The Arian heresy, if we are to understand it aright, must be recognised as an orientalism having much in common with Judaism and the later Mahometanism.  It denied several of the statements of the Nicene Creed, those monoliths upon which the new Europe was to be founded.  It maintained that the Father and the Son are distinct Beings; that the Son though divine is not equal to the Father; that the Son had a state of existence previous to His appearance upon earth, but is not from Eternity; that Christ Jesus was not really man but a divine being in a case of flesh.  Already against it the future frowned dark and enormous as the Alps.

Such was the heresy at the root of the Ostrogothic kingdom, and it is significant that the cause of the first open alienation between Theodoric and the Catholics of Italy was concerned with the Jews.  It seems that the Jews, whom Theodoric had always protected, had, during his absence from Ravenna, mocked the Christian rite of baptism and made sport of it by throwing one another into one of the two muddy rivers of that city, and also by some blasphemous foolishness aimed at the Mass.  The Catholic population had naturally retaliated by burning all the Jewish synagogues to the ground.  Theodoric, like all the Gothic Arians, sided with the Jews and fined the Catholic citizens of Ravenna, publicly flogging those who could not pay, in order that the synagogues might be rebuilt.  Such was the first open breach between the king and the Romans, who now began to remind themselves that there was an Augustus at Constantinople.  This memory, which had slumbered while pope and emperor were in conflict—­such is the creative and formative power of religion—­was stirred and strengthened by the reconciliation between the emperor Justin and the Holy See.  It is curious that the man who was to lead the Catholic party and to suffer in the national cause had translated thirty books of Aristotle into Latin; his name was Boethius and he was master of the offices.

This great and pathetic figure had been till the year 523 continually in the favour of Theodoric.  In that year suddenly an accusation was brought against the patrician Albinus of “sending letters to the emperor Justin hostile to the royal rule of Theodoric.”  In the debate which followed, Boethius claimed to speak and declared that the accusation was false, “but whatever Albinus did, I and the whole senate of Rome with one purpose did the same.”  We may well ask for a clear statement of what they had done; we shall get no answer.  Boethius himself speaks of “the accusation against me of having hoped for Roman freedom,” and adds:  “As for Roman freedom, what hope is left to us of that?  Would that there were any such hope.”  To the charge of “hoping for Roman freedom” was added an accusation of sorcery.