Messala

Messala (Faustus Messala) was a young Roman senator of the early sixth century, ordinary consul in 506 AD and son of the powerful senator Faustus Niger, who held high office under the Ostrogothic king Theoderic the Great. He belonged to the senatorial milieu of post-Roman Italy centered on Rome and Ravenna, and he appears in the corpus chiefly as a recipient of letters from Ennodius, the Gallo-Roman rhetorician and future bishop of Pavia (Ticinum), who cultivated and praised promising aristocratic youths. The letters reflect the close ties of patronage, education, and friendship that bound the surviving senatorial nobility of Ostrogothic Italy.