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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What about the crock served up by the pair of Sage groups, Whitty and Vallance ? The Cabinet Office is key and there is no visibility as to what was going on there.
The administrative state is completely out of control. Any institution that receives sizeable quantities of public money should have people panels overseeing drawn in the same manner as jury service.
What you’re describing in your last sentence is what I refer to as Mr Biguglybloke and his baseball bat.
See my comment below which i just posted.
As the article says ‘it’s the politicians themselves’ that are the problem. My solution would be to create a jury type selection process for responsible adults over 50 years who are committed to doing their duty to governing/administering their local council or national government for a specific term of office, 3-5 years max.
Part of the current problem is the career opportunities that politics present to careerist, motivated individuals. It’s too tempting for ambitious, ego driven maniacs like Hancock and Johnson to take advantage of all the perks of high office. I would also get rid of the party system. Each member of parliament should represent their constituents not end up being controlled by party apparatniks. They should all be independent of party loyalties.
I would also reform the House of Lords. This should be a house of representatives or a council of elders whose responsibility should be to safeguard the sovereignty of the people by scrutinizing the legislature of the House of Commons. Again the members of this House could be selected through a jury selection process rather than individuals rewarded for political services.
Electoral reform is needed and there needs to be a national debate about it.
Rather than any of that, let’s just dismantle whole swathes of government. Life would go on. I think that is the author’s argument
“Matt Hancock, the Lockdowner-in-Chief.”
Seriously? He’s just a small cog in a huge global machine, and he probably doesn’t even realise it.
A welcome article, on a subject which I hope will be discussed much more on the DS: there is clearly something very wrong with the quality of people who comprise our governing class.
But why and how did they get to positions of responsibility? Why did we vote for them?
What can be done to limit their power and thus the degree of damage they can do?
How do we get a better class of human being into positions of responsibility? And – the flip side – how do we prevent sociopathic narcissists like Hancock, and so many others like him, gaining positions of responsibility?
The questions go on and on.
But one answer, or rather problem, keeps hitting me as I think along these lines: if the public at large is so intellectually bone-idle, so utterly lacking in self respect, so utterly devoid of any sense of justice or the value of liberty as 2020-22 demonstrated, then we really are all fucked.
I say public at large: in fact by my guess, as I have posted on here many times, if only 20% of people had stood out against this shitshow then it would have been stopped in its tracks. But they didn’t. Only maybe 1-3% did so.
Our society is in deep, deep shit.
It also makes one question the reason people choose to go into politics.
It clearly is not to make the country a better place in Hancock’s case.
Are there any decent politicians and how can we use them?
There should be a mechanism in place to remove a MP if clearly incompetent.
And why was there silence from all but a few MPs during this sorry saga.
As you said it would only have taken a few more to expose it all. Instead they remained silent….
Andrew Bridgen (MP for Ashby-de-la-Zouch). He had the courage to speak out and the integrity to ignore any threats or bribes not to do so
Homepage | Andrew Bridgen MP – Member of Parliament for NW Leicestershire
I noticed the change when we lost our statesmen, whose sole concern was the country and who took resonsibity for their department’s failings (Carrington at the time of the Falklands war was the last? ). In exchange we got politicians whose sole concern was themselves, who absolutely avoided any responsibility. Add to that the Bliar changes that gave bureaucrats more money for doing zero risk jobs where resonsibity was just a word, not an engrained behaviour, with effective tenure until they received their taxpayer funded, gold plated pensions.
Andrew Bridgen is an honourable man
Goodness, is there any reason why society shouldn’t be like this? You think about the structure of society: family – community – nation. There has to my mind been a war against all three going back to at least the 1960s. “Old fashioned” principles have been jettisoned and not replaced with anything of substance. Thus, to borrow a phrase, we find ourselves with this inverted pyramid of piffle. To borrow another phrase, why don’t they teach logic in these schools?
Of course things are a right mess, and to change this would take a cultural battle lasting probably decades (though unfortunately if we get “world war three” sooner, things could be knackered up even more).
