"I turn the wheel that spins": Boethius gives Fortune the floor, and she answers his complaint as a lawsuit about who owns what
A close read of the speech Boethius gives to Fortune in Book II of the Consolation, in H. R. James's English: she does not deny the loss, she denies the ownership, and the case turns on one verb.
Boethius was a Roman senator, a consul, and the master of offices at the Ostrogothic court — in effect the head of the kingdom's civil service. In 523 he was accused of treason, imprisoned at Pavia, and executed the following year 1.
The charge came out of a meeting at Verona. A courtier named Cyprianus accused a former consul of writing treasonously to the emperor in Constantinople, and Boethius answered that if the man was guilty, so was he, and so was the whole senate 1.
He wrote this book in the cell. It is not a treatise but a conversation: a woman appears to him and identifies herself as Philosophy, and over five books she answers his complaints 2.
Each book runs a few pages of prose, then breaks into verse, then returns to prose. H. R. James, whose English is quoted below, thought the alternation worked "like dialogue and chorus in a Greek play" 3.
James's version appeared in 1897. By then the book had already been turned into English by King Alfred in the ninth century, by Chaucer in the fourteenth, and by Elizabeth I in the sixteenth 2.
Book II is where the arguing starts. The prisoner has lost his property, his office and his freedom, and Philosophy's first move is to hand the floor to the other side 2.
Passage
‘Now I would fain also reason with thee a little in Fortune’s own words. Do thou observe whether her contentions be just. “Man,” she might say, “why dost thou pursue me with thy daily complainings? What wrong have I done thee? What goods of thine have I taken from thee? Choose an thou wilt a judge, and let us dispute before him concerning the rightful ownership of wealth and rank. If thou succeedest in showing that any one of these things is the true property of mortal man, I freely grant those things to be thine which thou claimest.When nature brought thee forth out of thy mother’s womb, I took thee, naked and destitute as thou wast, I cherished thee with my substance, and, in the partiality of my favour for thee, I brought thee up somewhat too indulgently, and this it is which now makes thee rebellious against me. I surrounded thee with a royal abundance of all those things that are in my power. Now it is my pleasure to draw back my hand. Thou hast reason to thank me for the use of what was not thine own; thou hast no right to complain, as if thou hadst lost what was wholly thine. Why, then, dost bemoan thyself? I have done thee no violence. Wealth, honour, and all such things are placed under my control. My handmaidens know their mistress; with me they come, and at my going they depart.I might boldly affirm that if those things the loss of which thou lamentest had been thine, thou couldst never have lost them. Am I alone to be forbidden to do what I will with my own? Unrebuked, the skies now reveal the brightness of day, now shroud the daylight in the darkness of night; the year may now engarland the face of the earth with flowers and fruits, now disfigure it with storms and cold. The sea is permitted to invite with smooth and tranquil surface to-day, to-morrow to roughen with wave and storm. Shall man’s insatiate greed bind me to a constancy foreign to my character? This is my art, this the game I never cease to play. I turn the wheel that spins.”
Three hundred and seventy words: Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, Book II, prose 2, in H. R. James's English (first published 1897; the pages read here are from an undated Routledge "New Universal Library" printing, London: George Routledge & Sons; New York: E. P. Dutton), pages 37–38 3. The page keeps Philosophy in single quotation marks and Fortune in double ones; that arrangement, and James's spelling and punctuation, are kept here.
Gloss
- property — James's word for the Latin proprium, the thing that is one's own. Roman law kept a separate name for what Boethius actually had: usus, use. A person allowed to use another's property without owning it holds a usufruct, and the phrase James renders as "the use of what was not thine own" — Latin usus alienis — is precisely that position 45.
- Unrebuked — the Latin is licet, "it is permitted". James's word makes it sound as though nobody scolds the weather; the Latin says the sky has leave to do it, in the vocabulary of a right granted rather than a fault overlooked 5.
- engarland — James's verb for Latin redimire, to wreathe or crown with a garland 6. The year puts a garland on the earth's face and then takes it off. It is the only ornament in the speech, and it belongs to a season rather than to anyone.
Close read
Philosophy introduces the speech with an instruction to the reader: "Do thou observe whether her contentions be just." The jury is seated before Fortune says a word.
What follows is a voice inside a voice. Philosophy speaks, Fortune speaks inside her, and the printed page marks the seam by switching from single quotation marks to double. Three speakers are stacked in a book that already has two.
Fortune's opening is not a defence. It is three questions in a row, then an offer of a court: "Choose an thou wilt a judge." A defendant who lets the plaintiff pick the bench is telling the plaintiff there is no case.
