The Consolation of Philosophy

Boethius c. 524 CE

A dialogue mixed with poems follows a prisoner's search for happiness amid loss and injustice. His visitor is Lady Philosophy, who treats his despair as an illness she can cure.

147 pages 2h 52m reading time

One of the most widely read books of the Middle Ages, and a bridge that carried ancient Greek and Roman thought into medieval Europe.
Argues that true happiness cannot come from luck, money, fame, or power, because these can be taken away, and can only be found in the highest good, which it identifies with God.
Pictures Fortune as a turning wheel that lifts people up and throws them down, and says we should not be surprised when it turns against us.
Tries to show that God can know everything that will happen while people still choose freely, an argument later thinkers kept returning to.
Was translated into English by King Alfred and later by Geoffrey Chaucer and Queen Elizabeth I, and its ideas shaped major works such as Dante's Divine Comedy and Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde.

Written awaiting execution

Boethius wrote it in prison near Pavia while waiting to be put to death for treason.
Accused by his king

Theodoric, the Gothic king of Italy, believed charges that Boethius had plotted with the emperor in Constantinople.
Cut off from books

Boethius seems to have written mostly from memory, since he likely had no library in his cell.
Drawn from Greek thinkers

It reshapes ideas from Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics, yet never mentions Jesus or the Bible.
Executed before finishing more

He was killed around 524 or 525, and the book ends abruptly, with no closing scene.