ABSTRACT
In the year of the Lord 510 the Roman Empire had only one consul. The consul of the year 510 was a youngish man of about thirty. His name was Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius Junior. Boethius may not have had particularly far-reaching plans from the very beginning, but by 510 he must have reached the point where he planned to translate all of the Aristotelian Logic, and accompany the translations with commentaries and handbooks based on authoritative Greek patterns. In the short run, Boethius' translations, commentaries and monographs met with no success, due to the collapse of the political structure and of higher schooling in the western part of the Roman empire shortly after his death. Boethius is unlikely to have foreseen the devastation of Italy that Justinian's attempt to reconquer Italy was to cause soon after his death, or the resulting near-annihilation of much of the learned culture he represented.
