navigatis.' The idea seems to be: 'You
have to sail about from one room to another of your own house, and
therefore Ravenna will seem like a neighbouring inn.']

[Footnote 879: The next four sentences describe the movement of the
ships when towed along the channels of the streams (Brenta, Piave,
Tagliamento, &c.) the deposits from which have made the lagunes.]

'It is a pleasure to recall the situation of your dwellings as I
myself have seen them. Venetia the praiseworthy[880], formerly full of
the dwellings of the nobility, touches on the south Ravenna and the
Po, while on the east it enjoys the delightsomeness of the Ionian
shore, where the alternating tide now discovers and now conceals the
face of the fields by the ebb and flow of its inundation. Here after
the manner of water-fowl have you fixed your home. He who was just now
on the mainland finds himself on an island, so that you might fancy
yourself in the Cyclades[881], from the sudden alterations in the
appearance of the shore.

[Footnote 880: 'Venetiae praedicabiles.' An allusion, no doubt, as
other commentators have suggested, to the reputed derivation of
Venetia from [Greek: Ainetoi], 'the laudable.']

[Footnote 881: Alluding probably to the story of the floating island
of Delos.]

'Like them[882] there are seen amid the wide expanse of the waters
your scattered homes, not the product of Nature, but cemented by the
care of man into a firm foundation[883]. For by a twisted and knotted
osier-work the earth there collected is turned into a solid mass, and
you oppose without fear to the waves of the sea so fragile a bulwark,
since forsooth the mass of waters is unable to sweep away the shallow
shore, the deficiency in depth depriving the waves of the necessary
power.

[Footnote 882: 'Earum similitudine.' Does Cassiodorus mean 'like the
water-fowl,' or 'like the Cyclades?']

[Footnote 883: The reading of Nivellius (followed by Migne),
'Domicilia videntur sparsa, quae Natura non protulit sed hominum cura
fundavit,' seems to give a better sense than that of Garet, who omits
the 'non.']

'The inhabitants have one notion of plenty, that of gorging themselves
with fish. Poverty therefore may associate itself with wealth on equal
terms. One kind of food refreshes all; the same sort of dwelling
shelters all; no one can envy his neighbour's home; and living in this
moderate style they escape that vice [of envy] to which all the rest
of the world is liable.