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Anonym[o]us Valesianus (Excerptum Valesianum [I and II]) is the conventional title of a compilation of two fragmentary vulgar Latin chronicles, named for its 17th-century editor, Henri Valois, or Henricus Valesius (1603–76), who published the text for the first time in 1636, together with his first printed edition of the Res Gestae of Ammianus Marcellinus. It took almost another fifty years when his brother Hadrian re-edited the work of Anonymus in the edition of Ammianus Marcellinus in 1681. It was the first time when Excerpta Valesiana, that is the edition of the Pars Posterior was clearly separated from other fragments.
Contents
The texts exist only in a single ninth-century manuscript in Berlin. The collection later turned up in the Jesuit Collège de Clermont in Paris. The parchment bundle, originally consisted of 34 flimsy layers – a manuscript prepared by nine different hands – was later ordered and attached together according to the hands. The collection appeared in the catalogue of the Jesuit college at the occasion of the sale of the library by auction in 1764. The collection was sold and transferred to a certain Johannes Meermann (Codex Meermannus 794) in the Hague. Following the death of Meermann, the collection was possessed by an English collector Sir Thomas Phillipps (Codex Phillippsianus 1885). Later, through the heirs, it was taken by the German State Library in Berlin in 1887 where it is accessible today under the shelf-mark: ‘Ms. Phill. 1885’. They are sometimes referred to as the Excerpta Valesiani.
The work of the Anonymus Valesianus is a debated issue of historiography for more than one hundred years, all the more so as both the identity of the author and the circumstances of the compilation of the work are obscure.
Anonymus Valesianus I
Anonymus Valesianus I, sometimes given the separate conventional title Origo Constantini Imperatoris ("The Lineage of the Emperor Constantine") possibly dates from around 390, and is generally regarded as providing a reliable source. The beginning of Origo already looks like the final sentence of an account on the rule of Diocletian and Maximian. In 1963 Arnaldo Momigliano summarized the results of scholarship on Origo Constantini in the words that “All is in doubt about the first part of the Anonymus Valesianus”. There are questions left, with regard to the date of Origo’s editions, sources, and revisions, which have not yet found convincing answers.
Anonymus Valesianus II
Anonymus Valesianus II, sometimes referred to as the Pars Posterior, written after 526 and probably between 540 and 550. The text, which mostly deals with the reign of the Gothic king in Italy, Theodoric the Great. The identity of the author and the circumstances of the compilation of the Pars Posterior is obscure, however a few scholars think it "based on a no longer extant chronicle by the bishop of Ravenna, Maximianus".
The Pars Posterior consists of 60 chapters and it presents the chain of events as a chronicle from Chapter 36 to 59: from the rule of Emperor Zeno, through the decline of the power of Odoacer, up to the succession of Theodoric the Great in 493. In the next section, from Chapter 60 to 79, the description of the rule of Theodoric the Great – the Italian ruler of Germanic origin – can be found. Besides the description of political events the author dwells on portraying the major virtues of the ruler through different narratives. In the closing section (Chapter 80 to 96) the author describes the tragic years of Theodoric's rule.
The work was used by Edward Gibbon as a major source for the Roman perspective on the Ostrogothic period in his History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.