'Cassiodorus item Chrysostomus atque Johannes,'
showing that the termination _rus_ was generally accepted as early as the eighth century. It is therefore to be hoped that this is the form which may finally prevail.
[Footnote 4: De Pontificibus et Sanctis Ecclesiae Eboracensis, p. 843 of Migne's Second Volume of Alcuin's Works. I owe this quotation to Adolph Franz.]
Senator, it is clear, was part of the original name of Cassiodorus, and not a title acquired by sitting in the Roman Senate. It seems a curious custom to give a title of this kind to an infant as part of his name, but the well-known instance of Patricius (St. Patrick) shows that this was sometimes done, and there are other instances (collected by Thorbecke, p. 34) of this very title Senator being used as a proper name.
It is clear from Jordanes (who calls the Gothic History of Cassiodorus 'duodecem Senatoris volumina de origine actibusque Getarum[5]'), from Pope Vigilius (who speaks of 'religiosum virum filium nostrum Senatorem[6]'), from the titles of the letters written by Cassiodorus[7], and from his punning allusions to his own name and the love to the Senate which it had prophetically expressed, that Senator was a real name and not a title of honour.
[Footnote 5: Preface to Getica (Mommsen's Edition, p. 53).]
[Footnote 6: Epist. XIV. ad Rusticum et Sebastianum (Migne, p. 49).]
[Footnote 7: Nearly all the letters in the XIth and XIIth Books of the Variae are headed 'Senator Praefectus Praetorio.']
(2) Scyllacium, the modern Squillace, was, according to Cassiodorus, the first, either in age or in importance, of the cities of Bruttii, a Province which corresponds pretty closely with the modern Calabria. It is situated at the head of the gulf to which it gives its name, on the eastern side of Italy, and at the point where the peninsula is pinched in by the Tyrrhene and Ionian Seas to a width of only fifteen miles, the narrowest dimensions to which it is anywhere reduced. The Apennine chain comes here within a distance of about five miles of the sea, and upon one of its lower dependencies Scyllacium was placed. The slight promontory in front of the town earned for it from the author of the Aeneid the ominous name of 'Navifragum Scylaceum[8].' In the description which Cassiodorus himself gives of his birthplace (Var. xii. 15) we hear nothing of the danger to mariners which had attracted the attention of Virgil, possibly a somewhat timid sailor. The name, however, given to the place by the Greek colonists who founded it, _Scylletium_, is thought by some to contain an allusion to dangers of the coast similar to those which were typified by the barking dogs of the not far distant Scylla.