342 Lozovsky
popular text in medieval schools. The library of Vivarium also became a major
centre of diffusion of Christian and secular texts.116
Conclusion
The peaceful years of Ostrogothic rule were beneficial for cultural life in Italy.
Theoderic and his family supported schools, employed classically educated
people in their administration, and patronized culture. Roman cultural values
continued to shape aesthetic tastes and intellectual pursuits of the educated
elite, whose members’ interests ranged from philosophy to theology to erotic
poetry. At the same time classically educated Christian scholars studied the
Bible and fathers of the church, composing their own exegetical works and
pondering a proper way of balancing classical and Christian learning.
The death of Theoderic ended the years of stability, and the events that fol-
lowed (the succession crisis, Justinian’s wars, and the Lombard conquest)
brought devastation to Italy. By the late 6th century, the intellectual world of this
region was transformed, but important links connected it to the earlier period.
Manuscripts produced at Vivarium and Castellum Lucullanum were copied in
medieval scriptoria all over western Europe. The works of Boethius, Cassiodorus,
and Dionysius Exiguus provided medieval scholars with philosophical ideas,
educational techniques, and fundamentals of canon law and calendric compu-
tation. Medical texts translated in Ostrogothic Italy were studied in 7th-century
Ravenna. In the period of social, political, and cultural transformation in western
Europe, the work of Ostrogothic intellectuals continued to matter.117
BibliographyPrimary Sources
Anonymus of Ravenna, Cosmographia, ed. J. Schnetz, Itineraria Romana, vol. 1,
Stuttgart 1990.
Anonymus Valesianus, ed. and trans. J.C. Rolfe, in Ammianus Marcellinus: Res gestae,
vol. 3 (Loeb Classical Library), Cambridge, MA 1939, pp. 530–69.
116 Riché, Education and Culture, pp. 161–9; O’Donnell, Cassiodorus, pp. 219–20; Barnish,
“Work of Cassiodorus”; Troncarelli, Vivarium.
117 Numerous studies have addressed the intellectual legacy of that period and its reception
in later centuries, from earlier classical treatments, such as Rand, Founders of the Middle
Ages to the recent Companion to Boethius in the Middle Ages.