[Sidenote: Position of Cassiodorus on the confines of the Ancient and
the Modern.]

His position, however, which was in more senses than one that of a
borderer between two worlds, gives to the study of his writings an
exceptional value. Born a few years after the overthrow of the Western
Empire, a Roman noble by his ancestry, a rhetorician-philosopher by
his training, he became what we should call the Prime Minister of the
Ostrogothic King Theodoric; he toiled with his master at the
construction of the new state, which was to unite the vigour of
Germany and the culture of Rome; for a generation he saw this edifice
stand, and when it fell beneath the blows of Belisarius he retired,
perhaps well-nigh broken-hearted, from the political arena. The
writings of such a man could hardly fail, at any rate they do not
fail, to give us many interesting glimpses into the political life
both of the Romans and the Barbarians. It is true that they throw more
light backwards than forwards, that they teach us far more about the
constitution of the Roman Empire than they do about the Teutonic
customs from whence in due time Feudalism was to be born. Still, they
do often illustrate these Teutonic usages; and when we remember that
the writer to whom after Tacitus we are most deeply indebted for our
knowledge of Teutonic antiquity, Jordanes, professedly compiled his
ill-written pamphlet from the Twelve Books of the Gothic History of
Cassiodorus, we see that indirectly his contribution to the history of
the German factor in European civilisation is a most important one.

Thus then, as has been already said, Cassiodorus stood on the confines
of two worlds, the Ancient and the Modern; indeed it is a noteworthy
fact that the very word _modernus_ occurs for the first time with any
frequency in his writings. Or, if the ever-shifting boundary between