The book is devoted to a topic that was not the subject of special interest in Russian historiography, and in foreign - with a seeming abundance of works dedicated to Symmachus and Cassiodorus - it was not solved at the interdisciplinary level proposed by the author. The monograph uses the achievements of recent decades made by world humanitarian science in the approach to the study of the literary text as an independent phenomenon. This approach to the study of the problem gave the author the opportunity to present in a new way the activities of one of the most prominent characters of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, and in fact - for the first time to enter it into the European historical and cultural process of the 5th-6th centuries.