Boethius

Boethius and The Consolation of Philosophy. For some 400 years across the European Middle Ages, one philosophy book was prized above any other. 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. 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. 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. Boethius was born into a highly successful and wealthy family in the years after the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West. 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. For many years, Boethius’s life was seemingly blessed. 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. 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.

Bertrand Russell wrote of him: He would have been remarkable in any age, in the age in which he lived, he is utterly amazing... (continues)

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PODCAST: The Consolations of Philosophy
In Our Time Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the consolation of Philosophy. In the 6th century AD, a successful and intelligent Roman politician called Boethius found himself unjustly accused of treason. Trapped in his prison cell, awaiting a brutal execution, he found solace in philosophical ideas - about the true nature of reality, about injustice and evil and the meaning of living a moral life. His thoughts did not save him from death, but his ideas lived on because he wrote them into a book. He called it The Consolation of Philosophy. The Consolation of Philosophy was read widely and a sense of consolation is woven into many philosophical ideas, but what for Boethius were the consolations of philosophy, what are they more generally and should philosophy lead us to consolation or lead us from it?With AC Grayling, Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London; Melissa Lane, Senior University Lecturer in History at the University of Cambridge and Roger Scruton, Research Professor at the Institute for the Psychological Sciences.