Boethius had everything: patrician birth into the Anicii family, adoption by the wealthy senator Symmachus, fluency in Greek at a time when it was vanishing from the West, a consulship by thirty-three, and in 522 AD the post of Magister Officiorum under the Ostrogothic king Theodoric while both of his sons served as consuls. Then he was accused of treason, stripped of his wealth, exiled to Pavia, and brutally executed in 524. This episode follows that rise and fall and the extraordinary book he wrote while awaiting death.

We look at his early tasks for Theodoric, from investigating debased coinage to designing a water clock, his campaign against corrupt officials extorting the poor, and the religious and political paranoia that made him a target once the churches of Rome and Constantinople began to reconcile. We then examine The Consolation ...