Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 17, 2025
Archaeologists have tried to determine at what date the old religion became extinct in Italy. Their research leads them well into the Middle Ages, but, undoubtedly, even then they pause too soon. Legend says that Cassiodorus attained the age of nearly a hundred years. We may be sure that to the end he lived busily, for of idleness he speaks with abhorrence as the root of evil.
If you had read Cassiodorus Remus you might, of course, reply that, according to his veracious chronicle, the celebrated Magdalena de la Croix, abbess of a convent at Cordova, in Spain, lived for thirty years in the happiest wedlock imaginable with a little gnome, whilst a similar result followed in the case of a sylph and the young Gertrude, a nun in Kloster Nazareth, near Cologne.
This peculiarity resulted, no doubt, from much rain upon the hills; it may be that in calmer seasons the Fiume di Squillace bears more resemblance to the Pellena as one pictures it, a delightful stream flowing through the gardens of the old monastery. Cassiodorus tells us that it abounded in fish. One of his happy labours was to make fish-ponds, filled and peopled from the river itself.
Yet Cassiodorus says that the hill by which you approached the town was not high enough to weary a traveller, a consideration making for the later view that Scylaceum stood very near to the Marina of Catanzaro, at a spot called Roccella, where not only is the nature of the ground suitable, but there exist considerable traces of ancient building, such as are not discoverable here on the mountain top.
The local cheese, which Cassiodorus praises in one of his letters, is the cacciacavallo common all over South Italy; the butter is of the kind which has been humorously, but quite wrongly, described by various travellers.
When the barbarians were established through Gaul and Italy the libraries in the old country-houses must have been completely destroyed. Some faint light of learning remained while Boethius 'trimmed the lamp with his skilful hand'; some knowledge of the classics survived during the lives of Cassiodorus and Isidore of Seville.
But beyond the brief words of Cassiodorus we know little about these early lagoon-dwellers. It is really with the Hunnish invasion that the history of Venice begins its first period of growth.
He was growing now to be a great power; styling himself 'King of nations , giving away to the Visigoths the Narbonnaise, the last remnant of the Western Empire; collecting round him learned Romans like Symmachus, Boethius, and Cassiodorus; respecting the Catholic clergy; and seemingly doing his best to govern well. His mercenaries, however, would not be governed.
Only when the purpose of his life was shattered, when Theodoric long dead his still faithful service to the Gothic rule became an idle form, when Belisarius was compassing the royal city of Ravenna, and voice of council could no longer make itself heard amid tumult and ruin, did Cassiodorus retire from useless office, and turn his back upon the world. He was aged about sixty.
Under Theodoric, Pola doubtless shared that general prosperity of the Istrian land on which Cassiodorus grows eloquent when writing to its inhabitants.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking