[Footnote 5: Preface to Getica (Mommsen's Edition, p. 53).]

[Footnote 6: Epist. XIV. ad Rusticum et Sebastianum (Migne, p. 49).]

[Footnote 7: Nearly all the letters in the XIth and XIIth Books of the
Variae are headed 'Senator Praefectus Praetorio.']

[Sidenote: Birthplace, Scyllacium.]

(2) Scyllacium, the modern Squillace, was, according to Cassiodorus,
the first, either in age or in importance, of the cities of Bruttii, a
Province which corresponds pretty closely with the modern Calabria. It
is situated at the head of the gulf to which it gives its name, on the
eastern side of Italy, and at the point where the peninsula is pinched
in by the Tyrrhene and Ionian Seas to a width of only fifteen miles,
the narrowest dimensions to which it is anywhere reduced. The Apennine
chain comes here within a distance of about five miles of the sea, and
upon one of its lower dependencies Scyllacium was placed. The slight
promontory in front of the town earned for it from the author of the
Aeneid the ominous name of 'Navifragum Scylaceum[8].' In the
description which Cassiodorus himself gives of his birthplace (Var.
xii. 15) we hear nothing of the danger to mariners which had attracted
the attention of Virgil, possibly a somewhat timid sailor. The name,
however, given to the place by the Greek colonists who founded it,
_Scylletium_, is thought by some to contain an allusion to dangers of
the coast similar to those which were typified by the barking dogs of
the not far distant Scylla.

[Footnote 8: