[In the following essay, Crabbe explores the literary influences on Boethius 's theme and style, paying particular attention to the works of Ovid and Augustine.]

I

Champion of Philosophy, orator to kings, theologian, poet, supreme logician: the achievements of Boethius compose a multicoloured garment. Yet just as the brief literary portrait supplied by Cassiodorus [in his Anecdoton Holderi] seems dulled by its omission of the Consolatio, so the sum of Boethius' other writings does not prepare us for this final work. True, each shade finds its place there, clearly discernible, indispensable to the complex weave of argument and theme. There is the breadth—and the depth—of erudition we should expect, the balance of control and composition. Yet the surprise remains. As literature all is of a different order, subsumed to a new and more vital purpose. Such urgency and creative independence hang strangely on this patient and methodical scholar, the meticulous translator and commentator who mapped out a lifetime's academic curriculum which he would not live to complete. For there came Pavia and the turn of Fortune's wheel: exile, prison, death. But before death, the Consolatio, the masterpiece, springing perhaps more clearly than any other work of antiquity directly out of the circumstances of its composition. Imminent death, it has been said, serves to concentrate the mind wonderfully. The real possibility of cold iron about the throat gave a new dimension to a Christian Platonist's understanding of metaphysical shackles.

To ask why and how Boethius wrote a masterpiece, instead of, or perhaps in view of its subsequent career as well as, a university text-book may go some way towards answering the equally fraught question of what exactly the Consolatio is. Imprisoned and despairing, Boethius receives a theophany, an apocalyptic vision. His former teacher Philosophy, an imposing figure with eyes ablaze and carrying sceptre and books, appears and chides him for his miserable state of mind. She diagnoses his problem and brings him gradually to recognize that it is his own distorted perception that has allowed temporal circumstance and mundane ill-fortune to affect him. Step by step as their talk progresses the quondam philosopher is re-educated; the arguments shift from the negative criticism of ephemeral values to a positive pursuit by means of reason of the 'summum bonum', which is found to consist in God. The whole culminates in a discussion of the problem of the existence of freewill in a universe governed by a supreme and prescient deity. To summarise thus briefly is to omit many of the work's more salient features, the majority of its difficulties and all its subtleties.

Attempts to define the nature and purpose of the book are bedevilled by its eclecticism in three respects: the genre, the figure of Philosophy and the details and direction of the philosophical arguments.

As regards genre, there is a surfeit of traditions within which to locate the piece, a welter of sources. Class it as a 'consolado'. Courcelle has spoken aptly of a 'consolation for life' and the shift whereby the victim rather than the bereaved is comforted gives a twist to the theme of the desirability of death that does not easily find earlier parallels. In one sense it may fairly be called protreptic— what was in the pagan world since Aristotle's day an invitation to philosophy; in another sense a theological treatise without specific Christian allegiance, so that Rand [E. K. Rand, HSCP XV (1904)] and Courcelle [in his Consolation, 1967] are driven to use the phrase προτρϵπτικος ϵἰς τὸν θϵοŒν that is 'a protreptic towards God'. Both apocalypse and philosophical dialogue, yet not with every feature of either, in its consistent alternation of prose and verse the De Consolatione Philosophiae is clearly the most highly organised and polished 'satura' we possess; yet in style and much of its content it is poles apart from all other examples which employ this form. In short it parallels no genre precisely yet is like almost all.

Turn from the general to the specific and matters get worse. Philosophy's person and function have provided a battle ground for scholars. Is the inspiration for her elaborate portrait in the first prose section a pagan Athena or the Christian Sophia? Is the lady a literary artifice, a philosophical abstraction or personification or a goddess of revelation? Does the movement of her hand to Boethius' breast denote revelation, inspiration, diagnosis or healing? A strong case can and probably should be made for every view. The portrait is the source of the great group of metaphors which articulate the dramatic progress of the work, and all these aspects are to be developed in due course. Given that Philosophy expresses her scorn for the different schools of thought that snatch at her garment and come away merely with scraps, we may assume that Boethius intended a figure as comprehensive as a lifetime's reading might make it.

Details throughout the work, in both prose and verse passages, present similar difficulties. Times have changed since the Consolatio could be dismissed as a mere conflation, not necessarily original, of Aristotle's Protreptic with a neoplatonic source, done into Latin and interspersed with some rather indifferent verse, the whole being equipped with a 'Boethian' introduction of a book and a half. Even a perfunctory glance at recent treatments shows a different picture. The Plotinus expert may nail a source for a given phrase only to have it snatched by a champion of Proclus or Porphyry. On the other hand many will prefer to take the emphasis right back to the Platonic original. The enthusiast for Latin prose enters the lists next: something from Cicero's Somnium Scipionis or his lost Hortensius, a letter of Seneca perhaps, or one of his dialogues? And then there is always Augustine. We have yet to hear from the specialists in poetry: the omnipresent Seneca apart, surely a touch of Virgil, or Horace, Lucretius, Ovid, while the Hellenist retaliates with a parallel from a hymn of Synesius. Frequently everyone will be right. We must lay aside the residual, if declining, scholarly assumption that no late antique writer's acquaintance with classical authors extended much beyond select snippets from florilegia. Nevertheless how can it be legitimate to talk in terms of such a mosaic of sources and inspirations for a work whose author was incarcerated at Pavia under sentence of death without access to his library? One way out would be to assume some degree of literary fiction on the author's part about his circumstances. But such desperate measures are perhaps unnecessary, and in one sense unhelpful. Ultimately it may be that the explanation actually depends on those circumstances.

Roughly speaking, the detailed sources of the Consolatio boil down to three main constituents, Greek philosophy, Roman philosophy and Latin poetry, all areas in which Boethius was adept. Extensive knowledge of Plato, Aristotle and the Neoplatonic authors is clear already from the range and content of his previous works. His view was comprehensive rather than divisive, witness his avowed ideal, one shared by earlier Neoplatonists, of reconciling Plato's and Aristotle's philosophical systems. The master of logic's admiration for the Stagirite was complemented by the stronger appeal of Plato to the theologian and to the more concretely visual imagination of the poet. The Neoplatonic movement was not something set apart, rather a continuation and refinement of a tradition, with Proclus the most up to date modern commentator on an enduringly significant original. Klingner's view of Boethius as one who understood Plato 'Platonice', that is a Neoplatonist ('Platonicus') and a Platonist simultaneously is both acute and perceptive in this respect. Among the Latins, it was to Cicero and to Seneca that Boethius owed many features of his pleasantly anachronistic prose style as well as much of his philosophical vocabulary. Originality of thought had been the chief concern of neither writer. Cicero claimed to have invented a Latin vocabulary for philosophy as also for rhetoric and that his task was to transmit the gold of Greek thought to an untutored Roman world. Seneca's dependence on the Greeks is no less readily apparent. Boethius faced a similar task at a grimmer stage of Roman history. Instead of laying the foundations of a bright future, he had a salvage operation to perform: what might be preserved from a brilliant past for a dying civilisation as the dark ages fell. Christianity would survive, but its prospects in the west had little to do with those of the finer points of human reason. Nowhere is this more urgently apparent than in the Consolatio.

