[In the following excerpt, Lerer analyzes the thematic and stylistic patterns of the third book of the Consolation of Philosophy, calling it "a book of transformations, as its poetry turns mythological narrative and Senecan tragedy into an almost religious cosmology, and its prose turns the language of Aristotelian dialectic into a suitable medium for philosophic inquiry."]

The third book of the Consolation is perhaps the most philosophically rewarding and the most methodologically subtle of all the dialogue's sections. Containing the great Timean hymn (m.9), the long discourse on earthly goods (pr.3-9), the intricate Platonic arguments of prosa 12, and the enigmatic poem on Orpheus (m. 12), the book challenges the prisoner's expressive and interpretive abilities. It is little wonder that the book has stimulated more criticism than any other part of the Consolation. Most readers have found in it the heart of Boethius' Platonic thought and imagery. Structurally, the book has traditionally been seen as dividing itself, and in turn the work as a whole, in two. While the first section (prosae 1-9) appears to continue the Aristotelian dialectic of Books One and Two, the second section (metrum 9 to the end) points towards an explicitly Platonic epistemology. This Platonism may inform the concluding poem on Orpheus, as the hell-descent it portrays carries with it a mass of Platonic and Neoplatonic allegorical implications. The function of the metra themselves has also been understood as changing in the course of the book. From what one critic has called "a larger dialogue between rational argumentation and poetry," the poetry after "O qui perpetua" seems "relegated to the role of a moralizing chorus."

My reading of Book Three qualifies and takes issue with these earlier approaches. The opening prosae develop the relationship between dialectical and philosophical forms of argument explored in earlier books. The speakers come to talk more and more about the structure of their dialogue itself. Their discussion becomes self-reflexive, in that it is fundamentally concerned with elucidating its own method. It also becomes self-referring, in that key terms presume the reader's familiarity with their use elsewhere in Boethius' writings. I will explore these qualities by finding the sources for the Consolation's language in the technical vocabulary of the logical writings. Boethius' remarks on the relationship of probable logic to philosophical demonstration highlight one aspect of Philosophy's conversation with the prisoner. While she relies on proofs, he is content with opinions; while she addresses his mind, he responds through his senses. This tension motivates the text's dramatic progress, and Boethius' constant Platonizing of the dialectical terminology gives the discussion an added dimension.

If the Consolation's opening books represent the search for a voice through which the prisoner may learn to argue, then Book Three may be said to portray the search for a place towards which he must direct his energies. That place has been interpreted as the soul's home in the heavens, the patria towards which the mind returns after death. The prisoner's position thus places him in a state of loss or unfulfillment. He lacks the awareness of his future spiritual goal and a present intellectual direction. Philosophy's purpose in Book Three will involve directing his mind (metaphorically described as looking upwards) and developing his reason (methodologically depicted as learning how to argue). Images of loss, be they of purpose, direction, or meaning, permeate the book, from Philosophy's opening arguments on happiness, to the final poem on Orpheus' loss of Eurydice. As Philosophy herself puts it, the prisoner is menaced by psychological disturbances which create in him a feeling of emptiness or absence. Human desire, she argues, is motivated through an inner need to fill that absence with a spiritual beatitude. The longing for fulfillment or knowledge leaves man dependent on such earthly substitutes as wealth, fame, power, or sensory pleasure. These "external" ways to happiness are but bypaths on the path to the true good. Fulfillment will be gained, she argues, through self-sufficiency: through strength of mind and growth of spirit.

To this end, Book Three explores images of alienation and of the undeniable otherness which sets the self apart from the multitude. If the movement of the opening books was methodological, then in Book Three it is epistemological. The prisoner must come to know and to comprehend that process of knowing. In this sense, the book develops a vocabulary of wonder, both in the prose and the poetry. While Philosophy's arguments are calculated to eliminate admiration and foster comprehension, her poetry, especially the Timean hymn, is designed to inspire awe. Her poems turn nature into myth, for they figure forth the physical or psychological processes in literary narratives. Her poetry also contributes to the intellectual progress of the dialogue, embodying through its rhetoric and imagery the underlying order of rational inquiry.

Book Three is also the most obviously rhetorical of the Consolation's sections, for in it Boethius uses structures of form and imagery to call attention to his thematic concern with technique. It offers a counterpoint to the "rhetoric of silence" explored in the Augustinianism of the tractates, and it presents a more rigorous system of argument than the forensics of Book One. Close examination of the formal structures of metra 2, 9, and 12 reveals how Philosophy presents herself not only as a model disputant, but as a model poet and musician. Through these devices, her poetry directs the prisoner's mind away from his earthly cares and towards the inspired meditation of the kind Boethius experienced in the Contra Eutychen. By filling the prisoner with a sense of wonder, she restores his emotional stability and points towards spiritual enlightenment.

I

After her initial commitment to describe in words the subjects familiar to the prisoner, Philosophy begins her extended analysis of human happiness in prosa 2. Like Boethius' own meditative process described in Contra Eutychen, Philosophy prepares for her speech by directing her vision and her voice away from external distractions and towards her own thoughts. As in the tractate, the process of introspection appears in visual terms. Boethius was concerned with watching Symmachus, and with seeking to discover in his expression a source for his opinions. Similarly, throughout the Consolation, the prisoner pays careful attention to Philosophy's countenance, from her opening look which fills him with awe (I.I.I) and her blazing eyes, to the gravity of her appearance at the opening of Book Four (IV.I.I). The movement of turning away from or towards something becomes the central image of Boethian meditation (as when he turns away from the mob in Contra Eutychen), and it informs Philosophy's own injunction at the opening of Book Three for the prisoner to turn his eyes towards blessedness. Moreover, Philosophy's appearance contrasts with the fallen look of the prisoner at the dialogue's beginning. Just as she had sought to see into the prisoner's mind ("tuae mentis sedem requiro," l.pr.5.6), now Boethius echoes her own words in describing her thoughtful countenance ("… suae mentis sedem recepta," III.pr.2.1). Her inward preparation for rational argument also recalls the prisoner's misguided attempt to shape his own arguments before his oratorical outburst at l.pr.4.

