ABSTRACT
This chapter explains how Boethius and his contemporaries framed and understood his projects of intellectual translatio. It traces De disciplina’s depictions of Athens and Paris as a continuation of the authentic Boethius’s earlier work before turning to examine how De disciplina was used in later institutional histories to vie for prestige. The chapter explains Boethius’s sense of the reproductive nature of the transfer of intellectual life by tracing the erotic language that sometimes surrounds pedagogy, exegesis, and projects of translatio studii. De disciplina exemplifies an understanding of Boethius as a scholar of the world, an intellectual Aeneas or Brutus, who emerges from the ruin the Consolatio anticipates to sanction and pass down a scholastic dynasty grounded in his early work. De disciplina, as a narrative of translatio studii, follows a secular historical model: it celebrates the acquisition and transfer of worldly knowledge, and constructs a strikingly pagan intellectual origin by depicting Boethius as a product of an Athenian education.
