In 523 AD Boethius was among the most powerful men in Ostrogothic Italy. From a family of consuls and fluent in Greek philosophy, he served King Theoderic the Great as magister officiorum, the master of offices who ran the kingdom’s administration. As Theoderic grew suspicious that Roman senators were conspiring with Constantinople, Boethius defended a fellow senator and was himself accused of treason on the basis of disputed letters. He was imprisoned near Pavia for about a year awaiting execution, and there he wrote The Consolation of Philosophy, a prosimetrical Menippean satire alternating prose and verse in which Lady Philosophy, her robes torn by lesser philosophers, visits him in his cell.
She tells him that wealth, fame and power belong to Fortune, whose wheel always turns, and that virtue is the one good it cannot take. She argues that the wicked can never reach true happiness and sink toward an animal state, and that criminals should be treated like sick patients. The book never mentions Christianity, yet it became one of medieval Christianity’s most loved texts, and Boethius is called the last of the Romans and the first of the scholastics. Its songs, written in neumes, were thought lost until 2016.
- King Alfred the Great translated it into Old English, Geoffrey Chaucer into Middle English, and Queen Elizabeth I later made her own translation.
- Its influence reaches Dante, Milton’s Paradise Lost and J.R.R. Tolkien’s treatment of evil and free will.
- The main character of A Confederacy of Dunces is obsessed with Boethius.
- From the 9th to the 13th century, musicians set hundreds of Latin songs to the book’s poems.
- In 2016 University of Cambridge researchers and the ensemble Sequentia reconstructed and performed the melodies.
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