I PARCHI LETTERARI® IN CALABRIA “JOURNEYS TO THE FUTURE OF MEMORY” - I PARCHI LETTERARI ON THE ISTHMUS: CASSIODORUS

Flavio Magno Aurelio CASSIODORUS (Scolacium ca. 490 – Vivario ca. 583)

A politician, literary man and historian of Roman heritage, lived under the Roman-Barbarian reign of the Ostrogoths and under the Byzantine domination. He held a variety of political offices at the court of the Ostrogoth king, Theodoric the Great. Included among Cassiodorus’s greatest works we can mention Gothic History, a eulogy to Theodoric’s politics, the Variae, a collection of documents, written for the Goth sovereigns, the Istitutiones divinarum et saecularum litterarum, an erudite introduction to the study of Sacred Writings and liberal arts. At the age of 92, he wrote the treatise De orthographia.

Upon Theodoric’s death, Cassiodorus was at the service of a number of Ostrogoth sovereigns. However, when the general Belisarius took the sovereign Witiges (540) prisoner, Cassiodorus retired from political life and founded the monastery of Vivario at Squillace, where he lived out the rest of his life, dedicating himself to study and writing. There, he created a scriptorium for the collection and reproduction of manuscripts, which became a model for the Medieval monasteries that came later.