules for systematic thinking, the Organon lies at the heart of Aristotelian rationalism. It is here that Aristotle lays out for his readers such intellectual methods as the syllogism, which proceeds in careful steps from premise to conclusion: Socrates is a philosopher; all philosophers are human; therefore Socrates is human.

  These translations, however, would be ignored for centuries. It was Boethius’ other work that went a long way toward single-handedly fixing the educational curriculum that the West would follow throughout the Middle Ages: dense technical tracts on arithmetic, music theory, astronomy, rhetoric, philosophy, and theology. In contrast with the translations from Greek, these works of synthesis stayed in the mainstream and would become standard reading, the last word on their subjects up to and into the Renaissance.

  Hidden in the work that fell by the wayside was the overarching concern that Boethius shared with the great thinker who would resume his work seven centuries later, Thomas Aquinas: conjungere rationem fidemque, to join faith and reason. Like the idea of reconciling Plato and Aristotle, in some ways parallel to it (for Plato's writings have strongly mystical elements), this need to harmonize cosmic epistemological opposites was an appetite that the West would lose and then rediscover in the centuries to come.

  To replace Boethius as master of offices, Theoderic promoted his court rhetorician Cassiodorus, who had written the fulsome letters requesting Boethius’ services mentioned earlier. Writing such letters in the king's name was part of his job as royal rhetorician, a role he gracefully fulfilled while holding a number of political offices in the first decades of the sixth century. A collection of these urbane missives, carefully edited for publication by Cassiodorus later, survives and is one of the major sources for our picture of Italy in the age of Theoderic.

  Boethius had sailed close to the wind, but Cassiodorus, a careful survivor if ever there was one, sailed squarely with it. All along Cassiodorus had endorsed the ruling Goths, concocting a History of the Goths meant to show how Roman they really were underneath it all. He lived and worked in Ravenna, breathing its atmosphere of eager collaboration, whereas Boethius had remained Roman geographically as well as culturally. Cassiodorus was a civil servant, not a philosopher, not so famous in his own times, and in all respects a more representative figure than the imposing Boethius. Cassiodorus’ long life—he was said to have lived to one hundred—extended into the new age just as Boethius’ was cut short at the edge of the old one.

  Cassiodorus’ service to the Goths was based on his considerable skills as a classically trained rhetorician. It wasn't for much longer that such skills would have a place in Italy. Theoderic himself died in 526, and Justinian put growing diplomatic pressure on the weakened Gothic government. His armies invaded Italy in 535, and in 540 his brilliant general Belisarius captured Ravenna. The collaborator Cassiodorus became, in effect, a prisoner of war. Replacing the Gothic administration with direct rule, the Byzantines spirited Cassiodorus off to Constantinople.

  Though he went as a hostage, they were really doing him a favor. After its strong start, Justinian's Reconquest of Italy bogged down, grinding on for another decade and a half of bitter, destructive fighting. By the time it ended in 553 the Goths had been wiped out and Italy itself devastated. Cassiodorus seems to have stayed in Constantinople the whole time. Although he left no record of his sojourn there, we can imagine how the city must have struck him. Italy was being blasted, but here was wealth and glitter, pomp and power, ceremony and civilization.

  The city stands at the brink of Europe, on a blunt promontory whose hilly tip looks out toward Asia across the narrow Bosporus. According to legend, the Greek colonists who founded the city in archaic times named it after Byzas, their leader; the colonists who had already founded Chalcedon across the Bosporus were accused of blindness for passing up the site. Its southern edge lies on the Sea of Marmara, its northern edge on the Golden Horn, a deep tapered slice cut into the European shore of the Bosporus that gives the city one of the best natural harbors in the world. In the event of attack by sea, the Byzantines would hoist a heavy iron chain across the mouth of the harbor, sealing out the hostile ships.

  Constantine's city was enlarged after a century by Theodosius, whose great double walls run for five miles, cutting the city off by the landward approach. The city's central artery, the Mese, opened onto the Augusteum, a complex of grand public spaces near the promontory's outer tip: the Hippodrome, where chariot races and games were held; numerous forums ringed about with columns, arches, and porticoes; the two ornate Senate Houses, built to symbolize the transfer of power from Rome, along with the vast complex of the Great Palace, where imperial business was transacted, and which overflowed onto the hillside toward the seawalls fronting the Bosporus. Constantinople bristled with commemorative columns, statues, churches, public bathhouses, monasteries, and palaces. In Justinian's day the belief was taking shape that God himself guarded it. It was the center of the world, a temporal version of the heavenly city, a great physical and metaphysical tortoise shell into which the Byzantines would tuck themselves over and over, weat
hering attack after attack by less civilized invaders.

