ITALY AND HER INVADERS.
BOOK V
.
CHAPTER XIII.
THE FALL OF RAVENNA.
Osimo being taken, Belisarius collected all his energies for the siege
of Ravenna. Ravenna, defended by a power having command of the sea, would have
been practically impregnable; Ravenna, beleaguered by land and by sea, had
delayed Theodoric for three years before its walls, and had at length only
surrendered on a capitulation which, if faithfully observed, would have left
Theodoric but half a victory. Belisarius therefore, while making all his
preparations for a siege, determined not to leave untried the path of
negotiation, which in the present state of the Emperor's affairs, with Persia
menacing and the Franks eager for mischief, might shorten this dangerous last
act of the drama. The Franks, as the General had been informed, were sending
their embassy to Witigis, proposing an alliance for the reconquest and division
of Italy; and Belisarius sent his ambassadors to confront them there, and argue
against Metz for Constantinople. At the head of the Imperial embassy was
Theodosius, an officer of high rank in the semi-regal household of Belisarius,
but whose guilty intimacy with Antonina, the mistress of that household, had
already been spoken of by his retinue under their breath, and was at a later
period to be blazed abroad in court and marketplace, and to exercise a
disastrous influence on the fortunes and character of the uxorious General.
As was before said, Belisarius was not trusting wholly to negotiation.
Magnus and Vitalius, with two large bodies of troops,
were sent to operate on the two banks of the Po, and to prevent provisions from
its fertile valley being introduced into Ravenna. Their efforts were marvellously
seconded by a sudden failure of the waters of the river, which caused the
Gothic flotilla, prepared for the transport of provisions, to be stranded on
the banks and to fall a prey to the Roman soldiers. In a very short time the
river resumed its usual course, and navigable once more, served the purposes of
the besiegers as it had failed to serve those of the besieged. It was therefore
in a city which was already feeling some of the hardships of scarcity, if not
yet of actual famine, that the envoys of Belisarius and of Theudibert set forth their commissions.
The Franks declared that their master was even now sending 500,000
warriors over the Alps, whose hatchets flying through the air would soon bury
the Roman army in one heap of ruin. Theudibert had
heard with sorrow of the sufferings of his good friends the Goths at the hands
of the Romans, the natural and perfidious enemy of all barbarian nations. He
offered them therefore victory if they would accept his companionship in arms,
and a peaceable division of the land of Italy between them; or, on the other
hand, if they were mad enough to choose the Roman alliance, defeat, ignominious
defeat, to be shared with their bitterest and most irreconcilable foes.
The ambassadors of Belisarius had an easy task in enlarging on the
faithlessness of the nation of Clovis. The present depressed condition of the
Thuringians and Burgundians showed too plainly what an alliance with this
all-grasping nation foreboded to those who were foolish enough to enter into
such a compact. The corpses of all the brave Gothic warriors lately slain upon
the banks of the Po attested the peculiar Frankish manner of helping distressed
allies. What god they could invoke, or what pledge of fidelity they could give
that had not already been forsworn and violated by them, the ambassadors could
not conjecture. This last proposition, that the Goths should share all their
lands with the Franks, was the most impudent of all their proceedings. Let Witigis
and his subjects once make trial of it, and they would find, too late, that
partnership with the insatiable Frank meant the loss of all that yet remained
to them.
When the ambassadors had finished their harangues, Witigis conferred
with the leading men of the nation as to their proposals. Would that the
debates of this Gothic Witenagemote had been
preserved for us! We can, however, only record the result of their
deliberations, which was, that the Emperors offers should be accepted and the
Frankish envoys dismissed. Parleys as to the terms of peace followed; but
Belisarius, less generous or more wary than the Gothic King, when similar
negotiations were going forward two years previously under the walls of Rome,
refused to relax by a single sentinel the rigor of his blockade of Ravenna. Ildiger commanded the flying columns which maneuverer on
each bank of the Po, while Vitalius was sent into
Venetia to force or persuade the cities in that province to resume their
allegiance to the Empire. During this pause in the contest the large magazines
of provisions collected in Ravenna were destroyed by fire. In the Roman army it
was generally believed that this was brought about by the bribes of Belisarius.
