[2] Having regard to the military importance of Arretium during the Punic wars, it is difficult to believe that no direct road existed to this point before 187 b.c.
CASSIANUS, JOANNES EREMITA, or Joannes Massiliensis (?360-?435), a celebrated recluse, one of the first founders of monastic institutions in western Europe, was probably born in Provence about 360, but he spent the early part of his life in the monastery of Bethlehem with his friend Germanus, and his affinities were always Eastern rather than Western. In company with Germanus he visited Egypt, and dwelt for several years among the ascetics of the desert near the banks of the Nile. In 403 he repaired to Constantinople, where he received ordination as deacon at the hands of Chrysostom. At Marseilles (after 410) he founded two religious societies—a convent for nuns, and the abbey of St Victor, which during his time is said to have contained 5000 inmates. In later times his regulations enjoyed a high reputation, and were adopted by the monks and nuns of Port Royal. He was eventually canonized; and a festival in his honour long continued to be celebrated at Marseilles on the 25th of July. Cassianus was one of the first and most prominent of the Semi-Pelagians, maintaining that while man is by nature sinful, he yet has some good remaining in him, and that, while the immediate gift of God’s grace is necessary to salvation, conversion may also be begun by the exercise of man’s will. He further asserted that God is always willing to bestow his grace on all who seek it, though, at the same time, it is true that he sometimes bestows it without its being sought. These views have been held by a very large part of the church from his time, and embrace much of the essence of Arminianism. The style of Cassianus is slovenly, and shows no literary polish, but its direct simplicity is far superior to the rhetorical affectations which disfigure most of the writings of that age. At the request of Castor, bishop of Apt, he wrote two monumental and influential treatises on the monastic life. The De Institutione Coenobiorum (twelve books) describes the dress, the food, the devotional exercises, the discipline and the special spiritual dangers of monastic life in the East (gluttony, unchastity, avarice, anger, gloom, apathy, vanity and pride). The Collationes Patrum, a series of dialogues with the pious fathers of Egypt, deal with the way in which these dangers (and others, e.g. demons) may be avoided or overcome. At the desire of Leo (then archdeacon of Rome) he wrote against Nestorius his De Incarnatione Domini in seven books.
Editions.—Douay (1616) by Alardus Gazäus, with excellent notes; Migne’s Patrol. Lat. vols. xlix. and l.; M. Petschenig in the Vienna Corpus Script. Eccles. Lat. (2 vols., 1886-1888). See A. Harnack, History of Dogma, v. 246 ff., 253 ff.; A. Hoch, Die Lehre d. Joh. Cassian von Natur und Gnade (Freiburg, 1895); W. Moeller, History of the Chr. Church, i. 368-370.
CASSINI, the name of an Italian family of astronomers, four generations of whom succeeded each other in official charge of the observatory at Paris.
Giovanni Domenico Cassini (1625-1712), the first of these, was born at Perinaldo near Nice on the 8th of June 1625. Educated by the Jesuits at Genoa, he was nominated in 1650 professor of astronomy in the university of Bologna; he observed and wrote a treatise on the comet of 1652; was employed by the senate of Bologna as hydraulic engineer; and appointed by Pope Alexander VII. inspector of fortifications in 1657, and subsequently director of waterways in the papal states. His determinations of the rotation-periods of Jupiter, Mars and Venus in 1665-1667 enhanced his fame; and Louis XIV. applied for his services in 1669 at the stately observatory then in course of erection at Paris. The pope (Clement IX.) reluctantly assented, on the understanding that the appointment was to be temporary; but it proved to be irrevocable. Cassini was naturalized as a French subject in 1673, having begun work at the observatory in September 1671. Between 1671 and 1684 he discovered four Saturnian satellites, and in 1675 the division in Saturn’s ring (see [Saturn]); made the earliest sustained observations of the zodiacal light, and published, in Les Éléments de l’astronomie vérifiés (1684), an account of Jean Richer’s (1630-1696) geodetical operations in Cayenne. Certain oval curves which he proposed to substitute for Kepler’s ellipses as the paths of the planets were named after him “Cassinians.” He died at the Paris observatory on the 11th of September 1712.
A partial autobiography left by Giovanni Domenico Cassini was published by his great-grandson, Count Cassini, in his Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire des sciences (1810). See also C. Wolf, Histoire de l’observatoire de Paris (1902); Max. Marie, Histoire des sciences, t. iv. p. 234; R. Wolf, Geschichte der Astronomie, p. 450, &c.
Jacques Cassini (1677-1756), son of Domenico Cassini, was born at the Paris observatory on the 8th of February 1677. Admitted at the age of seventeen to membership of the French Academy of Sciences, he was elected in 1696 a fellow of the Royal Society of London, and became maitre des comptes in 1706. Having succeeded to his father’s position at the observatory in 1712, he measured in 1713 the arc of the meridian from Dunkirk to Perpignan, and published the results in a volume entitled De la grandeur et de la figure de la terre (1720) (see [Geodesy]). He wrote besides Élémens d’astronomie (1740), and died on the 18th of April 1756 at Thury, near Clermont. The first tables of the satellites of Saturn were supplied by him in 1716.
See C. Wolf, Histoire de l’observatoire de Paris; Max. Marie, Histoire des sciences, vii. 214; R. Wolf, Geschichte der Astronomie, p. 451; J.C. Houzeau, Bibl. astronomique; J. Delambre, Histoire de l’astronomie au XVIII’e siècle, pp. 250-275 (unfairly depreciatory); J.F. Montucla, Hist. des mathématiques, iv. 145, 248.