From
Many A Bar-Parlour In English Country Towns I Have Gone Away Heavy
With Tedium And Disgust; The Cafe At Catanzaro Seemed, In
Comparison, A Place Of Assembly For Wits And Philosophers.
Meanwhile a season of rain had begun; heavy skies warned me that I
must not hope for a renewal of sunny idleness on this mountain top;
it would be well if intervals of cheerful weather lighted my further
course by the Ionian Sea.
Reluctantly, I made ready to depart.
CHAPTER XIV
SQUILLACE
In meditating my southern ramble I had lingered on the thought that
I should see Squillace. For Squillace (Virgil's "ship-wrecking
Scylaceum") was the ancestral home of Cassiodorus, and his retreat
when he became a monk; Cassiodorus, the delightful pedant, the
liberal statesman and patriot, who stands upon the far limit of his
old Roman world and bids a sad farewell to its glories. He had
niched himself in my imagination. Once when I was spending a silent
winter upon the shore of Devon, I had with me the two folio volumes
of his works, and patiently read the better part of them; it was
more fruitful than a study of all the modern historians who have
written about his time. I saw the man; caught many a glimpse of his
mind and heart, and names which had been to me but symbols in a
period of obscure history became things living and recognizable.
I could have travelled from Catanzaro by railway to the sea-coast
station called Squillace, but the town itself is perched upon a
mountain some miles inland, and it was simpler to perform the whole
journey by road, a drive of four hours, which, if the weather
favoured me, would be thoroughly enjoyable.
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