Variae
A collection of official letters and edicts which the Roman senator Cassiodorus drafted for Theoderic and his successors, the Gothic kings of Italy. They show how those kings presented their rule to the emperor and to the Roman senate.
Cassiodorus held high office under Theoderic and the Gothic rulers who followed him, ending as praetorian prefect in the 530s, and wrote their state correspondence in polished Latin. He gathered the letters into twelve books.
The letters are official documents, though literary ones, and they say what the Gothic court wished to have said. The first in the collection, from Theoderic to the emperor Anastasius, calls the king’s government an imitation of the emperor’s and speaks of the two realms as one body. Hodgkin’s English version shortens the letters, so it serves for their substance and not for close reading of their wording.
Cited in
- AD 476, firm date