all day long, yet cooled by the breezes from the sea, and looking at
her leisure on the labours of the husbandman in the corn-fields, the
vineyards, and the olive-groves around her,' is an attractive one, and
shows that kind of appreciation of the gentler beauties of Nature
which befits a countryman of Virgil.

This picture, however, is not distinctive enough to enable us from it
alone to fix the exact site of the Roman city. Lenormant (pp.
360-370), while carefully distinguishing between the sites of the
Greek Scylletion and the Latin Scolacium, and assigning the former
with much apparent probability to the neighbourhood of the promontory
and the Grotte di Stalletti, has been probably too hasty in his
assertion that the modern city of Squillace incontestably covers the
ground of the Latin Scolacium. Mr. Arthur J. Evans, after making a
much more careful survey of the place and its neighbourhood than the
French archaeologist had leisure for, has come to the conclusion that
in this identification M. Lenormant is entirely wrong, and that the
Roman city was not at Squillace, where there are no remains of earlier
than mediaeval times, but at Roccella del Vescovo, five or six miles
from Squillace in a north-easterly direction, where there are such
remains as can only have belonged to a Roman provincial city of the
first rank. For a further discussion of the question the reader is
referred to the Note (and accompanying Map) at the end of this
chapter.

We pass on from considering the place of Cassiodorus' birth to
investigate the date of that event.

[Sidenote: Date of birth.]

(3) The only positive statement that we possess as to the birth-year
of Cassiodorus comes from a very late and somewhat unsatisfactory
source. John Trittheim (or Trithemius), Abbot of the Benedictine
Monastery of Spanheim, who died in 1516, was one of the ecclesiastical
scholars of the Renaissance period, and composed, besides a multitude
of other books, a treatise 'De Scriptoribus Ecclesiasticis,' in which
is found this notice of Cassiodorus[12]:--

'Claruit temporibus Justini senioris usque ad imperii Justini junioris
paene finem, annos habens aetatis plus quam 95, Anno Domini 575.'

[Footnote 12: The reference is given by Koepke (Die Anfaenge des
Koenigthums, p. 88) as 'De scr. ecc. 212 Bibliotheca Ecclesiastica, ed.
Fabricius, p. 58;' by Thorbecke (p. 8) as 'Catalogus seu liber
scriptorum ecclesiasticorum, Coloniae 1546, p. 94.' Franz (p. 4)