He also had written some texts on music theory, geometry, and theology. While Boethius was a Christian, The Consolations of Philosophy is remarkable in that it has no reference to Christian beliefs, and is of a strictly philosophical nature.

This is a nice quote attributed to him: "Of all misfortune, the worst kind of fate is to have been happy. "

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Boethius was the son-in-law of the consul Symmachus. He himself became a senator at the age of only 30, and sole consul in 510. The height of his good fortune was to see his two sons as consuls together in 522. But then he and others including Symmachus were accused of plotting against Theodoric, the Ostrogothic king of Italy, and he was executed after long imprisonment at Pavia, where he wrote the De Consolatione Philosophiae.

The author is in prison, bewailing his sorrows, being consoled a little by the sweet singing of the Muses. In stalks Philosophy, a giant of a woman in wondrous garb, who is uncharacteristically bitchy in showing the Nine the door. In fact, to quote Chaucer,

sche was a litil amoeved, and glowede with cruel eighen. "Who," quod sche, "hath suffred aprochen to this sike man thise comune strompettis of swich a place that mean clepen the theatre; the which not oonly ne asswagen noght his sorwes with none remedies, but thei wolden fedyn and noryssen hym with sweete venym."

In earlier times his importance rested on his translations and digests of Aristotle. Boethius was the last great scholar in the Roman West to understand Greek, so in his Latin survived much of the learning of antiquity. This lasted until Arabic manuscripts, direct translations, began to be circulated in the West in the 1100s.