The Consolation of Philosophy

IN MECHANICAL WORKS:

He translated Archimedes the Mechanician.
He published, moreover, Plato translated by himself.
One book of Letters to various people.
He also undertook to write the Concordance of Aristotelian Philosophy with Platonic.
One book On Hebdomads Theological tractate on how substances are good.

I would also believe that at Rome, either he himself taught certain noble youths out of the ordinary, or he presided over those who were teaching, and instituted various exercises of all wisdom in his own home. For at that time, even Rome itself was famous for the celebrity of its literature, philosophy, and humane disciplines and arts: just as appears from the rescript of King Theodoric to Symmachus, the father-in-law of Boethius, in which he calls Rome the fruitful mother of eloquence and the most spacious temple of all virtues: and he forbids that the children of Valerian, brought from the city of Syracuse to Rome for the sake of studies, should return to their father without his consultation or knowledge.

The fame of the erudition of our Boethius was also known to foreigners: for when Theodoric was joined by kinship to Chlodoveus, King of the Franks, and Gundibaldus, King of the Burgundians—because he himself had taken the former's sister Audafleda as his wife, and had given his own daughter in marriage to the other—it happened by chance that Gundibaldus, who had visited his father-in-law at Ravenna, also traveled to Rome, stirred by the fame of the city and the celebrity of Boethius's name. When Boethius had shown him, among other instruments of mechanical work, two clocks, one of which indicated the course of the Sun on a moving sphere, and the other indicated the spaces of hours by dripping water—which kind the Greeks call clepsydras water clocks—the barbarian man was stunned by the sight of them. As soon as he returned to his own kingdom, having sent envoys, he requested from Theodoric that such clocks be sent to him. Theodoric asked Boethius to construct such things for his kinsman; once constructed, he sent them. There exist two letters of his in Cassiodorus, which are witnesses to these matters, and which it is worth the effort to know, both to confirm the truth of those things which I have said, and...