For 10 points, name this scholar who outlived Boethius by about four decades, a scribe of Theodoric the Great who is sometimes considered the last great mind of antiquity.
In one letter, this man snarkily asked Faustus if a sucking-fish or a giant Indian conch or a stingray was obstructing an unacceptably late grain shipment. Translator Thomas Hodgkin lambasted the "verbose and flaccid" style of this man, whose writings tell us that Dionysius Exiguus, the man who invented the BC/AD calendar system, was a Scythian. This correspondent of Pope Agapetus I founded a building whose name roughly means "fishpond" at Squillace after retiring from civil service. German scholar Theodor Mommsen translated decades of official letters written by this man, the (*) Variae. Jordanes' Getica abridges a lost history by this man, whose two-book Institutiones instructed monks on what was worth copying at his school-like institution, the Vivarium. For 10 points, name this scholar who outlived Boethius by about four decades, a scribe of Theodoric the Great who is sometimes considered the last great mind of antiquity.
In one letter, this man snarkily asked Faustus if a sucking-fish or a giant Indian conch or a stingray was obstructing an unacceptably late grain shipment.
Cassiodorus [or Flavius Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator; accept Theodoric the Great before "verbose," as the letter was written in Theodoric's name]