Amazon.com description: Product Description: "An eminent public figure under the Gothic emperor Theodoric, Boethius (c. A.D. 475-525) was also an exceptional Greek scholar and it was to the Greek philosophers that he turned when he fell from favor and was imprisoned in Pavia. Written in the period leading up to his brutal execution, it is a dialogue of alternating prose and verse between the ailing prisoner and his nurse' Philosophy, whose instruction on the nature of fortune and happiness, good and evil, fate and free will, restore his health and bring him to enlightenment." This quote is from the back cover of an earlier publication of The Consolation of Philosophy