  To our modern ears its very name conjures the exotic, but since its earliest days it thrummed with foreign voices, for it lies at the convergence of trade routes from all points of the compass: north and south by water, between the Mediterranean and the grain-rich ports of the Black Sea; east and west by land, from Europe into farthest Asia. It always remained polyglot, a place where unknown tongues might constantly be heard striking bargains, offering wares, disputing urgent theological matters.

  When Cassiodorus got there, the city was passing through a frenzy of construction. Less than a decade earlier, much of it had been torched in riots that began in the rowdiness of the games at the Hippodrome. Sweeping away the ruins of the old, Justinian had undertaken a spectacular building spree. Public baths, government buildings, porticoed palaces, and especially churches all arose in just a few years. In the city center, along the Mese, the Church of the Holy Apostles had survived the fires but was pulled down and rebuilt anyway, bigger and better, in the shape of a cross with five domes. Contruction was under way when Cassiodorus got there, and it was completed during his stay∗

  It would be the second biggest church in the city. Cassiodorus would have been able to visit the biggest right away, Justinian's great new church of Hagia Sophia, which replaced a burned-down original, and which the emperor's builders had recently finished. Surmounted by a broad, shallow celestial dome more than one hundred feet across, the squat, powerful brick structure commanded the heights near the Hippodrome at the farthest end of the Mese. Centuries earlier, the Romans had invented concrete, using it on its own or in combination with brick and stone to make buildings, aqueducts, monuments, roads. Such knowledge had faded in the West, where brickmaking, like ancient Greek, disappeared for almost a thousand years. It survived in Byzantium, where the bricks and mortar of Hagia Sophia mark the climax of late Roman building.

  Only a few years later, though, the dome collapsed. Jostled from its perch by an earthquake, it had to be replaced by a steeper one. Less impressive to the observer inside, the new dome had the compensatory quality of staying put. The story makes a good allegory of Justinian's reign: grandiose designs bring down the house, which then has to be rebuilt with less grandiosity and more practicality.

  The years that Cassiodorus spent in Constantinople fell precisely on the hinge connecting antiquity and the Middle Ages. The decade of the 540s is when things began to go badly for Justinian and Byzantium. Seemingly concluded with the capture of Ravenna, the war in the West reignited for its long, furious burn through the Italian peninsula. Even so, the Byzantines might have dealt with it, but starting a year or so after Cassiodorus arrived, Constantinople and other Byzantine cities were ravaged by a severe outbreak of bubonic plague, which carried off something like a quarter of Justinian's subjects. In coming decades, the outbreaks would recur over and over, depopulating the empire and putting huge strains on the army. Justinian had other wars to fight as well, having opened up hostilities on a second front in the East, against Persia. When Belisarius sent for reinforcements, none were available.

  Byzantines began turning inward, and Cassiodorus did, too. Sometime around the beginning of the war, he had “converted,” in the ancient sense of embracing a Christian life and Christian values more fully, even if already nominally Christian. Now he stepped completely into the world of the monks. It was probably while in Constantinople that he composed a voluminous commentary on the Psalms that later became the standard guide in the West to reading this text, which was an intimate, daily part of monastic life. By the time he returned to Italy, Cassiodorus was committed to that life.

  Looking around at the wreck that was his homeland, Cassiodorus withdrew to his family's extensive estates in the south. There, near the windswept sea cliffs at Squillace, he established a monastery called Vivarium, “Fishpond.” As monasteries go, it wasn't a powerhouse. It certainly didn't hold a candle to the great monastery of the age, Monte Cassino, which had been founded a couple of decades earlier by St. Benedict, the father of Western monasticism. What seems to ensure its place in history, however, is something its highly literary founder gave it: a scriptorium, a specially equipped room dedicated to the copying of manuscripts. While we can't be sure, it appears that the Vivarium's scriptorium was the first in the West, and that Cassiodorus brought the idea back with him from Byzantium, where such rooms already existed in monasteries as well as in the private homes of aristocratic literati.

  Cassiodorus describes the Vivarium's scriptorium proudly in his book Institutions of Divine and Secular Letters, a sort of monastic handbook cum encyclopedia that is probably his most influential work. It had a sundial for sunny days, a water clock for cloudy ones or nighttime, and “cleverly constructed lamps which … without human attendance abundantly maintain a very full clearness of most copious light.” While the Vivarium foundered soon after Cassiodorus’ death, the scriptorium caught on and became a standard feature of Western monasteries.

