Cassiodorus

Cassiodorus (c. 485 - c. 580) was a Roman statesman who served the Ostrogothic king Theodoric the Great and, in the later part of his life, a Christian scholar who devoted his final years to founding a monastery and to the study of texts. He belongs to the transition between Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages, in Italy. His importance lies in his attempt to preserve both the classical and the Christian inheritance in a period of political instability and war.

He was born at Scylletium, in Calabria, into a family of Syrian origin that had held public office for several generations. His father served Theodoric as praetorian prefect, and Cassiodorus began his own career as an adviser to him. He later worked as quaestor of the sacred palace, received the honorary consulship in 514, and held the post of magister officiorum, which Boethius had held before him. He then became praetorian prefect, the highest office in the civil administration of the Ostrogothic kingdom, until he was removed from it in 538. His role in the fall of Boethius, who was executed in 524, remains debated, since his Variae barely mention that episode.

Around the 530s his life changed course, as he turned with real intensity to religious questions. After the Byzantine capture of Ravenna he spent a long period in Constantinople. Around 555 he returned to Calabria and founded the monastery of Vivarium on his family lands. It combined a community of monks with a retreat for those who preferred solitude, and it assembled a library whose books were carefully copied and corrected. There he wrote the Institutiones, his commentaries on the Psalms and, in his old age, the treatise De orthographia. His History of the Goths is lost, and is known mainly through Jordanes' summary.

Cassiodorus believed that the liberal arts, from grammar to astronomy, were valuable above all as tools for understanding Scripture. He held that reading changes the reader, so he set out a structured course of study that began with the Psalms, which he regarded as a suitable first text for an untrained reader. He admired Greek and Latin authors for the truths they contained, though he judged them inferior to revealed Scripture. His influence was largely bibliographic and educational: his catalogues of sources and his plan of studies passed into medieval learning, and part of his library reached England.