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seems to be stringing together the favorite topics of his happier days by the machinery of dialogue, and this explains the repeated allusions to the doctrine of "reminiscence." Boethius is only learning over again what he has forgotten twice -once when he fell into a fleshly body, and once when he fell into despondency.

CHAPTER II.

ENNODIUS.

THE superiority of Boethius to his contemporaries is as marked as his superiority to his predecessors, though in their own day two of them, at any rate, had a very considerable reputation, and the reputation of one lasted far into the middle ages. Ennodius, bishop of Pavia, is even a completer type than Sidonius Apollinaris of the man of letters turned bishop by the force of circumstances. His full name was Magnus Felix Ennodius. He was practically a refugee from southern Gaul. He managed to marry an Italian heiress, and when through bad luck he could no longer count upon her heritage, he entered the clergy and she retired to a convent. The natural interest of Ennodius lay in the direction of puzzle poetry, but the greater part of his poetical works appear to have perished, because neither he nor others thought them worth preserving. We have two books of his poems, of which the first is made up of complimentary copies of verses, to which some editors add a dozen tame hymns; the second consists of 151 epigrams, partly inscriptions of no interest, partly the latest echo of Martial's uncleanly jests. The poems of the first book correspond in range with those of Ausonius: it is noteworthy that in a poem on the thirtieth anniversary of the consecration of his predecessor he quotes the example of Orpheus with as little embarrassment as earlier artists had represented it upon the walls of the catacombs.

The most curious part of his works are those which he composed in the way of business as a rhetorician: oddly enough, he did not think it necessary to destroy them upon his conversion, though he felt it necessary to renounce poetry and apparently to destroy his poems. There are regular school de

bates on the old stories of stepmothers and tyrannicides and brave men, and the gods are invoked, but one sees the decay of the art in the comparative prominence given to its easiest branch, in which the speaker had not even to give advice, but simply to express the feelings of a real or imaginary speaker in a traditional situation. A still stronger proof of decadence is the panegyric on Theodoric, which is as far below the panegyrists of the fourth century as they are below Pliny, or the "Eucharisticum de Vita sua" below the "Confessions" of St. Augustin. It is true that the falling-off in the "Eucharisticum" is largely due to the poverty of material. Ennodius has nothing to tell but his thankfulness for having been led from a secular to a spiritual life. Besides, we have

a bulky collection of letters, which occupies nine books, and tells us little or nothing of contemporary life compared with Sidonius Apollinaris, or even Symmachus. There are also lives of St. Epiphanius, who distinguished himself by his endeavors to keep the peace between the Goths at Toulouse and Italy, and Antonius, a Pannonian of good family, who had settled in a hermitage near the Lake of Como, and when pilgrims refused to leave him in peace retreated to Lerins to live as a common monk. There is also a treatise on education, addressed to young men, in which there is a curious medley of Christian ethics and pagan rhetoric: rhetoric is the crown of the sciences and the mother of the arts, and is able to make white black and black white.

CASSIODORUS.

Cassiodorus, like Ennodius, was loyal to the Gothic dynasty; and though he survived its fall he never appears to have done homage to Justinian; indeed, he spent the last thirty years of his life on his estate of Bruttium, where he founded a monastery, which he intended to be a university. He would have liked to see a high-school of Christian studies established by public authority at Rome as the existing high-school for classical studies had been, and, like Bacon, he was reduced to attempt to carry out by himself a work which was too extensive for any private person. The greater part of his works were

written during his retreat, and have something of the prolixity of old age, for he tells us himself he lived to be ninety-three, and went on writing to the last.

He was in the official service of the Gothic kings for something over thirty years, and under Theodoric his action as private secretary gave him a real influence in politics. He continued to draft official documents as late as the reign of Witiges; he was once consul, in 514, four years after Boethius, and thrice prætorian prefect, but he lost part of his influence after the death of Amalasuntha, Theodoric's daughter, who carried her father's policy of conciliating the Romans further than he had done, and was put to death because she showed an intention of bringing up her son as a Roman. Like every one else, he commenced his career as a rhetorician, and some fragments of his panegyrics have been recovered and edited at Turin. But the most important work of his official life was the twelve books of letters, mostly official in character, which, after Cicero's, are the most instructive that have come down from antiquity, though they are about the low-water mark both for sense and taste, being often so clumsy and pompous as to be barely intelligible: their general style is like the worst parts of Ammianus Marcellinus.

Besides the letters he wrote a history of the Goths in twelve books, which was completed about A.D. 533, and is now, unfortunately, lost, having been superseded by an epitome compiled less than twenty years later by a Goth of the name of Jornandes, or Jordanes. We derive some information about it from a letter which Cassiodorus wrote in his own honor in the name of Athalaric in 533. Athalaric speaks of the surprise of the Goths that a Roman should have read what the oldest of them could hardly remember, and is delighted that the royal descent of his own family, the Amals, is established for seventeen generations. He tells us that Cassiodorus had brought together what had hitherto been scattered over the wide fields of books. This compilation was not altogether well inspired. It is clear from Jordanes that Cassiodorus identified the Goths with the Geta, and with all, or almost all, the tribes who had occupied the same territories; and the information about them

and about the Amazons and the Scythians of Herodotus is mixed up in Jordanes, at any rate, with the national traditions of the Goths, in a very confusing manner. The history ends with the death of Athalaric in 534, and was probably published the following year. An earlier work was a chronicle from the creation of the world to the consulate of Eutharic in 519, covering a space, according to the author's reckoning, of 5271 years. It is only for the last sixty-four that Cassiodorus tells us anything that is not better said elsewhere; it is only for the last twenty-four that he appears to write from his own knowledge, though during the whole of the period during which the Goths were in contact with Rome it is noticed that he seems careful to mention everything to their credit, and to pass over everything that tells against them. Up to the first consuls he follows the Chronicle of Eusebius as enlarged by St. Jerome. For the rest he follows Livy in an epitome down to 9 B.C., and then Aufidius Bassus for forty years, after which he returns to purely Christian sources: from A.D. 455 to 495 he follows the Chronicle of Ravenna, which he gives in its full form; from 495 he seems to be an independent writer. The early part of the work is astonishingly capricious: for instance, the third Punic war is not mentioned, and the institution of state mines in Macedonia (ten years after the overthrow of Perseus) is: so, too, the Decemvirate is set down as having lasted forty years, because the compiler does not care to mention the military tribunes.

The same inattention to system appears in the commentary on the Psalter, which was the first work to which he applied himself after his "conversion," i. e., his retirement from the world, though the "De Anima" was finished sooner, just after the publication of the letters. This work is arranged in twelve chapters, because twelve is a sacred number, and this kind of arithmetical mysticism has great attractions for Cassiodorus: in substance it is taken from Claudianus Mamertus and St. Augustin, and is rather a collection of excerpts than an original work; the most characteristic part of it is the tenth and eleventh chapters, which treat of the signs whereby the good and evil are to be known. Practically the evil man

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