Boethius - Early Life

Early Life

Boethius' exact birth date is unknown. Boethius was born to a patrician family; his father Manlius Boethius was appointed consul in 487. However, his father died when Boethius was young, and he was adopted by another patrician, Quintus Aurelius Memmius Symmachus. Memmius Symmachus raised him and instilled in him a love for literature and philosophy. Both Memmius Symmachus and Boethius were fluent in Greek, an increasingly rare skill at the time in the Western Empire, which has led some scholars to think that Boethius was educated in the East. According to John Moorhead, the traditional view is that Boethius studied in Athens based on Cassiodorus's rhetoric describing Boethius' learning in one of his letters. The French scholar Pierre Courcelle has argued that Boethius studied at Alexandria with the Neo-Platonist philosopher Ammonius Hermiae. However, Moorhead observes that the evidence supporting Boethius having studied in Alexandria "is not as strong as it may appear", and concludes "Perhaps Boethius was able to acquire his formidable learning without travelling."

Although Boethius is believed to have been born into a Christian family, some scholars in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have conjectured that he abandoned Christianity for paganism, perhaps on his deathbed. Momigliano argues "many people have turned to Christianity for consolation. Boethius turned to paganism. His Christianity collapsed — it collapsed so thoroughly that perhaps he did not even notice its disappearance." However, this view does not reflect the majority of current scholarship on the matter.

Due to his erudition, Boethius entered the service of Theodoric the Great. His earliest documented acts on behalf of the Ostrogothic ruler were to investigate allegations that the paymaster of Theodoric's Bodyguards had debased the coins of their pay, to produce a water-clock which Theodoric intended to give to king Gundobad of the Burgunds, and to recruit a lyre-player to perform for king Clovis of the Franks.

Boethius married his foster-father's daughter Rusticiana, and their children included two boys, Symmachus and Boethius. He held many important offices during Theodoric's reign, including being appointed consul for the year 510, but Boethius confesses in his De consolatione philosophiae that his greatest achievement was to have both his sons made consuls for the same year (522), and finding himself sitting "between the two consuls and as if it were a military triumph let your largess fulfil the wildest expectations of the people packed in their seats around you."