Consolation of Philosophy

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Consolation of Philosophy

$10.99

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Written in a Cell, Read for a Millennium

Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius wrote The Consolation of Philosophy in a prison cell in Pavia around the year 524 AD, awaiting execution on charges of treason that were almost certainly fabricated. He had been one of the most powerful men in the Roman world: a senator, a consul, the chief minister to the Ostrogothic king Theodoric. Then he fell. The Consolation is what he wrote on the way down.

What the Book Contains

The text alternates between prose and verse, a classical form called prosimetrum. Boethius, in his cell, receives a visit from Lady Philosophy, a personified figure who arrives to diagnose his despair and cure it. The dialogue that follows covers the nature of fortune (it was never yours to keep), the problem of evil (it damages the doer more than the victim), the compatibility of divine foreknowledge with human free will, and the question of whether happiness can be found in wealth, power, fame, or pleasure (it cannot).

Boethius draws on Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics, but the voice is his own. The argument is not academic. It is a man trying to talk himself out of despair, and the intellectual rigor of the attempt is what gives it weight. The Consolation was the most widely read book in medieval Europe after the Bible. Chaucer translated it. Dante cited it. For a thousand years, it was the standard Western answer to the question of how to endure unjust suffering.