Born 480

Died 524

Roman philosopher

In his Consolation of Philosophy, written in a prison cell as he awaited execution, Boethius developed a view of the world that came to symbolize the medieval age in Europe. True virtue, he explained, lay not in changing one's fate, but in accepting the fate one was assigned by Fortune. His personification of "Fortune" and "Philosophy" as women also set the tone for countless medieval allegories, symbolic stories in which characters represented ideas. Though he was born after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, Boethius was a Roman to the core, and as with Augustine (see entry), his writings represent a vital link between the ancient and medieval worlds.

A distinguished Roman family

Four years before Boethius (boh-EE-thee-us) was born, the Western Roman Empire came to an end when the Germanic chieftain Odoacer...