Vivarium

VIVARIUM. - Monastery founded by Cassiodorus (v.), who had withdrawn from politics, on the ancestral property of V., near Squillace, a little below the hermitage situated on Mount Castellum, so that Cassiodorus himself gave it the designation both of Vivariensis and of Castellensis (De positione monasterii Vivariensis sive Castellensis, in Instit. divin. litter., ed. Mommsen, in MGH, Auctores antiquiss., XXIX) and took pleasure in describing the locality and the advantages it offered (Institut., XII, 29; Variae, XII, 15; Expos. Ps., III, 17).

St. Gregory calls the monastery Castelliniensis (Epist., VIII, 30 and VIII, 32 of the year 598). The monastery was founded by Cassiodorus, it seems, in 555, on his return from Constantinople, thus succeeding in bringing to fulfillment his long-standing aspiration of establishing a «schola christiana». And the scriptorium flourished at once. Indeed the Evangeliary of Echternach, today in the National Library in Paris (ms. lat. 9380), is a copy of an evangeliary written at V. in 558.

The founder recommended to the monks the transcription and correction of books not only for the monastery, but also for sale (Instit. divin. litterarum, xv; xxx). Besides the monastic library, the personal library of Cassiodorus also found a place in the foundation (mes o nostra: Instit. div. litter., xxxi), which he later donated to the monastery. The monastic library contained the biblical texts, the commentaries on Holy Scripture, some brought from Africa (Inst. div. litterarum, viii; xxix) or from other places (ibid., viii); furthermore volumes of history, medicine, rhetoric, dialectic, agriculture, music.

The library was in part destroyed through political vicissitudes, in part dispersed between the 7th and 9th centuries. But on the dispersion of the library judgments vary (R. Beer, Bemerkungen über den ältesten Handschriftenbestand des Klosters Bobbio, in Anzeiger der Königl-Abademie der Wissenschaft. Wien, Philolog.-historische Klasse, 48 [1911], pp. 78-104; id., Monumenta paleographica Vindobonensis, II, Leipzig 1913, pp. 15-26; W. Weinberger, Handschriften von Vivarium, in Miscellanea Fr. Ehrle, IV, Rome 1924, pp. 75-88; P. Lejay, in Bulletin d'ancienne littérature et d'archéol. chrétienne, 3 [1913], p. 265; G. Mercati in the introduction to the edition: M. Tullii Ciceronis De republica libri e codice rescripto Vaticano latino 5757 phototypice expressi, Vatican City 1934; more recently see L. W. Jones, Notes on the Style and Vocabulary of Cassiodorus Institutions, in Classical Philology, 50 [1945], pp. 24-31; P. Courcelles, Les lettres grecques de Macrobe à Cassiodore, 2nd ed., Paris 1948, pp. 313-88). Some volumes ended up in the Library of the Lateran, others at Jarrow, brought there by Benedict Biscop, at Montecassino, at Bobbio, at Milan, at Verona, at Florence, at Naples, at Bamberg, at Karlsruhe, at Cologne, at Aachen, at Luxeuil, at Corbie, at Lyon, at St. Gall; some have been identified by their paleographic characteristics (E. A. Lowe, Codices latini antiquiores, III, Oxford 1938, nos. 391-98).

From the study of the miniatures illustrating three manuscripts of the Institutions (Cod. Bambergensis Patr. 61 of the 8th century, Cod. Cassellanus Theol. of the 9th century and the Cod. Herbipalensis of the 10th century), P. Courcelle recognized in them faithful copies of Cassiodorus's archetype, in which were represented a fishpond full of fish, a church with two towers, indicated as SES MARTINUS, a stream indicated as fluvius or fluctus pellei or apellena and another church called Ilarius. In Calabria, P. Courcelle identified in the territory of Squillace, a little south of the present watercourse called Alessi, a district S. Martino attested as early as 1151, where a modern church stands a short distance from an earlier one of which he found archaeological remains; furthermore at the foot of the promontory where the church is, among natural basins connected with the sea by a canal in which he recognized the fishpond, at about 800 m. away on a height a small church now called S. Maria de Vetere, where as early as 1219 a Basilian monastery called S. Maria del vecchio Squillace is indicated.

Enrico Josi