Cassiodorus c. 485 – c. 585

Flavius Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator was a Roman senator, scholar, and statesman who served the Ostrogothic kings of Italy under Theodoric and his successors before retiring in the 540s to found the monastery of Vivarium on his family estates in Calabria. There he organized one of the earliest Christian programs of systematic manuscript copying, instructing his monks in his Institutes of Divine and Secular Learning to preserve and transmit both Christian texts and the classical heritage. His Variae preserve decades of administrative correspondence in polished Latin, and his Expositions of the Psalms and his Etymologies of the Liberal Arts shaped monastic learning for centuries.