The group of philosophical writings, both Greek and Latin, from which Boethius assembled his material and arguments, 'consolatio', protreptic and discussion of the nature of the soul, is a consistent one. It turns on the same questions of rejection of this world, the pursuit of the 'summum bonum', the understanding of man's existence and essence. Much of its metaphorical vocabulary is also common ground: imprisonment and freedom, exile and return, slavery and tyranny and the like. Bemoan the lack of his library as Boethius may, the range and subtlety of his manipulations of this large but related body of writings imply an ability to work without constantly referring to a small group of basic sources, but rather independently from a store of assimilated learning. This holds still more forcibly for the poems. An appreciation of the finest Latin poetry speaks for itself in the metra of the Consolatio. Even without the testimony of Cassiodorus, the variety of forms attempted demonstrates that writing poetry was hardly a new departure for Boethius. Poems, merely by being metrical, are held more easily in the mind than prose. Many of Boethius' metra display a freedom of creative variation on his predecessors, exceptional at this late date, which would demand that he had much of Latin poetry by heart.

In this outline one figure is conspicuously absent: Augustine. I omit him deliberately here because there is some controversy over his importance to the Consolatio. At one time Courcelle went so far as to doubt that Boethius had even read the early Dialogues, let alone taken note of them. My own view, in large measure shared by Silk [E. T. Silk in HTR XXXII (1939)], is that Augustine is crucial to the conception of the Consolatio. For the present it is appropriate merely to remark that this sketch of Boethius' intellectual interests and equipment would require little adaptation beyond the removal of the latest century and a half of Neoplatonic refinements to apply equally well to Augustine shortly after his conversion.

II

Assuming that Boethius was capable of writing a work as complex as the Consolatio in such straitened circumstances, then his death-sentence, imprisonment and exile relate directly to the selection and treatment of his major sources. There are two obvious consequences and both bear on the immediacy of the composition. The first, on which I have touched already, is the imagery common to most of Boethius' philosophical mentors, above all those in the Platonic tradition, concerning the situation of the unenlightened soul, imprisoned by an earthly body and material circumstances, in exile from its true home, far from the light, without real freedom and at the beck and call of human tyranny. The Philosophy of the Consolatio is obsessed with these images and the task she sets herself is the release of her pupil's soul from their domination. Freedom, for the soul of the philosopher, she argues, is there for the taking. Chains and imprisonment, if they exist, are self-imposed. Even the final discussion in Book V of the relation of providence and freewill hinges on the question of 'libertas'. The constant repetition and manipulation of these themes as a significant part of the work's argument makes us unable to forget Boethius' actual circumstances. We are not meant to. It is not just the material world in general, but actual imprisonment and exile, perhaps even physical chains and certainly physical death towards which he must learn indifference in order to return to his former philosophical state. The paradox involved in the apparently identical nature of his physical and spiritual situation and the long struggle to establish the unreality of the physical prison and escape the reality of the mental chains provides the work's impetus. For once all the metaphors have become concrete and their validity is here put to the test.

Most of those authors of whom we are most explicitly reminded in the Consolatio share more than their metaphorical vocabulary with Boethius. Their biographies bear a striking resemblance to his own. This series of historical links has large consequences for the Consolatio We are required to picture Boethius sitting alone in prison mulling over his own predicament, measuring his own reactions to adversity up against those of his predecessors, and, with Philosophy's aid, finally outstripping them all. Ovid, Cicero, Seneca, Socrates and, in a rather different sense, Augustine: all play their part in this respect. Let us start with the three pagan philosophers. Philosophy herself draws her pupil's attention to two of them, Socrates and Seneca, in the group of those brought to disaster merely by virtue of a training in her school which set them apart from the interest of the wicked. She offers them as examples to account for Boethius' own fate and it is hard to imagine that Boethius himself had not compared his plight with theirs. This gives an insight into his thoughts in planning the Consolatio The pre-eminence of Plato is, as we have seen, scarcely surprising. Yet Plato implies also Socrates, and Socrates preferred a cup of hemlock to abandoning his beloved Athens for voluntary exile. The case of Seneca is more complex. Exile he had known and some of his writings at the time are perhaps not the finest testimonial to his strength of character. Nonetheless, he ranks as one of the foremost contributors to the genre of consolation literature. The majority of his philosophical writings, particularly the late ones, are deserving of respect. He tried, and signally failed, to educate the young Nero in clemency and philosophy. For some years he was one of the two most powerful men in Rome, apart from the emperor, and certainly the wealthiest. Yet the gift of his riches to Nero and his own philosophical retirement were not sufficient to avert the doom he saw approaching. The all too familiar invitation to suicide arrived from the palace and Seneca too went to his death at the hands of an erratic and uncivilised emperor. For Nero we can do worse than read Theoderic. Turning back to Cicero, of the three perhaps most akin to Boethius, a similar pattern emerges. Like Seneca, Cicero rose high in the land. More like Boethius he viewed his consulship as his supreme achievement and was the foremost orator of his day. He too had faced exile—and liked it little—political isolation and eventually, under the Triumvirate, death for political reasons. The climax of his personal misfortunes, something that Boethius did not have to face, as Philosophy trenchantly points out, was the death of his daughter Tullia. In this loss, combined with an enforced retirement from public life, must be sought the explanation of the extraordinary outpouring of philosophical writings between February 45 and November 44 B.C., many of them closely related to his own adversities. Several are particularly important here: the de consolatione and Hortensius (both lost, the latter a close imitation of Aristotle's Protrepticus) and the Tusculan Disputations and De Finibus, both of which are in five books, a point of some importance to the Consolatio.

Of the three figures so far mentioned, although Cicero's career is most closely parallel to its author's, Socrates, through the mediation of Plato and the Platonic school, emerges as the worthiest example in the Consolatio For although it is impossible to limit absolutely the importance of Cicero, Seneca or Platonism to any specific area in the work, it is fair to say that Cicero and Seneca receive by far their greatest weight in the consolatory and protreptic sections of the first two and a half books, and Plato thereafter. A parallel might be drawn here with the stairs which Boethius chooses to depict on Philosophy's robe, linking the π and the θ, praktideμ and theομreμtikeμ. This motif of ascent, which recurs frequently, is reflected in the general movement of the work as the vicissitudes of politics and the material world are left behind and the argument turns more positively to a pursuit of knowledge and enlightenment. The same applies to the three figures under discussion. Neither Cicero nor Seneca can be said to have confined their careers to philosophy, however considerable their contribution, or indeed ever to have achieved total indifference to the concerns of the world. In fact their very mixed interests are something of a mirror of Boethius before his downfall. Boethius, pondering his imprisonment in the light of the endeavours of his literary forebears in the face of adversity, came in the end to reject all but philosophical concerns. His Consolatio is the account of that journey. Small wonder that it is to Socrates, philosopher and nothing else, that the ascending scale proceeds.

III

There remain, of our original list of five, Ovid and Augustine: an unlikely pairing, yet paired they are at the start of the Consolatio, or rather set one against the other. Both require more detailed attention than the three pagan philosophical writers. To begin, like Boethius, with Ovid: two biographical points must be underlined. Ovid was the last and the youngest of the Augustan elegiac poets, and elegy in ancient tradition implied chiefly two things, the poetry of lament and that of love. Ovid's Amores, Ars Amatoria and Heroides fall into the second category, his Tristia and Ex Ponto into the first. Secondly Ovid ended his days in exile at Tomi on the Black Sea coast. He had been banished, as he repeatedly tells us in the two collections of elegiacs written there, for his salacious erotic verse, most notably the Ars Amatoria, and for some nameless 'error' or 'crimen' which was probably the more serious offence and may well have been political. Of all Latin writers composing and complaining in exile, Ovid was undoubtedly the most vociferous. Whether or not everything in the Tristia and Ex Ponto should in fact be taken at its lugubrious face value, Boethius saw little irony there, since it is in the guise of a despairing Ovid that he presents himself to us in the elegiac couplets of his opening metrum. Although both Tristia and Ex Ponto contribute to that poem, Tristia is the title we are intended to recall. Together with the Ciceronian Tusculans and De Finibus, the fact that there were also five books of Tristia undoubtedly influenced Boethius' decision to write five books De Consolatione Philosophiae.

Boethius' singular treatment of Ovid in the first section acts as something of a guarantee for the view I have been expressing above of a hierarchy of reactions to adversity. If Socrates stands at the top, Ovid can scarcely be said to qualify at all. To all intents he has had his say by the end of the first metrum, before Philosophy has put in an appearance or her robe been mentioned. Clearly he is not fit to associate with her and there is no question of his ever ascending any philosophical stairs. The two are anathema to each other.

Nonetheless the introduction and almost instant dismissal of the muses of elegy, that is, of an Ovidian approach to the problem of distress, is of enormous consequence. The philosophical content of the opening poem is not impressive, but it could be urged that there is no single more significant piece in the whole work. Before introducing Augustine then, it will be well to give it close consideration.

Carmina qui quondam studio fiorente peregi,
I who made poems once with youthful zeal,

Flebilis, heu, maestos cogor inire modos.
Weeping, am forced to turn to grievous song.

Ecce mihi lacerae dictant scribenda Camenae
See now, the Muses, torn, dictate my words

Et ueris elegi fletibus ora rigant.
And with true tears Lament makes moist my lips.

5 Has saltem nullus potuit peruincere terror
  These few at least no terror could dissuade

Ne nostrum comites prosequerentur iter.
To tread my road and give me company.

Gloria felicis olim uiridisque iuuentae,
They, once the pride of bright and happy
youth,

Solantur maesti nunc mea fata senis.
Solace this old man's grief against his
destiny.

Venit enim properata malis inopina senectus
Age entered, sped by sorrows, unforeseen;

10  Et dolor aetatem iussit inesse suam.
    Grief gave command her years should stand
  in me.

Intempestiui funduntur uertice cani
White hairs upon my crown are out of season
spread

 Et tremit effeto corpore laxa cutis.
 And over the worn-out body slack skin
shakes.

Mors hominum felix quae se nec dulcibus
annis
Happy of men a Death intruding not himself

Inserit et maestis saepe uocata uenit.
On joyous years yet swift to answer grief.

15  Eheu, quam surda miseros auertitur aure
 Alas, with how deaf an ear he turns from
 wretched men,

Et fientes oculos claudere saeua negat!
How fierce declines to seal the eyes that
weep!

Dum leuibus male fida bonis fortuna faueret
Whilst fickle Fortune smiled with trifling
goods,

  Paene caput trists merserat hora meum;
  The hour of sorrow had near drowned my
life.

Nunc quia fallacem mutauit nubila uultum
Now that, all cloud, she's changed her
treacherous face,

20  Protrahit ingratas impia uita moras.
   A thankless life draws out unwished delays.

Quid me felicem totiens iactastis, amici?
Friends, why did you boast my happiness so
oft?

Qui cecidit, stabili non erat ille gradu.
The fallen man had never stood secure.

That there are many points of contact between Boethius' soliloquy and Ovid's exile poetry, particularly the programmatic poems which open individual books, will be clear to readers of the Tristia and Ex Ponto. The links are concentrated in the opening lines, with the poet's unwilling change of subject matter to the elegy of lament, with the chameleon-like sympathy and constancy of the Muses and their elegiac grief-stricken appearance. Premature old age and a death-wish are features common to both, although the discussion of Death's insensibility and uncertain temper belongs as much to the philosophical diatribe or indeed to the genre of 'consolatio' proper as to the Ovidian elegy. Ovid's pride in his earlier poetry, although it clearly exists, is somewhat tempered by the fact that some of it shared the responsibility for his misfortunes. The treachery of fortune is also found in Ovid, but at this point Boethius is laying the foundations for the elaborate portrait of that uncertain deity which will be painted by Philosophy at the start of book II in a passage designed to answer the opening of the first book. Further it should be noted that it was Ovid who transferred the use of 'comites' or 'amici', the standard source of advice to lovers in elegiac love poetry, to a key role in the Tristia and Ex Ponto in a consideration of the power of adversity to distinguish the true friends from the false. Underlying the final couplet of this metrum is the notion that, by their lack of judgement, Boethius' friends have also failed in their office. There is indeed more to the piece than a string of Ovidian tags applied to Boethius' own experience. The opening lines appear programmatic and should therefore anticipate the nature of the coming work. Yet anyone who takes the first poem as symptomatic of the Consolatio as a whole will be in for a rude awakening. Perhaps surprisingly, given his circumstances, but none the less certainly, Boethius is indulging in a display of cultivated literary wit that will extend some way into the work, and which is little short of playful. He has chosen to fuse several traditional topoi, or characteristic elements, of programmatic poetry, namely (i) the claim to ascend the literary scale from an inferior to a superior genre and (ii) the reverse, generally called 'recusatio', that is a refusal to write, either at all or in some expected genre, usually epic. Both types of 'recusatio' function as an apology, often specious, for the work in hand, and either personal grief or the advent of an inspirational deity is used to account for the poet's inadequacy in other fields.

Looking at the first metrum then, we are startled to find poetry at all beneath the dignified title De Consolatione Philosophiae, but the first line gives ground for hope. The hexameter, if one does not happen to be thinking of Ovid's Tristia, is a brazen conflation of two famous Virgilian passages which sum up their author's poetic achievements and look to the future. Virgil had ended the Georgics by stating that whilst Caesar was at war thundering as far as the Euphrates, he himself, a poet whom Naples nourished 'STUDIEIS FLORENTEM ignobilis oti', had written the Georgics and before them the Eclogues or Bucolics: 'CARMINA QUI lusi pastorum'. The four spurious lines prefixed to the Aeneid carry the story further. 'Ille ego', announces 'Virgil' 'QUI QUONDAM gracili modulatus auena/CARMEN': I wrote bucolic, then didactic, and now I proceed to epic. Given the Virgilian analogy we might reasonably infer two things from Boethius' first line, a backward reference to the 'carmen bucolicum' mentioned by Cassiodorus and an intention to follow his famous predecessor in progressing to higher things. The first inference is correct; about the second we are instantly disillusioned. The hexameter is answered by a pentameter. Elegy's status is low, far beneath that of 'carmina', whatever their nature. Boethius is sounding a retreat, writing a 'recusatio', rather than advancing. Worse still, the phrasing of the second line—whereby 'flebilis' (of Boethius) and 'modos' (of his verses) frame a line with 'maestos' at its centre—evokes not only elegiac lament but also the disreputable love elegy. Horace after all had played on the dual function of the metre by composing a mock funeral 'consolatio' to an erotic elegist in which he cruelly but accurately dismissed his victim's outpourings as 'weepy love poetry' in the phrase 'flebilibus … modis', and it is perfectly true that cheerful love elegies possess some scarcity value. Boethius' elegant allusion to the Horatian phrase with its pejorative undertones implies that he is well aware that even for a poet his current behaviour is pretty disgraceful. The role of the Muses in this moral collapse requires more attention than the mere listing of the plethora of Ovidian parallels. They dictate ('dictant') what Boethius writes and are therefore largely responsible for the abandoning of 'carmina', that is they function as the inspiring deities of the traditional 'recusatio', here with little independence of mind. Instead of water from Parnassus or even the rococo springs of an elegiac Venus, the best they can offer Boethius to wet his poetic whistle are what we take to be his own salt tears. The adjective 'true' applied to those tears may underline the seriousness of the grief but is probably also conciliatory, an attempt to draw some distinction between the present brand of elegy and the erotic variety. Apart from rather maudlin sympathy, Ovid's Muses can offer no real consolation for the unwelcome attendance of 'senectus' and 'dolor', merely an incitement to self pity, with the result that by the end of the poem Boethius is convinced that misery has been his since the day he was born.

But the programmatic section is not yet finished; rather it is about to be turned on its head. Whilst Boethius sits musing on this lament and committing it to paper, enter another lady, a rival claimant for his regard and, indeed, for his affections, whom at first he does not recognise. Philosophy's portrait is justly famous, but for the moment what concerns us is the contrast between her and the snivelling Muses of the first poem. Her gaze is clear and penetrating, her bearing queenly and her stature at times superhuman. She has woven her garment, learned associations and all, with her own hands. Any damage it may have suffered is not her fault but others'; it is dusky with neglect and there are holes where 'certain violent men's hands' ('uiolentorum quorundam manus') have torn pieces away. By contrast, we may well imagine from the adjective 'lacerae' applied to them that the Muses, in dressing the part of funeral mourners, have themselves torn their own garments as well as scratched their faces. Certainly they carry no symbols of learning or its sovereignty. This stately lady's reaction to the sight of the Muses dictating lugubrious elegy to her favourite pupil is a violent one. She is in no doubt as to the harm they can effect, increasing sickness, accustoming the mind to its illness rather than healing it. Now these 'stagey whores', these literary and lethal Sirens 'usque in exitium dulces' have dared to seduce one brought up in her own mysteries, not just a common 'profanus'. Out they must go, and out they do go, sadder than ever and covered in blushes, leaving Philosophy to get down to diagnosis and cure with the help of her own personal muses. We have arrived at the real 'recusatio' at last. Instead of an Apollo or a Cupid with accompanying muses finding some poet writing epic and insisting he pen elegies instead, Philosophy has caught her favourite protégé degraded to the composition of elegy, the lowest possible rung on the poetic ladder, and soon puts a stop to it by resubstituting her own interests.

It is worth noting that although this motif of 'recusatio' extends well into the prose sections of Book I, fundamentally it is more at home in poetry than in prose writing. Boethius, in a bold adaptation, has turned the question rather differently. He does not use it merely to ask 'What sort of poetry is appropriate?' but 'What sort of contemplation is worthwhile?' Ultimately neither form of composition is to be ruled out. For the present the expulsion of the Muses underlines the dichotomy between poetry and prose generally and poetry and philosophy in particular.

Philosophy's antipathy towards the Muses centres on the epithet 'scenicas meretriculas'. Were we to seek a poetic parallel for the expulsion of harlots, we would find only one poem, admittedly itself an elegy, but one remote from any literary concern. In one of Propertius' most famous elegies, his mistress Cynthia arrives home unexpectedly, purportedly from some religious festival, to discover her lover sharing his couch with a couple of very inferior prostitutes. Eyes ablaze (a point mentioned no fewer than three times), she kicks them out of the house. It is very likely that Propertius' witty and purportedly autobiographical piece made its contribution to Boethius' dramatisation of his own scene. However the idea that poetry plays the painted whore to Philosophy's virtuous woman is of great importance to the work as a whole. It finds its root in prose philosophical writing; the ultimate source for this scene is generally agreed to be Plato's banishing of the poets from the ideal state of his Republic. His decision was cited with approval by Cicero in his Republic, now lost, and in the Tusculans, where the peril involved in poetry that was 'dulcis' was stressed. Augustine does the same in the De Civitate Dei in a passage that forcibly underlines the connection of poetry with the stage. Boethius knew it from Plato as well as from both these Latin writers, since he prefaces his own De Musica with references to the very similar discussion of music that immediately succeeds it in the Republic. The stress in the De Musica on the inherent tendency of certain types of music to produce demoralising 'affectus' is closely parallel to Philosophy's analysis of the harm done by the Muses and fits well with her enduring hostility to any preponderance of the emotions over the reasoning faculties. To Boethius then, poetry and indeed the whole art of music was a dangerous affair, requiring rigorous discipline to make it safe.

