As a minister of the Ostrogothic regime in the time of Theoderic, Cassiodorus had as brilliant a political career as any Roman of the late empire. Around A.D. 538, on the eve of the Byzantine reconquest of Italy, he published a collection of his state letters entitled Variae and disappeared from the public record. Half a century later, dying at his country estate in Calabria, he left behind in two books his Institutions of Divine and Secular Learning, a work that was later excerpted and copied in monasteries throughout the Latin Middle Ages. The Institutions appears here in the first new English translation in more than fifty years, with explanatory notes and a historical and interpretative introduction. The treatise On the Soul, which was originally published as the thirteenth book of the Variae, is included as an appendix.

Cassiodorus emerges from this edition as an exceptional but nonetheless representative exponent of the learned Christian culture of later Latin antiquity. The work will be of interest to historians of the late Roman empire and the early Christian church, to medievalists, and to students of the classical tradition.