Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius (c. 480–524) is the last of the antique Roman philosophers — also the last of the Roman senatorial elite, and the man who had set out to translate Plato and Aristotle into Latin. He served as consul and magister officiorum at the court of Theodoric; in 523 he was arrested on a charge of treason, stripped of his property, jailed near Pavia, and executed the following year.

In that cell he wrote the Consolatio Philosophiae (Consolation of Philosophy), a dialogue that alternates between prose and verse. Boethius opens with a lament; an allegorical female figure of Philosophy appears to him. As the dialogue unfolds, Philosophy walks him through the impermanence of worldly happiness (the wheel of Fortuna), the location of true happiness in God, the doctrine that evil is privation rather than substance, and the reconciliation of free will with divine foreknowledge. The work names Christ not even once; instead it shows how the classical philosophers — chiefly Plato and Aristotle — can be reconciled with Christian theology.

The Consolatio became one of the most-read books in Europe for the next thousand years. From Alfred the Great in the ninth century to Chaucer in the fourteenth and Queen Elizabeth I, rulers and poets translated it into their own languages. Boethius is single-handedly the bridge through which classical logic, music, arithmetic, and philosophy passed into medieval Europe.