The Letters of Cassiodorus
[Footnote 15: Or possibly 501.]
[Footnote 16: This fact, and also the cause of Senator's promotion to
the Quaestorship, we learn from the Anecdoton Holderi described in a
following chapter.]
[Footnote 17: The terms Adsessor, Consiliarius, [Greek: Paredros],
[Greek: Symboulos], seem all to indicate the same office.]
[Footnote 18: Cod. Theod. i. 12. 1.]
[Footnote 19: This seems to be the meaning of Cod. Theod. i. 12. 2.
The gains of the 'filii familias Assessores' were to be protected as
if they were 'castrense peculium.']
[Footnote 20: Some points in this description are taken from Bethmann
Hollweg, Gerichtsverfassung der sinkenden Roemischen Reichs, pp.
153-158.]
[Sidenote: Panegyric on Theodoric.]
[Sidenote: Appointed Quaestor.]
It was while Cassiodorus was holding this agreeable but not important
position, that the opportunity came to him, by his dexterous use of
which he sprang at one bound into the foremost ranks of the official
hierarchy. On some public occasion it fell to his lot to deliver an
oration in praise of Theodoric[21], and he did this with such
admirable eloquence--admirable according to the depraved taste of the
time--that Theodoric at once bestowed upon the orator, still in the
first dawn of manhood[22], the 'Illustrious' office of Quaestor,
giving him thereby what we should call Cabinet-rank, and placing him
among the ten or eleven ministers of the highest class[23], by whom,
under the King, the fortunes of the Gothic-Roman State were absolutely
controlled.
[Footnote 21: 'Cassiodorus Senator ... juvenis adeo, dum patris
Cassiodori patricii et praefecti praetorii consiliarius fieret et
laudes Theodorichi regis Gothorum facundissime recitasset, ab eo
quaestor est factus' (Anecdoton Holderi, ap. Usener, p. 4).]
[Footnote 22: He himself says, or rather makes Theodoric's grandson
say to him, 'Quem _primaevum_ recipiens ad quaestoris officium, mox
reperit [Theodoricus] conscientia praeditum, et legum eruditione
maturum' (Var. ix. 24).]
[Footnote 23: At this time the Illustres actually in office would
probably be the Praefectus Praetorio Italiae (Cassiodorus the father),
the Praefectus Urbis Romae, the two Magistri Militum in Praesenti, the
Praepositus Sacri Cubiculi, the Magister Officiorum, the Quaestor, the
Comes Sacrarum Largitionum, the Comes Rerum Privatarum, and the two
Comites Domesticorum Equitum et Peditum.]
[Sidenote: Nature of the Quaestor's office.]
The Quaestor's duty required him to be beyond all other Ministers the
mouthpiece of the Sovereign. In the 'Notitia[24]' the matters under
his control are concisely stated to be 'Laws which are to be dictated,
and Petitions.'
[Footnote 24: 'Sub dispositione viri illustris Quaestoris
Leges dictandae
Preces.
Officium non habet sed adjutores de scriniis quos voluerit.']
To him therefore was assigned the duty (which the British Parliament
in its folly assigns to no one) of giving a final revision to the laws
which received the Sovereign's signature, and seeing that they were
consistent with one another and with previous enactments, and were
clothed in fitting language. He replied in the Sovereign's name to the
petitions which were presented to him. He also, as we learn from
Cassiodorus, had audience with the ambassadors of foreign powers, to
whom he addressed suitable and stately harangues, or through whom he
forwarded written replies to the letters which they had brought, but
always of course speaking or writing in the name of his master. In the
performance of these duties he had chiefly to rely on his own
intellectual resources as a trained jurist and rhetorician. The large
official staff which waited upon the nod of the other great Ministers
of State was absent from his apartments[25]; but for the mere manual
work of copying, filing correspondence, and the like, he could summon
the needful number of clerks from the four great bureaux (scrinia)
which were under the control of the Master of the Offices.
[Footnote 25: Officium non habet.]
We have an interesting summary of the Quaestor's duties and privileges
from the pen of Cassiodorus himself in the 'Variae' (vi. 5), under the
title 'Formula Quaesturae,' and to this document I refer the reader
who wishes to complete the picture of the occupations in which the
busiest years of the life of Cassiodorus were passed.
[Sidenote: Special utility of a Quaestor to Theodoric.]
To a ruler in Theodoric's position the acquisition of such a Quaestor
as Cassiodorus was a most fortunate event. He himself was doubtless
unable to speak or to write Latin with fluency. According to the
common story, which passes current on the authority of the 'Anonymus
Valesii,' he never could learn to write, and had to 'stencil' his
signature. I look upon this story with some suspicion, especially
because it is also told of his contemporary, the Emperor Justin; but I
have no doubt that such literary education as Theodoric ever received
was Greek rather than Latin, being imparted during the ten years of
his residence as a hostage at Constantinople. Years of marches and
countermarches, of battle and foray, at the head of his Ostrogothic
warriors, may well have effaced much of the knowledge thus acquired.
At any rate, when he descended the Julian Alps, close upon forty years
of age, and appeared for the first time in Italy to commence his long
and terrible duel with Odovacar, it was too late to learn the language
of her sons in such fashion that the first sentence spoken by him in
the Hall of Audience should not betray him to his new subjects as an
alien and a barbarian.
