He was looked upon by his contemporaries and immediate successors as a master, for Cassiodorus[285] (c. 490-c. 585 A.D.) says to him: "Through your translations the music of Pythagoras and the astronomy of Ptolemy are read by those of Italy, and the arithmetic of Nicomachus and the geometry of Euclid are known to those of the West."[286] Founder of the medieval scholasticism, {73} distinguishing the trivium and quadrivium,[287] writing the only classics of his time, Gibbon well called him "the last of the Romans whom Cato or Tully could have acknowledged for their countryman."[288] The second question relating to Boethius is this: Could he possibly have known the Hindu numerals? In view of the relations that will be shown to have existed between the East and the West, there can only be an affirmative answer to this question. The numerals had existed, without the zero, for several centuries; they had been well known in India; there had been a continued interchange of thought between the East and West; and warriors, ambassadors, scholars, and the restless trader, all had gone back and forth, by land or more frequently by sea, between the Mediterranean lands and the centers of Indian commerce and culture. Boethius could very well have learned one or more forms of Hindu numerals from some traveler or merchant. To justify this statement it is necessary to speak more fully of these relations between the Far East and Europe. It is true that we have no records of the interchange of learning, in any large way, between eastern Asia and central Europe in the century preceding the time of Boethius. But it is one of the mistakes of scholars to believe that they are the sole transmitters of knowledge. {74} As a matter of fact there is abundant reason for believing that Hindu numerals would naturally have been known to the Arabs, and even along every trade route to the remote west, long before the zero entered to make their place-value possible, and that the characters, the methods of calculating, the improvements that took place from time to time, the zero when it appeared, and the customs as to solving business problems, would all have been made known from generation to generation along these same trade routes from the Orient to the Occident. It must always be kept in mind that it was to the tradesman and the wandering scholar that the spread of such learning was due, rather than to the school man. Indeed, Avicenna[289] (980-1037 A.D.) in a short biography of himself relates that when his people were living at Bokh[=a]ra his father sent him to the house of a grocer to learn the Hindu art of reckoning, in which this grocer (oil dealer, possibly) was expert. Leonardo of Pisa, too, had a similar training.