Symmachus

Quintus Aurelius Memmius Symmachus (d. c. 525/526) was a Roman aristocrat, consul (485), and princeps senatus who stood at the head of the senatorial nobility in Ostrogothic Italy under Theoderic the Great. A learned man in the old Roman tradition, he authored a (now lost) seven-book Roman History and was the father-in-law and patron of the philosopher Boethius. When Boethius fell under suspicion of treason, Symmachus defended him; he too was accused, arrested, and executed on Theoderic's orders, a killing that became emblematic of the rupture between the Gothic king and the Catholic senatorial elite. He appears in this corpus through the letters of his contemporaries Cassiodorus and Ennodius of Pavia. NOTE: the database has merged several distinct men named 'Symmachus' under one node — most prominently this senator (the Cassiodorus/Ennodius context), but the 'pope_symmachus' material belongs to Pope Symmachus (r. 498–514) and any 'isidore_pelusium' reference to a separate 5th-century Egyptian correspondent; the bio above describes the dominant figure only.