In this manner, Boethius uses one of the Consolation's prevalent metaphors to characterize Philosophy's intellectual virtue. From a purely technical standpoint, however, Philosophy's initial moves also correspond to the mental activity prescribed for a debater in Aristotle's Topica. Aristotle had outlined a three-step process for formulating and expressing an argument. First, the questioner must select the basis of the approach; second, he must frame and arrange his points in his own mind; finally, he must proceed to verbalize his argument to his partner. Philosophy's preparation describes her as a textbook disputant, where the order of the argument corresponds to the ordering of thoughts. Her behavior also conforms to Aristotle's suggested habits of philosophical inquiry. While both dialecticians and philosophers, he wrote, start from the same tripartite system of inquiry, the philosopher may prefer to begin questioning with familiar axioms, and his initial argumentative moves may seem to progress little from the given starting point. When Philosophy decides, therefore, to present in words things better known to the prisoner, she commits herself to a method of inquiry consonant with the Aristotelian rules for reasoned investigation. It is from this commitment to begin with familiar subjects that, as Aristotle claimed, syllogistic reasoning grows (in the Boethian translation, "ex his enim disciplinales syllogismi," … ).

It is significant that Philosophy speaks metaphorically in her opening remarks, and that her images are securely grounded in the vocabulary of direction developed in Boethius' logical writings. In the In Topica Ciceronis Boethius credited Cicero with preserving Aristotle's method for finding arguments directly and without error. His own De topicis differentiis had developed the image of argument as a way through error into a controlling ethos of study. When Philosophy comes to characterize the human and cosmic order, she draws upon a dialectical vocabulary to make her concepts understandable to the prisoner. Her repetitions reinforce the sense of direction which returns the mind to its proper home.

Mortal men laboriously pursue many different interests along many different paths, but all strive to reach the same goal of happiness.… And, as I said, all men try by various paths to attain this state of happiness; for there is naturally implanted in the minds of men the desire for the true good, even though foolish error draws them toward false goods.

In the course of her speech, Philosophy speaks more and more figuratively, developing her metaphors and similes into codes of behavior. She employes the imagery of vision to place before his eyes the range of human happiness. In a simile which recalls the picture of the wandering ignorant or the fickleness of fortune, she explains how the mind no longer knows the good, "like the drunken man who cannot find his way home." The symbolic drunkenness of the mind lost in sensory error contrasts with Philosophy's earlier claims for the sobriety of prudent caution. Boethius has built these figures from the language of dialectic, and he equates propriety of speech and thought with propriety of action. The strong moral sense of error is also figuratively transformed into a kind of incompleteness. The prisoner lacks a sense of home (a domus or patria), and his spiritual error creates a psychological condition of insufficiency or emptiness.

To this end, Philosophy, in her next prosa, questions the prisoner about his emotional condition. To his realization that at no time could he recall being free of worry, she asserts: "And wasn't it because you wanted something you did not have, or had something you did not want?" ("Nonne quia uel aberat quod abesse non uelles uel aderat quod adesse noluisses?") Her questioning establishes a tension between wanting and having, reinforced by the rhetorical pattern of her speech. She arranges her words chiastically, with parallel sequences: aderat / addesse answers aberat / abesse. At the heart of the prisoner's misery is a deep void, expressed as a lack of direction and fulfillment. To Philosophy, the action of desire becomes a longing to fill that emptiness: "So you desired the presence of the one, and the absence of the other?" As her argument develops, she delineates the relationship between the outer show of language, cheapened by time, and inner virtue. In characterizing the prisoner's condition of desire, she shows how such external qualities as language, wealth, power, and glory serve only to alienate man from man: to render hiim parasitic on the world rather than sufficient in himself. Fame, as she argued in Book Two, does not eliminate desire, it intensifies it. The fear of loss motivates worldly achievement, as the man enamored of earthly goods obsessively tries to guard them against theft. This activity, compounded by an equally compulsive appetite for personal ownership, creates insatiable need.

In formulating Philosophy's arguments, Boethius draws on his own view of the individual's relationship to the mob expressed in Contra Eutychen and adumbrated in the asides in his commentaries. His repeated use of the word aliena reinforces the split between the self and the other. Throughout the Consolation the word describes those external goods which, by directing man towards others, alienate him from himself. The language of the mob also appears in these terms. Like rumor and popularity, the common speech of men is vapid and meaningless, rendering man passively subject to a corrupting force. In Book Three Philosophy shows how public reputation and nobility depend on the perception of others. Like fame, nobility brings man into the confusion of other men, and the fame of others cannot redound to oneself. Together, these images restate the fundamental emptiness of fame and the vacuity of power.

Into this structure of imagery, Philosophy introduces the word extrinsecus to characterize spiritual and rational insufficiency. With its source in Cicero's and Boethius' dialectical writings, the word signals a discipline where belief takes precedence over truth. Because dialectic aims to convince, rather than demonstrate, it can employ extrinseca argumenta which depend on the authority of others for their credibility to the listener. In De topicis differentiis Boethius classes arguments from judgment under the heading of extrinsecus, and he clarifies their difference from philosophical demonstration.

There remains the Topic which he [i.e., Cicero] said is taken from without (extrinsecus assumi). This depends on judgment and authority and is only readily believable, containing nothing necessary.

In the dialectical writings, extrinsecus is a term used to characterize an argument which derives its strength from outside opinion. In other writings, it is used metaphorically, to describe accidental qualities (as in De Trinitate) or, in the Consolation itself, to refer to the power of God or the power of reasoning. God's grace is not received from outside, but is unique to and part of his nature. Unlike the transitory, extrinsic things of this world—which depend on perception for their value— God needs no outside assistance in governing the Universe. He remains the uniquely self-sufficient being of the cosmos. Towards the end of Book Three, the prisoner begins to recognize the structure of philosophical arguments in these terms, and he commends his partner: "And you proved all this without outside assumptions (nullis extrinsecus sumptis) and used only internal proofs which draw their force from one another." Central to his praise is his characterization of Philosophy as a philosopher; he virtually echoes his own earlier definition of De topicis differentiis, and reveals that, by the conclusion of Book Three, he has learned something of method, if not of doctrine. The imagery here is not designed to suggest, as some have claimed, that the prisoner praises Philosophy for arguing without need of outside, Christian arguments. It is specifically couched in the language of the logical writings, and it contributes to the larger structure of imagery which to this point has focused on interiority, propriety, and self-sufficiency.

