Boethius, Anicius Manlius Severinus c.475-524AD
Roman philosopher and politician

Born of a patrician Roman family, he studied in Athens and later produced the translations of and commentaries on Aristotle and Porphyry that became the standard textbooks on logic in medieval Europe. He was made consul in 510AD during the Gothic occupation of Rome and later Chief Minister to the ruler Theodoric, but in 523 he was accused of treason and imprisoned in Pavia, and was executed the following year. It was during his imprisonment that he wrote the famous De Consolatione Philosophiae ('The Consolation of Philosophy'), in which Philosophy personified solaces the distraught author by explaining the mutability of all earthly fortune and the insecurity of everything except virtue. The Consolation was for the next thousand years probably the most widely read book after the Bible. He is sometimes described as 'the last of the Roman philosophers, the first of the scholastic theologians'.

Bibliography: H H Patch, The Tradition of Boethius (1935)