this fact permits us to doubt
whether Cassiodorus has not exaggerated the pre-eminence of the Amal
race in early days, it must be admitted to be also an evidence of the
good faith with which he preserved the national tradition on these
points. Had he been merely inventing, it would have been easy to
include every name of a distinguished Gothic King among the
progenitors of his Sovereign.

[Footnote 44: Jordanes, De Reb. Get. xiii.]

[Sidenote: Abstract by Jordanes.]

Such then was the general purpose of the Gothic History of
Cassiodorus. The book itself has perished--a tantalising loss when we
consider how many treatises from the same pen have been preserved to
us which we could well have spared. But we can speak, as will be seen
from the preceding remarks, with considerable confidence as to its
plan and purpose, because we possess in the well-known treatise of
Jordanes 'On the Origin of the Goths[45]' an abbreviated copy,
executed it is true by a very inferior hand, but still manifestly
preserving some of the features of the original. It will not be
necessary here to go into the difficult question as to the personality
of this writer, which has been debated at considerable length and with
much ingenuity by several German authors[46]. It is enough to say that
Jordanes, who was, according to his own statement, 'agrammatus,' a man
of Gothic descent, a notary, and then a monk[47], on the alleged
request of his friend Castalius, 'compressed the twelve books of
Senator, _de origine actibusque Getarum_, bringing down the history
from olden times to our own days by kings and generations, into one
little pamphlet.' Still, according to his statement, which there can
be little doubt is here thoroughly false, he had the loan of the
Gothic History for only three days from the steward of Cassiodorus,
and wrote chiefly or entirely from his recollection of this hasty
perusal[48]. He says that he added some suitable passages from the
Greek and Latin historians, but his own range of historical reading
was evidently so narrow that we may fairly suspect these additions to
have been of the slenderest possible dimensions. Upon the whole, there
can be little doubt that it is a safe rule to attribute everything
that is good or passable in this little treatise to Cassiodorus, and
everything that is very bad, childish, and absurd in it to Jordanes.

[Footnote 45: 'De Rebus Geticis,' or 'De Gothorum Origine,' is the
name by which this litt