n
sense diffused over the whole body?

9. Concerning the form and composition of the body itself.

10. Sufficient signs by which we may discern what properties the souls
of sinners possess.

11. Similar signs by which we may distinguish the souls of righteous
men, since we cannot see them with our bodily eyes.

12. Concerning the Soul's state after death, and how it will be
affected by the general resurrection.

The treatise ends with a prayer to Christ to preserve the body in good
health, that it may be in tune with the harmony of the soul; to give
reason the ascendancy over the flesh; and to keep the mind in happy
equipoise, neither so strong as to be puffed up with pride, nor so
languid as to fail of its proper powers.

[Sidenote: Cassiodorus retires to the cloister.]

The line of thought indicated by the 'De Anima' led, in such a country
as Italy, at such a time as the Gothic War, to one inevitable end--the
cloister. It can have surprised none of the friends of Cassiodorus
when the veteran statesman announced his intention of spending the
remainder of his days in monastic retirement. He was now sixty years
of age[73]; his wife, if he had ever married, was probably by this
time dead; and we hear nothing of any children for whose sake he need
have remained longer in the world. The Emperor would probably have
received him gladly into his service, but Cassiodorus had now done
with politics. The dream of his life had been to build up an
independent Italian State, strong with the strength of the Goths, and
wise with the wisdom of the Romans. That dream was now scattered to
the winds. Providence had made it plain that not by this bridge was
civilisation to pass over from the Old World to the New. Cassiodorus
accepted the decision, and consecrated his old age to religious
meditation and to a work even more important than any of his political
labours (though one which must be lightly touched on here), the
preservation by the pens of monastic copyists of the Christian
Scriptures, and of the great works of classical antiquity.

[Footnote 73: Fifty-eight, if the retirement was in 538.]

[Sidenote: He founds two monasteries at Scyllacium.]

It was to his ancestral Scyllacium that Cassiodorus retired; and here,
between the mountains of Aspromonte and the sea, he founded his
monastery, or, more accurately, his two monasteries, one for the
austere hermit, and the other for the less aspiring coenobite. The
former was si