Produced by Ted Garvin, Robert Connal and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team.
1918
[Transcriber's Note: The paper edition of this book has Latin and Englishpages facing each other. This version of the text uses alternating Latinand English sections, with the English text slightly indented.]
In preparing the text of the Consolatio I have used the apparatus inPeiper's edition (Teubner, 1871), since his reports, as I know in the caseof the Tegernseensis, are generally accurate and complete; I have dependedalso on my own collations or excerpts from various of the importantmanuscripts, nearly all of which I have at least examined, and I have alsofollowed, not always but usually, the opinions of Engelbrecht in hisadmirable article, Die Consolatio Philosophiae des Boethius in theSitzungsberichte of the Vienna Academy, cxliv. (1902) 1-60. Thepresent text, then, has been constructed from only part of the materialwith which an editor should reckon, though the reader may at least assumethat every reading in the text has, unless otherwise stated, the authorityof some manuscript of the ninth or tenth century; in certain orthographicaldetails, evidence from the text of the Opuscula Sacra has been usedwithout special mention of this fact. We look to August Engelbrecht for thefirst critical edition of the Consolatio at, we hope, no distantdate.
The text of the Opuscula Sacra is based on my own collations of allthe important manuscripts of these works. An edition with completeapparatus criticus will be ready before long for the ViennaCorpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum. The history of thetext of the Opuscula Sacra, as I shall attempt to show elsewhere, isintimately connected with that of the Consolatio.
Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, of the famous Praenestine family of theAnicii, was born about 480 A.D. in Rome. His father was an ex-consul; hehimself was consul under Theodoric the Ostrogoth in 510, and his two sons,children of a great grand-daughter of the renowned Q. Aurelius Symmachus,were joint consuls in 522. His public career was splendid and honourable,as befitted a man of his race, attainments, and character. But he fellunder the displeasure of Theodoric, and was charged with conspiring todeliver Rome from his rule, and with corresponding treasonably to this endwith Justin, Emperor of the East. He was thrown into prison at Pavia, wherehe wrote the Consolation of Philosophy, and he was brutally put to deathin 524. His brief and busy life was marked by great literary achi