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.

Flavius Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator was born at Scyllacium, in modern Calabria, around 485 into a senatorial family that had served the late Roman state. He entered Theoderic the Ostrogoth's administration as quaestor around 507, became consul in 514, served as Master of the Offices under Athalaric, and from 533 to 537 held the praetorian prefecture of Italy. Around 540, with the Gothic kingdom collapsing under Justinian's reconquest, he retired to his Calabrian estate and founded the monastic community of Vivarium with its celebrated library and scriptorium.

His works include the Variae (537), a collection of his official letters and edicts that is the principal source for Ostrogothic Italy; the lost History of the Goths, surviving only in Jordanes's Getica; the Chronica; the dialogue De anima; the encyclopaedic Institutiones divinarum et saecularium litterarum, a guide to sacred and secular reading for his monks; the immense Expositio Psalmorum; and the late De orthographia, written when he was over ninety.

Cassiodorus organised at Vivarium a programme of copying and correcting Christian and pagan texts that became a model for later monastic libraries, transmitting the seven liberal arts of the trivium and quadrivium to the medieval West and preserving works that would otherwise have perished. He died at Vivarium around 585, having lived through Theoderic, the Gothic War, and the early Lombard invasions.