The Consolation of Philosophy

*The Consolation of Philosophy* is the best-known work of Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, a Roman statesman and scholar who lived at the intersection of the classical and medieval periods. Identified by fifteenth-century humanist Lorenzo Valla as "the last of the Romans and the first of the scholastics," Boethius was born in Rome around 476 to an aristocratic family, received a thorough education in Greek and rose rapidly to the ranks of senator, master of offices, and sole consul. In 523, having publicly expressed support for a senator who had been accused of treason, Boethius was stripped of all honors and exiled to Pavia, where he composed the work translated into English as *The Consolation of Philosophy*.

Boethius himself is one of the work's two main characters. At its beginning, he sits in prison composing a song of lament at his unjust detention. The figure of Philosophy then appears to him, a woman of supernatural appearance who begins a dialogue with the prisoner, leading him through disquisitions on the nature of fortune, true and false happiness, fate and providence, and the relationship between free will and divine foreknowledge.

With sections alternating between prose and verse, *The Consolation of Philosophy* serves as one of Western literature's foremost examples of prosimetrical composition. It contains in total thirty-nine poems, leading scholar Joel Relihan to describe it as "the most prosimetric text of antiquity."

The importance of Christianity to the work is disputed: central sections concern God, the "Divine," and "Providence," but seemingly only as represented in the Greek philosophical tradition; the dialogue proceeds without ever mentioning the Catholic faith. Nevertheless, the work was interpreted in roundly Christian terms in the Middle Ages, and Dante would refer to Boethius in the *Divine Comedy* as "the sainted soul, which the fallacious world / Makes manifest to him who listeneth well."

Unlike Boethius' theological tractates and logical commentaries, the *Consolation* was immensely popular for many centuries, having been rendered in English by King Alfred, Queen Elizabeth I, and Chaucer. Gibbon judged it to be "a golden volume not unworthy of the leisure of Plato or Tully."