idence as a hostage at Constantinople. Years of marches and
countermarches, of battle and foray, at the head of his Ostrogothic
warriors, may well have effaced much of the knowledge thus acquired.
At any rate, when he descended the Julian Alps, close upon forty years
of age, and appeared for the first time in Italy to commence his long
and terrible duel with Odovacar, it was too late to learn the language
of her sons in such fashion that the first sentence spoken by him in
the Hall of Audience should not betray him to his new subjects as an
alien and a barbarian.

Yet Theodoric was by no means indifferent to the power of well-spoken
words, by no means unconcerned as to the opinion which his
Latin-speaking subjects held concerning him. He was no Cambyses or
Timour, ruling by the sword alone. His proud title was 'Gothorum
Romanorumque Rex,' and the ideal of his hopes, successfully realised
during the greater part of his long and tranquil reign, was to be
equally the King of either people. He had been fortunate thus far in
his Praetorian Praefects. Liberius, a man of whom history knows too
little, had amid general applause steered the vessel of the State for
the first seven years of the new reign. The elder Cassiodorus, who had
succeeded him, seemed likely to follow the same course. But possibly
Theodoric had begun to feel the necessity laid upon all rulers of men,
not only to be, but also to seem, anxious for the welfare of their
subjects. Possibly some dull, unsympathetic Quaestor had failed to
present the generous thoughts of the King in a sufficiently attractive
shape to the minds of the people. This much at all events we know,
that when the young Consiliarius, high-born, fluent, and learned,
poured forth his stream of panegyric on 'Our Lord Theodoric'--a
panegyric which, to an extent unusual with these orations, reflected
the real feelings of the speaker, and all the finest passages of which
were the genuine outcome of his own enthusiasm--the great Ostrogoth
recognised at once the man whom he was in want of to be the exponent
of his thoughts to the people, and by one stroke of wise audacity
turned the boyish and comparatively obscure Assessor into the
Illustrious Quaestor, one of the great personages of his realm.

[Sidenote: Composition of the VARIAE.]

[Sidenote: Their style.]

The monument of the official life of Cassiodorus is the correspondence
styled the 'Variae,' of which an abstract is now submitted to the