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Invaluable for their light upon men and things fourteen hundred years ago, these Variae of Cassiodorus; and for their own sake, as literary productions, most characteristic, most entertaining. Not quite easy to read, for the Latin is by no means Augustan, but after labour well spent, a delightful revelation of the man and the age.
Soon after the river had again its wonted stream and was navigable as before. This scarcity of water had never till then occurred so far as we could hear." Cassiodorus, Variae, II. 20, where we read of Theodoric in a time of scarcity supplying Liguria with food from Ravenna.
To compare the variae lectiones of two manuscripts concerning a fourteenth-century skirmish is good, it has all the excitement of the chase; but to be collating the field note-book of a living Hun with the dossier of a contemporary Justice de Paix, this is better. It has all the contact of reality and the breathless joy of the hue and cry. And, after all, were things so very different?
In Ravenna we read he repaired the Aqueduct which Trajan had built and which had long been out of repair, so that Ravenna always deficient in water had for many years suffered on this account. In the Variae of Cassiodorus, his minister and a Roman, we read as follows: "King Theodoric to all Cultivators. "The Aqueducts are an object of our special care.
Christianity rarely finds expression in the Variae, a point sufficiently explained by the Gothic heresy, which imposed discretion in public utterances; on the other hand, pagan mythology abounds; we observe the hold it still had upon educated minds education, indeed, meaning much the same thing in the sixth century after Christ as in the early times of the Empire.
Is Hamlet's monologue the meditation of a criminal? He merely declares that if we had any certainty of being annihilated by it, death would be infinitely preferable to the world as it is. But there lies the rub! Nat. Lib. ii., c. 6, § 7 et 8. Heraclides Ponticus; fragmenta de rebus publicis, ix. Aeliani variae historiae, iii., 37. Ecl. Palmira: a female slave in Goethe's play of Mahomet.
"Aurora in roseis fulgebat lutea bigis, Cum venti posuere . . . . . . variae circumque supraque Assuetae ripis volucres, et fluminis alveo, AEthera mulcebant cantu."
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