 Like all his contemporaries, Boethius believed in astral influence, and he seems to have believed in the “great year”, i.e., that every so many years (some said 36,000) all heavenly bodies are aligned in the same way, meaning that if everything happening on Earth depended on celestial causality, history would be cyclical. Yet, he points out that such a cyclical view of history is unwarranted, for there is at least one independent causal factor that can override the celestial influence: human free will (Quaest. Ph., 247–253). The thesis about the great year and the exact repetition of history was condemned in 1277; perhaps bishop Tempier’s men found it defended by some other master, perhaps they just read Boethius too superficially.