CassiodôrUs, or cAssiodorius, mAgnus aUrelius

Cassiodôrus, Or Cassiodorius, Magnus Aurelius,

Senator, was born at Scylacium (Squillace), in Bruttium (Lucania), of a noble Roman family, about 463, and gained a high reputation for wisdom and eloquence at a comparatively early age. Theodoric loaded him with honors and employments near his own person, and about 500 made him prefect of the Prietorium, and raised him to the patrician rank. In 514 he was sole consul. He retained his influence at court under Athalaric, but in 537 he retired into the country, and founded the monastery of Viviers (Tivariense), in Calabria. He was still living in 562, and is believed to have lived beyond a hundred years. In his retreat he devoted himself to literature, even to copying manuscripts, and it is an undoubted fact that we owe to him the preservation of many precious manuscripts. Some, indeed, say that he first of all set the monks to this labor of copying. Besides some grammatical works, he wrote Historiae Ecclesiast. Tripartitce (Frankf. 1588); Computus Paschalis, etc.; De Institutione Div narum Literarum; Ecpositio in Psalmos; Complexiones in Epist. Apostol. (Rott. 1723, 8vo). His works were collected and published in 1491 and 1588; the most exact is the edition of Dom Garet (Rouen, 1679, 2 vols. fol., and Ven. 1729). They are also in Migne, Patrologia. Maffei published at Verona (1702) a commentary of Cassiodorus on the Acts and Epistles, which he discovered in the library of that city. His life was written by the Benedictine St. Marthe (La vie de Cassiodore, Paris, 1694). — Landon, Ecclesiastes Dictionary,

s.v.; Gieseler, Church History, 1, § 112; Herzog, Real-Encyklopädie, 2:603; Cave, Hist. Lit. (1720), p. 325.