The Goths differed in opinion from one another, some attributing the disaster
to a stroke of lightning, others to domestic treachery, in connection with
which the name of Matasuentha, the ill-mated wife of
Witigis, was freely mentioned. They scarcely knew which explanation of the
event should fill them with the gloomier forebodings, since one indicated the
faithlessness of man, the other the anger of Heaven.
The brave and loyal Uraias, hearing of the blockade of Ravenna, was
about to march to its assistance with 4000 men, partly natives of Liguria,
partly Goths whom he had drawn from garrison duty in the various fortresses of
the Cottian Alps. Unfortunately on their march the troops heard that the
garrisons of these fortresses, at the instigation of Sisigis,
the general upon the Frankish frontier, were surrendering themselves wholesale
to a guardsman of Belisarius named Thomas, who had been sent with quite a small
body of troops to receive them into the Imperial allegiance. Anxious for the
safety of their wives and children, the soldiers of Uraias insisted on
retracing their steps westward. They were too late: John and Martin, who were
still stationed in the upper valley of the Po, hurried to the Cottian forts
before them, took the very castles in which the families of these soldiers were
lodged, and carried them into captivity. With such precious pledges in the
hands of the Romans, the barbarians refused to fight against them. They
suddenly deserted the standards of Uraias, and seeking the encampment of John
begged to be admitted as foederati into the Imperial service. Baffled and
powerless, Uraias was obliged to retire with a few followers into the
fastnesses of Liguria. Thus all hope of assistance from him for the blockaded
city was at an end.
About this time, probably early in the year 540, came two senators from
Constantinople, Domnicus and Maximus, bearing the
Emperor's offer of terms of peace. These terms were unexpectedly favourable to
the Goths. Witigis was to be allowed to retain the title of King and half the
royal treasure, and to reign over all the rich plains to the north of the Po;
the other half of the royal treasure and all Italy south of the Po, with
Sicily, were to be reunited to the Empire Such concessions, at this late period
of the struggle, might well seem almost absurd to one who watched the fortune
of the game in Italy alone. But the Emperor knew well the other and terrible
dangers which threatened his dominions. A swarm of ferocious Huns were about to
burst upon Illyria, Macedon, and Thrace, extending their ravages up to the very
suburbs of Constantinople. Even more formidable than these transitory marauders
was the more deeply calculated advance of the Persia potentate, Chosroes was
moving to battle, stirred thereto in part by the representations of Witigis, in
part by his own hereditary hatred of the Empire: and in June of this year he
was to fall, with the pitiless fury of an Oriental despot, on the wealthy and luxurious
city of Antioch. Decidedly Justinian had good reason for wishing to have his
matchless general and as many as possible of his soldiers recalled from Italy.
Decidedly he was right in offering easy terms to the Goths; and Italy might
possibly have been spared some centuries of misery could those terms have
formed the basis of a peace.
The obstacle came not from the Goths, who gave a joyful assent to the
proposals of the ambassadors, his It came from Belisarius, who had set his
heart on ending the Italian war with a complete and dramatic success, and on
leading Witigis, as he had already led Gelimer, a captive to the feet of
Justinian. He refused to be any party to the proposed treaty; and the Goths,
fearing some stratagem, would not accept it without his counter-signature.
Murmurs were heard in the tents of the Imperial captains against the
presumption of the General who dared to disobey the orders which proceeded from
the sacred presence-chamber of the Emperor, and who was bent on prolonging the
war for sinister purposes of his own. Knowing that these injurious reports were
flying about the camp, Belisarius called a council of war, at which he invited
the presence of the ambassadors. He said to his discontented subordinates, with
apparent frankness: “No one knows better than myself the great part which
chance plays in war, and how a cause apparently quite hopeless will sometimes
revive, and prove after all victorious. By all means let us take the best
possible advice in debating so important a subject as the proposed treaty. Only
one thing I must protest against. No man must hold his peace now, and then lie
in wait to censure me after the event. Let everyone speak his opinion now, on
the question whether we can recover the whole of Italy, or whether it is wiser
to abandon part of it to the barbarians; and, having spoken it, let him stand
by it like a man”. Thus adjured, the generals without exception stated that
they thought it politic to let the treaty of peace go forward, upon the
proposed conditions. Belisarius desired them to sign a paper to that effect,
and they signed it.
