This project examines the political context for a collection of governmental letters written by Cassiodorus during Italy’s transition from a late-classical to a postclassical society. The collection (the Variae) contains diplomatic, administrative, and legal briefs to which scholarship has often turned for insights into the continuities and discontinuities that Cassiodorus’s Italy had with earlier Roman society, positioning the text prominently in debates concerning “decline and fall.” The present study argues that, rather than a passive witness to the early sixth century, Cassiodorus constructed in the Variae a rhetorical presentation of Italy as a political apologetic for the bureaucratic elite who had served under the Ostrogothic regime by deploying certain key themes (bureaucratic corporatism, legal traditionalism, natural conceptions of law). By examining this bureaucratic code in its relationship to external political and social pressures, this study provides a model for understanding the intersection of politics, philosophy, and literature.