(Register of Dignitaries), c. 400
The Notitia Dignitatum is an official listing of all ancient Roman civil and military posts. It survives as a 1551 copy of the now-missing original and is the major source of information on the administrative organization of the late Roman Empire.
From William Fairley, Notitia Dignitatum or Register of Dignitaries, in Translations and Reprints from Original Sources of European History, Vol. VI:4 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, n.d.). Pagination preserved in this etext.
Readers of this etext should note:
There is a new edition of the Notitia Dignitatum due:
Notitia Dignitatum, ed. Robert Ireland, (Teubner: 1999, catalogue no. 1552)
INTRODUCTION
The Notitia Dignitatum is an official register of all the offices, other than municipal, which existed in the Roman Empire. It suggests, our Statesman’s year-book and other such publications. But this register was official, prepared, as will be seen, by the “chief of the notaries” in the East and West respectively. (See pp. 15, 35) It differs from its modern representatives in that it gives only the offices, and not in any case the name of the incumbent. Gibbon gave to this document a date between 395 and 407 when the Vandals disturbed the Roman regime in Gaul. Bury, following Hodgkin (Italy and her Invaders, Vol. 1, P. 717), thinks that 402 is the probable date from the fact that the twentieth legion which was in that year transferred from Britain to Italy is not mentioned as being in either of these divisions of the empire. But Dr. Otto Seeck (in Hermes, Vol. XI, 71-78) finds some conditions, principally in the disposition of the troops which could be true only of a time before the battle of Adrianople (378) and others which are as late as 427. He infers that the Notitia was drawn up as early as the time of Valens, and corrected from year to year here and there, while left in many parts unchanged; and that, therefore, does not give the exact military status at any one time.
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