De Musica
Boethius, De institutione musica
Boethius (c. 477–524)
Proof that the world was tuned, filed under mathematics.
- Catch rate
- 42 / 255
- Base research
- 158
- Stat total
- 268
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 books, the last one unfinished — the fullest thing Boethius wrote that is not a translation, and the West’s music theory for a thousand years.
It does not argue about God at all. It argues that the world is set to a ratio, that beauty is number the ear can hear, and lets the reader draw the line to a maker.
It was a university set text into the seventeenth century. Very little in the game has been leaned on that long without breaking.
Slow to the table — it is a mathematics book — but once there it changes what the argument is about.
Cited for this book
Boethius set music inside the quadrivium, beside arithmetic, geometry and astronomy, as one of the four ways number shows itself. The claim underneath is the ancient Christian one: the cosmos is rationally ordered, and its order can be measured and heard. No public-domain English translation of the work exists, so the game states its argument in its own words.
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 | Three Kinds of Music | Natural Theology | Argument | 78 | 100% | 15 |
| 1 | Random Verse | Bible | Argument | 10 | 100% | 30 |
| 20 | Chapter… | Bible | Scripture | — | — | 12 |
| 26 | Number Made Audible | Rationality | Argument | 74 | 100% | 15 |