urch towards scholarship thus early.

The next great name in the tradition should probably be that of
Cassiodorus, the Roman writer and statesman, prime minister of
Theodoric, who, after a busy political life, retired to his estate at
Vivarium, and, in imitation of St. Benedict, who had recently
established a monastery at Monte Cassino, founded a monastery there. He
is said to have lived to the age of ninety-three. His retirement favored
this long life, for, after the death of Theodoric, troublous times came,
and civil war, and only his monastic privileges saved him from the storm
and stress of the times. He had been interested in literature and the
collection of information of many kinds before his retirement, and it is
not unlikely that his recognition of the fact that the monastic life
offered opportunities for the pursuit of this, under favorable
circumstances, led him to take it up.

While still a statesman he wrote a series of works relating to history
and politics and public affairs generally. These consisted mainly of
chronicles and panegyrics, and twelve books of miscellanies called
Variae. After his retirement to the monastery, a period of ardent
devotion to writing begins, and a great number of books were issued. He
evidently gathered round him a number of men whom he inspired with his
spirit, or, perhaps, selected, because he found that, while they had a
taste for a quiet, peaceful spiritual life, they were also devoted to
the accumulation and diffusion of knowledge. A series of commentaries on
portions of the Scriptures was written, the Jewish antiquities of
Josephus translated, and the ecclesiastical histories of Theodoric,
Sozomen, and Socrates made available in Latin. Cassiodorus himself is
said to have made a compendium of these, called the "Historia
Tripartita," which was much used as a manual of history during
succeeding centuries. Then there were treatises on grammar, on
orthography, and a series of works on mathematics. In all of his
writings Cassiodorus shows a special fondness for the symbolism of
numbers.

There is a well-grounded tradition that he insisted on the study of the
Greek classics of medical literature, especially Hippocrates and Galen,
and awakened the interest of the monks in the necessity for making
copies of these fathers of medicine. The tradition that he established
at Vivarium is also found to have existed at Monte Cassino among the
Benedictines, and, doubtless, to this is to