The Consolation of Philosophy

In a prison cell at Pavia, a condemned man is weeping over his ruin when a woman appears at his side and tells him to stop. It is Philosophy herself, come to reason him out of his grief. Boethius had been consul, the most powerful civilian in Italy, until a charge of treason under Theodoric left him awaiting execution. What he wrote in those last months is neither plea nor prayer but a conversation, alternating prose and verse, in which Fortune's wheel turns exactly as it must, raising and dropping every life without malice, because nothing it lends was ever truly given. Wealth, office, reputation: loans, all of them, and all recalled. Only the reasoning soul holds anything that cannot be seized. For a thousand years the grieving reached for this book, Alfred and Chaucer and Elizabeth I among those who translated it, and found a man at the edge of death still insisting, gently, that the argument held.