Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius was executed on October 23, 525 A.D. under orders of Theodoric, the king of the Goths. Philosopher Boethius was either beheaded or bludgeoned to death for supposed treason by the Gothic strongman, who had lapsed into the Arian heresy. The author of several works of theology and philosophy, he is best known for The Consolations of Philosophy. This work would have profound effects throughout the Middle Ages, being first translated into Anglo-Saxon by King Alfred himself and into later English by Geoffrey Chaucer. Recognized as a saint by the Catholic Church, a pious tradition holds that following his beheading, Boethius’ corpse was scoffingly asked by the king’s executioner “Who hath put thee to death?” “Wicked men,” replied the disembodied head which was then taken up by the corpse that then walked to the nearby churchyard for burial. Boethius is mentioned in the farcical novel “A Confederacy of Dunces” by Louisiana author John Kennedy O’Toole as is the device of the Wheel of Fortune so central to Boethius’ writings and to O’Toole’s fictional character, Ignatius P. O’Reilly.
According to Anglican Bishop James Usher of seventeenth century Ireland, it is on this day at 9 AM that the Lord God created the Earth and everything on it in 400 BC.
The author of famed novel Dr. Zhivago – a romance centering on the Bolshevik Revolution – won the Nobel Prize for literature on this day in 1958. Boris Pasternak was expelled from the Soviet Writers’ Union on October 28 and thereafter wired his “voluntary refusal” of the Norwegian prize because of “the meaning given to this honor in the community to which I belong.” Pasternak was imprisoned for a time in the Gulag.
On this day in 1925 was born author Gore Vidal, raconteur and author of several works including the pornographic “Myra Breckinridge".
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