The Notitia Dignitatum

Abstract

§ 1. The document (or rather two documents) which has come down under the title Notitia Dignitatum is well known to all students who have concerned themselves, however incidentally, with the government of the Roman empire in the fourth and fifth centuries. It sometimes strikes one that it is referred to in a way that betrays a defective realisation of what it was. Some of those who quote it appear to think that it was compiled for the purpose of giving information to the Roman public as to the organisation of the civil and military services and belongs to much the same class of work as e.g. the Synecdemus of Hierocles or the Notitia of Polemius Silvius. It was, of course, nothing of the kind, and it has been known since the days of Pancirolus precisely what it was; but even by some who were fully aware of its character and purpose deductions have been drawn which its character and purpose exclude. For students of Roman Britain it is particularly important to have a full grasp of the general questions connected with the Notitia, since it contains a great deal of the little evidence we have for the fortunes of that country at the beginning of the fifth century. § 2. The primicerius notariorum was one of the highest officials of the second class (i.e. those who had the rank of spectabilis ). In A.D. 381 an imperial law elevated him above the vicarii and placed him in the same group as the proconsuls.