On the other hand, if prose writers were more or less united in their disapproval of poetry, not all poets viewed philosophy as outside their purview. Even Propertius, insistently denying that he would ever abandon elegy for martial epic, could at a pinch consider an old age spent writing didactic poetry about natural philosophy. Horace also in later years abandoned the 'ludiera' of lyric verse for the moral philosophy of the Epistles, yet ironically still used the hexameter and so remained a poet. This Horatian riddle 'When is a poem not a poem?' applies the more forcibly to the Boethian Philosophy with her own private troupe of muses and a pair of servants, one called Music and the other Rhetoric. How can this paradox be upheld in the face of her extreme antagonism towards other poetic muses? Initially the question is generic. Some of the highest grades of poetry are closely related to philosophical concerns. The relationship has a strong historical basis in that in its infancy much natural philosophy used didactic poetry as its vehicle. Rhetorical theory viewed didactic dealing with τὰθϵι̑ᾳ̑ as the most sublime theme to which the poet might aspire and superior even to epic, which largely concerned itself with human affairs. Thus Philosophy's lament in the second metrum over the former achievements of Boethius in the field of natural philosophy describes a double collapse, in its most obvious application philosophical, but also poetical in a descent from potential didactic themes, possibly even the high peaks of astronomy, to the degradation of elegy. The literary notions of ascent and descent run roughly parallel to the Neoplatonic view of the soul's movement upwards towards enlightenment or downwards away from it which is to be expounded in Book III. Here at the start philosophy can criticize Boethius' poetry quite as much as his state of mind.

IV

If poetry of a didactic nature, a fair description of most of the remaining metra in the Consolatio, might just gain admittance to a philosophical work, it remains none the less exceptional. We are still no wiser as to what exactly prompted Boethius to choose the satura form in the first place and then instantly to question its propriety. Why does he throw down the gauntlet quite so violently? The simple answer is Augustine; and it is to the profound influence of the bishop of Hippo on the Consolatio that we must now turn. He figured in the list of five whose lives bore some relation to that of Boethius, but this time the links are confined to the development of intellectual attitudes and their literary presentation rather than to specific events.

Augustine's views on poetry are important for the issues raised by the Consolatio. We have seen that he shared Plato's doubts on the subject. Nowhere is this made so apparent as in the Dialogues composed in the country villa at Cassiciacum shortly after his conversion. If we leave aside the serious matter of Augustine's debates with his friends during that period of retreat, the dramatic background to the De Ordine is coloured by an intense argument on the subject of poetry. A young and talented friend Licentius is at the time engrossed in the composition of a poem about Pyramus and Thisbe. Augustine is eager to wean him from his Muses to the more profitable pursuit of philosophy. So passionately determined is he in this matter that we are presented with an unflattering selfportrait of a doctrinaire and sometimes almost brutally domineering Augustine that is lightened only by a slight element of teasing. Poetry, it would seem, is the Devil and all his works.

Yet Augustine himself was not immune to the charms of poetry, far from it. Even at that time he regarded half a book of Virgil as the appropriate lunchtime aperitif, and we know from the Confessions how deep an impression the tragedy of Dido and Aeneas had made on him as a youth. But unlike Plato, who also liked poetry and regretted the necessity of excluding it from his Republic, Augustine opposes Licentius' endeavours with something close to violence. In one sense then, Augustine's views contribute to the account of Philosophy's antagonism towards the Muses; in another we must think of Boethius (the author here, rather than the participating character) as taking up the cudgels on Licentius' behalf. Not only does he affirm that there is a place for the sweetness of poetry in a serious work, but also that philosophy and poetry can coexist to each other's mutual benefit. This is a step which Augustine cannot take. Licentius must leave poetry for a pure love whereby with the aid of philosophy the rational soul may be led to the 'uita beatissima'. Whereas for Augustine such a step involved the abandonment of poetic enterprise altogether, Boethius spends a good part of the Consolatio giving a practical demonstration that only its refinement is required. His teacher Philosophy may call her verses 'musici carminis oblectamenta', yet elsewhere she makes it abundantly clear that their function can be quite as serious as that of the more straightforward discussion and that anyway the rhetoric of the prose passages has an equal share in the work's decoration.

Yet it is the language of Augustine's hostility to poetry that concerns us most. Poetry, he says, builds a wall between Licentius and philosophy quite as solid as that which separated the two lovers Pyramus and Thisbe. This barrier proves to be a moral one, described in terms of spiritual adultery, and it brings us to the ladies in the case. It is a truism that the feminine gender of many classical abstract nouns fostered a natural inclination towards personification in literature. Philosophy herself has a lengthy pedigree in this respect. Already we have seen that Boethius, in setting her against the Muses, made effective use of this tendency. But the female opposition in his work is not confined to the Muses. The portrait of Fortuna at the beginning of Book II is painted in still more villainous colours: Boethius is languishing with desire for his former mistress, but the lady has transfered her affections. In Philosophy's opinion Fortune's various allurements come out of a jar; she is a hussy who leads men on and then leaves them in the lurch just when they think she is theirs. Boethius had known this perfectly well once and used to chase her from Philosophy's sanctuary. Inconstant in her nature, she but plays with men, and it is Boethius' own fault for choosing such a mistress ('domina') and bowing beneath such a yoke. Fortune views him as a mere slave who has no reason to complain at how she treats him. The metaphors throughout are those of love elegy, the image that of a real woman. There is much in common here with Augustine. In the De Ordine not only the subject matter of Licentius' poem, but the very fact of writing it belongs in the realm of 'foeda libido' as opposed to a 'purus et sincerus amor'. It is the pursuit 'modesta sane atque succincta' of liberal disciplines that produces lovers ('amatores') fit to embrace truth. God, that best and most beautiful husband ('coniunx ille optimus et pulcherrimus') seeks out souls worthy of the 'beata uita'. For the time being, says Augustine, let Licentius sow his wild oats among the Muses: when he has tired of them he may come to a better love. And indeed Licentius himself has already admitted that he thinks Philosophy more beautiful 'quam Thisbe, quam Pyramus, quam illa Venus et Cupido talesque omnimodi amores'.

