other · 524 · Pavia
Boethius had everything his world could give — patrician, consul, both sons consuls in the same year, master of offices to Theoderic — and he lost it defending a senator accused of treasonous correspondence with Constantinople. Charged in turn, imprisoned at Pavia, and executed in 524. The Consolation of Philosophy was written in that interval. Philosophy comes to him as a woman and takes his self-pity apart: fortune never promised permanence, the goods he lost were never his, and the good that is worth having cannot be taken. It ends in the hardest place, on whether divine foreknowledge leaves anything free, and answers with the distinction between eternity and mere endlessness that scholastic theology then built on for centuries. What is most striking is what is absent. He had written tractates on the Trinity and against Eutyches and Nestorius, and there is not one specifically Christian word in the Consolation — no scripture, no Christ, no prayer to anything but philosophy. It was nonetheless the most widely read book in the Latin west after the Bible for a thousand years, translated by Alfred, by Chaucer and by Elizabeth I. His other service was quieter and larger: he set out to translate all of Plato and Aristotle into Latin, got through the logic, and that fragment was very nearly all the Aristotle the west had until the twelfth century.
What does a man write when he has been condemned and has some months left?
Not an apologia. An argument with Philosophy about whether any of it was ever his.