received him gladly into his service, but Cassiodorus had now done
with politics. The dream of his life had been to build up an
independent Italian State, strong with the strength of the Goths, and
wise with the wisdom of the Romans. That dream was now scattered to
the winds. Providence had made it plain that not by this bridge was
civilisation to pass over from the Old World to the New. Cassiodorus
accepted the decision, and consecrated his old age to religious
meditation and to a work even more important than any of his political
labours (though one which must be lightly touched on here), the
preservation by the pens of monastic copyists of the Christian
Scriptures, and of the great works of classical antiquity.

[Footnote 73: Fifty-eight, if the retirement was in 538.]

[Sidenote: He founds two monasteries at Scyllacium.]

It was to his ancestral Scyllacium that Cassiodorus retired; and here,
between the mountains of Aspromonte and the sea, he founded his
monastery, or, more accurately, his two monasteries, one for the
austere hermit, and the other for the less aspiring coenobite. The
former was situated among the 'sweet recesses of Mons Castellius[74],'
the latter among the well-watered gardens which took their name from
the Vivaria (fish-ponds) that Cassiodorus had constructed among them
in connection with the river Pellena[75]. Baths, too, especially
intended for the use of the sick, had been prepared on the banks of
the stream[76]. Here in monastic simplicity, but not without comfort,
Cassiodorus ordained that his monks should dwell. The Rule of the
order--in so far as it had a written Rule--was drawn from the writings
of Cassian, the great founder of Western Monachism, who had died about
a century before the Vivarian monastery was founded. In commending the