Yet Theodoric was by no means indifferent to the power of well-spoken
words, by no means unconcerned as to the opinion which his
Latin-speaking subjects held concerning him. He was no Cambyses or
Timour, ruling by the sword alone. His proud title was 'Gothorum
Romanorumque Rex,' and the ideal of his hopes, successfully realised
during the greater part of his long and tranquil reign, was to be
equally the King of either people. He had been fortunate thus far in
his Praetorian Praefects. Liberius, a man of whom history knows too
little, had amid general applause steered the vessel of the State for
the first seven years of the new reign. The elder Cassiodorus, who had
succeeded him, seemed likely to follow the same course. But possibly
Theodoric had begun to feel the necessity laid upon all rulers of men,
not only to be, but also to seem, anxious for the welfare of their
subjects. Possibly some dull, unsympathetic Quaestor had failed to
present the generous thoughts of the King in a sufficiently attractive
shape to the minds of the people. This much at all events we know,
that when the young Consiliarius, high-born, fluent, and learned,
poured forth his stream of panegyric on 'Our Lord Theodoric'--a
panegyric which, to an extent unusual with these orations, reflected
the real feelings of the speaker, and all the finest passages of which
were the genuine outcome of his own enthusiasm--the great Ostrogoth
recognised at once the man whom he was in want of to be the exponent
of his thoughts to the people, and by one stroke of wise audacity
turned the boyish and comparatively obscure Assessor into the
Illustrious Quaestor, one of the great personages of his realm.
[Sidenote: Composition of the VARIAE.]
[Sidenote: Their style.]
The monument of the official life of Cassiodorus is the correspondence
styled the 'Variae,' of which an abstract is now submitted to the
reader. There is no need to say much here, either as to the style or
the thoughts of these letters; a perusal of a few pages of the
abstract will give a better idea of both than an elaborate
description. The style is undoubtedly a bad one, whether it be
compared with the great works of Greek and Latin literature or with
our own estimate of excellence in speech. Scarcely ever do we find a
thought clothed in clear, precise, closely-fitting words, or a
metaphor which really corresponds to the abstract idea that is
represented by it. We take up sentence after sentence of verbose and
flaccid Latin, analyse them with difficulty, and when at last we come
to the central thought enshrouded in them, we too often find that it
is the merest and most obvious commonplace, a piece of tinsel wrapped
in endless folds of tissue paper. Perhaps from one point of view the
study of the style of Cassiodorus might prove useful to a writer of
English, as indicating the faults which he has in this age most
carefully to avoid. Over and over again, when reading newspaper
articles full of pompous words borrowed from Latin through French,
when wearied with 'velleities' and 'solidarities' and 'altruisms' and
'homologators,' or when vainly endeavouring to discover the real
meaning which lies hidden in a jungle of Parliamentary verbiage, I
have said to myself, remembering my similar labour upon the 'Variae,'
'How like this is to Cassiodorus.'
[Sidenote: Lack of humour.]
[Sidenote: The letter about the sucking-fish.]
Intellectually one of the chief deficiencies of our author--a
deficiency in which perhaps his age and nation participated--was a
lack of humour. It is difficult to think that anyone who possessed a
keen sense of humour could have written letters so drolly unsuited to
the character of Theodoric, their supposed author, as are some which
we find in the 'Variae.' For instance, the King had reason to complain
that Faustus, the Praetorian Praefect, was dawdling over the execution
of an order which he had received for the shipment of corn from the
regions of Calabria and Apulia to Rome. We find the literary Quaestor
putting such words as these into the mouth of Theodoric, when
reprimanding the lazy official[26]: 'Why is there such great delay in
sending your swift ships to traverse the tranquil seas? Though the
south wind blows and the rowers are bending to their oars, has the
sucking-fish[27] fixed its teeth into the hulls through the liquid
waves; or have the shells of the Indian Sea, whose quiet touch is said
to hold so firmly that the angry billows cannot loosen it, with like
power fixed their lips into your keels? Idle stands the bark though
winged by swelling sails; the wind favours her but she makes no way;
she is fixed without an anchor, she is bound without a cable; and
these tiny animals hinder more than all such prospering circumstances
can help. Thus, though the loyal wave may be hastening its course, we
are informed that the ship stands fixed on the surface of the sea, and
by a strange paradox the swimmer [the ship] is made to remain
immovable while the wave is hurried along by movements numberless. Or,
to describe the nature of another kind of fish, perchance the sailors
in the aforesaid ships have grown dull and torpid by the touch of the
torpedo, by which such a deadly chill is struck into the right hand of
him who attacks it, that even through the spear by which it is itself
wounded, it gives a shock which causes the hand of the striker to
remain, though still a living substance, senseless and immovable. I
think some such misfortunes as these must have happened to men who are
unable to move their own bodies. But I know that in their case the
echeneis is corruption trading on delays; the bite of the Indian
shell-fish is insatiable cupidity; the torpedo is fraudulent pretence.
With perverted ingenuity they manufacture delays that they may seem to
have met with a run of ill-luck. Wherefore let your Greatness, whom it
specially concerns to look after such men as these, by a speedy rebuke
bring them to a better mind. Else the famine which we fear, will be
imputed not to the barrenness of the times but to official
negligence, whose true child it will manifestly appear.'
[Footnote 26: Var. i. 35.]
[Footnote 27: Echeneis.]