II

Before the prisoner can recognize Philosophy's method for what it is, and long before he can attempt to imitate it, he must engage his teacher's arguments and learn to respond rationally. He has said nothing from the middle of prosa 3 to the beginning of prosa 9. When he begins to speak again, it is through a rhetoric of simple assents which reveal his apparent impatience with Philosophy's method and his lack of commitment to the proper order of inquiry. The concluding prosae of Book Three create the context for reflection and interpretation, as they continually take stock of the dialogue's progress. These prosae also develop the imagery of wonder which Philosophy had earlier used to describe the inability to express divine wisdom in human terms. For verbal discussion to progress, she must eliminate the sense of wonder in the prisoner, a wonder which had kept him in silent awe of Philosophy's implied truths. In the Contra Eutychen Boethius had marvelled at the truth revealed through private meditation ("unde mihi maxime subiit admirari … "). This emotional response resulted from the figurative opening of the door to knowledge, or from the experience of truth unmediated by public discourse. In the Consolation, however, where public discussion is but a propaedeutic to the revelation of enigmatic truth, arguments must proceed without amazement on the part of either disputant. Just as Philosophy had suppressed her own impending wonderment in order to proceed at the end of Book Two, so the prisoner must replace his sense of wonder with a sense of purpose.

Prosa 9 opens with Philosophy's explicit statement of procedure: "Up to this point, I have shown clearly enough the nature of false happiness, and, if you have understood it, I can now go on to speak of true happiness." In the Latin, the phrasing emphasizes the proper sequence of inquiry: "… ordo est deinceps quae sit uera monstrare" (III.pr.9.1). This prosa will explore the various ways of understanding, and it repeatedly expresses the action of knowing as a process of seeing. The metaphorical structures have moved from telling (from Philosophy's earlier desire to explicare) to showing. Philosophy now attempts to monstrare, and the prisoner responds that he sees, albeit imperfectly, the purpose of her arguments. "I see," he begins, and then qualifies his statement with an image which recalls, by contrast, the metaphors of the tractates: "I think I glimpse them [i.e., Philosophy's reasons] as it were through a narrow crack, but I should prefer to learn of them more plainly from you." At one level, the prisoner prefers to have Philosophy do his intellectual work for him. His desire to learn "more openly" (apertius) is a request to listen rather than to argue. At another level, the prisoner's statement illustrates the preliminary nature of dialogue, and it reveals the limitations of verbal explanation. In his request for a more open method of understanding, the prisoner hearkens back to the imagery of the tractates, where philosophical knowledge was wrapped in new and enigmatic terms, but also where truth itself could come revealed as through an open door. At the heart of the prisoner's imagery is a basic impatience with the slow moving method of question and response, and at the same time an awareness of the need for progressing through the steps of argument. He is not yet ready to see the truth openly, and his vocabulary here recalls the rhetoric of understanding reserved for the theological investigations of the tractates or the close of Augustine's Confessions.

The prisoner's impatience extends to his evaluation of his own abilities. By the end of prosa 9 he has agreed with much of what Philosophy has said, and he itches to inform her of the scope of his understanding. For the first time in the Consolation, the prisoner reformulates her arguments, and he registers his attention to their outer structure and their inner substance.

But this is clear even to a blind man, and you revealed it a little while ago when you tried to explain the causes of false happiness.… And to show that I have understood you, I acknowledge that whatever can truly provide any one of these must be true and perfect happiness, since all are one and the same.

The prisoner's vocabulary revives the imagery he and Philosophy have developed to this point. Clarity appears in terms of sense perception, and even though the seeing is metaphorical, the prisoner's use of the blind man as his foil reinforces the notion of logical demonstration as a form of showing rather than explaining. He uses Philosophy's word monstrare here, and his term for explanation (aperire) echoes his own earlier request for philosophical revelation. The prisoner is also deeply concerned that Philosophy come to know something of his own interior state. He has understood her inwardly (interius,) and he seems to exult in his discovery of a truth sine ambiguitate. He offers an attempt at pure philosophizing without the double edge of dialectic, and an attempt to move beyond that discourse in which, as Augustine noted, every word is ambiguous.

While Philosophy is proud of her pupil, she qualifies her praise. She makes clear that the prisoner still labors under opinion: that, while he may grasp the form of her argument, he is still incapable of complete understanding. "Your observation is a happy one," she states, "if you add just one thing." She focuses on an epistemological movement subtly different from the prisoner's, and the vocabulary shifts are important. While he attempted to cognoscere, she will show him how to agnoscere. I think the difference in these terms represents a difference between cognition and acknowledgment, or between the inner contentment of knowing and the outer expression of that knowledge through verbal activity. Again, Boethius distinguishes between things understood passively, as through listening or revelation, and things learned actively, as through public argument. This activity, however, will for the moment be postponed, as Philosophy offers in the Timaean hymn a poetic counterpoint to her prose argument. If her prose passages are calculated to eliminate wonder and foster verbal discussion, her poetry is designed to inspire awe and instill a reverent silence. As expressed in the visual metaphors of the Book, "O qui perpetua" directs the prisoner to look up to his heavenly goal, to see (defigere, cernere) not with the eyes but with the mind. In its use of the central figures of the Consolation's thought, the Timaean hymn recapitulates the movement of the dialogue, and it imbues the terms taken from dialectic with a new philosophical and cosmological significance.

The poem's indebtedness to the Timaeus and its Commentaries is so apparently obvious, and so frequently stressed by critics, that few of its readers have cared to notice how the poem functions within the dialogue itself. Generations of the Consolation's readers have found in "O qui perpetua" a set piece of Boethian Platonism; next to Fortune's wheel, this is perhaps the most famous of all sections of the work. By restating the fundamental images developed by the disputants, the poem comments on the terms in which Philosophy and the prisoner characterize their method and their music. One example of this restatement appears at the poem's opening. God acts without external causes, and forms within himself an image of the good impressed on all creation. "No external causes impelled You to make this work from chaotic matter." This phrasing recalls the language of extrinsic arguments developed by Boethius and explored, in its moral dimension, throughout the Consolation. It also looks forward to the description of God as sufficient in himself, and it will give to the conversation later in Book Three—where the prisoner praises Philosophy's arguments as containing nullis extrinsecus sumptis—a certain philosophical resonance. The poem's initial effect depends on recognizing its uniquely Boethian vocabulary. The hymn takes Philosophy at her word by developing her earlier ideas of musical and cosmic order. It enacts this recapitulation by transforming earlier mythological motifs into an abstract Platonic cosmology. In two earlier poems, II.m.8 and III.m.2, Phoebus had been a figure for celestial harmony. The regularity of sunrise and sunset in these poems confirmed one's expectation of and faith in the essential rightness of the system.

