that Dietrich was damned for his Arianism, and that all his virtues
went for nothing because he had not charity, which exists, he says,
alone within the pale of the Church), cannot help the naive comment,
that if the Pontiff did really write that letter, he cannot wonder at
Dietrich's being a little angry. Kings now, it is true, can afford
to smile at such outbursts; they could not afford to do so in
Dietrich's days. Such words meant murder, pillage, civil war,
dethronement, general anarchy; and so Dietrich threw Pope John into
prison. He had been in bad health before he sailed to
Constantinople, and in a few months he died, and was worshipped as a
saint.

As for the political conspiracy, we shall never know the truth of it.
The 'Anonymus Valesii,' meanwhile says, that when Cyprian accused
Albinus, Boethius answered, 'It is false: but if Albinus has done
it, so have I, and the whole senate, with one consent. It is false,
my Lord King!' Whatever such words may prove, they prove at least
this, that Boethius, as he says himself, was the victim of his own
chivalry. To save Albinus, and the senate, he thrust himself into
the fore-front of the battle, and fell at least like a brave man.
Whether Albinus, Boethius, and Symmachus did plot to bring in Justin;
whether the senate did send a letter to him, I cannot tell.
Boethius, in his De Consolatione, denies it all; and Boethius was a
good man. He says that the letters in which he hoped for the liberty
of Rome were forged; how could he hope for the impossible? but he
adds, 'would that any liberty could have been hoped for! I would
have answered the king as Cassius did, when falsely accused of
conspiring by Caligula: "If I had known of it, you should not."'
One knows not whether Dietrich ever saw those words: but they prove
at least that all his confidence, justice, kindness to the patrician