The Fons Arethusae.
III. The Fountain of Arethusa may possibly, according to Mr. Evans, be identified with the Fontana della Panaghia, a small fountain by the sea-shore at the south end of a little bay under the promontory of S. Gregorio. The so-called Fontana di Cassiodoro, near Coscia, has received its name and its present appearance in modern times, and is much too far from the sea to be the Fountain of Arethusa.
CHAPTER II.
THE ANECDOTON HOLDERI.
A few pages must be devoted to the MS. bearing the somewhat uncouth title of 'Anecdoton Holderi,' because it is the most recently opened source of information as to the life and works of Cassiodorus, and one which, if genuine, settles some questions which have been long and vigorously debated among scholars.
My information on the subject is derived from a pamphlet of 79 pages by Hermann Usener, printed at Bonn in 1877, and bearing the title 'Anecdoton Holderi: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte Roms in Ostgothischer Zeit.' I am indebted to Mr. Bywater, of Exeter College, Oxford, for my introduction to this pamphlet, which, while strikingly confirming some conclusions which I had come to from my own independent study of the 'Variae,' has been of the greatest possible service to me in studying the lives of Cassiodorus and Boethius.
Description of the MS.
The 'Anecdoton' (which loses its right to that name by Usener's publication of it) was discovered by Alfred Holder in a MS. known as Codex Augiensis, No. CVL, which came from the Monastery of Reichenau and is now in the Grand-Ducal Library at Carlsruhe. The monks of the fertile island of Reichenau (Augia Dives), in the Lake of Constance, were celebrated in the ninth and tenth centuries for their zeal in the collection and transcription of manuscripts. The well-known Codex Augiensis (an uncial MS. of the Greek text of the New Testament, with the Vulgate version in parallel columns) is referred by palaeographers to the ninth century[96]. The Codex Augiensis with which we are now concerned, and which is a copy of the 'Institutiones Humanarum Rerum' of Cassiodorus, is believed to have been written in the next succeeding century. On the last page of this MS. Holder discovered the fragment—not properly belonging to the 'Institutiones'—to which he has given his name, and which is as follows[97]:—