… that Phoebus in his golden chariot brings in the shining day, that the night, led by Hesperus, is ruled by Phoebe, …

(II.m.8.)

Phoebus sets at night beneath the Hesperian waves, but returning again along his secret path he drives his chariot to the place where it always rises.

(III.m.2)

In these metra the chariot symbolizes the process of travel and return. Phoebus and Hesperus appear as mythological representatives of day and night and of light and dark. In "O qui perpetua," however, the picture of Phoebus in his chariot becomes an image of the human soul's passage from heaven to earth and back to heaven. While the ideas expressed in the poem have their origins in Plato and Proclus, within the structure of the Consolation these lines resonate with earlier poetic treatments of the same image.

In like manner You create souls and lesser living forms and, adapting them to their high flight in swift chariots, You scatter them through the earth and sky. And when they have turned again toward You, by your gracious law, You call them back like leaping flames.

The Phoebus narratives which described features of living in the world prefigure the condition of living in the cosmos. The human sight of the sun returning in its rosy dawn becomes the divine vision of the soul returning in its celestial fire. By Platonizing the story of Phoebus, Boethius creates a new philosophical context in which to re-read the earlier passages. His structure of imagery unifies the poetic sequences in the early books. In this framework, the Timaean hymn reads less as an isolatable expression of Neoplatonic thought and more as an integral part of the Consolation's progress.

The image of returning expressed in the lines above complements the theories of harmony which find thematic and structural expression both in the hymn itself and in Philosophy's earlier poem, "Quantas rerum flectat habenas" (III.m.2). This metrum foreshadows the metaphorical and structural patterns of the hymn, and points toward a theory of poetic composition embedded in the poetry. In III.m.2, Philosophy restates her moral and methodological aims. The opening lines reformulate her earlier injunction against the vicious muses of the prisoner's opening song, and she presents him with an example of music at its best.

Now I will show you in graceful song, accompanied by pliant strings, how mightily Nature guides the reins of all things; how she providently governs the immense world by her laws; how she controls all things, binding them in unbreakable bonds.

The instrumental music she offers in this poem fosters wisdom and virtue, and the imagery of its opening lines associates the strings on which she plays with the bonds which unite all elements of the universe. Concord is both instrumental and cosmic, and even the formal structure of her verse mimes the metaphorical structure of her subject. The Latin is intricately woven in its syntax; internal and end rhymes complement the patterns of assonance; the first sentence, six lines long, suspends its agent cantu ("in song") until the very last word. Philosophy's elaborate display of technique exemplifies the poet as orderer and creator. Throughout this poem Philosophy uses structural devices to imitate her subject. In her description of the caged bird, she employs a self-conscious formal pattern to give new expression to the old Platonic idea, dubbed by Courcelle [Pierre Courcelle, "L'âme en cage," in K. Flasch, ed., Parusia, 1965], of "l'âme en cage." The bird shut in her cavernous cage suggests the Platonic image of the soul imprisoned in the body. In the final two lines of this description, anaphora marks the bird's vocal longing with a metrical pattern: "Siluas tantum maesta requirit, / siluas dulci uoce susurrat" (III.m.2.25-26). The poem's end brings the reader structurally and thematically back to its beginning. The sense of returning home in the last lines combines with the idea of order expressed in the first sentence. The ordered course is "that which connects the beginning to the end" (quod fini iunxerit ortum, 37). While this moral statement comments on the poem's structure as a whole, the text's final lines give a unifying conclusion through a pattern of repetition:

currum solitos vertit ad ortus.
Repetunt proprios quaeque recursus
redituque suo singula gaudent
nec manet ulli traditus ordo
nisi quod fini iunxerit ortum
stabilemque sui fecerit orbem.

Through the repeated or-syllable, the ideas embodied in the poem's vocabulary are reified through sound, as well as sense.

The Timaean hymn appears as a complex restatement of the problems posed by this earlier poem, for it uses rhetoric and musical imagery to express its philosophical content. The expression of Timaean world harmony and the imagery of binding the elements develop the poetic and mythological material of the earlier poem into a statement of divine cosmology. The phrasing of "O qui perpetua" has been seen, in one critic's words, as offering "man a pattern of love and order by which to guide his own life." But these patterns also suggest imaginative structures: habits of mind which find their voice in virtuous metrics. Philosophy's language points to a poetry subject to the divine ordo, yet also governed by the speaker's own power. The self-reflexive qualities which the poem attributes to God are embodied in the verbal patterns of the text. As the mind of God turns inward from the world created in its own likeness, and as the soul turns inward to comprehend itself, so the text creates a system of self-reference through rhetorical echoes. As in III.m.2, the order of reason becomes the order of poetry.

"O qui perpetua" contains in its opening sentence a series of repetitions which establish the reflective patterning. It opens with what Gruber calls [J. Gruber, Kommentar zu Boethius De Consolatione Philosophiae, 1978], "der Relativstil der Prädikation … mit dem anaphorischen qui … qui … quem." It then works through a rhetorical system of interlacement to reinforce God's impression of his own mind on the outer shape of creation. Using a limited vocabulary charged with meaning, the poem mirrors itself metrically and sonically, as creation mirrors creator. The entire text is punctuated by rhetorical parallels which mark the progress of the argument. Through antistrophe, Boethius repeats line endings (cuncta moueri, 3; cuncta superno, 6; cuncta mouentem, 13). Through anaphora, he restates the form of address in an almost litanizing way (Tu numeris, 10; Tu triplicis, 13; Tu causis, 18). The appearance of words for earth and sky sets up a chiastic pattern of echo and return.

terrarum caelique sator … (2)
… deducant pondera terras. (12)
… conuertit imagine caelum. (17)
in caelum terramque seris, … (20)

The concluding repetitions, "Da, pater, … / Da fontem …, da luce" (21-22), and, "tu namque serenum, / tu requies …" (26-27), bring the poem to an emphatic climax, directing the reader's mind away from the forms of God's work to divinity itself. The poem's final vision thus fulfills the prisoner's "eager longing" for the way to happiness.

