The publisher and the University of California Press Foundation gratefully acknowledge the generous support of the Joan Palevsky Endowment Fund in Literature in Translation.
University of California Press
Oakland, California
2020 by Shane Bjornlie
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cassiodorus, Senator, approximately 487approximately 580, author. | Bjornlie, M. Shane, translator, editor.
Title: The selected letters of Cassiodorus : a sixth-century sourcebook / Cassiodorus; edited and translated by M. Shane Bjornlie.
Other titles: Variae. Selections. English
Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2020] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020004116 (print) | LCCN 2020004117 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520297357 (cloth) | ISBN 9780520297340 (paperback) | ISBN 9780520969728 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH : Cassiodorus, Senator, approximately 487-approximately 580Correspondence. | OstrogothsItalyHistorySources. | ItalyHistory476774Sources.
Classification: LCC PA 6271. C 4 Z 48 2020 (print) | LCC PA 6271. C 4 (ebook) | DDC 945/.01dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020004116
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020004117
Manufactured in the United States of America
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Introduction
CASSIODORUS, THE VARIAE, AND THEIR WORLD
The Variae are an important source of primary evidence for the study of late antiquity. Cassiodorus, their author, wrote toward the end of a period in which the Mediterranean world assumed striking differences from what we consider a classical Roman Empire. In general terms, late antiquity (ca. 300600) is characterized by the coalescence and then the fragmentation of political unity on scales not previously experienced under the Roman Empire. At the beginning of this period, the Roman Empire reached its greatest extent, spanning from the deep hinterlands of North Africa to the Rhine and the Danube in Europe, and from Britain and the Atlantic shores of Europe to the culturally fertile crescent of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers at the Persian frontier in the east. Although these far-flung regions were initially treated as conquests, by the time of Emperor Constantines reign (30637), people from every corner of the empire self-identified as Roman: peasants lived their lives in accordance with the diverse customs and languages of their own provinces, but from the Rhine to the Euphrates the members of the empires governing and military classes could at some level identify themselves as Roman. The expansion of military and civil service facilitated this to a great degree. Where the emperor Augustus and his successors (a dynasty known today as the Julio-Claudians, who ruled from 27 B.C. to 68 A.D. ) had relied on a coterie of senatorial appointments made in Rome and the support of soldiers conscripted largely from Italy to govern their subjects, by the fourth century the Roman Empire drew men to state service from cities across the Mediterranean and recruited soldiers from the villages and fields of every province, and even from beyond imperial borders. In this sense, the fourth century was a period of grand cosmopolitanism. It also saw the empire reach its greatest accumulation of wealth, as the now-massive imperial bureaucracy enabled tax collection on a scale never witnessed before. Late antiquity is also when Christianity emerged as the dominant religion of the Mediterranean world, slowly but ineluctably eroding the traditional partnership between the state and what were increasingly thought of as pagan gods. Thus, the fourth century may be seen as the high point of the Christian Roman Empire. By contrast, the fifth century witnessed increasing fragmentation: civil wars fractured the unity of the military and bureaucratic establishment, the rise of Christian bishops and clergy as political leaders altered the orientation and culture of the classical city, and new immigrants to the empire offered alternatives to traditional government at the regional level. Only in its eastern provinces, with the imperial seat firmly anchored at Constantinople, would the Roman Empire resist the forces that tore at the social and political fabric of the western provinces.
Thus, scholarship uses the term late antiquity, with increasingly wide scope, to demarcate a period in which the Roman Mediterraneans cultural, religious, and political characteristics transitioned from what we generally recognize as classical to what we think of as medieval. Upon even cursory examination, however, it becomes clear that there were many late antiquities from the fourth to the seventh century. The grandeur of imperial power in the mid-fourth century, for example, contrasts markedly with the disintegration of imperial boundaries evident at the end of the fifth century. And, almost inversely, the modest ambitions of Christianity at the beginning of the fourth century contrast, again markedly, with the deeply entrenched position of the church at the end of the sixth century. Furthermore, regional differences in the Roman and former Roman world become increasingly evident in this period. Whereas Italy, for example, shared political, religious, and material cultures with the rest of the Mediterranean in the second century, in the sixth century it bore the marks of profound economic and cultural differences from other regions of the western Mediterranean and from the eastern empire, its partner during the last Roman centuries. In a setting where not only discontinuity, rupture, and transition but also continuity were the norm, it is difficult to identify definitive watershed moments, let alone sources that can be said to typify a particular late-antique moment. One of the rare exceptions is the Variae of Cassiodorus.
The letters of the Variae represent approximately thirty years (50740), during which their author served as a senior magistrate of the Ostrogothic kingdom in Italy. Cassiodorus was thus a privileged participant in the peninsulas political, economic, cultural, and religious life in the first half of the sixth century. The 468 letters that he collected and published under the title Variae originally served as political and administrative instruments, correspondence with other high-placed officials in the last Roman-style government in Italy. More than official documents, however, they are also the literary product of a highly educated individual author, and as such they reveal an extended and nearly continuous period with a level of detail and variations of texture not found in any other late-antique text.
