Cassiodorus

Flavius Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator was a Roman statesman, scholar, and writer of the late fifth and sixth centuries. He was born at Scylletium (also spelled Scyllaceum; modern Squillace) in Bruttium, on the Ionian coast of southern Italy, into a family of senatorial rank that had long served the imperial administration. His father, often distinguished as Cassiodorus the elder, held the governorship of Sicily and later the praetorian prefecture of Italy. The younger Cassiodorus received a thorough education in the Latin rhetorical and legal tradition of late antiquity and became known for an ornate official style that made him valuable to the Ostrogothic court. The exact years of his birth and death are not recorded in surviving sources; they are inferred only approximately from the chronology of his offices and from remarks in his latest writings.

He entered public service under Theodoric the Great in the early sixth century, first as quaestor of the sacred palace, the official responsible for drafting royal letters, edicts, and legal replies. He was ordinary consul in 514 and later held the posts of magister officiorum and praetorian prefect of Italy, remaining in high office through the reigns of Athalaric, Amalasuntha, and Theodahad and into the opening phase of the Gothic War. His twelve-book collection of official correspondence, the Variae, is a principal source for Ostrogothic government, diplomacy, fiscal practice, and cultural policy, including the presentation of Gothic rule as a continuation of Roman civilitas. He also composed a Chronicle and a Gothic History intended to give the Goths a respectable place in the Roman past; the latter work is lost and is known chiefly through the abridgment made by Jordanes in the Getica.

The Byzantine reconquest of Italy under Justinian, beginning in the 530s, ended Cassiodorus’s political career. He spent a period in Constantinople, where Italian notables gathered during the war, and afterward withdrew from public life. On his ancestral estates near Scylletium he founded the monastery called Vivarium, named for the fishponds on the site, gathering a community devoted to prayer, study, and the copying of books. Vivarium was conceived as a library and school at a moment when Italian urban culture was collapsing under prolonged warfare. Cassiodorus did not attach the house to a later named religious order such as the Benedictines; it was his own foundation, organized around a program of sacred and secular reading.

For that community he wrote the Institutiones divinarum et saecularium litterarum, a two-part guide to Scripture, the Fathers, and the seven liberal arts, together with recommendations for a well-equipped monastic library. He produced an extensive commentary on the Psalms, a treatise on the soul (De anima), and, in extreme old age, a handbook on orthography (De orthographia). Through the scriptorium of Vivarium and through these works he helped transmit Latin biblical scholarship and a selection of classical learning into the early medieval West. He lived to a very advanced age and is believed to have died at Vivarium in the later sixth century. He was not a bishop, was never pope or patriarch, and has no securely documented spouse, children, formal canonization, or universally recognized feast day in the major calendars.