The Consolation of Philosophy

The Consolation of Philosophy is the work Boethius wrote in prison, and it begins with a man in despair. The Standard Ebooks edition presents a translation based on the Latin text of Peiper, Leipzig, 1874. The opening shows Boethius seated in his cell, grief-stricken and indignant at the injustice of his fall, writing verses that describe his condition. His first poem, a complaint, laments that the Muses who once helped him compose happy verse now guide his pen in sorrow. They alone stayed faithful in the hour of danger. He describes premature old age, white hairs and a shrunken frame, and he wishes for a death that does not come. He also remembers how friends once called him happy, and he concludes that a man who could fall so far was never firmly founded.

While he is thinking in silence, a woman appears above his head. Her face is venerable, her eyes burn with more than human keenness, and her years are many, yet she seems not to belong to our age. Her height shifts: sometimes ordinary, sometimes her forehead seems to strike the sky. Her robe is of imperishable cloth that she wove herself, but it is tarnished and torn by violent hands, each of which has snatched away what it could grasp. On its lower edge is the Greek letter Pi and on its upper edge the letter Theta, with steps like a staircase between them. In her right hand she holds a notebook and in her left a staff.

She sees the Muses of Poetry at his bedside dictating his lamentations and she is angry. She accuses them of feeding his illness with sweet poison, of choking the crop of reason with the thorns of passion, and of accustoming minds to disease instead of freeing them. This man, she says, was nurtured in the Eleatic and Academic philosophies. She drives them out as sirens and promises that her own muses will heal him. The Muses leave ashamed, with downcast eyes.

Boethius, his sight dimmed by weeping, cannot tell who she is. He stays dumbfounded, eyes on the ground. She sits on the edge of his couch and sings a second poem mourning the state of his mind. It recalls that he once ranged the heavens, tracked the sun and the waxing and waning moon, and sought the causes of winds and seas, and it contrasts that man with the one now sunk in darkness and tossed by care.

The book’s own summaries sketch what follows in Book I. Boethius recognises his mistress Philosophy. She reminds him that ignorant crowds have persecuted philosophy before. She asks him to tell his griefs, and he recounts his unjust accusation and ruin, ending with a prayer that moral disorder in human affairs be set right. Philosophy accepts his self-defence but grieves for the change in his mind. She plans gentle remedies first. Her questions reveal three causes of his sickness: he has forgotten his own nature, he does not know the end toward which the universe tends, and he does not know how the world is governed.

The prefatory proem explains the circumstances. Boethius was a Roman of ancient family, consul in 510, later head of the civil administration under Theodoric. His sons were made joint consuls in 522, and within a year he was a solitary prisoner at Pavia. The work alternates prose and verse, like dialogue and chorus in a Greek play.