The poetry thus differs from the prose in that it shows rather than argues. It is designed to instill wonder not simply by stating God's power but by presenting the poet's skills. The elaborate rhetorical patterns in poems such as III.m.2 and III.m.9 are an integral part of Philosophy's purpose; rather than the vacuous displays of the prisoner's early poetry, these technical flourishes enact the themes of the metra. They show Philosophy as a master of poetic diction, as well as of dialectical and philosophical argument, and her return to these systems of rational inquiry may come as something of an anticlimax to the prisoner and reader. In prosa 10 she returns to structures of reason from patterns of wonder. Even though the prisoner has seen (uidisti) the form of the good, he must use logical inquiry to understand its earthly counterpart. Now, Philosophy's commitment is to demonstrate (demonstrare) her truths. As in her earlier decision to "designare verbis," or to "explicare," her terminology signals a rational rather than a transcendental process. By directing the prisoner back to a system of questioning (her word inquirendum, III.pr.10.2) she restates the dialectical contract made in Book One. But, as before, the prisoner is unable to follow her arguments precisely and to fulfill his role in the discussion. Whereas his earlier failures revealed themselves either through silence or incomprehension, his problems at the close of Book Three are masked by a misguided self-confidence and an impatient readiness to agree with anything Philosophy says.

III

As the dialogue continues through prosae 10-12, the prisoner responds to Philosophy's arguments with a bold, confident series of assents. His ready responses voice a concern with the formal correctness of reasoning rather than an intuitive awareness of higher truths. Behind his assents lies the voice of Fabius from the early In Isagogen, and, as I will suggest, it has a strong analogue with the figure of Adeodatus from Augustine's De Magistro. At times, the prisoner's words read like a schoolboy's vain attempt to impress the master with his command of terminology and the intensity of his attention. "That is firmly and truly established," he avers on one occasion. Soon after, he answers, "I agree. Your argument cannot be contradicted." To another argument, he chimes, "Rectissime" (III.pr.10.16), and he asserts the impregnability of Philosophy's line of reasoning as proof of her claims: "I found your earlier arguments unassailable, and I see that this conclusion follows from them." In his desire to hear, rather than talk, the prisoner prefers the silent passivity of the pupil to the activity of the debater. He asks Philosophy to clarify her arguments through specific examples; he longs to hear her conclusion; he is waiting for the rest of her proofs.

I wish you would explain this point by recalling what is involved.

I understand the problem now and am eager to have your answer.

There is no doubt about that, but you have not yet given me the solution.

The prisoner opens prosa II continuing his rhetoric of assent, and Philosophy now responds to his desire to know God by conceding to his brand of reasoning. Answering his earlier request for her to explain (patefacere, III.pr.10.29), she announces: "I will show you (patefaciam) this with certainty." As if to interject a bit of modesty, however, she qualifies her assertion and seems almost to request the prisoner to let the conclusions stand ("maneant modo quae paulo ante conclusa sunt," III.pr.II.4). But the prisoner will have none of these qualifications; her remarks will stand ("Manebunt," III.pr.II.4). His confidence in Philosophy's reasoning betrays that lack of doubt which has permeated the tone of his responses ("ne dubitari" is his favorite expression of agreement). Arguments still appeal to his all-too-human judgment and opinion. They are acceptable not because they are true, but because they are incapable of being challenged, doubted, or denied. The prisoner expresses positive assent in negative terms, and his phrasing reveals a habit of mind which relies on structures of belief rather than on proof. His diction reflects the fundamental subjectivity behind the ways in which he sees the world and follows Philosophy's arguments. His commendations of her rational coherence depend only on his perception of that coherence, as a language of seeming (e.g., in his term videtur) predominates. In short, for Philosophy, things are; for the prisoner, they seem to be.

By prosa 12, however, the dialogue begins to break down, and Philosophy must exhort the prisoner to maintain his side of the discussion. As before, the prisoner notices the manner and method of her speech at the expense of its meaning. In one case in particular, he is so taken with the beauty of her reasoning that Philosophy must stop the discussion altogether and reaffirm their contract. Both disputants develop an imagery of sweetness and delight which leads up to that moment of breakdown. Philosophy begins by noting that the highest good disposes all things sweetly. The prisoner responds:

I am delighted not only by your powerful argument and its conclusion, but even more by the words you have used.

Most readers of this exchange have considered the prisoner's apparent delight to derive from the Book of Wisdom. For tescue considered this moment the most certain of all possible Biblical allusions in the Consolation, and many have argued that the prisoner's pleasure is the joy of recognizing the word of God. Whether Boethius puts the words of Wisdom into Philosophy's mouth, or whether this vocabulary was received second-hand through Augustine, Philo Judaeus, or others, is less important than the effect of the diction within the dialogue itself. Boethius presents this rational sweetness as an alternative to the dubious sweetness of Fortuna's rhetoric in Book Two. The prisoner himself had warned against the "specious sweetness" of her arguments, honeyed with music and rhetoric (II.pr.3.2). His words were also designed to echo Philosophy's praise of right rhetoric, whose sweet persuasiveness was only effective if it kept to the path of reason (II.pr.L8). Now, in Book Three, the prisoner recognizes almost intuitively the elegance of reason and the kindly strength which, as Philosophy tells him, sets desire in its rightful place. The imagery has its counterpoint in the violent pictures of the tortured prisoner, the warring Giants, and the clash of arguments which Philosophy proposes. Taken together, these impressions of conflict and beauty figuratively restate the original system of question and answer which motivated the dialogue, and point towards the rewards of verbal struggle:

You have read in the fables of the poets how giants made war on heaven; but this benign power overthrew them as they deserved. But now let us set our arguments against each other and perhaps from their opposition some special truth will emerge.

Unlike Boethius in the De Trinitate preface, where the writer's spark of reason was fired by solitary meditation, Philosophy applies the same, essentially Platonic, image to characterize public discussion. She establishes a complex metaphorical environment in which to reflect upon the dialogue's formal progress. In addition, she explicitly reminds the prisoner of his experiences as a reader, and her characterization here will have great importance for the interpretive demands which her poem on Orpheus will make on him.

In this context of imagery, allusion, and metaphor, it is significant that the prisoner responds to Philosophy also in a figurative way. He complains that she is playing games with him, losing him in an inextricable verbal labyrinth. His restatement of her procedure summarizes many of the central figures of thought developed in the Consolation thus far: the imagery of the way; the notion of philosophical wonder; the explicit use of mythological allusion in the mention of the labyrinth.

You are playing with me by weaving a labyrinthine argument from which I cannot escape. You seem to begin where you ended and to end where you began. Are you perhaps making a marvelous circle of the divine simplicity?