Boethius, then, has much in common with Augustine in his treatment of Philosophy's rivals and errant philosophers. Unlike Augustine, and to a lesser degree the two other Latin panegyricists of Philosophy, Cicero and Seneca, he is remarkably restrained about casting Philosophy herself in the answering role of the truly desirable woman. Physician, wet-nurse, teacher, protectress, any other in the long list of common metaphors, yet this perhaps most frequent characterisation as the woman desired above all others, the unearthly love instead of the worldly, is played down to a surprising extent. It is still more surprising if two more passages of Augustine are adduced, the panegyric of Philosophy from the Contra Academicos, another of the Dialogues written during the days at Cassiciacum, and secondly the praise of Continentia from the Confessions.

In the first piece, Philosophy's face, as she appears to Augustine in a vision, is such as will turn a man from all earthly delights and make him flee to her beauty as a lover who is 'blandus et sanctus, mirans anhelans aestuans'. A fable follows speaking of Philocalia and Philosophia, love of beauty and love of wisdom, as sisters; and Licentius is there also represented as the lover of false beauty. Could he but see the true loveliness of Philosophy's face, 'quanta uoluptate philosophiae gremio se inuolueret'! All the complex symbolism of Boethius' description is absent; there is nothing but the two ideas of love and beauty. Nevertheless, in view of the mention of Licentius who figures so dramatically in the De Ordine's argument over poetry and philosophy in this passage of the Contra Academicos, there can be no doubt that Boethius' version was intended to challenge that of Augustine, nor indeed that he knew the Dialogues well. Of all Augustine's writings they would be the ones most calculated to appeal to Boethius' mind when he was writing the Consolatio. They are presented as springing from study of Cicero's Hortensius, a work which exercised a great influence on the early part of the Consolatio. (Indeed it is chiefly to these two later books that we must turn in any attempt to recover some of the lost Ciceronian dialogue.)

They are also Augustine's most Neoplatonic writings, to a degree indeed for which he felt it necessary to apologise when reviewing what he had written in the course of a long life. He is particularly critical of the way in which he had treated Fortuna and the Muses almost as goddesses. Boethius had no such qualms, either about the validity of Neoplatonic ideas or the presentation of Philosophy as a goddess. His views are such as the newly converted Augustine might have approved. Where the latter parts company from him is in the passionate expression of personal feeling towards a personified Philosophy or for that matter towards the deity.

The same distinction between the two authors can be seen in the second Augustinian passage, that from the Confessions. The description of the vision of Continentia is a crucial element of that scene in the garden which was of such moment in the course of Augustine's conversion. By a characteristic paradox Continence is represented as the fruitful mother of many children, her joys, by her husband Christ. Sick and in torment, it is to Continence that Augustine finally turns in his protracted struggle against the temptations of the flesh. These he describes as trifles and vanities 'nugae nugarum et uanitates uanitatum', old girl friends of his ('amicae') who pluck at the garment of his flesh and whisper to him, asking—Will he send them away? Shall they never be with him again after their dismissal? Despite all his efforts, it is not until the vision of the chastely wedded Continence that he can shake them off entirely. Even during her admonitions Augustine says that he blushed because he still heard the murmuring of these 'nugae'. There follow the storm of penitent tears in the garden, the unexplained children's voices bidding him 'tolle, lege'—Take up and read—and the passage from Romans 13 which ends Augustine's doubts. He says that it was as if a light of certainty poured into his heart and all the dark shadows of doubting took flight: 'quasi luce securitatis infusa corde meo, omnes dubitationis tenebrae diffugerunt'. The whole account is strikingly like the arrival of Philosophy in Boethius. The clinging girl friends are adapted to become the Muses of elegy; Philosophy takes the place of Continence and her criticisms are directed more at the Muses than Boethius; likewise it is they who blush rather than the sinner. There is mention of tears again, but perhaps most striking of all is the final image of light out of the darkness. For when Philosophy wipes the blinded and deluded eyes of her pupil we meet the same image expanded over an entire metrum and into the start of the next prose as vision floods back again. It is hard to escape the conclusion that Boethius took the Augustinian conversion scene and fused it with those parts of the Dialogues discussed above as one of the major models for his own opening. If this is correct we are dealing with considerable literary pretensions on our author's part. There is one further scrap of evidence that would support the idea. Augustine calls the temptations that were his former 'amicae' trifles or playthings ('nugae'). In literature the word has a very specific significance. Catullus uses it to describe his poems in his dedicatory epigram to Cornelius Nepos. Horace calls his own poetry 'nugae', and on abandoning lyric for philosophical epistles, playthings ('ludicra'). Thus it fits well with the image of literary prostitutes and may have had some influence on the fusion of ideas in Boethius' adaptation. Augustine offered two paradoxes, an overwhelming passion that is both holy and lawful and a personification of Continence that is not barren; so Boethius makes his own plea in the Consolatio for a poetry that both serves and enriches philosophy.

V

Augustine and Boethius stand side by side in any treatment of early autobiography as the only Latin examples more concerned with matters spiritual than temporal. By and large Augustine figures as the author of a masterpiece, Boethius of an interesting curiosity. Certainly it is true that the intimacy and explicitness with which Augustine bares his soul has provided a more attractive model and more palatable reading matter to recent centuries than Boethius' intellectual dialogue. Nevertheless if the famous garden scene is indeed partly responsible for the later work, further consideration of the general relationship between the two seems desirable. I would like to suggest in what follows that Boethius was well aware that his Consolatio must inevitably challenge the Confessions, that he intended it to do so and that the similarities and contrasts between the two works give a clear insight into the very different mentalities of their respective authors, particularly with regard to their view of the appropriate relationship between man and God. On a small scale this had already been seen in the distinction between the two portrayals of Philosophy. Something of the sort applies throughout the two books.

It is simplest to begin with the use made of factual events. Like most autobiographies, they both contain a great many. Less usually, these facts are not central, but rather subordinate to the main purpose.

