Cassiodorus
6th-century Roman senator and scholar
Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator (c. 485 – c. 585), commonly known as Cassiodorus (), was a Roman statesman, scholar, and writer who served in the administration of Theodoric the Great, king of the Ostrogoths. Senator was part of his surname, not his rank. In his later years, he devoted himself to Christian learning and founded the Vivarium monastery, where he worked extensively during the final decades of his life.
Life
Cassiodorus was born at Scylletium, near present-day Catanzaro in the Calabria region of Italy, into a family of Syrian origin. His ancestry included some of the most prominent ministers of the state extending back several generations. His great-grandfather held a command in the defense of the coasts of southern Italy from Vandal sea-raiders in the middle of the fifth century; his grandfather appears in a Roman embassy to Attila the Hun, and his father (who bore the same name) served as comes sacrarum largitionum and comes rerum privatarum to Odovacer and as Praetorian Prefect to Theoderic the Great.
Cassiodorus began his career under the auspices of his father, about in his twentieth year, when the latter made him his consiliarius upon his own appointment to the Praetorian Prefecture. In his judicial capacity as prefect, he held the absolute right of appeal to any magistrate in the empire (or, later, the Gothic kingdom), and the consiliarius served as a sort of legal advisor in cases of greater complexity.
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This entry incorporates text from “Cassiodorus” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.