foundation · 554 · Scylletium
Cassiodorus spent thirty years in Ostrogothic service, drafting the state letters that are now the main source for the kingdom, and he tried with Pope Agapetus to found a Christian school of higher studies at Rome. The Gothic war ended that. So he went home to the family estate at Squillace and built Vivarium round its fishponds, and wrote the Institutiones for the monks there: a reading list with a curriculum attached, what to read and in what order, sacred first and secular after, with instructions on how to correct a text and how to bind one. That is the consequential part. Monastic copying already happened; what he did was make it a formal obligation of the life, with standards, and argue that pagan learning was worth preserving because scripture could not be read without it. Benedict's Rule gave the west its monasteries and Cassiodorus gave those monasteries a scriptorium. He was still writing at ninety-three, a treatise on spelling for the copyists, because bad orthography was corrupting the books.
Rome will not fund a Christian university. What can one man do instead?
Retire to Calabria and make copying manuscripts a duty rather than a hobby.