Augustine, writing in retrospect, charts events from his childhood till shortly after his conversion at intervals throughout the first ten books of the Confessions only in so far as they shed light on the development of his mind and beliefs. Events and people are on a par with the books that influenced him. If, as was often the case, they affected him deeply, they find their place. Otherwise they are left to one side. Boethius works differently. We are given the chief events of his life according to the lights of any Roman gentleman of affairs pursuing the cursus with such outstanding success as was possible under the Ostrogothic domination of the early sixth century. Political honours and activities emerge; something of his family, of his fine library and scholarly researches. Although Philosophy succeeds in eliciting further details about the behaviour of his friends as well as his enemies during the recent crisis, that is hardly the main purpose of the exchange. Instead it forms the basis of a discussion of 'amicitia' within the framework of 'consolatio'. Further, it underlines the purpose of all the factual information crammed into the early chapter where Boethius speaks at such length and with such bitterness: a practical demonstration of his deluded state; otherwise such details could hold no absorbing interest for him, nor we are to suppose, for his audience. Historians may be grateful that he chose to record the symptoms of the disease as well as its cure.

Briefly then, Augustine uses his own life to give some sort of historical framework to his steps backward as well as forward on the road towards the apprehension of the divine. Boethius prefers a division, lumping the terrestrial together at the start under the heading 'failure', before recording an intellectual ascent towards higher things. Consequently, we know almost nothing of the manner in which the earlier philosophical beliefs so painfully reacquired in the arguments of the Consolatio interacted with his career before his downfall. Rather the work has a linear development from the physical to the metaphysical, with the result that the explicit statement in Book V that Boethius was once so crassly practical as to undertake extensive researches into the question of providence comes as something of a shock to the reader.

Neoplatonism is a fundamental point of contact between the two works. Yet the manner of its introduction is very different. All the great metaphors are held in common and nowhere in Latin literature will the scholar find so striking a collection of the Boethian imagery of the earthbound soul imprisoned, exiled, unenlightened, sunk in oblivion, together with its antithetical counterparts (ascent, freedom and the rest) as in the Confessions of Augustine. In Book VII, dealing with his own introduction to Plotinus, Augustine is at pains to list what he did not find in Neoplatonism, most notably trinitarian theology and a personal deity, yet he is far from underestimating the extent of his debt. It is in the great spiritual events and insights of Augustine's life that the Neoplatonic character of the writing is most heavily concentrated. We have already noted the metaphor of light and dark that closes the conversion scene. Two further examples must suffice. The first is the account of his extraordinary conversation with his mother, Monica, before her death. As they talk, both are taken over by an unparalleled spiritual exaltation and clarity, at the height of which their hearts seem briefly to touch the eternal Wisdom. The passage would read like Plotinus at his most sublime speaking of the ascent of the soul to unity, were it not for two things: the personal nature of Augustine's god and the fact that the experience is one shared between two human beings and springing directly from their reciprocal perception. A similar personal and individual approach to God also distinguishes my second example from pure Neoplatonism. In the first four chapters of the thirteenth book Augustine speaks of the nature of Creation and of the relation of Creator to creature: the dependent creature is forgetful of but not forgotten by his Maker. Memory is here linked with a turning, a 'conuersio' towards the Creator. There is a return to unity and perfection, a resolution of the dissimilitude between creature and Creator.

All these ideas are to be found also in the Consolatio, albeit in a far less personal vein, but I shall concentrate on that of memory, since it heads the discussion of Creation with which the final book of the Confessions opens. Creation occupies a position of comparable significance in the Consolatio. The work's turning point, the shift from negative to positive argument, is the great central metrum III. ix, a poem which summarises much of the creation myth of Plato's Timaeus. Hitherto Neoplatonic ideas had been largely confined to the metra and to the metaphorical bulletins on the state of Boethius' mental health. Almost nothing of what follows that hymn is actually foreign to Neoplatonic thought, and the rest of Book III and most of Book IV are steeped in the tenets of the philosophy. But perhaps most striking in the passages immediately following the Timaeus poem, particularly the metra III. xi and xii and IV. i, is the stress on the theme of memory and forgetfulness. According to the Platonic doctrine of recollection or 'anamnesis' human knowledge consists in the regaining of what the earthbound soul had once known, but lost by its imprisonment in the body. The return of memory is therefore essential to the soul's ascent. The Neoplatonists laid particular emphasis on the idea of self-knowledge, the turning-in upon itself of the soul in order to arrive at a clear perception of truth without the distractions and confusions of a material world. This, in effect is the diagnosis of Philosophy: Boethius has somewhat forgotten himself, 'sui paulisper oblitus est', together with most of the things he once knew for certain. In the three poems I have mentioned it finds three very different modes of expression. The first is an abstract and highly metaphorical piece that draws all the associated images together to give a very precise account of the doctrine. Next comes a rewriting of the Orpheus myth, where the most dramatic moment, the point at which Orpheus turns back towards Hades, forgetful of his promise and concerned only with his Eurydice, is used to portray the failure of a soul in its ascent towards the light; finally the Phaedrus myth of the winged souls that have not lost their perception of the light is briefly adumbrated in an exhortation to Boethius to make use of the wings of Philosophy and return whence he came. In his ascent he will cease from his present forgetfulness and be no more 'immemor'. The significance of all this is not lost on Boethius. After the first poem he remarks that Plato's theory is correct but that exceptionally he has gone twice through the same process. He first 'forgot' when he put on mortal flesh with all its imperfections ('corporea contagione'), and for the second time when, bowed beneath the weight of grief ('maeroris mole pressus'), he lost what he had so far recollected. Here is one key to Boethius' conception of the work in relation to the Confessions. Augustine charts the journey to conversion, a process of anamnesis across the span of half a lifetime's searching. Boethius' tale is likewise anamnesis from start to finish, but he takes up the thread much later, when all has been won and then lost and is to be done again. The Orpheus myth becomes a self-portrait of a man who has bent his eyes once more to the depths from which he had almost emerged. But for him there are Philosophy's wings and he can turn again to the light and begin the long ascent. Reconversion is his theme and so he turns to Augustine's masterpiece both to imitate and to challenge.

Autobiography, anamnesis and conversion; there is another factor in common, this time one of design. Both books are very one-sided dialogues. Augustine rejects all intermediaries; his interlocutor is God. Boethius keeps God at a distance; Philosophy provides the link. It would be an exaggeration to say that Augustine does all the talking in the dialogue of the Confessions and Philosophy in the Consolatio, yet it is close enough to the truth to serve. Again, although both writers present themselves as failures, backsliders who need rescuing by divine intervention, Augustine writes in retrospect delivering a running commentary on events; the reader of Boethius must tread the road beside him, learning from Philosophy's arguments as they are presented.

