 One, perfectly plausible, way of reading the Consolation is to take it, as most philosophical works are taken, at face value. On this reading, Philosophy is recognized as a clearly authoritative figure, whose teaching should not be doubted and whose success in consoling the character Boethius must be assumed to be complete. The apparent changes of direction noted in  Section 5  will be taken either as stages in Boethius’s re-education or as unintended effects of the author’s wish to make this work into a compendium of a syncretistic philosophical system, and Philosophy’s own view that she has resolved the problem of prescience will be accepted as that of Boethius the author.