While these deliberations were going: on in the Imperial camp, the
scarcity was growing into famine within the city. Sore pressed by hunger, yet
determined not to surrender unconditionally to the Emperor, fearing, above all
things, to be transported from their own beloved Italy to the distant and
unknown Constantinople, the Goths conceived the extraordinary idea of offering
to their victor, Belisarius, the Empire of the West. Even Witigis supported
this proposal, and besought the great General to accept the proffered dignity.
The scheme had a certain brilliant audacity about it, and was the most striking
testimony ever offered to the strategical genius of Belisarius. Yet it probably
seemed less strange and (if we may use the word by anticipation) less romantic
to contemporaries than it does to us. All the traditions of the Ostrogoths,
except for the thirty years of Theodoric's reign, pointed to the Empire as the
natural employer of armies of Gothic foederati. Even Theodoric, in his mode of
working the machinery of the state, had shown himself an Emperor of the West in
everything but the name. A Teutonic kingdom in Roman lands was still a
comparatively new and untried thing, while an Empire fought for by Gothic arms
was a familiar conception.
The feelings with which Belisarius received this startling proposition
were probably of a mingled kind. As Procopius says, “he hated the name of an
usurper with perfect hatred, and had bound himself by the most solemn oaths to
the Emperor to attempt no revolution in his lifetime”. He probably looked upon
himself as the destined successor of his master, should he survive Justinian,
and he knew what ruin the revolutionary attempts upon the purple, made by
successful generals, had wrought for the Empire. On the other hand, he saw that
a feigned compliance with the wishes of the Goths would at once open to him the
gates of Ravenna, and, possibly, the thought was not altogether absent from his
mind that it might be desirable at any moment to turn that feigned compliance
into reality.
In order to keep his hands clear, he ordered the generals of the party
which still called itself anti-Belisarian to disperse
in various directions in order to obtain provisions for the army. These
generals were John and Bessas, Narses the Less, and Aratius;
and they were accompanied by Athanasius, the recently-appointed Praetorian
Prefect of Italy. Before they went, he convoked another council of generals and
ambassadors, and asked them what they would think of the deed if he succeeded
in saving all Italy for the Empire and carrying all the Gothic nobles, with
their treasures, captive to Constantinople. They replied that it would be a
deed past all praise, and bade him by all means to accomplish it if he could.
He then sent private messengers to the Goths offering to do all their will. The
Gothic envoys returned with their vague talk of peace for the multitude and
their secret proposals for Belisarius's own ear. He willingly stipulated that
the persons and property of the Goths should be held harmless, but postponed
till after the entry into Ravenna, the solemn oath (the coronation-oath, as we
should term it), by which he was to pledge himself to reign as the impartial
ruler of Goths and Romans alike. The suspicions of the barbarians were not
excited even by this postponement. They imagined that he was hungering and
thirsting for empire, and never supposed that he himself would throw any
difficulties in the way of winning it.
Of all the many dramatic situations in the life of the great general—and
they are so many as to excite our marvel that no great poet has based a tragedy
on his story—the most dramatic was surely his entry into Ravenna in the spring
of 540. The Roman fleet, laden with corn and other provisions, had been ordered
to cast anchor in the port of Classis. Thus, when the gates were opened to
admit Belisarius, he brought with him plenty to a famine-stricken people. Then
he rode through the streets of the impregnable Queen of the Lagoons, with the
Gothic ambassadors by his side, and the all-observing Procopius in his train.
