Boethius c. 480 – 524

Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius was a 5th and 6th-century Roman senator, consul, and philosopher, one of the last representatives of classical learning in the Latin West and a foundational figure of medieval philosophy. His life was spent in service to the Ostrogothic king Theodoric in Italy, until political accusations led to his imprisonment and eventual execution in 524. His Consolation of Philosophy, written in prison while awaiting execution, is one of the most widely-read philosophical texts of the Middle Ages, dramatising in dialogue with Lady Philosophy the questions of fortune, providence, freedom, and happiness. His project of translating and commenting on the works of Plato and Aristotle was cut short, but his commentaries on Aristotle's logical works became standard texts in medieval education. He has been called the last of the Romans and the first of the scholastics.

Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius (c. 480–524) was a late Roman philosopher and statesman whose Consolation of Philosophy is one of the most influential single books of the Latin philosophical tradition. Born to an old senatorial family in the last decades of the Roman empire in the West, he served Theodoric the Great's Ostrogothic regime as consul and magister officiorum before being arrested on charges of treason and executed in 524 or 525.

Boethius's life project was the translation and commentary of Aristotle and Plato into Latin, a project he was unable to complete. His translations of Aristotle's logical works — the Categories and On Interpretation in particular — were the only Aristotelian texts available to Latin Europe for the next six hundred years and shaped early medieval philosophy decisively. The original logical treatises and the theological tractates round out his philosophical work.

The Consolation of Philosophy was written in prison while Boethius awaited execution. The text is a dialogue in alternating prose and verse between the imprisoned narrator and the personified Lady Philosophy, who consoles him with arguments about Fortune, true happiness, divine providence, and the compatibility of divine foreknowledge with human freedom. The Consolation became one of the most-translated and most-commented works of medieval philosophy. It was translated into Old English by King Alfred the Great, into Middle English by Chaucer, and into Elizabethan English by Queen Elizabeth I.