Cassiodorus and Ancient Medicine: From Institutional Patronage to the Birth of Western Monastic Medicine: Was Cassiodorus a Physician?

Abstract

Flavius Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator (Squillace, c. 485/490 – Squillace, c. 580) occupies an ambiguous place in the historiography of medicine: invoked for over a century as a “precursor” or even as a “physician” of Western monastic medicine, he never practised the medical art clinically, but was, first as an imperial official and later as a monastic founder, its most effective cultural mediator between late antiquity and the Middle Ages. Grounded in a critical engagement with the Cassiodorian sources (Variae, Institutiones) – consulted here through the transcriptions and translations offered by the secondary literature rather than directly in their critical editions – and in a comparison between mid-twentieth-century Calabrian historiography, recent scholarly literature, and standard biographical reference works, this article reconstructs in four chapters the trajectory that runs from the institution of the Comes archiatrorum to the formation of the medical library at Vivarium, arriving at an updated historiographical assessment of the vexata quaestio “Was Cassiodorus a physician?” It is argued that the most defensible formula, already proposed by second-half-twentieth-century historiography, is that of a “competent expert and patron” of medicine, while his most significant historical contribution remains institutional, bibliographical, and organisational in nature.