Boethius’ Corpus
The Works of Boethius
Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius (c. 477–524)
The whole hand he was dealt and the part of it he lived to play.
- Catch rate
- Not found in the wild
- Base research
- 206
- Stat total
- 336
Base stats
Every stat is a checkable fact about the actual book, not a designer's mood. Bars are drawn against the highest value any book reaches.
Why these numbers
The game's own explanation, as a reader sees it in the backpack.
Five theological tractates, the Consolation, the logic that carried Aristotle into Latin, and treatises on arithmetic and music. Not a vast body of work — he was dead at forty-seven — but a load-bearing one.
Every part of it argues from something the other side already grants: reason, number, the shared categories. It rarely raises its voice and it rarely has to.
The single hardest book on the medieval shelf to knock over. Each piece braces the others, and the schools spent seven hundred years building on all of them at once.
The Consolation alone was the age’s bestseller; the logic was its textbook. Boethius takes the floor before most of the men who quote him were born.
Cited for this book
Boethius set out to put all of Plato and all of Aristotle into Latin and to show they agreed. He got through the logic before Theodoric had him killed. What he finished — the logical textbooks, the arithmetic, the music, the five tractates, the Consolation — is most of what the Latin West had to think with for the next six centuries. He is buried in Pavia in the same church as Augustine; venerated locally as a martyr, a cult confirmed for that diocese in 1883.
Development
A book develops as it is read — the fragment becomes the work, the work becomes the corpus.
Moves learned
By levelling up. A book that develops keeps what it knew and learns the rest on its new schedule.
| Lv | Move | Type | Cat. | Pwr | Acc | PP |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Random Verse | Bible | Argument | 10 | 100% | 30 |
| 26 | Chapter… | Bible | Scripture | — | — | 12 |
| 28 | Likeness Attracts | Rationality | Argument | 76 | 100% | 15 |
| 33 | The Will of the Good | Natural Theology | Argument | 82 | 100% | 10 |
| 37 | Not Three Truths | Theology Proper | Argument | 88 | 95% | 10 |
| 40 | Only by Relation | Theology Proper | Argument | 90 | 100% | 10 |
| 43 | An Individual Substance | Christology | Argument | 85 | 100% | 10 |
| 46 | Three Kinds of Music | Natural Theology | Argument | 78 | 100% | 15 |
| 49 | Every Fortune Is Good | Rationality | Argument | 86 | 95% | 10 |