It was the fortune of Cassiodorus to serve as a connecting link between the world of classic Rome and that of the Middle Ages. He saw the direction and control of the community pass from the monarchs and the leaders of armies to the Church and to the monasteries, and he was himself an active agent in helping to bring about such transfer. Born in 479, only three years after the overthrow of the last of the Emperors of the West, he grew up under the rule of Odovacar, the Herulian. While still a youth, he had seen the Herulian kingdom destroyed by Theodoric, and he had lived to mourn over the ruins of the realm founded by the Goth, which he had himself helped to govern. He saw his beloved Italy taken possession of by the armies of Narses and Belisarius from the east, and a little later overrun by the undisciplined hordes of the Lombards from the north. The first great schism between the Eastern and the Western Churches began during his boyhood and terminated before, as Abbot of Vivaria, it became necessary for him to take a decided part on the one side or the other. A Greek by ancestry, a Roman by training, the experience of Cassiodorus included work and achievements as statesman, orator, scholar, author, and ecclesiastic. He had witnessed the extinction of the Roman Senate, of which both his father and himself had been members; the practical abolition of the Consulate, an honour to which he had also attained; and the close of the schools of philosophy in Athens, with the doctrines of which he, almost alone in his generation of Italians, was familiar. He had done much to maintain in the Court and throughout the kingdom of Theodoric, such standard of scholarly interests and of literary appreciation as was practicable with the resources available; and, in like manner, he brought with him to his monastery a scholarly enthusiasm for classic literature, of which literature he may not unnaturally have felt himself to be almost the sole surviving representative. It is difficult to over-estimate the extent of the service rendered by Cassiodorus to literature and to later generations in initiating the training of monks as scribes, and in putting into their hands for their first work in the _scriptorium_ the masterpieces of classic literature. He belonged both to the world of ancient Rome, which he had outlived, and to that of the Middle Ages, the thought and work of which he helped to shape. With the close of the official career of Cassiodorus as Secretary of State for the Gothic kingdom of Italy, the history of ancient Europe may, for the purpose of my narrative, be considered to end. With the consecration of Cassiodorus, as Abbot of the monastery of Vivaria, (which took place about 550, when he was seventy years of age), and the instituting by him of the first European _scriptorium_, I may begin the record of the production of books during the Middle Ages. [Illustration] [Illustration] CHAPTER I. THE MAKING OF BOOKS IN THE MONASTERIES.