ABSTRACT
Around 422, owing to accusations of treason, Boethius was imprisoned by Theodoric, king of the Ostrogoths, and sentenced to death. A few years later he was executed – an unseemly end for a man devoted to learning and the public good. As a young scholar, he had grand plans to translate all of Plato’s dialogues and Aristotle’s treatises into Latin – with commentaries to boot!1 As a politician, he espoused ideals inspired by the books he had studied, especially Plato’s Republic. Sitting in prison, however, and condemned to death, Boethius was sick with grief, his unfinished projects and high ideals only exacerbating his sorrow. Is it too far-fetched to imagine that in this situation Boethius yearned to confront his lot
more like a Stoic – untroubled, objective, self-sufficient? This may seem unlikely, given the criticisms he levels at the Stoics in works written prior to his imprisonment. But in the face of death, Boethius finds a place for Stoicism in life. We see this in the magnum opus he wrote during his imprisonment, the Consolation of Philosophy, which recounts a dialogue between the Prisoner (i.e. Boethius as a character in his own work) and Philosophy, a mysterious lady who appears to him in his cell. Under her care, the Prisoner recovers from grief by achieving a Stoic attitude – a crucial stage in his convalescence, though one he passes beyond on the way toward full intellectual health. And so, although in this work Boethius still considers Stoicism to be philosophically constricting, he has nonetheless learned how it may prove indispensable in one’s intellectual development. In the Consolation, then, Boethius arrives at a twofold judgment – a “mixed review” – of
Stoicism. That he remains critical of Stoicism is evident in the opening pages. When Philosophy first appears, her clothes are described as tattered; for “the hands of certain violent men tore this garment and carried off little portions as each was able” (Cons. 1.1, 23-24). Philosophy recalls her own persecution, especially in the persons of Socrates and Plato, who clothed her beautifully with courageous perseverance. Since then, however, Philosophy has not fared well:
After [Plato], the crowds of Epicureans and Stoics and the rest, each for their own part, were struggling to go and capture his inheritance and to drag me away screaming and resisting, as if I were part of their loot. Doing so, they tore apart this garment which I had woven with my own hands, and they went off with little pieces they had snatched from it, believing that the whole of me had gone off with
them. Because a few traces of my outfit were seen in these pieces, their imprudence regarded me as their kin, and not a few of them strayed off into the errors of the profane multitude.