Much did the secretary ponder, as he rode, on one of his favourite themes of
meditation, that hidden force—he will not call it Providence, and perhaps dare
not call it Fate—which loves to baffle the calculations of men, and give the
race not to the swift, the battle not to the strong, but to the objects of its
own apparently capricious selection. The streets were crowded with tall and
martial Goths, far surpassing in number and size the Roman army, and through
them marched the little band of Belisarius, undersized, mean-looking men, but
conquerors. The Goths, still confiding in what the new Emperor of the West
would do for them, felt not nor admitted the shame; but the quick instinct of
the women told them that their husbands were disgraced by such an ending to the
war. They spat in the faces of the barbarians, and, pointing to the
insignificant-looking men who followed the ensigns of the Senatus Populusque Romanus, “Are these the mighty heroes”, said
they, “with whose deeds you have terrified us? Are these your conquerors? Men
can we call you no longer, who have been beaten by champions such as these”
The exact time when Belisarius dropped the mask and let the barbarians
see that he was not their Emperor, but still only the general of Justinian, is
not clearly indicated. Probably the process of disillusion was a gradual one.
At the moment of his triumphal entry he doubtless allowed himself to be saluted
as Caesar, but any thoughts which he may have entertained of keeping his
promise to the Goths and actually assuming the purple vanished.
His honour rooted in dishonour stood,
And
faith unfaithful, kept him falsely true.
On one point, however, he did keep the compact to which he had sworn.
There was no plunder of the city, and the Goths were allowed to retain all
their private property. But the great hoard of the kings, stored up in the
palace, all that the wisdom of Theodoric and the insatiate avarice of Theodahad
had accumulated, was carried away to Constantinople. Some of it may perchance
have remained in the treasure-vaults of the palace of the Eastern Caesars till
Baldwin and Dandolo with their Franks and Venetians, the soldiers of the Fourth
Crusade, wrenched open the doors of those mysterious chambers, nearly seven
centuries after the accession of Justinian. Witigis himself was treated
courteously, but kept for the present in ward, till he could be taken in the
conquerors train to Constantinople. Some of his greatest nobles were selected
to accompany him. The mass of the Gothic warriors, at least such of them as
dwelt south of the Po, were told to return to their own lands. The Roman
soldiers and the men of Roman extraction thus became actually the majority in
the former capital of the Goths.
In this way did the strong and stately city of Ravenna come again under
the sway of a Roman Caesar, the stronghold of whose dominion in Italy it was
destined to remain for two centuries, till Aistulf the Lombard in 752 reft it from Byzantium, to be himself despoiled of it a few
years later by Pepin the Frank. and many others, surrendered at once to the
Imperial forces on hearing of the fall of Ravenna. Verona and Pavia seem to
have been the only cities of any importance still held by the unsubdued Gothic
warriors. In Verona the command was vested in a brave chief named Ildibad,
nephew of Theudis, King of the Visigoths in Spain.
This man refused to transfer his allegiance to the Emperor, though Belisarius,
by detaining his children captives in Ravenna, had it in his power to put sore
pressure upon him. In Pavia the noble Uraias, nephew of Witigis, still
commanded.
When the hope that Belisarius would play an independent part as Emperor
of the West faded from the hearts of the Gothic warriors, the bravest of them
flocked to Pavia and sought an audience with Uraias. With tears such as valiant
men may shed, they thus addressed him: “Of all the evils which have befallen
the nation of the Goths you, O Uraias! are the chief cause, through your very
worthiness. For that uncle of yours, so cowardly and so unfortunate in war,
would long ago have been thrust aside by us from the throne, even as we thrust
aside Theodoric's own nephew Theodahad, if we had not looked with admiration on
your prowess, and believed that you were in truth at the helm of the state,
leaving only the name of kingship to your uncle. Now is our good-nature shown
to have been folly, and the very root of all the evils that have come upon us.
