ABSTRACT
Boethius was an aristocrat and scholar living in northern Italy from 480 to 524. He had been educated in Greek, particularly in Plato’s works. In 510 he was briefl y a consul in the service of Theoderic, the Gothic prefect of Ravenna and Italy (ruled 493-526). In 523 Boethius returned to politics as a high civil servant, as Theoderic’s magister offi ciorum ‘master of the offi ces’. This was also the year in which Theoderic, who was an Arian Christian (Jesus as fully human), began to persecute Catholics and intellectuals. Theoderic had no male heir, and when his men intercepted a letter to Emperor Justin I of Byzantium on the issue of the royal succession, the author, an ex-consul named Albinus, was arrested and charged with high treason. Boethius made the mistake of defending him, saying ‘if Albinus did anything, I myself and the entire Roman senate are also guilty’ (Wolfram 1988: 331). Boethius’ enemies at the court in Ravenna used this remark to entangle him, and a year later Boethius was dead, executed on the orders of the paranoid Goth. Whilst he sat in Pavia, awaiting execution, whether in a cell or under house arrest or in internal exile it is not clear, Boethius composed his masterpiece, De consolatione Philosophiae ‘On the consolation of Philosophy’, a rhetorical neo-Platonist dialogue in fi ve books on the subject of fate and destiny.
