During the Middle Ages no two works were more popular than the City of God and Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy. To the former Charlemagne listened at meals : ‘Inter caenandum aut aliquod acroama aut lectorum audiebat .... Delectabatur et libris Sancti Augustini praecipueque his qui De Civitate Dei praetitulati sunt.’ A generation later Alfred in England translated the Consolation, ranking it together with the Regula Pastoralis and Bede’s Ecclesiastical History as a fitting instrument for the education of his people. Already Boethius had coloured the great Anglo-Saxon secular epic Beowulf with the influence of his thought, just as in later years Chaucer interpreted Boccaccio with the insight of the Consolation, tinting the Italian’s realism with the compassion that springs from that bond uniting God and man, alternus amor. To Boethius, introducing Aristotle to Western Europe, scholasticism is as much indebted as to the Arab commentators. For if Averroes and Avicenna led Albert the Great and Aquinas to Aristotelian nietaphysics it was Boethius who had provided the basis of scientific thought in translating into Latin the Organon and annotating in the style of Themistius the Isagoge of Porphyry. Through Cassiodorus again he established the ratio studiorum, the trivium and quadrivium, which remained substantially unchanged until the seventeenth century. To Dante he is the eighth light, of the company of St. Thomas and Richard of St. Victor, ‘si trovan molte gioie care e belle tanto che non si posson trar del regno!’ Boethius has fallen into an obscurity that on all counts is undeserved.