We assume therefore with some confidence the year 480 as the approximate date of the birth of our author; and while we observe that this date fits well with those which the course of history induces us to assign to his ancestors in the three preceding generations[14], we also note with interest that it was, as nearly as we can ascertain, the year of the birth of two of the most distinguished contemporaries of Cassiodorus—Boethius and Benedict.
Education of Cassiodorus.
Of the training and education of the young Senator we can only speak from their evident results as displayed in the 'Variae,' to which the reader is accordingly referred. It may be remarked, however, that though he evidently received the usual instruction in philosophy and rhetoric which was given to a young Roman noble aspiring to employment in the Civil Service, there are some indications that the bent of his own genius was towards Natural History, strange and often laughable as are the facts or fictions which this taste of his has caused him to accumulate.
Consiliarius to his father.
In the year 500[15], when Senator had just attained the age of twenty, his father, as we have already seen, received from Theodoric the high office of Praetorian Praefect. As a General might make an Aide-de-camp of his son, so the Praefect conferred upon the young Senator the post of Consiliarius, or Assessor in his Court[16]. The Consiliarius[17] had been in the time of the Republic an experienced jurist who sat beside the Praetor or the Consul (who might be a man quite unversed in the law) and advised him as to his judgments. From the time of Severus onwards he became a paid functionary of the Court, receiving a salary which varied from 12 to 72 solidi (£7 to £43). At the time which we are now describing it was customary for the Judge to choose his Consiliarius from among the ranks of young jurists who had just completed their studies. The great legal school of Berytus especially furnished a large number of Consiliarii to the Roman Governors. In order to prevent an officer in this position from obtaining an undue influence over the mind of his principal, the latter was forbidden by law to keep a Consiliarius, who was a native of the Province in which he was administering justice, more than four months in his employ[18]. This provision, of course, would not apply when the young Assessor, as in the case of Cassiodorus, came with his father from a distant Province: and in such a case, if the Magistrate died during his year of office, by a special enactment the fairly-earned pay of the Assessor was protected from unjust demands on the part of the Exchequer[19]. The functions thus exercised by Senator in his father's court at Rome, and the title which he bore, were somewhat similar to those which Procopius held in the camp of Belisarius, but doubtless required a more thorough legal training. In our own system, if we could imagine the Judge's Marshal invested with the responsibilities of a Registrar of the Court, we should perhaps get a pretty fair idea of the position and duties of a Roman Consiliarius[20].
Panegyric on Theodoric.
It was while Cassiodorus was holding this agreeable but not important position, that the opportunity came to him, by his dexterous use of which he sprang at one bound into the foremost ranks of the official hierarchy. On some public occasion it fell to his lot to deliver an oration in praise of Theodoric[21], and he did this with such admirable eloquence—admirable according to the depraved taste of the time—that Theodoric at once bestowed upon the orator, still in the first dawn of manhood[22], Appointed Quaestor.the 'Illustrious' office of Quaestor, giving him thereby what we should call Cabinet-rank, and placing him among the ten or eleven ministers of the highest class[23], by whom, under the King, the fortunes of the Gothic-Roman State were absolutely controlled.
Nature of the Quaestor's office.
The Quaestor's duty required him to be beyond all other Ministers the mouthpiece of the Sovereign. In the 'Notitia[24]' the matters under his control are concisely stated to be 'Laws which are to be dictated, and Petitions.'
To him therefore was assigned the duty (which the British Parliament in its folly assigns to no one) of giving a final revision to the laws which received the Sovereign's signature, and seeing that they were consistent with one another and with previous enactments, and were clothed in fitting language. He replied in the Sovereign's name to the petitions which were presented to him. He also, as we learn from Cassiodorus, had audience with the ambassadors of foreign powers, to whom he addressed suitable and stately harangues, or through whom he forwarded written replies to the letters which they had brought, but always of course speaking or writing in the name of his master. In the performance of these duties he had chiefly to rely on his own intellectual resources as a trained jurist and rhetorician. The large official staff which waited upon the nod of the other great Ministers of State was absent from his apartments[25]; but for the mere manual work of copying, filing correspondence, and the like, he could summon the needful number of clerks from the four great bureaux (scrinia) which were under the control of the Master of the Offices.