Argolicus appointed Praefect of the City.
Announces to this young man his nomination to the Praefecture of the City (for the 4th Indiction). Enlarges on the dignity of the office, especially as involving the Presidency of the Senate, and calls upon him by a righteous and sober life to show himself worthy of the choice.
Argolicus is a great student [perhaps a literary friend of Cassiodorus], and he is exhorted to keep himself in the right path by musing on the great examples of antiquity.
[There is a sort of tone of apology for the appointment of Argolicus, which is perhaps accounted for by the fact, which comes out in the next letter, that his father was a comparatively poor man.
See a sharp rebuke of Argolicus for venal procrastination, [iv. 29].]
[12.] King Theodoric to the Senate of the City of Rome.
The same subject.
Rehearses the usual sentiments about the dignity of the Senate and Theodoric's care in the choice of officials.
'It is easier, if one may say so, for Nature herself to err, than that a Sovereign should make a State unlike to himself.'
Recounts the ancestry of Argolicus. The older Senators will remember his eloquent and purely-living grandfather, a man of perfectly orthodox reputation, who filled the offices of Comes Sacrarum Largitionum and Magister Officiorum. His father never stained the dignity of 'Comes Privatarum' by cruelty, and was free from ill-gotten gains in an age when avarice was not accounted a crime[288].