Anicius Manlius Torquatus Severinus Boethius, the greatest philosopher of late antiquity, was born in 475-477 AD in Rome in a noble family: his father had been prefect and consul in 487 AD. After his father's death, he was educated by the historian Quintus Aurelius Symmachus, a man whom Boethius remembers with great affection in the De consolatione philosophiae. Boethius also married Rusticiana, Symmachus' daughter.

Boethius began his activity in about 500 AD, dealing mainly with the quadrivius: De institutione arithmetica, De institutione musica, De institutione geometrica, De institutione astronomica. From a Neoplatonic perspective, it is significant that Boethius was firstly an arithmologist, and also his musical theorization is strictly connected to his mathematical works.

His musical theories quickly became very popular in the Middle Ages, and their influence both from the point of view of content and terminology was huge. The egestas linguae required Boethius a considerable effort of lexical creativity to translate Greek speculation concepts into Latin (Garrido Domenè 2018). Sources of the geometric and astronomical work are respectively Euclid and Ptolemy.

The first commentary on Porphyry's Isagoge, an introductory manual to logic that enjoyed widespread appreciation, dates back to 508 AD. As was customary for late antique intellectuals, the young Boethius travelled to the East, then returned to Italy and took his cursus honorum. Theodoric became interested in that promising man of letters and Boethius became firstly prefect of Rome, then prefect of the Praetorium for Italy and in 510 AD he was finally appointed consul sine collega and entered the Senate.

Together with his political career, Boethius carried on the ambitious project of translating into Latin all the works of Aristotle and Plato's dialogues, to show their consonances. The plan was too ambitious, and Boethius ended up limiting his plans to logical works. He firstly translated the Categories and began work on the Organon. Subsequently, he worked on the commentary on the Analytica priora, the treatise De syllogismis categoricis and the De divisione; the last ones were the commentary on the De interpretatione, the translation of the Analytica posteriora and the De hypoteticis syllogismis. Boethius' approach to translation aims at the maximum accuracy in representing the original in order to give translation the status of a potential replacement for the Greek text. He aspired to avoiding any significant loss of meaning in the passage between the two languages (Gazziero 2017).

From 518 AD onwards, he translated and commented on Aristotle's Topica and commented on Cicero's homonymous work. In these years, his interest turned to theology: De trinitate; Utrum Pater et Filius et Spiritus Sanctus de divinitate substantialiter praedicentur; Quomodo substantiae in eo quod sint bonae sint, cum non sint substantialia bona. However, this is not a project wholly detached from the previous ones, since even the religious treatises base on Aristotelian logic more frequently than on the auctoritas of the Bible or on the tradition of the Fathers. For this reason, they constitute an anomaly for the traditional forms of theological argumentation: the theme of rationality is always prevalent over that of faith (Hankey 2017-2018). This feature is also why they were sometimes revoked in doubt until Usener published the Anecdoton Holderi, a sixth-century text that explicitly attributed these texts to Boethius. Today, the traces of paganism in Boethius' work are recognized and well accepted by critics (Polara 2016).

In 521 AD Boethius translated the De sophisticis elenchis and composed the De differentis topicis. The following year, when his two sons became consuls, he wrote a thanksgiving speech for the emperor Theodoric. In the meantime, he leaves Rome for travelling to Ravenna, Verona and then Pavia with Ennode the bishop, a man with whom Boethius had a close (but sometimes quarrelsome) friendship (Ferrarini 2018). In Pavia, he finds himself implicated in the defence of Patricius Albinus, accused of plotting against Theodoric at the Eastern Emperor Justin's instigation. However, the magistrate Cyprian extends the accusations of sedition and use of magic to Boethius himself, who was thus forced to defend himself like Apuleius centuries before (Fournier 2011), but with far less luck. In 523 AD Boethius was imprisoned in the wait of the trial in Pavia. From the jail, he begins to write his most famous work, the De consolatione philosophiae, a prosimeter with regular alternation between poetry and verse. The Senate judges him guilty and sentences him to death and confiscation of assets. Theodoric ratifies the sentence without giving any audience to Boethius, who was executed in 525 AD. [M.Manca; tr. M.Manca, A.Borgna]