  To go with the scriptorium, Cassiodorus gave his monastery an unusually beefy library, including a load of books he had brought back from Constantinople. Scholars used to depict Cassiodorus as the savior of pagan literature at the Vivarium. They now believe that he was interested almost exclusively in religious texts, and that goes as well for the Greek works he brought from Byzantium. It was a Christian library he created, and a Christian intellectual milieu that he fostered, aiming to replace, not to repair, the West's decayed centers of secular learning. He did include some texts of secular Latin authors, but his interest in them now was for purely linguistic instruction. The monks used them as models to improve their knowledge of classical Latin grammar and syntax, which they could then deploy for religious purposes. Outside the church, spoken Latin was turning into Italian, French, and Spanish. Cassiodorus’ last work, written when he was in his nineties, was an elementary manual on Latin spelling, which he put together for the undereducated monks who manned the scriptorium.

  It was a far cry from the secular historical works and high-flown rhetorical flourishes with which he'd begun. But that wide-open world was gone. The scale of things had shrunk. The rhythm and direction of Cassiodorus’ career offer a handy epitome of the general drift in the West toward a church monopoly on learning, as life moved from the public arena to the closer confines of the private estate. There's no doubt that Cassiodorus was a chameleon of the first order, but one has to wonder whether the circumstances of his extreme old age might have brought this chameleon a touch of nostalgic pentimento.

  The Parting

  In the Dark Age that now began, Christendom slowly and organically split itself in two halves, a Latin Catholic half and a Byzantine Orthodox half. One rested on a foundation of Latin church writings, the other on Greek. For centuries both upheld the façade of a single unified church. But the cracks in that façade grew ever wider.

  It wasn't just the church. Justinian's Reconquest crumbled away with the emperor's passing, and into the depopulated Italian peninsula poured a new group of barbarians, the Lombards, who unlike the Goths cared nothing for the prestige of the Roman past. Isolated by the collapse of Byzantine power and under threat from the Lombards, the popes eventually turned north for protection, to the rising power of the Franks. The union was consummated on Christmas Day in the year 800, when Pope Leo III crowned the Frankish king Charlemagne “emperor” of a restored Roman empire. This was a deep affront to the Byzantines when they heard about it. At the time, the empress Irene ruled in Constantinople, and one of the pope's rationales for appropriating the title was that a woman could never be considered the rightful Roman ruler. Byzantine indignation was sharpened by underlying suspicion that the pope was correct.∗ Byzantines started lumping all Westerners together as Frangoi (Franks), perceiving them as an undifferentiated and dangerous barbarian horde.

  In the years, decades, and centuries to come, wrangling over the title emperor of the Romans assumed almost comically exaggerated proportions. With a s
teadfastness that at times approached the delusional, the Byzantines always insisted that they alone were the true “Romans” and that only their emperor could claim the title, maintaining the fiction that Byzantine sway was universal among Christians and that Western kings ruled at their pleasure. But the reality fell short, even though Byzantium began to recover in the early ninth century. By then, the West's isolation had bred self-reliance—among its scrappy and ambitious feudal kings, the most powerful of whom, following the example of Charlemagne, couldn't help but covet the ultimate title, emperor of the Romans; and in the papacy, which, accustomed to standing alone, reserved the right to bestow that title.

  Westerner and Byzantine no longer knew each other, and when introduced they busily erected walls of mutual contempt. Fortune has given us an illuminating window into this estrangement in the figure of Liudprand, a Lombard noble and diplomat who made two visits to Constantinople around the middle of the tenth century, in 949 and 968. The first was in the service of the Burgundian king; the second was on behalf of Liudprand's new master Otto the Great, duke of Saxony, German king, and eventually (inevitably, one might say) “emperor of the Romans.” Between these visits, both of which the prolific Liudprand wrote about in copious detail, Otto appointed him bishop of Cremona, and so he is known to history as Liudprand of Cremona.

  On his first visit he was favorably impressed by the Byzantine emperor Romanus I, and his descriptions dwell on the magnificence of Constantinople's palaces and court ritual, both of which far outshone anything in the West. Like the caliphs of Baghdad, the Byzantines deployed sophisticated devices at court to create an impression of awe-inspiring majesty. A gilded bronze tree stood next to the emperor's throne, with mechanical birds, also gilded, on its branches. Each bird sang the song appropriate to its species. Romanus himself sat on a huge throne guarded by mechanical golden lions, “who beat the ground with their tails and gave a dreadful roar with an open mouth and quivering tongue” as the visitor approached. Then, in a final demonstration of supernatural omnipotence, the throne itself rose magically into the air, up to ceiling level, emperor and all.∗ When it descended seconds later the emperor was wearing a new, elaborate costume. Distance prevented any direct interaction, and the emperor communicated through a secretary with the now thoroughly softened-up visitor.