Translate the whole of Aristotle and the whole of Plato into Latin, comment on all of it, and then demonstrate that the two men had never really disagreed: that was the programme one Roman aristocrat announced for himself in the early sixth century. Greek was slipping out of the West. Educated Romans had once read Plato and Aristotle in the original as a matter of course; by then almost nobody in Italy could, and the philosophy of a thousand years was drifting toward a language its heirs no longer spoke.
He had the standing to attempt it: he came from the Anicii, held the consulship in 510, and in 522 saw both his sons made joint consuls in the same year — an honour he later called the summit of his fortune. That same year he accepted the post of Master of Offices, head of the entire civil administration, under Theodoric, the Ostrogothic king who ruled Italy as an Arian Christian in the midst of a Catholic senate.
So the translations were a second job, worked around the running of a government, and he never got past the logic. Aristotle's Categories and On Interpretation, Porphyry's introduction to them, his own commentaries and textbooks: that was the fragment he finished, and for six centuries it was all the Aristotle Latin Europe had.
Politics ended the rest. In 523 the senator Albinus was accused of treasonous correspondence with the emperor in Constantinople. Boethius defended him, arguing that if Albinus was guilty then the whole Senate was, and the court took him at his word. He was charged with treason, with sacrilege and with the practice of magic, condemned without ever appearing before the Senate that tried him, held at Pavia, and executed in 524. His father-in-law Symmachus, who had raised him, was killed shortly after.
He wrote The Consolation of Philosophy while waiting. It is a dialogue between a prisoner complaining of injustice and a woman who is Philosophy herself, refusing to let the complaint stand. Her argument is blunt, and it is the book's whole engine: Fortune never promised anything. Office, reputation, wealth and family were on loan the entire time, and a man who lodged his happiness in things that can be confiscated built where he was warned not to build.
Then comes the harder question, the one that keeps the book alive. If God already knows what you will do tomorrow, in what sense is tomorrow yours? His answer was to attack the word "already": eternity is not time stretched out forever but the possession of all one's life at once, so God does not foresee what a prisoner in Pavia will do; he sees it. What is future to the prisoner is present to a mind outside the sequence, and being seen doing something freely does not make it compelled.
There is nothing Christian anywhere in the book, though he had written five short theological treatises, two of them on the Trinity and one against the Christological heresies of Eutyches and Nestorius. Scholars have argued about the silence for centuries without settling it.
Medieval Europe read the Consolation as it read almost nothing else. King Alfred's court produced an Old English version, Chaucer made an English Boece, Elizabeth I translated it in her sixties. A stray remark of his on whether universal terms name real things or only thoughts set the agenda for four hundred years of argument. And his image of Fortune turning her wheel, indifferent to who is on it, outlived everything else he wrote.