Boethius

Boethius was born into the noblest Roman aristocracy shortly after the last Western emperor was deposed. He rose to the consulship under Theodoric, the Ostrogothic king who ruled Italy, and seemed to hold everything a man could want: an ancient name and the highest office in the land. Then he was accused of treason for defending a senator, thrown into prison at Pavia, and sentenced to death. In his cell, awaiting execution, he wrote The Consolation of Philosophy.

Into that cell comes Philosophy in the shape of a stately woman, and she cures his despair. First she shows him the wheel of Fortune: everything Fortune had given him – wealth and honour – had remained Fortune's own to reclaim, because it had never been his to begin with. Then, in Book V, he raises a question that would be argued for another thousand years: if God foreknows every choice I make, how can the choice be free? His answer is among the deepest in the history of thought. God does not foresee the future in time; for Him there is no "before" and no "after." Eternity is "the whole, simultaneous, and perfect possession of unbounded life," totum simul – God sees all of time at once, in a single eternal present, and so His knowing compels nothing.

Boethius is the last of the Romans and the first of the scholastics. His Latin translations of Aristotle's logic were very nearly all the West had of Aristotle for six hundred years. And he is the death of Socrates staged a second time, at the seam between antiquity and the Middle Ages: a man calmly writing philosophy's greatest consolation while the state that condemned him sharpens the axe.