Hosts of our best and bravest, as you know, 0 dear Uraias! have fallen on our
Italian battlefields. Our proudest nobles, with Witigis and the Gothic hoard,
are being carried off to Constantinople by Belisarius. You and we alone remain,
a feeble and miserable remnant, and we too shall soon, if we live, share the
same fate. But we can die, 0 Uraias! and it is better for us to die than to be
carried captive with our wives and our little ones to the uttermost ends of the
earth. Be you our leader, and we shall do something worthy of our renown before
we find a grave in Italy”
Uraias replied, that he too, like them, preferred death to slavery, but
that the kingship he would not take, since he would seem to be setting himself
up as a rival to his uncle. He strongly advised them to offer it to Ildibad, a
man of bravery and might, and one whose relationship to Theudis,
the Visigothic King, might at this crisis prove serviceable to their cause. The
advice seemed good to the Gothic warriors, who at once repaired to Verona and
invested Ildibad with the purple robe of royalty. Though accepting the kingly
office, he urged his new subjects not yet to abandon all hope of persuading
Belisarius to fulfil his plighted word and ascend the Western throne by their
assistance, in which event Ildibad would willingly return into a private
station. One more effort accordingly they made to shake the loyalty of their
conqueror. All Italy knew that he was under orders to leave Ravenna; to take
charge of the Persian war, said some, accused by his brother generals of
treasonable designs, said others. There was some truth in both assertions.
Justinian needed Belisarius on the banks of the Euphrates, but he also feared him
in the palace at Ravenna. The Gothic envoys appeared in the presence of
Belisarius: they reproached him for his former breach of faith; they upbraided
him as a self-made slave, who did not blush to choose the condition of a lackey
of Justinian when he might, in all the dignity of manhood, reign as Emperor of
the West over brave and loyal warriors. They besought him even yet to retrace
his steps. Ildibad would bring his new purple and gladly lay it at the feet of
the monarch of the Goths and Italians. Reproaches and blandishments were alike
in vain. The Roman General refused to strike a single stroke for Empire in the
lifetime of Justinian. The Envoys returned to Ildibad. Belisarius, in obedience
to his masters orders, quitted Ravenna; and with his departure, which coincided
with the end of the fifth year of the war, ended the first act of the Byzantine
reconquest of Italy.
At this point also we take our final leave of one whose name has been of
continual occurrence through many chapters of this history, the late Praetorian
Prefect, Cassiodorus. Since the election of King Witigis he had not,
apparently, taken any conspicuous part in public affairs. Amid the clash of
arms his persuasive voice was silent: and with the two races, Goth and Roman,
exasperated against one another by memories of battle, massacre, and the
privations of terrible sieges, he recognized but too plainly that the labour of
his life was wasted. The united commonwealth of Goths and Romans was a broken
bubble, and he might as easily call up Theodoric from the grave as recall even
one of the days of that golden age when Theodoric was king.
Something, however, might yet be done to save the precious inheritance
of classical antiquity from the waves of barbaric invasion which were now too
obviously about to roll over Italy, from Byzantium's mercenaries, the Lombard
and the Herul, as well as from the Frankish neighbour who had learned with too
fatal aptitude the road across the Alps. This service—and it was the greatest
he could have rendered to humanity—Cassiodorus determined to perform while he
passed the evening of his life in monastic seclusion in his native Bruttii, at his own beloved Scyllacium.
It was probably in the year 539 or 540 that the veteran statesman laid
aside the insignia of a Praetorian Prefect and assumed the garb of a monk. The
chief reason for choosing the earlier year, and for supposing Cassiodorus not
to have continued till the bitter end in the service of Witigis, is that had he
been present on the memorable day when Belisarius and his men entered Ravenna,
he would probably have met and conversed with Procopius. In that case his noble
character, and the important part which he had played for a generation in the
Ostrogothic monarchy, would surely have impressed themselves on the mind of the
historian, and prevented that strange omission which he has made in writing so
fully about Theodoric's kingdom and never mentioning the name of Cassiodorus.
