boethius on the consolation of philosophy

In a tiny cell, he contemplated his rapid fall from grace, his love for his family and the unfairness of his destiny. With scarcely time to say goodbye to his family, Boethius was carted off to prison.Įntirely innocent but also aware of the risk he was in, Boethius fell into despair. There was a knock at the door and a gang of Theodoric’s guards accused him (quite falsely) of having plotted against the increasingly paranoid and vengeful king. Bertrand Russell wrote of him: He would have been remarkable in any age, in the age in which he lived, he is utterly amazing.īut suddenly, in the spring of 523 A.D, Boethius’s fortune ran out. Under a sense of obligation to his society, Boethius eventually entered politics and occupied a number of elevated administrative positions under the ruler of Italy, Theodoric, king of the Ostrogoths.

He lived in a sumptuous villa in Rome and was married to a kind and beautiful woman called Rusticiana, with whom he had two handsome, clever and affectionate sons. From an early age, he took an interest in the Classics, and translated much of Plato and Aristotle’s work from Greek into Latin it is thanks in great measure to his efforts that Classical philosophy made its way into the Middle Ages and from there into the modern world.įor many years, Boethius’s life was seemingly blessed. Boethius was born into a highly successful and wealthy family in the years after the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West.

The book was the work of the Italian statesman, scholar and academic Boethius, who penned it in a few months in appalling circumstances in a prison in Pavia in 523 A.D. Editions appeared in all the large European languages, Chaucer translated it into English, as did Sir Thomas More and Elizabeth I – and Dante made it a centerpiece of the intellectual scaffolding of his Divine Comedy. Present in every educated person’s library, it was titled in Latin De Consolatione Philosophiae or, as we know it in English today, The Consolation of Philosophy. For some 400 years across the European Middle Ages, one philosophy book was prized above any other.

Boethius on the consolation of philosophy