Philosophy must convince him that it is no game (minime ludimus, III.pr.12.36), but a process grounded in a formal method and directed towards a vital truth. But her explanation sustains the metaphorical coloring of their discussion, as Boethius lets diction do the work of reason. The prisoner and Philosophy exchange the metaphors of inner and outer which they developed earlier. He praises her arguments for developing proofs not from outside but from within. Philosophy takes up his imagery, giving his argument precision and concentrating on its emotional effect.

You ought not be surprised that I have sought no outside proofs, but have used only those within the scope of our subject, since you have learned, on Plato's authority, that the language we use ought to be related to the subject of our discourse.

As she adopts the prisoner's explication of her method, Philosophy places it in a stated Platonic context. The intrinsic/extrinsic dichotomy now has an epistemological purpose, and she builds her theory of knowledge out of the language of topical argument and the figurative expression of wonder. While her thought is clearly Platonic, and her Greek Presocratic, her diction is uniquely Boethian. The relationship between res and verba is calculated to confirm the prisoner's own intuitions. She invokes the authority of Plato and Parmenedes if only to make her truths believable to the prisoner. If it is the opinions of the wise he needs—as any dialectician would—then Philosophy is ready to provide them. Moreover, the prisoner should not wonder ("nihil est quod ammirere") at these truths, but accept them as sanctioned by their authors.

A similar problem arises in De Magistro, where Augustine must make clear to Adeodatus that the playful or taunting appearance of his questions is a systematic prelude to a more difficult form of investigation. In this dialogue, however, the figurative diction lacks the poetic resonance which it has for Boethius, and yet it offers an analogue to the Consolation's thematic treatment of formal structure. Midway through the discussion (De Mag., VIII.21) Augustine recognizes the seeming formlessness of his line of questioning and the obscurity of his train of thought.

But it is difficult at this point to say just where I am striving to lead you by so many circumlocutions. For it may seem that we are quibbling (ludere nos) and so diverting the mind from earnest matters with naive questions, or that we are seeking after some mean advantage.

Both the prisoner and Adeodatus confront a loss of rational and verbal direction. While it may seem that they are playing a game, Augustine shows his son the importance of their goal and the validity of their method: "But I want you to believe that I wish neither to have occupied myself with quibbles in this discussion, although we cannot afford to play if the matter is not viewed naively; nor to have labored for petty or unimportant ends." He entreats Adeodatus to follow their course, as argument becomes a praeludo, and not a ludus, which exercises the mind and develops the reason. When their dialogue begins again Adeodatus seems stunned to find Augustine asking him "whether man is a man." He takes homo to be the signified object, rather than the word, and in his confusion Adeodatus protests, "Nunc uero an ludas nescio" (VIII.22.29). Augustine has prepared for this moment, developing the language of game and providing the vocabulary in which his son can express his confusion.

By pausing in the dialogue to explain its purpose, Augustine raises the discussion of method to a statement of theme. He builds the reader's awareness of how discussion directs reason rather than perfects it. The imagery of the "way" and of the ludus in Boethius and Augustine, then, achieves three effects. First, it makes the formal constraints of dialogue a suitable subject matter. By taking the time to justify their method or defend their techniques, the speakers create an environment in which no outside excuses are necessary. They close off the world of the dialogue by making it uniquely self-referring. Second, these pauses create in the listener (either Adeodatus or the prisoner) certain expectations. They bring to the fore the hidden desire which motivates the soul, and they turn that desire into an interest in the process of discovery itself. Finally, the moments when dialogue collapses reveal the limits of human understanding and expression. While the prisoner seems lost in a tangle of language, Adeodatus is perplexed by the reference of a single word. Both these examples posit the relationship between the student's failure at formal argument and his relative success at adopting his teacher's phrasing. Where Boethius differs sharply from the Saint is in his use of a highly figurative language to recall the diction of poetry and to create, in the speaker, the sense of wonder associated with the transcendent poetry of Book Three. By denying the prisoner the opportunity to marvel, Philosophy distinguishes between the emotional effects of poetry and prose. She points him, instead, to a hermeneutic principle based on reflection and literally presented as a process of looking back. Augustine is seldom so concerned with reviewing in the De Magistro. He pauses to restate the formal constraints of the discussion, but his argument, and Adeodatus' remarks at the dialogue's end, stress a linear progress.

For Boethius, however, literary interpretation follows the same reflective patterns as the structure of the Consolation itself. The prisoner is constantly called upon to look back over the progress of his life and his discussion with Philosophy. As I have already shown, passages of the Consolation's poetry will recast earlier images from the text, and the prisoner and Philosophy will frequently echo each other to establish a unity of diction and a continual sense of repetition as the governing principle of the Consolation's composition. In the final poem of Book Three, Orpheus becomes a figure for the prisoner himself, for not only does his journey recapitulate the prisoner's early condition, but the very effect of the poem is designed to make the prisoner learn from the narrative. The following analysis of metrum 12 explores the ways in which Boethius rewrites earlier moments of the Consolation's text into this new mythological context. Like the Timaean hymn, the poem on Orpheus reviews the progress of the dialogue by drawing upon the diction, imagery, and narratives developed earlier in the work. Like the hymn as well, the poem is a "reading" of an outside text: here, not of Plato but of Seneca. Boethius recasts scenes from Seneca's Hercules Furens to measure the prisoner's progress and Philosophy's authority. The principle of rewriting which operated within the Consolation itself now operates on an outside text as well. Philosophy presents a poem to be read and interpreted; for its ultimate effect, however, Boethius relies on his reader's recognition of the Senecan "super-text" to his metrum, as we measure the prisoner, Philosophy, and the author of the Consolation himself as readers and rewriters of the tragic mythology which stand behind their words. In its presentation of musical ideas, its self-conscious metrical structuring, and its concluding moral, the poem takes as one of its subjects the formal problems of literary execution. By encapsulating the central hermeneutic movements of the Consolation, the text also comments on the process of loss and recovery characteristic of the prisoner's spiritual development.

IV

The parallels are clear between Orpheus and the prisoner at the Consolation's beginning. Both are oppressed by grief and are subject to those Muses who stifle reason and engender passion. In this and the opening metrum, the speakers contrast former happiness with present grief. The prisoner bemoaned his lost literary abilities (I.m.1.1-2), and Philosophy shows how Orpheus' grief also impedes the exercise of his poetic power.