In any event the late chief minister was close upon the 60th year of his
age when he retired to Squillace. His mind during the last few dreary years had
been ever more and more turning to the two great solaces of a disappointed man,
Literature and Religion. After he had completed the collection of his Various
Epistles he had, upon the earnest entreaty of his friends, composed a short
treatise on the Nature of the Soul. The philosophy of this treatise is not new,
being chiefly derived from Plato: and the philology, as displayed in some marvellous
derivations at the outset of the treatise, if new, is not true. But there are
some striking thoughts in this little essay, as, for instance, on the ineffable
love which the soul bears to her dwelling place the body, fearing death for
its sake though herself immortal, dreading the body's pain from which she
cannot herself receive any injury. But the most interesting passage, coming
from so old and astute a statesman as Cassiodorus, is one in which he naively
attempts to describe the outward signs by which we distinguish evil men from
the good.
“The bad man's countenance, whatever be its natural beauty, always has a
cloud resting upon it. In the midst of his mirth a deep and secret sadness is
always waiting to take possession of him, and appears on his countenance when
he deems himself unobserved. His eye wanders hither and thither, and he is ever
on the watch to see what others think of him. His conversation is by fits and
starts: he takes up one subject after another and leaves his narratives
unfinished without apparent cause. He has a look of worry and preoccupation in
his idlest hours, and lives in perpetual fear when none is pursuing him.
Seeking greedily for all the pleasures of life, he is incurring the penalty of
eternal death; and endeavouring to prolong his share of this world's light he
is preparing for himself the shades of eternal night”
Was Cassiodorus when he drew this striking picture describing the way in
which the memory of the murdered Amalasuntha tormented the soul of Theodahad?
“The good man, on the other hand, has a certain calm joyousness in his
countenance, earned by many secret tears. His face is pale and thin, but
suggests the idea of strength. A long beard gives venerableness to his aspect:
he is very clean, without a trace of foppery. His eyes are clear, and brighten
naturally when he addresses you. His voice is of moderate tone, not so low as
to be akin to silence, nor swoln into the harsh
bluster of the bully. His very pace is ordered, neither hurrying nor creeping.
He does not watch another's eye to see how it is regarding him, but holds
simply straightforward on his way. Even the natural sweetness of his breath
distinguishes him from the evil man, who seeks to hide the fumes of wine by the
sickening scent of artificial perfumes”.
The time was now come for Cassiodorus openly to enter that monastic
state towards which, as we can perceive from this ideal portraiture of a good
man, his own aspirations had for some time been tending. Leaving the lagunes of
Ravenna, the pine-wood and the palace of the Ostrogothic kings, where so many
of the hours of his middle life had been spent, he returned to his first love,
his own ancestral Scyllacium, its hills, its
fish-ponds, its wide outlook over the Ionian sea. Here upon his patrimonial
domain he founded two monasteries. High up on the hill, and perhaps surrounded
by the walls of the older and deserted city, was placed the secluded hermitage
of Castellum, destined for those who preferred the solitary life of the rigid
anchorite to the more social atmosphere of the monastic brotherhood. The latter
and more popular type of convent was represented by the monastery of Vivarium,
situated by the little river Pellena, and on the edge
of the fish-ponds of which Cassiodorus has already given us so picturesque a
description. Here the old statesman erected for the monks, who soon flocked
round him, a building which, though not luxurious, was better supplied with the
comforts of life than was usual with institutions of this kind, at any rate in
the first fervour of monasticism. These are the terms in which Cassiodorus
himself describes the place, in a treatise dedicated to his monks:
“The very situation of the Vivarian monastery
invites you to exercise hospitality towards travellers and the poor. There you
have well-watered gardens and the streams of the river Pellena,
abounding in fish, close beside you. A modest and useful stream, not
overwhelming you by the multitude of its waters, but on the other hand never
running dry, it is ever at your call when needed for the supply of your
gardens. Here, by God's help, we have made in the mountain caverns safe
receptacles for the fish which you may catch from the stream. In these they can
swim about and feed and disport themselves, and never know that they are
captives, till the time comes when you require them for your food. We have also
ordered baths to be built, suitably prepared for those who are in feeble
health; and into these flows the fair transparent stream, good alike for
washing and for drinking. We hope therefore that your monastery will be sought
by strangers rather than that you will need to go elsewhere to seek delight in
strange places. But all these things, as you know, pertain to the joys of the
present life, and have nought to do with the hope of the future which belongs
to the faithful. Thus placed here, let us transfer our desires to those things
which shall cause us to reign there with Christ”.
