Cassiodorus

Cassiodorus (about 485–about 585), in full Flavius Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator, was a Roman statesman and writer under the Ostrogothic kings of Italy. Born to a landed family at Squillace in Calabria, he served Theodoric and his successors as quaestor, consul, master of the offices and praetorian prefect, drafting the royal correspondence he later collected as the Variae. His Gothic history survives only in Jordanes' abridgment. After the Byzantine reconquest he retired to found the monastery of Vivarium on his estates, where monks copied manuscripts under his direction, and wrote the Institutiones, a guide to sacred and secular learning that shaped medieval education.