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.