Long ago the Thracian poet mourned for his dead wife. With his sorrowful music (flebilibus modis) he made the woodland dance and the rivers stand still.

Through flebilibus modis Orpheus' songs, while they reorder nature and calm the beasts, fail to soothe the singer. The prisoner wrote tearful verses (flebilis modos, I.m. 1.2), having taken dictation from the Muses. For both Orpheus and the prisoner, extreme grief comes to represent the loss of power and of poetry. Vocal imagery permeates both poems. Written in silence, it shows how his lament goes unheard: "Death … turns a deaf ear to the wretched." Death is a process of literal calling (vocata, I.m.I.14), as the poem details the prisoner's emotional and creative responses through specific sensory imagery.

In the poem on Orpheus repeated patterns of musical and vocal imagery also express artistic and psychological tensions by marking the movement of his song and the progress of his descent. Verbal parallels highlight the formal nature of the text and draw attention to the technical devices used to punctuate emotion.

captus carmine ianitor (III.m. 12.30)
emptam carmine coniugem (43)

At the poem's opening, structural parallels again reinforce psychological problems. Orpheus' infelicity appears twice at the poem's opening:

Felix, qui potuit boni (1)
felix, qui potuit grauis (3)

In his opening carmen, however, the prisoner tried to objectify his unhappiness by placing the blame on friends (I.m. 1.21). Both poems offer images of felicitas turned into suffering, as their speakers move from a language of music to a language of sensation. While Philosophy's poem stresses Orpheus' lost clarity of vision, the prisoner's poem concentrates on the opacity through which he discerns the world. The fog which obscures true vision oppresses the prisoner; his life is ruled by the clouded, cheating face of Fortune (19); his eyes will not close in death (16). For Orpheus, who could once behold the fountain of goodness, his gaze has turned to Hell and he is lost. Echoes mark the narrative movement:

fas sit lumina flectere (46)
uictus lumina flexerit (56).

In one brief line, Orpheus sees, loses, and kills his love, and with her dies his truth: "uidit, perdidit, occidit" (51).

Metrum 12 restates in mythological terms the literary and psychological condition of the prisoner. It also develops the philosophical diction expressed in the Consolation's poetry, and the Timaean hymn provides one foil for its opening image. In her final prayer, Philosophy had petitioned the mind to raise itself towards God, to wander by the fountain of the good (III.m.9.22-24). Orpheus, however, cannot look upon the fans boni, nor can he lift his vision to the light. He must face downward to darkness, for while Philosophy points desire towards Heaven, his passion leads him to Hell. The divine serenitas and tranquillitas, granted to the blessed in the Timaean hymn and effected in the speaker by prayer, are denied an Orpheus unsoothed by his own music. The phrasing which describes his fervor recalls the picture of the prisoner struck dumb by Philosophy's poetry at the opening of Book III, and this recollection highlights the relationship between music and emotion present throughout the Consolation. Parallels in the Latin pointedly bring this out.

cum flagrantior intima
feruor pectoris ureret
nec qui cuncta subegerant
mulcerent dominum modi,
(III.m.12.14-17)

Iam cantum illa finiuerat, cum me
audiendi auidum stupentemque
arrectis adhuc auribus carminis
mulcedo defixerat.
(III.pr.I.I)

Central to these passages is the effect of music on the listener, and his ability to attend to the possibilities of meaning in song. Implicit also in these two passages is the difference between human and beastly reactions to music. True music addresses the soul directly and brings it into harmony with the heavenly concord. It is a limited music which affects only the passions and which charms the beasts without calming Orpheus' mind. The differences, then, between the prisoner at the opening of Book Three and Orpheus at its close depend for their effectiveness on a pattern of rewriting which give a unity to the reading of the Consolation.

Such patterns of rewriting operate on the cosmological metra of Book Two, as well. The poem on Orpheus draws on the naturalism and mythology of the earlier metra to make figurative statements about man's place in the world. While Orpheus could once tame the beasts of the wood with his song, to retrieve his wife he must subdue the inhabitants of Hell. He had reshaped the natural order to his own will; the fearful are tamed, and the eternal torments of the damned stop for one brief moment. These images of music altering the natural and supernatural order stand as a climactic inversion of the thematic movement of the Consolation's poetry. The stable concord Philosophy praised in II.m.8 had kept the sea within its bounds and the land within its borders. The love which joined the married had bound the world—but now that bond is broken as Orpheus faces the funera coniugis. The sequence of naturalistic poems in Book Two, depicting the stability of a rural golden age and the trauma of an urban Roman past, established a controlling tension between order and chaos at the level of human civilization. The ideas of order developed in the poetry are instinctively perverted in the picture of Orpheus the poet. His abilities to transform the observed world into his own image comment on the creative power of the vates. As one critic has noticed, "the poem gives eloquent expression to the very impulse it is intended to curb," for it confounds the natural harmony of Philosophy's world view. In its illogic, the story presents a pervasive disharmony, from the breaking of the bonds of marriage, through Orpheus' fervor, and finally to the mad pursuit of the dead. The poem suspends the workings of necessity to admit the power of passion, if only to negate that power in the end.

In the image of Orpheus turning back, Philosophy incorporates the poem's interpretive key. Not only is her moral not to turn back towards earthly goods, but in it lies the complementary movement of looking back to review the prisoner's life. Her admonition presents the prisoner, and the reader, with a method of interpretation as well as a guide to behavior.

This fable applies (respicit) to all of you who seek to raise your minds to sovereign day.

The word respicit here embodies one of the central metaphors of the Consolation. It signifies the human contemplation of heaven or the enlightened contempt of the world. To respicere is literally to re-spicere, to "review" or "see again," and it signals the full exercise of rational abilities and the desire to review and interpret past events as guides for present behavior. When Philosophy notes that her fable itself respicit she means two things. First, she implies that the narrative looks back over the prisoner's progress to this moment. The poem itself points backwards to the worldly concupiscence which enslaved him, and forward to the higher day towards which he must direct his mind. Second, Philosophy enjoins the prisoner to interpret her fable. She prods him into activity, showing how the story retells his life and how he must act upon it. The poem is explicitly a fabula, and like the fabulae which had earlier illustrated the proper order of being (III.pr.12.24), it is designed to be read and interpreted. Like the fables of the Giants which the prisoner had read, the poem on Orpheus will become a text against which he can measure both the order of the world and the reordering of his own psyche. In turn, just as the Giants attempted to rule Heaven, so Orpheus made his bid to sway Hell. In their own ways, these fabled characters challenged the benign strength which controls earth and sky and which points the prisoner on his moral path.

Philosophy has to this point been directing the prisoner's interpretive abilities. She explicitly refers to his earlier acts of reading, and her monitory moral is as much a guide for the prisoner as it is for the reader outside the Consolation' fiction. The ways in which the poem on Orpheus rewrites earlier portions of the Consolation's prose and verse, moreover, signal a process of rereading and revision: the reader is, in effect, encouraged to return to earlier portions in the text to notice, not simple repetition, but subtle shifts in tone and emphasis. Through these structural devices, Boethius measures the progress of his prisoner; he also enables the reader to measure himself against the work's persona. These injunctions towards the end of Book Three also return the reader to the figure of the prisoner as a reader and writer expressed in the opening metrum. Read in the larger context of Boethius' self-styled literary career, and his development of a reading persona throughout his earlier works, these injunctions sustain the fictional construct at the heart of the Boethian corpus.

With these issues in mind, I now turn to what has long been recognized as the clearest source for the poem on Orpheus, Seneca's Hercules Furens, to show how Boethius rewrites not only his own text but that of another. The undeniable presence of Seneca's text behind Boethius' reveals, at another level, the activity of the prisoner as a reader, and it also gives a new facet to Philosophy's abilities as a writer of philosophical poetry. Orpheus appears in Seneca's play in an exemplary moral chorus anticipating Hercules' arrival on stage. Boethius adapts verbatim about one-third of Seneca's material (Herc. Fur., 570-595), and his editing and expansions chronicle a reader's response to the meaning of Seneca's scene for the Consolation's prisoner.

Because the poem on Orpheus so consciously directs its purpose and phrasing to the earlier stages in the prisoner's development, Boethius naturally redirects the focus of Seneca's lines away from public grief and towards private loss. From the opening of his poem, Boethius makes Orpheus' own pain the subject of his verse, while Seneca continuously shifts the acts of grieving and weeping to other characters. In Boethius, it is the Thracian poet who mourns, while in Seneca it is the chorus of Thracian brides. Seneca stresses the power of Orpheus' music to tame the beasts, alter heaven, and soothe Hell. Boethius, however, concentrates on the ways in which Orpheus' music fails to soothe himself. His use of the word dominus to characterize Orpheus himself counterpoints the phrasing dominos umbrarum in both his own and Seneca's text. His usage reinforces a focus on the condition of Orpheus' mind, and directs the reader's attention to the inner workings of his character's psyche. Seneca continually points to the outer effects of Orpheus' music on an audience. In Hercules Furens it is the gods of Hades who weep; in the Consolation it is Orpheus himself. Whereas Seneca's Orpheus is admonished not to respicere and lose his wife, it is the prisoner whom Philosophy advises to look back, as the poem itself refers and reviews (respicit) his own life. Moreover, while Seneca's Orpheus is warned not to turn until he reaches daylight, it is Philosophy's metrum which directs the prisoner to seek the "higher day." Boethius' penultimate lines echo Seneca's introductory verses to the Orpheus chorus, and he thus contrasts the upper world towards which his hero strives with the higher daylight granted the mind in heaven.

To turn Seneca's Orpheus into a figure for the prisoner, Boethius' revisions have concerned tone and focus. He also redirects the doctrinal emphases of the play's chorus by altering the relationship of love and law in the legend. Both poems present Pluto's judgment as law, but while Seneca's lex is violated only by true love's hatred of delay, Boethius points directly at love's denial of all laws save its own (HF 582-598; Cons. Phil., III.m.12.40-48). Boethius' description of the conquest of Pluto appears as a nearly verbatim quotation from the Chorus:

Tandem, "Vincimur" arbiter
umbrarum miserans ait
(III.m.12.40-41)

tandem mortis ait "vincimur"
  arbiter
(HF, 582)

In transforming the motives of Hell's court, Boethius shifts the notion of judgment and authority away from individually empowered beings and towards a higher, abstract law. Within the structure of Seneca's play, Pluto's system of judgment—losophy, however, the "higher day" is lit not by the sun and stars but by the light of reason and the glow of heaven.

Book Three may be said to end in the way it began, with Philosophy commenting explicitly on the intent and method behind her dialogue with the prisoner. Her arguments in prose and her statements in poetry re-state phrases developed elsewhere in Boethius' writing, and her diction alerts the reader to sources in earlier literary and philosophical texts. Boethius creates unified structures of allusion in the Book: to his earlier remarks in the Consolation; to his definitions and idioms of the logical writings; to the persona of the tractates and commentaries. In sustaining the figure of a reader and a writer, Boethius provides a guide for the Consolation's audience: they may measure themselves against the prisoner's progress and include themselves in Philosophy's final injunction; but they may also measure the prisoner against the corpus of Boethius' earlier works. These patterns of self-reference are also articulated in the dialogue's moments of pause and breakdown. By stopping to reflect on technique, the disputants make method their theme; they take as their subject the creation of the dialogue inscribed within the Consolation's text. In the poetry, rhetorical forms create structures of imagery which unify the metra into narrative sequences. Moreover, the prose dialogue itself frequently moves through figurative diction and allusive metaphor. Through these patterns of literary allusion and imagery, the Consolation's progress can be charted in ways which complement the straightforward and apparently linear movement of the dialogue's logic.

Book Three has an integrity of movement which reenacts the themes of returning, reviewing, and recapitulating in its very structure. A deep feeling of loss permeates the book, and it is only at its end that the prisoner witnesses the possibility of recovering a stability of mind and a strength of purpose. Book Three is also a book of transformations, as its poetry turns mythological narrative and Senecan tragedy into an almost religious cosmology, and as its prose turns the language of Aristotelian dialectic into a suitable medium for philosophic inquiry. The book gradually moves from literal explanations of method to figurative expressions of truth. While Philosophy begins with an attempt to explain her purpose in words, her final poem points towards a form of self-knowledge accessible only through individual meditation on literary symbols. The prisoner himself has been transported from a physical reliance on the impressions of his eyes and ears to a spiritual awareness granted the mind. He has moved from the limits of dialectic to an inkling of philosophic method, and his growth as a speaker and as a reader will inform the purpose of Book Four.