intellectual effort. Rather he was moved by an ardent wish to place before his Latin contemporaries what was best in the classic education and philosophy. He is first of all a translator from Greek to Latin, and, secondly, a helpful commentator on the works which he translates.
He was little over twenty years of age when he wrote his first work, the De arithmetica.[1] It was a free translation of the Arithmetic of Nichomachus, a Neo-Pythagorean who flourished about the year 100. Boëthius's work opens with a dedicatory Praefatio to his father-in-law Symmachus. In that and in the first chapter he evinces a broad conception of education, and shows that lovers of wisdom should not despise arithmetic, music, geometry and astronomy, the fourfold path or quadrivium, a word which he may have been the first to use in this sense.[2] With him arithmetic treats of quantity in and by itself; music, of quantity related to measure; geometry, of moveless, and astronomy, of moving, quantity. He was a better Greek scholar than mathematician; and his free translation ignores some of the finer points of Nichomachus's work, which would have impressed one better versed in mathematics.[3]
The young scholar followed up his maiden work with a treatise on Music, showing a knowledge of Greek harmonics. Then came a De geometria, in which the writer draws from Euclid as well as from the practical knowledge of Roman surveyors.[4] He composed or translated other works on elementary branches of education, as appears from a royal letter written by Cassiodorus in the name of Theodoric: "In your translations Pythagoras the musician, Ptolemy the astronomer, Nichomachus the arithmetician, Euclid the geometer are read by Italians, while Plato the theologian and Aristotle the logician dispute in Roman voice; and you have given back the mechanician Archimedes in Latin to the Sicilians."[5] Making
- ↑ Migne, Pat. Lat. 63, col. 1079-1167. Also edited by Friedlein (Leipsic, 1867).
- ↑ I know of no earlier employment of the word to designate these four branches of study. But one might infer from Boëthius's youth at this time that he received it from a teacher.
- ↑ See Cantor, Vorlesungen über die Ges. der Mathematik, i. 537-540.
- ↑ See Cantor, o.c. i. 540-551.
- ↑ Cassiodorus, Ep. variae, i. 45.
