Classics and the Western Canon discussion

This is a thread for background and resources.

For starters, here's an on-line version of the text useful for quoting passages:
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/14328/...

A comment: As regular participants here know, this group has a strict rule against spoilers and discourages the posting of materials, particularly early in the discussion, which include spoilers. For novels, where an author is deliberately presenting his events in a specific order and wants the reader to encounter those events in the sequ3nce the author has intended them to be read, this makes good sense. For Boethius (and also for Plato), we can be a bit more relaxed about this. While these authors are presenting their ideas in a sequence that makes logical sense to them, and we should respect their creativity in this regard, the occasional reference to a future passage, if it will help clarify the text under discussion, may be appropriate. I'm certainly not offering carte blanche for spoilers, and I still think we should be careful to keep the discussion focused on the specific text for the week, but the purpose here and in the Republic will be trying to understand some fairly challenging philosophic issues, and if an occasional reference to something coming down the road or a scholarly discussion which includes material beyond that week's reading can help clarify the current point under discussion, that seems reasonable to me.

This site has a fair amount of information about Boethius and the Consolation.

http://www9.georgetown.edu/faculty/jo...

Here's an essay on Medieval Philosophy which places Boethius in context.

http://www.utm.edu/staff/jfieser/clas...

I'm sure there are lots of other resources out there for others to find!

There is another online version at CCEL (Christian Classics Ethereal Library). Boethius was a Roman Christian, but this book doesn't touch on any Christian themes, AFAICT.

Just to throw this out there, in C.S. Lewis' The Discarded Image, he has a chapter which goes through each book of The Consolation and both summarizes and comments on them. It really helped me understand it better. The book also goes into the scientific and philosophical notions that would've been pertinent to his beliefs, though it is mostly focused on the Middle Ages and Boethius is brought up specifically because of his great influence on that era.

Joshua wrote: "Just to throw this out there, in C.S. Lewis' The Discarded Image, he has a chapter which goes through each book of The Consolation and both summarizes and comments on them. It really helped me und..."

Oh, thank you, Joshua. I have that book and have not yet cracked it open. He speaks of Boethius quite often in A Preface to Paradise Lost, I think it is.

I haven't read that, but I've heard it's quite good. He speaks a lot about Paradise Lost in The Discarded Image.

A bit of trivia: Boethius coined the term "quadrivium."

Thomas wrote: "A bit of trivia: Boethius coined the term "quadrivium.""

No trivial accomplishment!