Today, October 23rd, is the 1,500th anniversary of the death of the Roman statesman and writer Boethius, put to death on the orders of the Ostrogoth ruler Theodoric in AD 524. According to one tradition he had a cord twisted round his head so tightly it caused his eyeballs to protrude and was then beaten to death with a club, though the date and exact circumstances of his death are uncertain. October 23rd is the date used for commemoration by the Catholic Church for the man it knows as the Blessed Severinus Boethius.
Why is Boethius worth remembering in the Daily Sceptic?
First, because his story and that of his greatest work The Consolation of Philosophy reminds us that we share with our fellow Europeans a deep culture and long history, full of achievements of the human spirit and memories good and bad, that has nothing to do with the EU. Boethius’s life and writings and their reception are part of our common European heritage.
Second, at a time when we are constantly told that the past is full of bad things that bad people like us did to ‘the Other’, and our history is being removed daily from the walls of Nos 10 and 11 Downing Street, it is good to be reminded of someone whose writings crystallised parts of the 1,000 year old legacy of the preceding Greco-Roman civilisation and passed it on for countless numbers of people to profit from during the 1,500 years that followed.
Boethius was a Roman from a patrician family working as an official for the ‘barbarian’ Ostrogoths who had taken over control of Italy following the fall of the last Roman Emperor of the West in 476. Boethius was Catholic and Theodoric an Arian though political reasons for Theodoric’s decision to imprison and kill him seem more likely than religious ones. Born c. 480, Boethius spent his adult life as a scholarly Roman gentleman reading, thinking and writing. He was steeped in the philosophy and literature of Greece and Rome with Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero and Virgil his daily intellectual companions.
Among many writings he is chiefly remembered for The Consolation of Philosophy, which begins with the encounter in prison between Boethius and Philosophy represented by the figure of a woman. Philosophy’s role in the emerging dialogue is to console and to educate Boethius who, exiled and confined, begins with a long lament about his misfortunes. Philosophy is the doctor who tries out the remedies which might help him to put these in perspective, remind himself of the ends of the Universe, the nature of true happiness and the purpose of his life, and focus his mind on preparing his soul for death. Although Boethius was a Christian in a largely Christian society the Consolation is not a Christian book. It has been heavily Christianised in many translations but has no direct Christian references. This may be one reason for the breadth of its appeal, together with the ways it mingles verse with prose and blends in stories from history and classical mythology to make philosophical points.
The dissemination of the book throughout Europe has been extraordinary. Gilbert Highet, historian of the Western classical tradition, called Boethius “for a thousand years one of the most influential writers in Europe” and the Consolation “one of the great best-sellers”. Parchment copies of the Latin text were circulating in much of Europe throughout the Middle Ages. When printing arrived in the 15th century it quickly became one of the most published texts. There were also many translations into the vernacular. “No other book, except the Bible, was so much translated,” says Highet.
King Alfred worked on an Old English version at the end of the ninth century in the middle of his war with the Danes. Despite his authorship being in dispute the image of Alfred in his embattled Wessex kingdom communing at night with the shade of Boethius in his Pavia prison, while burning the cakes, is one that persists. Other English versions followed, the most notable being Chaucer’s in the late 14th century. The Consolation was translated into German, Provençal, Italian, Dutch, Greek and Hebrew and, above all, into French in which 12 different versions were in circulation in the late Middle Ages. There was even a 17th-century Icelandic version of one of the Consolation’s most moving poems by Stefán Ólafsson, Pastor of Vallanes in remotest north-eastern Iceland.
Educated people continued to be widely familiar with the Consolation up to the 18th century, but readership fell off in the 19th when Boethius slowly ceased to be a name one could assume others would know. The late 20th and early 21st centuries have seen an explosion of Boethian scholarship, together with the publication of David Slavitt’s excellent new translation of the Consolation, but little evidence of continuing general readership, as with so many ‘classic’ texts once widely read.
The Consolation’s readers during the preceding centuries included many women. Its most famous female reader was the now Starmer-cancelled Queen Elizabeth I, herself a former prisoner, who not only turned to it for consolation at a bad time but dictated her own English translation to her secretary during numerous sessions at Windsor in 1593 (she also translated Plutarch and Horace). Other distinguished readers who rated it highly include Samuel Johnson and Leibniz, both of whom also tried their hand at a translation, Erasmus, Robert Southey the Poet Laureate, Casanova who was made to read it when in prison, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Bertrand Russell, who called it “sublime”.
The book’s literary influence has been massive. Allusions to themes in the book can be found in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, in Dante’s Divina Commedia (where in Paradiso Boethius gets a VIP seat in The Circle of the Sun), in Boccaccio and Petrarch, and in both Milton’s Lycidas and his Comus. In the 20th-century Boethius and a copy of the Consolation play a central role in John Kennedy Toole’s Pulitzer Prize novel A Confederacy of Dunces (1980).
The Consolation is an example of ‘prison literature’, a genre to which it makes a major contribution. Boethius links his own fate with the similar ones of four of his predecessors: Cicero (murdered on the orders of Mark Anthony), Seneca (forced to kill himself by his pupil the Emperor Nero), Ovid (exiled by Augustus) and Socrates (sentenced to death by drinking hemlock). The Consolation established key features of the genre: the need to send a message to the outside world, testify for posterity, guide others and show the world that by the success of one’s struggle one has achieved the happiness which comes from the pursuit of virtue.
There was a spate of prison stories referencing Boethius in the late Middle Ages both in England and France. Two were written in London prisons by poets who were casualties of the Wars of the Roses: Thomas Usk, author of The Testament of Love, in Newgate prison from where he was sentenced in 1388 to be drawn, hanged and then beheaded, and George Ashby, who wrote Complaint of a Prisoner in the Fleet, from which prison he was lucky to be released in 1462.
In the following century it was the turn of Thomas More, imprisoned by King Henry VIII for refusing to accept the royal supremacy at the time of the Reformation. It was in the Tower of London while awaiting trial and execution in 1535 that he wrote his meditation Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation, basing it on the Consolation. Four hundred years later Dietrich Bonhoeffer, theologian and anti-Nazi dissident, in Berlin’s Tegel prison turned to More’s Dialogue for consolation in the way that More had turned to Boethius. It was one of the last things he read before he was hanged on Hitler’s orders in April 1945.
This whole story is an illustration of how the past is not “dead and silent”, as it has been called in our contemporary world, if we only make an effort to let it speak. Here we have a man (Bonhoeffer) in Germany at the end of his life in touch through a book with another man (More) in England who in a similar predicament four hundred years before was in his turn consoled by a third man (Boethius) in Italy a thousand years earlier who wrote a book drawing on the wisdom of a civilisation in Greece that had developed over 1,000 years before that (Socrates).
This long thread through a 2,500 year old history is one small example of what we mean when we say we are part of a European and Western civilisation which has remarkable elements of continuity within it. We should be proud of its achievements while remembering its cruelties and, as with our linked English and British legacies, make sure we pass on its story to the next generation.
Dr. Nicholas Tate is a former Headteacher and Government Chief Education Adviser and author of What is Education for? and The Conservative Case for Education. He was born in Stoke-on-Trent, educated at state schools and won a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford.
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