Boethius had everything: patrician birth into the Anicii family, adoption by the wealthy senator Symmachus, fluency in Greek at a time when it was vanishing from the West, a consulship by thirty-three, and in 522 AD the post of Magister Officiorum under the Ostrogothic king Theodoric while both of his sons served as consuls. Then he was accused of treason, stripped of his wealth, exiled to Pavia, and brutally executed in 524. This episode follows that rise and fall and the extraordinary book he wrote while awaiting death.

We look at his early tasks for Theodoric, from investigating debased coinage to designing a water clock, his campaign against corrupt officials extorting the poor, and the religious and political paranoia that made him a target once the churches of Rome and Constantinople began to reconcile. We then examine The Consolation of Philosophy, in which Lady Philosophy confronts him with the wheel of fortune, argues that suffering comes from attachment to things fortune can reclaim, and locates true freedom in the unmoving center of the axle. The episode also explains why a Christian martyr wrote his final work without mentioning scripture, and how his translations and music theory shaped the next thousand years.

• Why Boethius’s fluency in Greek made him like the only person who could still read civilization’s source code
• The Council of Verona, the accusation against Albinus, and the conflicting accounts of the three witnesses
• Lady Philosophy as an intellectual surgeon rather than a comforting nurse
• How the Opuscula Sacra resolved doubts about his faith, and why he saw reason and theology as complementary tools
• Musica mundana, musica humana, and musica instrumentalis: music as audible mathematics of the cosmos