f the veteran statesman's tenure of office were
years of some literary activity. It was in them that he was
collecting, and to some extent probably revising, the letters which
appear in the following collection. His motives for publishing this
monument of his official life are sufficiently set forth in the two
prefaces, one prefixed to the First Book and the other to the
Eleventh. Much emphasis is laid on the entreaties of his friends, the
regular excuse, in the sixth century as in the nineteenth, for an
author or a politician doing the very thing which most pleases his own
vanity. A worthier reason probably existed in the author's natural
desire to vindicate his own consistency, by showing that the influence
which for more than thirty years he had wielded in the councils of the
Gothic Sovereigns had been uniformly exerted on the side of law and
order and just government, directed equally to the repression of
Teutonic barbarism and the punishment of Roman venality.

[Sidenote: What alterations were made in the letters.]

The question how far the letters which now appear in the 'Variae'
really reproduce the actual documents originally issued by Cassiodorus
is one which has been a good deal discussed by scholars, but with no
very definite result. It is, after all, a matter of conjecture; and
every student who peruses the following letters is entitled to form
his own conjecture--especially as to those marvellous digressions on
matters of Natural History, Moral Philosophy, and the like--whether
they were veritably included in the original letters that issued from
the Royal Secretum, and were carried over Italy by the Cursus
Publicus. My own conjecture is, that though they may have been a
little amplified and elaborated, substantially they were to be found
in those original documents. The age was pedantic and half-educated,
and had lost both its poetic inspiration and its faculty of humour;
and I fear that these marvellous letters were read by the officials to
whom they were addressed with a kind of stolid admiration, provoking
neither the smile of amusement nor the shrug of impatience which are
their rightful meed.

[Sidenote: 'Illum atque Illum.']

The reader will observe that in many, in fact most of the letters,
which were meant to serve as credentials to ambassadors or commissions
to civil servants, no names are inserted, but we have instead only the
tantalising formula, 'Illum atque Illum,' which I have generally