This overall contrast is deliberate, but there is a complementary similarity. The Confessions employ two types of narration, the straightforward recounting of events and rather unusual direct addresses to the deity. The latter, particularly frequent at the start or finish of a book, take various forms, including that of prayer or prose hymn. Although arising often out of specific events, they interrupt the historical sequence and are delivered sub specie aeternitatis. Their chief function is to demonstrate that if Augustine did not always know what he was doing at the time, God has been directing his progress at every stage. This interweaving of narrative prose and emotional invocation occurs throughout the work, but there is a correlation between the level of Augustine's current perceptions and the isolation or otherwise of these addresses. They are rarer in the early stages and appear as interruptions in the narrative. Longer passages are found at the most significant moments in the author's life. By the time he arrives at the last confident philosophical books, his spiritual progress in understanding has so far increased that almost everything has become part of an address to God, almost a joint exercise in exposition.

The metra of the Consolatio are comparable. They contribute to the argument as it proceeds, yet take a wider view, with an authority outside and above the adjacent proses. They possess their own thematic design which spans the entire work. For example, many of the ideas of the later poems of Book III have been anticipated in the early metra of Book I. A certain unity and coherence result, in that the crucial issues are permanently before our eyes regardless of the immediate details discussed. There is an element of hindsight here that is comparable to Augustine's practice.

The disposition of proses and metra and also of speaker, quite apart from Philosophy's explicit comments on Boethius' needs for stronger or gentler remedies, enhance the work's dramatic design. Length and proportion of the prose and verse passages are particularly telling in this respect. The most famous example is the long prose IV. vi, where Philosophy proposes abandoning the pleasure of verse for a time because of the complexity of the subject under discussion. Fifty-seven sections later she notices that her pupil is flagging and offers him a draught ('haustus') of poetry to strengthen and refresh his mind. One more case must suffice. There are only two occasions in the work when Boethius delivers himself of a long speech and then launches without a break into the succeeding metrum. The fourth prose of Book I is disproportionately long, three times the length of any other in the book. The explanation is obvious: Boethius is giving a blow by blow account of his misfortunes and leaves nothing out; he does not even baulk at forty-eight lines of anapaestic hymn reproaching a god who can abandon mankind to the passing whims of fortune. Lest the point be missed, the narrating Boethius starts the next prose by saying that his prolixity had cut no ice with Philosophy: 'haec ubi continuato dolore delatraui', etc. By the time we get to Book V Boethius is strong enough to listen to lengthy arguments from Philosophy and is becoming very determined in his enquiries. Nonetheless the third prose is exceptionally long and both it and the following poem are given to Boethius. Gone is the bitter self-pity of Book I. In his philosophical zeal he passes from prose to the rhetorical questions of the poem. It is clear that the cure is almost complete. Clearly no precise correlation of method can be drawn between the two authors in this respect. But both may be said to employ the varied combination of two distinct types of writing to dramatic effect. Augustine's practice may have encouraged Boethius in developing his own.

The Confessions should be numbered among the most important influences on the Consolatio But Boethius' challenge is not purely literary. Rather he is concerned to draw attention to an area of fundamental disagreement. Already we have seen that he held differing views on poetry and that his expressions of enthusiasm, whether about Philosophy personified or about God, are muted by comparison with those of Augustine. Augustine thinks of God in terms of a personal relationship and his Confessions received embarrassed criticism on that account. Boethius' religion is the complete antithesis, coldly impersonal, abstract and theoretical to a degree, even when, for example, he is extolling divine amor. This may be brushed aside as simple difference of character, yet it offers a small insight into an old problem about the Consolato. Since Boethius was a theologian in his own right, why is there no explicit advocacy of Christianity in the work? We can evade the problem by saying that it would be inappropriate to the genre, or, better, that there is precious little evidence of pagan Neoplatonism either. Boethius has carefully avoided committing himself in either direction. More positively he has deliberately sought out the common ground between the two systems, especially in the matter of images. This is judicious, but an oddity remains.

One can ask another question. Is it at all likely that Boethius' commitment to Christianity ever bore the slightest resemblance to Augustine's? The answer will be a resounding 'no'. Augustine may have had a Christian mother, but his father was pagan, and every page of the Confessions declares that his conversion was anything but a foregone conclusion. He came late to it by way of a passionate intellectual search and a bitter emotional struggle. Boethius was probably brought up in a Christian household, without any great struggle or challenge in the matter, nor perhaps with any overwhelming enthusiasm either. He did not need his intellect to seek out an acceptable religion in the first place; rather he devoted his life to the pursuit of intellect pure and simple at a date when such a preoccupation was rare. The result was an isolationism that did not merely border on arrogance. He is Philosophy's star pupil in the Consolatio. In the prologue to the De Trinitate he tells his father-in-law Symmachus that he can discuss the Trinity with no-one else. He dismisses the rest of the world as incapable of understanding his views and so not fit to read them. Although Boethius acknowledges a profound debt to Augustine in this work, the opinion that philosophy in the service of theology is a discipline to be reserved for an intellectual elite of two would hardly have met with his predecessor's approval. The ignorant mob that requires amusement to make rational argument palatable is castigated on several further occasions.

The Opuscula Sacra cannot be called 'religious works' in the sense that Augustine's writings can, implying a commitment to God that receives everything that the resources of reason can supply. Rather they are written by an enthusiast for the intellect to whom the personal aspect of religion would constitute a barrier to the raising of human reason to its ultimate heights. Thus, in the context of Boethius' other writings, the theological works are far from central. It is not that Christianity was meaningless to the author, simply that it did not mean the same to a Boethius as to an Augustine. Theology constituted a special challenge: it was particularly important to get it right. Yet the challenge remained abstract, another field for the exercise of a powerful intellect.

In the De Trinitate then, Boethius is excited by the philosophical problem involved. Despite a courteous appeal to God and a disclaimer on the possible limits of human reason in the last paragraph, the envoi to Symmachus which precedes it is much more telling: 'Enough has been said about the problem put forward for discussion. All that is needed now is the yardstick of your judgement as to the acuteness of my enquiry. The authority of your verdict will settle whether or not it runs a straight course to its conclusion.' The preservation and refining of reason, whatever its sphere, was Boethius' aim in life. That part of religion which might be apprehended by the pure intellect without recourse to the vagaries of speculation ('nulla imaginatione … simplici intellectu') did matter. It is a view of the sublime that is patterned on abstraction rather than on human relationships. By a paradox, the loss of the ability to perceive the true order and proportion of Creation, rather than the loss of faith in God, could and did touch him deeply. That is the root of his argument with Augustine; the Consolatio forms a moving record of the renewal of that perception.