ABSTRACT
In the Latin text of the De Consolatione Boethius plays a literary game with the reader at the outset. The work opens with a poetic lament in which the author is apparently addressing his readers and complaining of his misery: ‘I used to sing of happiness’, he says, ‘now (nunc) I can only make poems about grief.’2 But the prose text that follows insists on a readjustment, a rethink of our relation to the text: ‘While I was thinking these thoughts to myself in silence, and set my pen to record this tearful complaint, there seemed to stand above my head a woman.’3 The narrator reveals that the opening verses are not addressed to any audience but were an interior monologue, a thought articulated in silence (tacitus) by the character Boethius at some moment in the past, and communicated now by the author to the reader as a record of that past event; the nunc of the opening verses is not the now of the literary present when the author addresses the reader but really the ‘then’ of the prison dialogue. And we relocate ourselves as the readers of a philosophical prose text rather than the audience of a poetic lament.
