Page 199 - Envoys and Political Communication in the Late Antique West 411 - 533

Cassiodorus and Senarius

kingdom of the fifth and sixth centuries, and its foreign relations are
the most clearly understood. The negotiations of the Ostrogothic king
Theoderic with the emperors Zeno, Anastasius, and Justin are well
if not fully attested, and the extensive network of marriage alliances
which bound Theoderic to the other major powers of the West draws
comment from several near-contemporary writers. Modern narratives
of Theoderic’s successors concentrate on deteriorating relations with
Constantinople up to Justinian’s commencement of war, rather than on
1
domestic developments. This historical context for the involvement of
Cassiodorus and Senarius in political communication is reasonably well
known.
It is not these participants, however, who are the sources for our knowl-
edge of foreign politics or policies. Cassiodorus and Senarius were closely
tied to the quasi-imperial court of Ostrogothic Ravenna. Though they
were members of the Italian aristocracy, both owed their social positions
notto descentfrom greatlandholding families, butprimarily to service
performed for the court by themselves and their immediate forebears.
Early sixth-century Italy was home to a vigorous literary culture, which
has left behind a wider range of Latin writings than any other part of
the West. Works survive from both Cassiodorus and Senarius, in greatly
differing quantities; they are considered here in inverse proportion to
the length of their extant writings. Cassiodorus not only was the editor
of a polished selection of 468 of his own official letters, which are of
interest here, but also was the author of an extant chronicle; of pan-
egyrics, two of which are preserved in fragments; of a history, now lost;
and, after his retirement into monastic otium, of theological, exegeti-
cal, grammatical, and didactic works which enjoyed a healthy history
of transmission throughout the Middle Ages. From Senarius, there is
extant only one eighteen-line poem, and one fragment and a loose para-
phrase of a letter; there exist also replies to several lost letters of Senarius

1
On the Ostrogothic kingdom, in addition to the standard accounts of Bury i, 422–69, Stein ii,
107–56, 328–68, Jones, LRE i, 245–57, and Demougeot ii, 796–833: Theodore Mommsen, ‘Ost-
gothische Studien’, Neues Archiv der Gesellschaft f¨ ur ¨ altere deutsche Geschichtskunde 14 (1889), 225–49,
453–544; 15 (1890), 181–6, reprinted in his Gesammelte Schriften vi (Berlin, 1910), 362–484, cited
here; Sundwall, Abhandlungen; Wilhelm Ensslin, Theoderich der Grosse, 2nd edn (Munich, 1956);
Ensslin, ‘Beweise der Romverbundheitin Theoderichs des Grossen Aussen- und Innenpolitik’,
I Goti in Occidente (Settimane di studio del Centro italiano di studi sull’alto medioevo 3; Spoleto,
1956), 509–36; Peter Llewellyn, Rome in the Middle Ages (London, 1971), 21–77; Wolfram, History
of the Goths, 247–362; John Moorhead, Theoderic in Italy (Oxford, 1992); Jan Prostko-Prostynski,
Utraeque res publicae: The Emperor Anastasius I’s Gothic Policy (491–518) (Poznan, 1994); Amory,
People and Identity in Ostrogothic Italy; and the conference proceedings Teoderico il Grande e i Goti
d’Italia, Atti de XIII Congresso internazionale di studi sull’alto medioevo, 2 vols. (Spoleto, 1993);
and Teoderico e i Goti tra Oriente e Occidente, ed. Antonio Carile (Ravenna, 1995).

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