Cassiodorus—famed throughout history as one of the great Christian exegetes of antiquity—spent most of his life as a high-ranking public official under the Ostrogothic King Theoderic and his heirs. He produced the <I>Variae</I>, a unique letter collection that gave witness to the sixth-century Mediterranean, as late antiquity gave way to the early middle ages. The <I>Variae</I> represents thirty years of Cassiodorus’s work in civil, legal,...
