Consolation of Philosophy

What It Is

A short Latin dialogue, about a hundred pages, written in 524. Boethius was a Roman aristocrat, a consul, and the best philosopher in the West: he was translating the whole of Plato and Aristotle into Latin, a project that would have changed European thought had he finished it. He served Theodoric the Ostrogoth, king of Italy. He was accused of treason, imprisoned at Pavia, and executed. He wrote this in prison.

The form is worth knowing about before you begin. It alternates prose argument with lyric poems in a range of classical metres, so the book keeps switching between reasoning and singing. The prose builds a case; the poems do something the prose cannot.

One fact shapes everything: Boethius was a Christian, and Christianity is never mentioned. The consolation on offer is philosophical, argued from Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics alone. Scholars have argued for centuries about why. You should carry the question with you.

Why It Matters

After the Bible, this was the most widely read book in medieval Europe. King Alfred translated it into Old English. Chaucer translated it, and it is under everything he wrote. Elizabeth I translated it too. Gibbon called it a golden volume, not unworthy of the leisure of Plato or Cicero, and Gibbon did not hand out compliments to Christians.

It gave the Middle Ages the Wheel of Fortune, which turns up in every later poem about a fall from greatness. It gave philosophy the standard treatment of a problem that will not go away: if God knows what you will do, is the doing still yours? Boethius takes it on directly, and the answer he gives has been in play ever since.

What actually keeps it alive is smaller and harder. It is an argument about which of the things you own were ever yours. Boethius had wealth, rank, reputation, a family, a future, and lost all of it in the space of a year. He then sat down and worked out, rigorously, what any of it had ever been worth. He is not being brave about this. He is thinking, and the thinking is the consolation.

Before You Read

Five books, three or four hours. It is short, and it is not easy.

The first half is direct and moves quickly. The second is real metaphysics, and Book V — providence, foreknowledge, freedom — deserves to be read twice, slowly, with a pencil.

Read the poems. They are not ornaments between the arguments; they carry weight the arguments cannot, and they mark where the book has got to at each stage. Read them aloud. Skip the verse and you have read half a book.

Which Translation to Read

• Victor Watts (Penguin Classics, 1969; revised 1999) — recommended. The version to read. Watts renders the prose in fluid modern English and, crucially, makes the poems work as English poems, which is where every other translator strains. Cheap, portable, and the one that has carried this book to general readers for half a century. The cost: he is freer with the Latin than the scholars like, and the notes are minimal for a text with this much philosophy in it. View on Amazon →
• P. G. Walsh (Oxford World's Classics, 1999). Tighter on the Latin, fuller notes, a better guide to the philosophical background. The one to study from. The cost: the verse translations are flat beside Watts, and the apparatus is aimed at a seminar.
• Joel Relihan (Hackett, 2001). The most interesting and the most argumentative. Relihan reproduces the metrical variety of the poems in English and reads the book against its own surface. The cost: his interpretation is contested, it saturates the introduction and notes, and the English is effortful by design.

Take Watts to read it, Walsh to study it, Relihan to be provoked by it. David Slavitt's version (Harvard University Press, 2008) is the most enjoyable and the furthest from the Latin; a fine second reading, a poor first one.

Getting the Most From This Book

Read it at one or two sittings. It was built as a single sustained argument and it loses its grip if you parcel it out over a month.

Save Relihan's introduction, and any introduction that takes a strong line on how the book ends, until afterwards. Watts's is safe to read first.

Notice that the argument is also a treatment. Every stage of the philosophy is calibrated to the condition of the man receiving it, which is why the book has consoled people for fifteen centuries rather than merely convincing them.

The common mistake is to read it as a period piece — quaint medieval comfort, the wheel and the goddess. It is a working argument by a first-rate mind under conditions none of us will face, and it never stops being an argument. That is the reason to read it now.