Cassiodorus (Flavius Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator), c.485-c.585, Roman statesman and author. He held high office under Theodoric the Great and the succeeding Gothic rulers of Italy, who gave him the task of putting into official Latin their state papers and correspondence. These he later collected as Variae epistolae (tr. by Thomas Hodgkin, 1886). After retiring he founded two monasteries; in one of these the monks devoted leisure time to copying old manuscripts, which were thus preserved. Among Cassiodorus's works were his History of the Goths, preserved in the abridgment by Jordanes, and a treatise on orthography.