When the moment demands it, he is pompously grandiloquent; in dealing with a delicate situation, he becomes involved and obscure.

We perceive in him a born courtier, a proud noble, a statesman of high purpose and no little sagacity; therewith, many gracious and attractive qualities, coloured by weaknesses, such as agreeable pedantry and amiable self-esteem, which are in part personal, partly the note of his time.
One's picture of the man is, of course, completed from a knowledge of the latter years of his life, of the works produced during his monastic retirement.

Christianity rarely finds expression in the _Variae_, a point sufficiently explained by the Gothic heresy, which imposed discretion in public utterances; on the other hand, pagan mythology abounds; we observe the hold it still had upon educated minds--education, indeed, meaning much the same thing in the sixth century after Christ as in the early times of the Empire.

Cassiodorus can never have been a fanatical devotee of any creed.

Of his sincere piety there is no doubt; it appears in a vast commentary on the Psalms, and more clearly in the book he wrote for the guidance and edification of his brother monks--brothers (_carissimi fratres_), for in his humility he declined to become the Abbot of Vivariense; enough that his worldly dignity, his spiritual and mental graces, assured to him the influence he desired.