"Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius was born at Rome c. 475. Not many generations after his death, the period being one in which historical criticism was at its lowest ebb, the church found it profitable to look upon his execution as a martyrdom. He was accordingly looked upon as a saint, his bones were enshrined, and as a natural consequence his books were among the classics in the church schools for a thousand years. It is pathetic, however, to think of the medieval student trying to extract mental nourishment from a work so abstract, so meaningless, so unnecessarily complicated, as the arithmetic of Boethius."