They got their because they aped the views and attitudes of their party leader and the rest of the political class. Few others get past the screening process.
Many people voted for such people because they believed the trope that not to do so would let the other lot in, and they would be worse. The truth was and is the others would be almost indistinguishable, just like competing soap powerd (fluids now).
Part of that 1-3% would comprise of members of the Heritage Party led by David Kurten who openly admits to declining the “jab”. Have a browse through its manifesto.
I am surprised at your surprise. Ordinary people have far too much else going on in their lives to have time to spend on the detail of politics. They are NOT “bone idle”, This just feels remote and not a priority, when you have a job and a family to care for. And hindsight is 20/20 vision. At the time a huge chunk of the public was baying for more restriction. We lived in a world of fear. The messages in the Lockdown Files do make me angry at how those in charge sneered at laughed at us. But at the same time, the drive was always to stay popular and to do what they thought the public wanted. Rule by opinion poll. Our politicians don’t lead. They follow. Society as a whole wanted what was done to us. And those who didn’t were sneered and laughed at by friends and family. The pressure was appalling. Let’s condemn them by all means but let’s not let ourselves off the hook.
Goebbels was right, propaganda does work
But as I understand it a century or so ago – even a few decades ago – people took far more interest in politics and current affairs. How can how you are governed feel remote and not a priority?
And we’re not talking here about some arcana of government policy which doesn’t affect day-to-day life that much. We’re talking about people having practically all their vestiges of freedom and liberty taken from them. And most people didn’t even question it, let alone push back.
That I do not understand, and believe that it augers very ill for the future.
As you conclude in your post, ‘let’s not let ourselves [i.e. the public at large] off the hook’.
Absolutely- any system of government, however well designed, will inevitably be taken over by those who are willing to do what others aren’t in pursuit of power: the criminals and the sociopaths.
There is no political system that can overcome this, so the only solution is the ensure that the power that can be claimed is absolutely as minimal as is necessary to do a limited number of essential jobs. Government must be small, constrained and directly accountable to the public at all times, not just during elections.
Indeed. The USA has got closest – separation of powers at Federal level, limited Federal government power over the States, but even there we’ve seen massive overreach.
Ultimately the defence against the state has to come from the individual in every choice they make – believe very little, question everything, push back early and hard. We need the general public to stop trusting politicians and their “experts”.
I wonder if there would be any value in having regular referenda (say yearly) on how much MPs get paid? I understand a town in the “United States” did something similar with local police – the electorate always vote for good wages for the police who in return make sure they deal with what people are worried about.
Recall rights would help moderate the worst and kick them out. A few examples might be enough to dissuade many others.
Indeed – I also think a system should be in place whereby election pledges are guaranteed and failing on a certain number of them automatically triggers a recall. Plus the end of party systems replaced by plebiscites on cabinet roles so the you get on as an MP if you do what your voters like not what your party masters like, and the complete outlawing of large donations to and share ownership by MPs and their wider families.
And that’s just the start.
I completely agree with James D in his latest piece here. This claptrap involving Hancockwomble is nothing more than a limited hangout that is designed/timed to distract. Particularly when it comes to his worst crimes. Totally transparent.
”There is nothing our corrupt, mendacious and hopeless compromised political class would like more than for you to think that Covid was all about cock up not conspiracy. That’s why the clownish Matt Hancock makes such a convenient fall guy. No one takes him seriously – especially not after his appearance on a TV game show, which was no doubt pre-planned as part of the strategy. The quid quo pro for Hancock’s agreeing to play the sacrificial lamb, I would guess, is that the story be focused on his bumbling incompetence rather than on his role as Midazolam Matt, serial killer of the elderly.
