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But on the top of the mountain was another retreat, known as Castellense, for those monks who divina gratia suffragante desired a severer discipline, and left the coenobitic house to become anchorites. Did these virtuous brothers continue their literary labours? One hopes so, and one is glad that Cassiodorus himself seems to have ended his life down in the valley by the Pellena.
The rules of this cloister were based on those of Cassian, who died in the early part of the fifth century. Benedict, at Monte Cassino, followed the example of Cassiodorus, and the Benedictine Order carried the work on for the seven succeeding centuries.
When his own kinsmen, Boethius and Symmachus, were put to death on a charge of treachery, Maximus burned with hatred of the Goth. He regarded with disdain the principles of Cassiodorus, who devoted his life to the Gothic cause, and who held that only as an independent kingdom could there be hope for Italy.
The principal minister of the court of Ravenna, the learned Cassiodorus, gratified the inclination of the conquerors in a Gothic history, which consisted of twelve books, now reduced to the imperfect abridgment of Jornandes.
On the one hand the earlier post-classical treatises composed by Martianus Capella, Cassiodorus, and Isidore, all inhabitants of the Mediterranean basin, are fairly close to the classical tradition of Quintilian. Their weakness consists not in that they restricted rhetoric to style, but in that their whole treatment of rhetorical theory was compact, arid, and schematic.
Of his latter boyhood part had been spent at Ravenna, where his father Probus, a friend as well as kinsman of the wise minister Cassiodorus, now and then made a long sojourn; and he had thus become accustomed to the society of the more cultivated Goths, especially of those who were the intimates of the learned Queen Amalasuntha.
It is therefore to the lasting credit of Benedict, inspired no doubt by the example of Cassiodorus, that he commanded his monks to read, encouraged literary work, and made provision for the education of the young. The Benedictines rendered a great social service in reclaiming deserted regions and in clearing forests.
Putnam is justified in his praises of this remarkable character when he declares: "It is not too much to say that the continuity of thought and civilization of the ancient world with that of the middle ages was due, more than to any other one man, to the life and labors of Cassiodorus." But the monk was more than a scribe and a collector of books, he became the chronicler and the school-teacher.
He and his ancestry would signify little now-a-days but for the life-work of his greater son Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator, statesman, historian, monk. Senator was not a title, but a personal name; the name our Cassiodorus always used when speaking of himself. But history calls him otherwise, and for us he must be Cassiodorus still. The year of his birth was 480.
Yet the effect of his government passed with him; his daughter and heiress, the noble princess Amalasuntha, in whose praise Cassiodorus exhausts himself, was murdered; his kingdom was broken up, and Cassiodorus himself, retiring from public life, confessed in his monastic life, continued for a generation, how vain had been the attempt of the Arian king to overcome the antagonistic forces of race and religion by justice, valour, and forbearance.
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