Cassiodorus, MAGNUS AURELIUS

Cassiodorus, MAGNUS AURELIUS, a Latin statesman and historian to whom we owe most of our information respecting the Gothic kingdom of Italy, was born at Scylaceum (Squillace) in Calabria in 468 A.D. He belonged to a noble family, and became secretary to the great Ostrogothic king, Theodoric. He held the offices of quæstor and prætorian prefect, was sole consul in 514 A.D., and after the death of Theodoric in 526 A.D. acted as chief minister to Queen Amalasontha. He was an able and broad-minded statesman, to whom the success of Theodoric's policy must be in part ascribed. He seems to have retired from public life not later than 540 A.D., and to have spent the last thirty years of his long life in Calabria, where he died about 568 A.D. Cassiodorus wrote a history of the Goths (De Rebus Geticis), which we only possess in the form of the epitome made of it by Jorandes. His other work, Variarum Epistolarum Libri XII., consists of a collection of the letters which he wrote as secretary to the Gothic sovereigns. They have no literary merit, for the style is bombastic and exceedingly diffuse, but their historical value is of the highest. They form, says Dean Milman, 'a rare collection of original official documents, which admit us, as it were, to the council-board of the cabinet at one of the most interesting of all periods of history.' They shed a flood of light on the policy pursued by Theodoric and his successors, the condition of the people, the affairs of the church, and the fiscal and administrative system of the Gothic kingdom of Italy. An edition of the letters was published in 1679 (2 vols. folio, Rouen). See Hodgkin's Letters of Cassiodorus; a condensed translation (1886).