I’m currently reading Boethius’s writing on the consolation of philosophy. Imprisoned awaiting the death penalty in 523 (for treason against King Theodoric), Boethius imagined a conversation with the personification of Philosophy herself, a woman of variable height whose fine dress was torn by various previous philosophers who had snatched tatters from it and imagined that they had the whole thing. The work has been available in English translation since the ninth century, when King Alfred commanded it be translated, though I’m reading a much more recent Penguin Classics translation.
The work leads me to imagine De Consolatione Ingenariae Computatraliae, in which someone is visited by the anthropomorphic personification of software engineering (in my headcanon this is Bruce Boxleitner as Tron), and the visitor uses the Socratic method to explore why the narrator chose to ignore so much knowledge of computing as they cut corners to close ticket after ticket in their career.
