Psalms, and a more valuable, though incomplete, version of Clement of Alexandria's notes on the Catholic Epistles. His library contained all the best Latin expositors of the fourth and fifth centuries.
His anxiety for the faithful presentation of the Biblical text finds expression in the stress he lays upon "orthography," a term which includes a great deal of what we should call grammar: he recommends the use of a number of older writers on the subject, and his own latest work was devoted to it. Incidentally he speaks of the utility of certain geographical books in connexion with sacred study, and of the Church histories of the fifth-century Greek writers, Socrates, Sozomen, and Theodoret, which he had induced one Epiphanius to render into Latin; we know this translation as the Historia Tripartita.
The end of the first division of the Institutions deals with the practically useful arts of agriculture (gardening) and medicine. The second part is a summary introduction to the seven Liberal Arts – they are the same for Cassiodorus as for Martianus Capella – Grammar, Rhetoric, Dialectic, Arithmetic, Music, Geometry, Astronomy. The bibliography is here much scantier than in the first book, but even so, some works are named and used which we no longer have. We do not, as was said above, find our author definitely prescribing for his monks the study of the older poets and historians. What we do find is a recognition of the usefulness of secular as well as of sacred learning, an authorisation of the enlargement of the field, an encouragement to make use of all that could be drawn from sources that might subsequently be opened, as well as from those that were at hand.
Thus Cassiodorus did his best to provide tools and to indicate the method of using them. An older contemporary had prepared the workmen and the field. There is no need to recapitulate here what has already been said (I. 537 sqq.) of St Benedict and his Rule. Only it is clear that, but for his work, that of Cassiodorus would not have outlasted more than a few generations. The Rule was, it seems likely, in force at Vivarium itself; but whether this was so or not, and whether or not St Benedict would have accorded a welcome to the scheme of study outlined by Cassiodorus, the fact remains that the ideas of the latter were taken up by the Order and were propagated with more or less activity wherever the Order settled.
There was a third agent in this same century who was a factor of immense importance (though, even more clearly than Benedict, an involuntary factor) in the preservation of ancient learning. This was St Gregory the Great († 604). Gregory was not a "learned" writer. He knew (he says) no Greek: it is doubtful if his writings have been the means of handing down a single reference to an ancient author, – even to a Christian author of the earliest period. His contempt for secular studies is more than once expressed; he is even credited (by John of Salisbury, in the twelfth century) with having burned the library of the
