Cassiodorus

Cassiodorus (Flavius Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator) (kăshōdō`rəs), c.485–c.585, Roman statesman and author. He held high office under Theodoric the Great and the succeeding Gothic rulers of Italy, who gave him the task of putting into official Latin their state papers and correspondence. These he later collected as Variae epistolae (tr. by Thomas Hodgkin, 1886). After retiring he founded two monasteries; in one of these the monks devoted leisure time to copying old manuscripts, which were thus preserved. Among Cassiodorus's works were his History of the Goths, preserved in the abridgment by Jordanes, and a treatise on orthography.

Bibliography

See J. J. O'Donnell, Cassiodorus (1979).

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Cassiodorus

 in full Flavius Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus

(born 490, Scylletium, Bruttium, kingdom of the Ostrogoths—died c. 585, Vivarium Monastery, near Scylletium) Historian, statesman, and monk who helped preserve Roman culture after the collapse of the Roman Empire. He was secretary to Theodoric and later held other high imperial offices. Soon after 540 he founded a monastery to perpetuate the culture of Rome. He collected pagan and Christian manuscripts and had the monks copy them, establishing a practice continued in later centuries. His own works included the Chronicon, a history of mankind to 519; De anima, on the soul after death; and Institutiones divinarum et saecularium litterarum, on the study of scripture and the seven liberal arts.

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Cassiodorus

Flavius Magnus Aurelius . ?490--?585 ad, Roman statesman, writer, and monk; author of Variae, a collection of official documents written for the Ostrogoths

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Cassiodorus 

(Flavius Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator). Born circa 487 at Scyllacium, in Calabria; died circa 578 at Vivarium. Writer and statesman of the Ostrogothic state.

Cassiodorus was a retainer of Theodoric and his successors. He favored rapprochement between the Ostrogoths and the Romans. In his old age he became a monk and founded the monastery of Vivarium, which became one of the centers of early medieval culture, on his estate on the western shore of the Gulf of Taranto. He wrote the 12-book History of the Goths, which has survived in Jordanes’ abridged version. Cassiodorus also composed several works on the history of the church and the Variae —collections of letters, rescripts, and the like—which are an important source for the history of the Goths.

WORKS

In Monumenta Germaniae historica: Auctorum antiquissimorum, vols. 11–12. Berlin, 1894.
In Patrologiae latina, vol. 69. Paris, 1865.