Written in prison awaiting execution, a dialogue between the condemned author and the personified figure of Philosophy on fortune, fate, and true happiness.
Boethius was a Roman senator and philosopher who rose to become a high official under the Ostrogothic king Theodoric, then fell from favor, was imprisoned on charges of treason, and was executed around 524 CE without ever learning whether the accusations against him were true. The Consolation of Philosophy was written during that imprisonment, in the last months of his life -- a dialogue between Boethius and a personification of Philosophy herself, who appears at his lowest moment to argue that fortune is inherently fickle, that worldly goods were never truly his to lose, and that genuine happiness must be sought elsewhere. It became one of the most widely read and translated books of the entire Middle Ages, translated into Old English by King Alfred the Great himself and later into Middle English by Chaucer -- read by a condemned man's captors' descendants for a thousand years as one of the great meditations on how to face loss.