Again, after describing in attractive terms the happy labours of the antiquarii in the copying-room of the monastery, he goes on
to speak of the permitted luxury of comely bookbinding, and of his mechanical
contrivances for promoting the regular employment of the monastic day. “To
these we have also added workmen skilled in covering the codices, in order that
the glory of the sacred books may be decked with robes of fitting beauty.
Herein we do in some sort imitate that householder in our Lord's parable who,
when he had asked the guests to his supper, desired that they should be clothed
in wedding garments. By these workmen we have caused several kinds of binding
to be all represented in one codex, in order that the man of taste may choose
that form of covering which pleases him best. We have also prepared for your
nocturnal studies mechanical lamps, self-trimming and self-supplied with oil,
so that they burn brightly without any human assistance. And in order that the
division of the hours of the day, so advantageous to the human race, may not
pass unobserved by you, I have caused one measurer of time to be constructed in
which the indication is made by the sun's rays, and another, worked by water,
which night and day marks regularly the passage of the hours. This is also of
use in cloudy days, when the inherent force of water accomplishes what the
fiery energy of the sun fails to perform. Thus do we make the two most opposite
elements, fire and water, concur harmoniously for the same purpose”. From these
few passages it will be seen what was the spirit in which Cassiodorus founded
his monastery of Vivarium. Religion and learning were to be the two poles upon
which the daily life of the community revolved. He himself tells us that he had
earnestly striven to persuade Pope Agapetus to found a great theological school
at Rome, like those which were then flourishing at Alexandria and Nisibis. The
wars and tumults which had recently afflicted the kingdom of Italy made the fulfilment
of this design impossible; and Cassiodorus thereupon resolved that his own
retirement from the field of political life should be the commencement of a
vigorous and sustained effort to stem the tide of ignorance and barbarism which
was flowing over Italy. Hitherto the monk retiring from the world had been too
much inclined to think only of the salvation of his own individual soul. Long
hours of mystic musing had filled up the day of the Egyptian anchorite.
Augustine and Cassian, men so widely divergent in their theological teaching,
had each contributed something towards the introduction of healthy work into
the routine of the monastic life; and Benedict, with whose life and career we
shall soon have to concern ourselves in greater detail, had wisely ordained in
his rule that a considerable part of the day should be devoted to actual toil.
Still, all this had reference only to manual labour. It was the glory of
Cassiodorus that he, first and pre-eminently, insisted on the expediency of
including intellectual labour in the sphere of monastic duties. Some monks, he
freely admitted, would never be at home in the cloister library, and might
better devote their energies to the cloister garden. But there were others who
only needed training to make them apt scholars in divine and human learning,
and this training he set himself to give them. This thought—may we not say this
divinely suggested thought?— in the mind of Cassiodorus was one of infinite
importance to the human race. Here, on the one hand, were the vast armies of
monks, whom both the unsettled state of the times and the religious ideas of
the age were driving irresistibly into the cloister; and who, when immured
there with only theology to occupy their minds, became, as the great cities of
the East knew too well, preachers of discord and mad fanaticism. Here, on the
other hand, were the accumulated stores of two thousand years of literature,
sacred and profane, the writings of Hebrew prophets, Greek philosophers, Latin
rhetoricians, perishing for want of men at leisure to transcribe them. The
luxurious Roman noble with his slave-amanuenses multiplying copies of his favourite
authors for his own and his friends' libraries, was an almost extinct
existence. With every movement of barbarian troops over Italy, whether those
barbarians called themselves the men of Witigis or of Justinian, some towns
were being sacked, some precious manuscripts were perishing from the world.
