losopher and statesman, described by Gibbon as "the last of the
Romans whom Cato or Tully could have acknowledged for their countryman."
The historians of the day give us but imperfect records or make
unsatisfactory allusions. Later chroniclers indulged in the fictitious
and the marvellous, and it is almost exclusively from his own books that
trustworthy information can be obtained. There is considerable diversity
among authorities as to his name. One editor of his _De Consolatione_,
Bertius, thinks that he bore the praenomen of Flavius, but there is no
authority for this supposition. His father was Flavius Manlius Boetius,
and it is probable that the Flavius Boetius, the praetorian prefect who
was put to death in A.D. 455 by order of Valentinian III., was his
grandfather, but these facts do not prove that he also had the praenomen
of Flavius. Many of the earlier editions inserted the name of Torquatus,
but it is not found in any of the best manuscripts. The last name is
commonly written Boethius, from the idea that it is connected with the
Greek [Greek: Boaethos]; but the best manuscripts agree in reading
Boetius.

His boyhood was spent in Rome during the reign of Odoacer. We know
nothing of his early years. A passage in a treatise falsely ascribed to
him (_De Disciplina Scholarium_) and a misinterpretation of a passage in
Cassiodorus led early scholars to suppose that he spent some eighteen
years in Athens pursuing his studies, but there is no foundation for
this opinion. His father, consul in 487, seems to have died soon after;
for Boetius states that, when he was bereaved of his parent, men of the
highest rank took him under their charge (_De Con_. lib. ii. c. 3),
especially the senator Q. Aur. Memmius Symmachus, whose daughter
Rusticiana he married. By her he had two sons, Anicius Manlius Severinus
Boetius and Q. Aurelius Memmius Symmachus. He became a favourite with
Theodoric, the Ostrogoth, who ruled in Rome from 500, and was one of
his intimate friends. Boetius was consul in 510, and his sons, while
still young, held the same honour together (522). Boetius regarded it as
the height of his good fortune when he witnessed his two sons, consuls
at the same time, convoyed from their home to the senate-house amid the
enthusiasm of the masses. On that day, he tells us, while his sons
occupied the curule chairs in the senate-house, he himself had the
honour of pronouncing a panegyric on the monarch. But his good fortune