he less. Saint Gregory
tells of the death of Benedict thus:

Benedict was at the end of his career. His interview with Totila
took place in Five Hundred Forty-two, in the year which preceded
his death; and from his earliest days of the following year, God
prepared him for his last struggle, by requiring from him the
sacrifice of the most tender affection he had retained on earth.
The beautiful and touching incident of the last meeting of Benedict
and his twin sister, Scholastica, is a picture long to remember. At
the window of his cell, three days after her death, Benedict had a
vision of his dear sister's soul entering heaven in the form of a
snowy dove. He immediately sent for the body and placed it in a
sepulcher which he had already prepared for himself, that death
might not separate those whose souls had always been united in God.

The death of his sister was the signal of departure for himself. He
survived her forty days. He announced his death to several of his
monks, then far from Monte Cassino. A violent fever having seized
him, he caused himself on the sixth day of his sickness to be
carried to the chapel of Saint John the Baptist; he had before
ordered the tomb in which his sister already slept to be opened.

There, supported in the arms of his disciples, he received the holy
Viaticum, then placing himself at the side of the open grave, but
at the foot of the altar, and with his arms extended towards
heaven, he died, standing, muttering a last prayer. Such a
victorious death became that great soldier of God. He was buried by
the side of his beloved Scholastica, in a sepulcher made on the
spot where stood the altar of Apollo, which had been replaced by
another to our beloved Savior.

In the very year, and at the same time, that Justinian and Theodora were
preparing the Justinian Code, Benedict was busy devising "The Monastic
Rules." Benedict did not put his rules forth as final, but explained
that they were merely expedient for their time and place. In this he was
singularly modest. If one can divest himself of the thought that there
was anything "holy" or "sacred" about these communal groups called
"monasteries," and then read these rules, he will see that they were
founded on a good knowledge of economics and a very stern commonsense.

Humanity was the same a thousand years