Page:The Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages.djvu/63

CHAP. IV] THE TRANS^nSSION OF LETTERS 45 literature passed over into the Middle Ages in its classic writings, and also in the summarizing and remodelling works of the transition centuries. For the preservation of the classics in the period of barbarian wars, no man deserves equal glory with Cassiodorus, the Roman-minded minister of Theodoric the Ostrogoth. As an old man, in the year 540, he founded the cloister of Vivarium in the extreme south of Italy. There he first incited monks to study the classics and copy the manuscripts. The example was followed in the rapidly increasing monasteries of the Benedictines. Of great importance also were the labors of the Irish, of Columbanus above all, who, in 615, founded that home of letters, the cloister of Bobbio, in the north of Italy. Then the Anglo- Saxons, eagerly learning from the Irish, take up the good work, — and the famous names are Aldhelm (d. 709), Bede (d. 735), Bonifacius-Winfried (d. 755), and Alcuin, Charlemagne's minister of education.^ These men were monks, and to monks, generally speaking, was due the preservation of the classics. Not that they had any special love for the classics,* which they often erased in order to write the lives of saints on the profane parchment. Nor was the church altogether friendly to pagan literature. The 1 See Ebert, op. cit., under these names : Norden, Antike Kunst- prosa, PP.G65-669; Ozanam, Civ. Chr€t. chez les Francs, Chape. IV, V, and IX. 3 The rales of Isidore of SeylUe and of some other monastic legis- lators forbade the reading of pagan writings without special per- mission. See Comparetti, Virgil in the Middle Age*, p. 86; Graf, Roma nella memoria e nelle imaginazioni del Medio Evo, II, p. 161 ; Specht, Oeschichte des Unt€rrichtw>esens in DeuUchland, pp. 40-67.