Few works have achieved the fame and influence of The Consolation of Philosophy, the last of the great philosophical works of Greco-Roman antiquity and one of the principal channels through which classical thought and literature reached the Middle Ages.

Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius (c. 480 – c. 526 AD), a Roman senator from a noble family, wrote it in prison while awaiting the execution of the death sentence handed down against him by the Ostrogothic king Theodoric. Throughout its pages, a philosophical autobiography unfolds, condensing and synthesizing, in a lucid and moving meditation, classical ethical thought and the unfathomable problems of the human conscience: the debate between good and evil, participation in political life, the influence of fortune on human life, human will and divine foresight, chance and destiny, and the separation of faith and reason.