Cassiodorus

Flavius Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator was born about 485 at Scylacium in Calabria, in the toe of Italy, to a family that had served the state for generations. He served it too, and at the highest level: quaestor, consul in 514, master of the offices, and finally praetorian prefect under the Ostrogothic kings who ruled Italy after the Western Empire fell. He spent his career as a Roman civil servant working for Gothic masters, and his Variae, the collected official letters he drafted for Theodoric and his successors, is the single best source we have for how Italy was actually governed in that strange overlap.

With Pope Agapetus he tried to found a Christian school of higher learning at Rome, on the model of the schools at Alexandria and Nisibis. Justinian's war to reconquer Italy destroyed the plan along with much else. Rome was besieged and sacked repeatedly; the aqueducts were cut; the old order was ending and everyone could see it.

So Cassiodorus, in his late sixties, retired to his family estate on the Ionian coast and did something else. He founded a monastery there called Vivarium, after the fishponds on the property, and gave it a library and a scriptorium. Then he wrote the Institutions of Divine and Secular Learning, a curriculum for his monks: read the Scriptures first, with these commentators; then learn grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, arithmetic, music, geometry and astronomy, because you cannot read Scripture well without them.

And he wrote something no one had said quite that way before, that copying manuscripts is itself holy work. He devoted a chapter to the scribe, praised the man who preaches with his fingers, gave rules for correcting texts, and even discussed bookbinding and lamps for working after dark. He had Greek works translated into Latin at Vivarium by Epiphanius Scholasticus and others.

That single conviction, taken up by Benedictine houses across Europe, is a large part of the reason classical and Christian literature survived the following centuries at all. Vivarium itself did not last long after his death, but the idea did.

He also wrote a full commentary on the Psalms and, at ninety-three, a treatise on spelling for his copyists. He died around 585, aged about a hundred.

Sources: Cassiodorus, Institutiones divinarum et saecularium litterarum; Cassiodorus, Variae; James J. O'Donnell, Cassiodorus (1979); The Catholic Encyclopedia (1913), s.v. "Cassiodorus".