CASSIODORUS, Magnus Aurelius, a Roman historian, statesman, and monk, was born at Scylaceum (Squillace), about 468. According to his own statement, he began public life under Odoacer as head of financial affairs, with the title of Comes sacrarum largitionum. By Theodoric he was raised to the highest offices; and, while the Ostro-Gothic power lasted, notwithstanding the intrigues which surrounded the throne, he continued (with the exception of a short period of retirement at the tyrannous close of the reign of Theodoric), to regulate the affairs of the Western empire, and to support it by alliances with the Eastern. After the triumph of Belisarius, he retired, at seventy years of age, to the monastery of Viviers, which he had founded in his native province of Bruttium, where he spent about thirty years of far more importance to the world than the fifty during which he held the highest political authority. He deserves to be reckoned as one of the first and most influential of those who set the monks to literary work, and thus preserved the continuity of ancient and modern learning. He has also left a number of books, as the De Artibus ac Disciplinis Liberalium Literamm, the De Institutione Divinarum Literarum, and the De Arte Grammatica, which were much valued and used in the Middle Ages. But the work which is most valuable to us is his Variarum Epistolarum Libri XII., which contains the decrees of Theodoric, and of his successors, Amalasontha, Athalaric, Theodatus, and Vitiges, aud is the best source of our knowledge of the Ostro-Gothic empire in Italy. The writings of Cassiodorus evince great erudition, ingenuity, and labour, but are disfigured by incorrectness and an affected artificiality, and his Latin partakes much of the corruptions of the age. His complete works ...