Not in my most cynical imaginings could I have predicted that at this late stage in the day, with the vaccine-dying and injured all around us, the legacy media would STILL be trotting out the line that it was all just cock up and that next time all we need to do is be a bit more authoritarian and ‘trust the experts.’ But then, unlike the Telegraph, Bill Gates didn’t pay me $6 million, so what would I know?”
https://delingpole.substack.com/p/the-telegraphs-lockdown-files-leak
“‘passionate embrace’” ? He was kneading her behind like a master baker kneads two handfuls of dough. As for the media, who remembers Robert Peston demanding lockdowns sooner?
Good article. The poverty of politics and the broken system around Parliament, replete with vote fraud, Hancocks, corruption (how much money did Hancock make from the Rona fascism?), graft, greed, and small people with enormous egos and shoe sized brains and depots of morality.
GK Chesterton said it best – that the House of Commons was actually the House of Lords and the Aristocracy, and had since the time of Richard II sought to crush the Commons. So we were ineffably crushed and slaughtered for 3 years by Pharma/Parle ment.
As Churchill observed, politicians are but glittering scum – but scum most of them are including Hancock.
Statism ends in something like a Rona Fascism, or the Dystopian Health-Bio surveillance state the same scum are so busily erecting. Another Hancock will rear his stupid smirking brainless cranium soon enough as Minister of something or other.
On the plus side – there was talk of getting rid of domestic cats – but that’s just me – I can’t stand them. I wonder how many “thumbs down” I’ll get for that?
Thumbs up from me
Happy to oblige, but that’s the first thumbs-down I’ve ever done.
The trouble with Hancock he is not under arrest awaiting trial.
I can only hope many people read this and start asking the same question.
Hancock is a product of a parliamentary system fuelled by neoliberal ideology. More neoliberalism will brings as more Hancocks, not no more Hancocks. It’s about time that the adherents of this failed 1980s ideology which has been driven politics everywhere since then accept that circumstances which manifested itself during its supreme rule (and which keep getting worse) are caused by it and that the solution to this problem is not more of the same. The solution is something else.
At the height of the corona madness an item posted by a videoblogger said that Hancock was a member of the House of Commons All Parliamentary Committee on the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’. It wasn’t clear if he had set this group up or was just a member but the item went on to say that at one of their meetings in 2018 Klaus Schwab was invited to attend.
Hancock having this association with Schwab and obviously enthusiastic about Schwabs ideas – technology solves everything – might explain how the UK Gummint got pushed into spending colossal sums of Tax Payers money on the Track & Trace app for your smart phone.
“The trouble with Matt Hancock”
He’s a complete twat!
“What is wrong with our governing classes?”
I was asking myself this with the USA elections: out of the world’s fourth largest population, how were Trump the Clinton the finalists? As for why people go into politics: I think many do go in with good intentions, but only those who know how to play the system become powerful enough to make a real difference; and by then, they are corrupted by it. Then there are those who start evil, and know exactly how to become rich and powerful, such as Bliar. To borrow another phrase, “There is no good and evil: there is only power, and those too weak to seek it.”
As I said on the news round-up, this “revelation” has “conveniently timed distraction” written all over it, all part of the plan. The number 100,000 seems familiar: didn’t Saint Boris do a staged grovel to mark 100,000 deaths? They are gaslighting us by telling us what might have happened, how they might have killed our cats, but didn’t, so that we kneel down and worship Satan for sparing us this. The “Partygate” revelations had a similar vibe: get the public angry at a suitable moment. Liz Truss was probably deliberately installed a short tenure as PM, so that the economic woes can be blamed on her, instead of the far more obvious cause: lockdowns. Greta Thunberg was silenced during lockdowns, and now they are dusting off her puppet strings again.
Nothing is as it seems.
Is it possible to retire this photo of Hancock? And, for that matter, any and all photos of Hancock? I find them triggering.
I have a horrid suspicion that Handcock is just the chosen fall guy since he’s political dead meat and the release of these WattsApp messages will be used to justify the UK signing the new WHO Treaty …. on the basis that politicians can’t be trusted to genuinely follow the science and keep politics out of their decision-making …… unlike the oh-so-wise “experts” of the WHO.
