Boethius writes The Consolation of Philosophy

Boethius (born c. 480) belonged to one of the great senatorial families of Rome and served Theodoric, the Ostrogothic king of Italy: he was consul in 510 and became magister officiorum in 522, the year in which both his sons were consuls. As a scholar he translated Aristotle’s logical works into Latin; until the 12th century they remained the only significant part of Aristotle available in the Latin West. In 523, at a royal council in Verona, the referendarius Cyprianus accused the senator Albinus of treasonable correspondence with Emperor Justin I. Boethius defended him, declaring that if Albinus was guilty, so were he and the whole Senate. He was then accused himself, of treason and of practising magic, arrested and condemned, and his office passed to Cassiodorus.

In prison — by tradition at Pavia, where his tomb is in the church of San Pietro in Ciel d’Oro — he wrote the Consolation, five books in which prose alternates with verse. Lady Philosophy appears to the despairing prisoner and leads him from complaints about the fickleness of Fortune and her wheel to reflections on true happiness, on providence and on how God’s foreknowledge can be reconciled with human free will. Boethius was a Christian, but the book argues from philosophy alone; as Henry Chadwick observed, it contains nothing distinctively Christian, but nothing specifically pagan either.

The chronology is uncertain. Boethius was put to death on an estate called the ager Calventianus, whose location is disputed; the English and Russian articles on him date the execution to 524, while John Marenbon and the Russian article on the Consolation consider 526 more likely; the English article dates the book to 523, Wikidata to about 524. His father-in-law Symmachus was executed soon afterwards. Some four hundred manuscripts of the Consolation survive; King Alfred translated it into Old English, later Jean de Meun, Chaucer and Elizabeth I rendered it into their languages, and Dante placed Boethius among the blessed in Paradise.