Cassiodorus perceived that the boundless, the often wearisome leisure of the
convent might be profitably spent in arresting this work of denudation, in
preserving for future ages the intellectual treasure which must otherwise have
inevitably perished. That this was one of the great services rendered by
monasticism to the human race, the most superficial student of history has
learned: but not all who have learned it know that the monk's first decided
impulse in this direction was derived from Theodoric's minister Cassiodorus.
The veteran statesman seems to have wisely abstained from making himself
actual Abbot of either of his two monasteries. To have done so would have
plunged him into a sea of petty administrative details and prevented him from
thinking out his schemes for the instruction of the men who had gathered round
him.
Cassiodorus (as has been said) was probably about sixty years of age
when he retired from Ravenna and when this Indian summer of his life, so
beautiful and so full of fruit for humanity, began. His own writings after this
time were copious, and though they have long since ceased to have any
scientific value, they are interesting as showing the many-sided, encyclopaedic
character of the attainments of him who had been all his life a busy official.
A voluminous commentary on the Psalms was the work on which he probably prided
himself the most, and which is now the most absolutely useless. In the
so-called “Historia Tripartita” he and his friend
Epiphanius wove together, somewhat clumsily, into a single narrative the three
histories of Church affairs from the Conversion of Constantine to the days of
Theodosius II given by Socrates, Sozomen, and Theodoret. In the 'Complexiones'
he comments upon the Epistles, the Acts of the Apostles, and the Apocalypse:
and here it may be remarked in passing, that he includes the Epistle to the
Hebrews among the writings of the Apostle Paul, apparently without a suspicion
that this had not always been the received view in the Roman Church. In his
book “De Institutione Divinarum Litterarum” from which some quotations have already
been made, he gives his monks some valuable hints how to study and how to
transcribe the Holy Scriptures and the writings of the Fathers. Some precepts
for the regulation of their daily life are also included herein, and upon the
whole the book seems to approach nearer to the character of the ‘Rule of
Cassiodorus' than any other that he has composed. In the “De Artibus ac Disciplinis liberalium Litterarum” he treats
of the seven liberal arts, which are Grammar, Rhetoric, Dialectic, Arithmetic,
Music, Geometry, and Astronomy. It is characteristic of the writer that
Rhetoric and Dialectic, the two great weapons in the armoury of a Roman
official, are treated of at considerable length, while of the other five arts
only the slenderest outline is furnished.
Lastly, when the veteran statesman had already reached the ninety-third
year of his age, he composed for his faithful monks a somewhat lengthy treatise
on Orthography. They said to him, “What does it profit us to know what the
ancients wrote or what your sagacity has added thereto, if we are entirely
ignorant how we ought to write these things, and through want of acquaintance
with spelling cannot accurately reproduce what we read in our own speech?”. He
accordingly collected for their benefit the precepts of ten grammarians, ending
with his contemporary Priscian, as to the art of orthography. One of the
greatest difficulties even of fairly educated Romans at that day seems to have
been to distinguish in writing between the two letters b and v, which were alike
in sound. This difficulty, which is abundantly illustrated by the errors in
inscriptions in the Imperial age, is strenuously grappled with by Cassiodorus,
or rather by the authors from whom he quotes, and who give long and elaborate
rules to prevent the student from spelling libero with a v, or navigo with a b.
Amid these literary labours, in the holy seclusion of Squillace, we may
suppose Cassiodorus to have died, having nearly completed a century of life.
Even in 573, when he wrote his treatise on Orthography, he had already long
overpassed the limit of time prescribed for the present volume. It was then
twenty years after the final overthrow of the Ostrogothic monarchy. The
Lombards had been in Italy five years. Narses was dead, Alboin was dead,
Justinian's successor had been for eight years upon the throne. Yet still the
brave and patient old man, who had once been the chief minister of a mighty
realm, toiled on at his self-imposed task. The folly of his countrymen, the
hopelessly adverse current of events, had prevented him from building up the
kingdom of Italy: they could not prevent him from conferring a priceless gift
on mankind by rescuing the literature of Rome from the barbarians for the
benefit of those barbarians’ progeny.
