SOURCE: “Cassiodorus, the Savior of Western Civilization,” in Bulletin of the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences in America, Vol. 3, No. 1, October, 1944, pp. 369-84.

In the essay below, Hammer reviews Cassiodorus's literary achievements, praising him for rejuvenating Western intellectual life when it was in “utter decay.”

Everybody is familiar with the phrase “forgotten man.” I shall speak to-day of a forgotten man, forgotten even by some classicists, a man whose absence is singularly noticeable in Holbrook Jackson's “Anatomy of Bibliomania.” And there certainly he ought to have found a place of honor. My forgotten man is Flavius Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator, 490-583 (?) a.d., a man who stood on the boundary of two worlds, the ancient and medieval, or as some maintain, the Roman and Teutonic. It may even be said that he stood on the confines of the ancient and modern worlds: in the writings of Cassiodorus...