The Latin tightens it. She calls herself ream, the woman in the dock, and what he is doing to her is agis, the verb for proceeding against a defendant 5. James's "pursue me" turns the trial back into a hunt, and the courtroom drops out of the English.
Then the burden of proof, reversed in a sentence: show that any of this is "the true property of mortal man," and it is yours. Read what she concedes. She does not claim the goods were worthless, or the loss imaginary. She claims that title was never transferred.
The next sentence repeats a verb. He asked what she had taken from him; she answers that she took him, "naked and destitute as thou wast," from his mother's womb. The theft she is charged with turns out to be the midwife's office. That is the hinge of the whole speech, and it is one word wide.
After that the language is domestic. Wealth and honour are "handmaidens" who know their mistress: "with me they come, and at my going they depart." Anyone who has watched a house empty knows the picture. The servants leave first.
"Am I alone to be forbidden to do what I will with my own?" Here the argument stops being about him. It had been an answer to a complaint about loss; it becomes a defence of the rights of an owner. The word "own" is doing the work of a deed.
Then she steps outside the house into the weather: skies, year, sea, three pairs of opposites in three sentences, each pair introduced by permission. In the Latin the three permissions are licet, licet, ius est — allowed, allowed, and a matter of right 5. The logic is a minore ad maius, and the minor premise is the sky: nobody indicts it for going dark.
She ends on the paradox the speech has been built toward: "Shall man's insatiate greed bind me to a constancy foreign to my character?" Fortune's one constancy is that she has none. The verse that follows, in James's rhymed couplets, says the same in another key — "Mad Fortune sweeps along in wanton pride" — and calls what the prose called a game her "sport" 3.
The last two sentences convert her into a performer: "This is my art, this the game I never cease to play. I turn the wheel that spins." The Latin is more physical than that — rotam uolubili orbe uersamus, we turn the wheel in its turning circle, a line that cannot get through the word "wheel" without spinning it 5.
And the sentence immediately after the passage keeps the courtroom in the playground: "Mount up, if thou wilt, but only on condition that thou wilt not think it a hardship to come down when the rules of my game require it." In Latin the condition is ea lege, on this law. Even the invitation to climb comes with a clause.
Her evidence is worth a second look. She cites Croesus on the pyre, saved by a shower; Paullus weeping over the captive King Perseus; and then the whole genre — "What else do tragedies make such woeful outcry over save the overthrow of kingdoms by the indiscriminate strokes of Fortune?" Fortune's case law is literature. The book has handed the defence of fortune to the one witness who has read the plays.
The speech closes by refusing the phrase one last time: "nor expect to live on thine own terms in a realm that is common to all." The Latin is proprio iure, by your own right — proprium again, the word that opened the case, arriving as a door shutting 5.
Then Boethius answers, and the answer is a refusal to be consoled by any of it. "Verily, thy pleas are plausible," he says, "steeped in the honeyed sweetness of music and rhetoric. But their charm lasts only while they are sounding in the ear; the sense of his misfortune lies deeper in the heart of the wretched" 3. The book has just built its most elegant argument and then, in its own voice, reports that the argument does not reach the place where the pain is.
Why it still matters
The speech is not wrong. It is the argument of every contract, every insurance policy, every marriage settlement: what you hold, you hold on terms, and you did not write the terms.
What it cannot do is the thing the prisoner asked for. It can tell him he was a tenant. It cannot make the emptied house less empty, and the book says so on the next page.
That matters now, because the same argument is used as a silencer. Said to a person who has just lost a job, a country or someone they loved, "you never owned it" is true and useless in the same breath. Boethius knew the difference, which is why he put the reply in.
The part worth keeping is smaller. Before calling something yours, ask what kind of hold you have on it — title or use — and notice how much of what you would mourn was always the second kind.
The book was copied and recopied for a thousand years, and the wheel in Fortune's hand became the standard picture of her: blindfolded, turning kings on the rim of a mill wheel 7. The image outlived the argument it came from. Pictures usually do.
Reflection
Take something you have lost, or are afraid of losing. Were you its owner or its user — and which of those two answers do you actually live by?
References
- 1Wikipedia: Boethius
en.wikipedia.org
- 2Wikipedia: On the Consolation of Philosophy
en.wikipedia.org
- 3
- 4Wikipedia: Usufruct
en.wikipedia.org
- 5Wikisource (Latin): De philosophiae consolatione, Liber Secundus
la.wikisource.org
- 6Wiktionary: redimio
en.wiktionary.org
- 7Wikipedia: Wheel of Fortune (medieval)
en.wikipedia.org
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