Though so ardent a lover, he had composed
no lyric or elegy in Veranilda's honour; his last poetical effort
was made in his sixteenth year, when, to his own joy, and to the
admiration of his friends, he wrote a distich, the verses of which
read the same whether you began from the left hand or the right.
Nowadays if he ever opened a book it was some historian of
antiquity. Livy, by choice, who reminded him of his country's
greatness, and reawakened in him the desire to live a not inglorious
life.
Of his latter boyhood part had been spent at Ravenna, where his
father Probus, a friend as well as kinsman of the wise minister
Cassiodorus, now and then made a long sojourn; and he had thus
become accustomed to the society of the more cultivated Goths,
especially of those who were the intimates of the learned Queen
Amalasuntha. Here, too, he learned a certain liberality in religious
matters; for it was Cassiodorus who, in one of the rescripts given
from the Gothic court, wrote those memorable words: 'Religious faith
we have no power to impose, seeing that no man can be made to
believe against his will.
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