composition the aged statesman and scholar, in the ninety-sixth year
of his age, entered into his well-earned rest[95]. The death of
Cassiodorus occurred (as I believe) in the year 575, three years
before the death of the Emperor Justin II, nephew and successor of
Justinian. The period covered by his life had been one of vast
changes. Born when the Kingdom of Odovacar was only four years old,
he had as a young man seen that Kingdom overthrown by the arms of
Theodoric; he had sat by the cradle of the Ostrogothic monarchy, and
mourned over its grave; had seen the eunuch Narses supreme vicegerent
of the Emperor; had heard the avalanche of the Lombard invasion
thunder over Italy, and had outlived even the Lombard invader Alboin.
Pope Leo, the tamer of Attila and the hero of Chalcedon, had not been
dead twenty years when Cassiodorus was born. Pope Gregory the Great,
the converter of England, was within fifteen years of his accession to
the Pontificate when Cassiodorus died. The first great schism between
the Eastern and Western Churches was begun in his boyhood and ended
before he had reached old age. He saw the irretrievable ruin of Rome,
such as Augustus and Trajan had known her; the extinction of the Roman
Senate; the practical abolition of the Consulate; the close of the
schools of philosophy at Athens.

[Footnote 95: In assigning the death of Cassiodorus to the
ninety-sixth year of his age I rest upon the authority of Trittheim
(as quoted in the earlier part of this chapter), who appears to me to
have preserved the chronology which was generally accepted, before the
question became entangled by the confusion between Cassiodorus and his
father.]

Reverting to the line of thought with which this chapter opened, if
one were asked to specify any single life which more than another was