"Patricii" under Valentinian III

Abstract

THE LIBRARY OF THE CATHEDRAL at Merseburg has preserved a fragment of a manuscript, which belongs to the eleventh century, but discloses invaluable information about a much earlier period.The bottom half of a single folio alone is known to survive, containing a text in three columns interspersed with illustrations. The nature of the work is immediately apparent: it is a fragment of the lost annals of Ravenna or fasti of Ravenna, whose existence had already been inferred from the extant chronicles of the fifth and sixth centuries.2 The entries preserved in the fragment concern the years 411-413, 421-423, 427-429, 434-437, 440443, and 452-454. Those for nine years are illustrated (412, 413, 422, 428, 429, 435, 443, 452, 454), and there also survive traces of the illustration of 439 (the elevation of Eudoxia to the rank of Augusta).3 This important discovery was first published in a Festschrift in 1939, and republished in an Italian periodical thirteen years later. Although it is duly registered in at least one standard manual,4 appreciation of its importance, or even knowledge of its existence, has been slow to spread. A recent study of the revolt of Heraclianus dates its inception to April 413:6 according to the new text Heraclianus had already been executed on 7 March. More serious, the fragment provides a precise date for the appointment of Aetius as patricius: under the year 435, it has the entry his consulibus Aetius magister militum patricius factus est non. Sept. Ravennae, and a vignette depicts the emperor performing the investiture (Studi Romagnoli 3 [1952] 6-7). Recent historians of the later Roman Empire and its institutions continue to assume that Aetius became

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