My information on the subject is derived from a pamphlet of 79 pages by Hermann Usener, printed at Bonn in 1877, and bearing the title 'Anecdoton Holderi: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte Roms in Ostgothischer Zeit.' I am indebted to Mr. Bywater, of Exeter College, Oxford, for my introduction to this pamphlet, which, while strikingly confirming some conclusions which I had come to from my own independent study of the 'Variae,' has been of the greatest possible service to me in studying the lives of Cassiodorus and Boethius. [Sidenote: Description of the MS.] The 'Anecdoton' (which loses its right to that name by Usener's publication of it) was discovered by Alfred Holder in a MS. known as Codex Augiensis, No. CVL, which came from the Monastery of Reichenau and is now in the Grand-Ducal Library at Carlsruhe. The monks of the fertile island of Reichenau (Augia Dives), in the Lake of Constance, were celebrated in the ninth and tenth centuries for their zeal in the collection and transcription of manuscripts. The well-known Codex Augiensis (an uncial MS. of the Greek text of the New Testament, with the Vulgate version in parallel columns) is referred by palaeographers to the ninth century[96]. The Codex Augiensis with which we are now concerned, and which is a copy of the 'Institutiones Humanarum Rerum' of Cassiodorus, is believed to have been written in the next succeeding century. On the last page of this MS. Holder discovered the fragment--not properly belonging to the 'Institutiones'--to which he has given his name, and which is as follows[97]:-- [Footnote 96: See Scrivener, Plain Introduction to the Criticism of the New Testament, pp. 133-4.] [Footnote 97: I have adopted the emendations--most of them the corrections of obvious mistakes--which are suggested by Usener.] [Sidenote: Contents of the Anecdoton Holderi.] 'Excerpta ex libello Cassiodori Senatoris monachi servi Dei, ex-Patricio, ex-Consule Ordinario Quaestore et Magistro Officiorum, quem scripsit ad Rufum Petronium Nicomachum ex-Consule Ordinario Patricium et Magistrum Officiorum. Ordo generis Cassiodororum[98]: qui scriptores exstiterint ex eorum progenie vel ex civibus[99] eruditis. [Footnote 98: In the original, 'Casiodoru.'] [Footnote 99: In the original, 'ex quibus.'] 'Symmachus Patricius et Consul Ordinarius, vir philosophus, qui antiqui Catonis fuit novellus imitator, sed virtutes veterum sanctissima religione transcendit. Dixit sententiam pro allecticiis in Senatu, parentesque suos imitatus historiam quoque Romanam septem libris edidit.