"The author begins by tracing the career of this Roman senator rising to high office under the Gothic king Theodoric the Great, and suggests that his death may be seen as a cruel by-product of Byzantine ambitions to restore Roman imperial rule after its elimination in the West in 476. Subsequent chapters examine in detail his education programme in the liberal arts, designed to avert a threatened collapse of culture, and his ambition of translating into Latin everything he could find on Plato and Aristotle. The last two chapters bring fresh evidence to illustrate the profound debt of the theological tractates to Neoplatonic commentaries on the 'Permednides' of Plato, and finally inquire what evidence for Boethius' personal faith is given by the vindication of providence in the 'Consolation of Philosophy', from which explicitly Christian elements are absent."--Jacket.