Le metamorfosi della Notitia Dignitatum

The Metamorphosis of the Notitia Dignitatum · Investigation into the structure of the Notitia Dignitatum, its nature and transmission. The author suggests that this document, consisting of two symmetrical parts (the Eastern Notitia followed by the Western Notitia), is a copy in a miscellaneous codex written and illustrated in the first half of the 6th century AD of the contents of two independent Latercula Maiora. The two Latercula were the two folders that contained the two notitiae dignitatum. The notitiae were written in the first twenty years of the 5th century. The western one was used by the primicerius notariorum in Ravenna until around AD 429/437. Both were probably kept in the western imperial palace. They consisted of the initial index without illustrations and the illustrated files of the individual civil and military, palatine and peripheral dignitaries of the one and other pars of the empire with the list of their administrationes. The two collections of fascicles served to draw up the documents for the appointment and dismissal of dignitaries by the primicerius notariorum, as the pictures placed at the intersection of the two partes show. The Notitia in the Western Laterculum Maius was updated longer than its twin from Constantinople, but both became obsolete during the 5th century crisis. About a century after their first composition, the Notitiae (texts and images) were copied (in Ravenna ?) in a miscellaneous codex, in which the eastern pars preceded the western : the pair of Notitiae then became an antiquarian text. Through a 9th-century Carolingian manuscript, it was the model for the lost ‘Codex Spirensis’.