Politics and Tradition between Rome, Ravenna, and Constantinople: A Study of Cassiodorus and the Variae, 527–554 by M. Shane Bjornlie (review)

Arranged in twelve books comprising 468 letters, proclamations, formulae for appointments, and edicts related to the Ostrogothic regime, the Variae of Cassiodorus (ca. 485–585) have been a prized source for scholars of early sixth-century Italy: from political and ecclesiastical affairs to fiscal and legal administration, from urban life and rural production to issues of barbarian ethnogenesis and the transformation of the classical world, the subject matter is so diverse that virtually no aspect of public life is left untouched. But reading the Variae is no simple task. They are among the most idiosyncratic of epistolary collections from Late Antiquity, containing a number of features that are entirely unprecedented in previous literary, administrative, and legal works.

Though there are other sources for the period, there is nothing so commanding and immediate as the Variae. Accordingly, any study of Ostrogothic Italy has also had to be, of necessity, an effort to understand this text and the author himself. The present book is the most penetrating and detailed effort yet made to interpret Cassiodorus and his Variae. A specialist in the literature and thought of the post-Roman world, Bjornlie now offers a comprehensive analysis that is essential for anyone wishing to understand the culture and politics of Italy in the first half of the sixth century.

Rather than a genuine record of governmental policies and a culture that was uniquely Ostrogothic, as has previously been assumed, Bjornlie asserts that the Variae represent a literary enterprise that was born from the political exigencies associated with the fall of the Amal court during the Gothic War. Originally written in three separate phases (507–511, 523–527, and 535–538/40) when Cassiodorus was holding office at Ravenna (in the first instance as quaestor, in the second as magister officiorum, and in the third as praetorian prefect) the collection was actually compiled at some point between the end of his troubled service as praetorian prefect and his retirement from public office around 554, either at Rome or perhaps even in Constantinople. Its immediate purpose was to rehabilitate the image of the Italian elite who had served as the palatine bureaucracy of the Ostrogothic administration, and to demonstrate both their legitimacy and their suitability for resuming such activities after Justinian’s presumed reconquest of the peninsula. To that end, Cassiodorus revised and interpolated letters from a preexisting assemblage, and in select cases even invented new letters, to highlight the contributions of the former bureaucratic elite of Ravenna. Thus, while the core content of the Variae corresponds closely to the conditions of Ostrogothic Italy as they actually were, much of the material found in the collection represents later intervention on the part of Cassiodorus, whose selections, omissions, and interpolations were influenced by powerful currents of cultural and political exchange between Rome, Ravenna, and Constantinople.

Although there is no way of knowing with certainty whether Cassiodorus assembled his collection in Italy sometime just before or after the capitulation of Ravenna to Belisarius’ forces in 540, or later, after he arrived in Constantinople, Bjornlie ventures his own dating of the Variae, and his conclusions on that count are at the very heart of his analysis. Believing the text to have been compiled sometime in the 540s (whether in Italy or Constantinople it makes little difference), he demonstrates how a keen awareness of the precise historical context in which the Variae were produced is essential for understanding their immediate purpose as a response to the new realities of postwar Italy. The Gothic War devastated Italian society and brought about greater ruin to the peninsula than did all of the barbarian invasions of the previous one hundred and fifty years. Within this context of extreme social and political uncertainty Cassiodorus undertook the task of...