Trois témoins privilégiés de l’état de la culture dans l’Italie de Théodoric : Ennode, Boèce et Cassiodore

Abstract

Boethius is the most important intellectual figure of Theodoric’s kingdom. At the instigation of his father-in-law Symmachus, he undertook to enrich the Latin culture via a vast program of scientific and philosophic translations of Greek writings. As shown by Ennodius and Cassiodorus, his contemporaries didn’t understand the interest of these theoretical works : in fact, their culture was basically literary. It may be for that reason that Boethius tried in another way, in his latest writing composed just before his death, to hold the attention of the Roman men of letters by using in a propaedeutic way the rhetoric’s and the poetry’s honey to prepare them at the philosophic reflections developed in the Consolation of Philosophy from 3 p. 10.