Cassiodorus was Theoderic’s man

Even out of office, Cassiodorus was Theoderic’s man. In 519, on the occasion of the great consular celebration of Eutharic’s role as heir to the throne, Cassiodorus delivered public addresses in praise of the regime and wrote two important books in courtly, impeccable Latin. His Chronicle was a traditional account of kings, consuls, and emperors from darkest antiquity to the present, easily and naturally showing Theoderic’s regime as the continuation of all that was Roman and ancient. The Gothic History, now lost and a subject of much speculation, was a more ambitious attempt to write of the Goths and Theoderic’s Amal family as full participants in the history of the ancient world going back many centuries. They embody the ambivalence of Eutharic’s moment in the spotlight, asserting Gothic identity as a way to ensure Roman authority.

Cassiodorus then vanished from the stage for a few years, until he was called back to court to be master of the offices following the downfall of Boethius, his predecessor. If we are supposed to believe that Boethius was a great man and nearly a saint, then Cassiodorus sometimes looks a little shady to his biographers for advancing at the cost of the martyr. If Boethius really had to die, then Cassiodorus was the kind of loyal servant brought back to court in a crisis.

Theoderic died in 526

Cassiodorus was still at work as master of the offices when Theoderic died in 526. The air was full of crisis and threat—how real we cannot tell, but Cassiodorus is credited with some bold action of a military nature. Most likely, he looked after the Adriatic fleet based in Ravenna, against the possibility that a direct visitation from Constantinople would attempt to influence, control, or terminate the young Athalaric’s succession.

Cassiodorus went out of office again after writing for young Athalaric, then returned in 533, this time to the highest civil office in the land, that of praetorian prefect. He still wrote letters for Amalasuntha, Theodahad, and then Witigis, because he was so good at it, but he had higher responsibilities than wordsmithing—effectively those of prime minister. From this period we have official letters in his own voice. He was in office when the Belisarian invasion began, and he held on for three years, through the coup of Witigis and through the dismal time of the first siege of Rome private tour bulgaria.

The latest date when we see him in office in Italy is 538. The Variae were published about then, a monumental presentation of 440 letters that show the years of Theoderic and his successors in a bright, dignified Roman light—a publication, in other words, of undoubted relevance and even controversy at a moment when Constantinople’s forces were fighting to destroy and replace what Cassiodorus had served all his life. By not mentioning the disasters crashing down on his country from all sides, Cassiodorus makes his most eloquent commentary on Justinian’s ambitions.

Constantinople along with the defeated Witigis

When Ravenna fell in 540, Cassiodorus was one of those taken from there to Constantinople along with the defeated Witigis, but his dignity doubtless spared him having to be paraded as a prisoner in Belisarius’s triumphal parade. He became instead one of those emigre Roman dignitaries of learning, leisure, and a keen interest in church and public affairs who by now had no choice but to side with Justinian in seeking the reconstitution of Italy on a Byzantine—that is, no longer a Roman—basis.

He devoted himself to theological writing, producing a commentary on the Psalms meant to introduce to a devout audience not only that text but a finer knowledge of language and rhetoric. Learned retirement was a very old, even Ciceronian, model for Roman gentlemen who did not quite let go of their interests in the great world, but churchly pursuits would sometimes make such retirement more serious and permanent. He appears on the periphery (but was perhaps also discreetly active in the back rooms) of ecclesiastical controversy in Constantinople in the years of the wretched Vigilius (whose story we still defer, poor man). With the “Pragmatic Sanction” of 554, he returned to Italy, to Squillace, and to the ruins left by Justinian’s awful war.