Boethius

Boethius lived between the fifth and the sixth centuries. After a period of collaboration with Ostrogoth King Theodoric, Boethius was imprisoned and then executed. He translated Aristotle’s works on logic, Plato and the Neoplatonics into Latin, and while in prison composed his best-known work, De consolatione philosophiae, a prosimetron in which he imagines being visited by a woman, the personification of philosophy, who consoles him by showing him, in the 5 books which make up the work, the nature of evil, the precariousness of fortune, the essence of true happiness, the apparent contradiction between the existence of God and the presence of evil, and the relationship between free will and divine foreknowledge. Boethius exercised a notable influence on Dante and his work, and is placed by him among the wise in the heaven of the sun. In the Convivio, the De Consolatione is used to justify the apparently inappropriate choice of speaking about himself, and reading Boethius and Cicero is indicated as a source of consolation following the death of Beatrice and a stimulus to the study of philosophy. On the basis of this declaration, some maintain that Boethius may have influenced the Vita nuova: not only by suggesting the prosimetron structure, but also, if one accepts the recent proposal to recognize Dante’s libello as an elegy[1], by providing a model for the genre, given that the medieval rhetorical tradition frequently considered De Consolatione as elegy. Boethius is present also in Dante’s later works, both ideologically, influencing his theme of fortune and free will, and poetically: the Commedia uses Boethian stylistic features, especially at points with strong mystical overtones, such as in the incipit of Par., X, where the reader is invited to contemplate the perfection of the heavenly order, or in the prayer to the Virgin in Par., XXXIII.

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[1] S. Carrai, Dante elegiaco. Una chiave di lettura per la Vita Nova, Firenze, Olschki, 2006.