The Empire Of The
West Had Perished; Theodoric And His Minister, Clearly Understanding
This, And Resolute Against The Byzantine Claim Which Was But In Half
Abeyance, Aimed At The Creation Of An Independent Italy, Where Goth
And Latin Should Blend Into A New Race.
The hope proved vain.
Theodoric's successors, no longer kings, but mere Gothic chieftains,
strove obscurely against inevitable doom, until the generals of
Juistinian trod Italy into barren servitude.
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. Long before, he had written a history of
the Goths (known to us only in a compendium by another hand), of
which the purpose seems to have been to reconcile the Romans to the
Gothic monarchy; it began by endeavouring to prove that Goths had
fought against the Greeks at Troy. Now that his public life was
over, he published a collection of the state papers composed by him
under the Gothic rulers from Theodoric to Vitigis: for the most part
royal rescripts addressed to foreign powers and to officials of the
kingdom. 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.
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