 Though the influence of these other works was great, the popularity and importance of the Consolation far exceeded it. The text already echoes in what must be one of the earliest pieces of genuinely medieval Latin philosophy, the little treatise ‘On True Philosophy’ with which Alcuin prefaced his De grammatica, and it remained a favourite through the later Middle Ages and into the Renaissance. Not until the time of Gibbon had it been reduced to an object of the historian’s condescending admiration. One measure of the extent and character of its readership is the translations, not merely into almost every medieval vernacular, but also into Greek and even Hebrew. Among the translators were two of the greatest vernacular writers of the whole epoch: Jean de Meun, who put the Consolation into Old French in the later thirteenth century, and Chaucer, who translated it into Middle English about a century later. As their involvement suggests, Boethius’s dialogue was a text which popularized philosophy outside the universities, and its literary features, as well as its arguments, inspired imitations and creative adaptations, from Alain of Lille’s De planctu Naturae (‘Nature’s Lament’) to, more distantly, Dante’s Convivio and even Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. Philosophers and theologians, too, used the work; it was part of the school syllabus from the ninth to the twelfth centuries, and although Aristotle’s treatises left no room for it in the university curriculum, it continued to be studied by students and teachers there. For example, Aquinas’s account of the highest good in his Summa Theologiae IaIIe builds on the Consolation, and the definition of eternity given by Philosophy in Book V became the starting-point for almost every later medieval discussion of God and time. Moreover, the Consolation continued to be important in philosophical discussions right up to the end of the seventeenth century (cf. Belli 2011).