I hope I’m wrong ….. but I smell a very large rat.
100%
Indeed. Our politicians made terrible decisions, but those decisions were theirs to make. You listen to “experts” – hopefully a good variety – you educate yourself as much as possible on the subject, question those experts to see if you detect bullshit or flaws in their arguments or conflicts of interest, then you consider the tradeoffs and make a political decision. In this case they made the wrong decision, for various reasons which don’t completely understand but suspect are to do with following a hidden agenda.
Oh it’s 100% contrived. Nothing about this or anything else we hear involving government is by chance. The key is to know when you’re being manipulated. Same goes for the legacy media of course. Anyone else notice how they, in particular the Telegraph, have been attempting to ingratiate themselves with us, pretending that they’re now on our side and that we have a common enemy? It’s all PsyOp and totally obvious as such. The traitorous, deceitful scumbags wouldn’t know quality, investigative journalism if it bit them on the arse. They’re just captured presstitutes that can tell which way the wind’s blowing and run their storylines accordingly. The PsyOp wouldn’t be possible without the MSM. “The media is the virus.”
Oohh, that last paragraph absolutely nails it. Unfortunately, there are still way too many people, probably even the majority on here tbh, that can’t wrap their heads around that. The system is broken beyond repair and must be razed to the ground before it can be rebuilt.
Says it all really.
These lunatics should be the last people to be exercising power but this is what we get when individuals with appropriate expertise have been forced out of ever considering going into politics by the destructive influence of mainstream and social media. Like never before we’re at the mercy of those politicians who are best at manipulating the ignorance and emotional hysteria of the masses.
But never give up hope. Perhaps something better will emerge before the next General Election!
The hypocrisy of the man to accuse someone of breaching trust when he has treated his wife in the manner he did.
I suggest an alternative explanation, that ministers have too little power, not too much. Politicians like Hancock are content to be, effectively, barristers arguing cases which have been constructed for them by their advisers. In the days when home secretaries had power of life or death and chancellors could set interest rates and fix exchange rates, those offices attracted people who cared about policy and you had them where you could see them. Policy makers now work unseen in think tanks and the “independent” advisory bodies which have multiplied over the years and there is nothing you can do about them. You could sack Edwina Currie but you can’t sack Neil Ferguson.
As the article says ‘it’s the politicians themselves’ that are the problem. My solution would be to create a jury type selection process for responsible adults over 50 years who are committed to doing their duty to governing/administering their local council or national government for a specific term of office, 3-5 years max.
Part of the current problem is the career opportunities that politics present to careerist, motivated individuals. It’s too tempting for ambitious, ego driven maniacs like Hancock and Johnson to take advantage of all the perks of high office. I would also get rid of the party system. Each member of parliament should represent their constituents not end up being controlled by party apparatniks. They should all be independent of party loyalties.
I would also reform the House of Lords. This should be a house of representatives or a council of elders whose responsibility should be to safeguard the sovereignty of the people by scrutinizing the legislature of the House of Commons. Again the members of this House could be selected through a jury selection process rather than individuals rewarded for political services.
Electoral reform is needed and there needs to be a national debate about it.
Calling fellow Scots/Scotland-based folk following Daily Sceptic! A friend and I are trying to set up Libertarian Drinks a la Dick Delingpole’s Third Wednesdays. Probably central belt. Is there anybody out there? Let me know if you are interested.
Only the original form of democracy, sortition, aka a lottery among all non-idiots (meaning the not politically interested), for a year or 2 at most can and will solve all these problems.
Alternatively, abolishing all political parties and allowing only independents to run, possibly with far smaller constituencies, might be worth giving a try.
Whatever radical solution is pursued, one thing is for certain: the outcome cannot be worse than what we have at the moment, everywhere.
So, bring it on.
Fat chance, I know: the people now in charge will never voluntarily abolish the current system.
The trouble with Midazolam Matt and his cohorts is that they are still not in prison and are still using valuable oxygen.