Chronicle
A Latin chronicle of the Eastern empire, year by year from 379 to 534, by an official with the rank of count, with an anonymous continuation to 548. It states, some forty years after the event, that the Western Roman empire ended with Romulus Augustulus in 476.
Read the text at thelatinlibrary.com ↗Theodor Mommsen’s edition in Chronica Minora II (Monumenta Germaniae Historica, 1894) ↗
Marcellinus styles himself vir clarissimus and comes, a man of senatorial rank and a count. He says in his preface that he continued the chronicle of Jerome from 379 down to 518, following only the Eastern empire, and then added a further sixteen years, to Justinian’s fourth consulship in 534. Another writer carried it on to 548. Each year is headed by its indiction and consuls.
He looks at the West from the East and some forty years after 476. Under that year he writes that the Western empire of the Roman people, which Augustus had begun to hold in the 709th year of the city, perished with Augustulus, and that Gothic kings held Rome from then on. Under 454 he had already written that the Western realm fell with the murder of the general Aetius and had not been raised since. The continuation gives the day on which Justinian’s Great Church at Constantinople was dedicated.
Cited in
- AD 476, firm date
- c. AD 530–550, estimated date
- 27 December AD 537, firm date