The Bronze Head of a Mule from Great Llanmelin Farm, Gwent

Abstract

By 428 it is difficult to see what value the document (apart from Occ. V, VI and VII) can have had. When it was then discarded, it was no doubt pushed into a pigeon-hole in a room in the building in Ravenna occupied by the mag. ped. praesentalis, and lay gathering dust throughout the fifth century and into the sixth, latterly during the period when Theodoric controlled Italy as mag. ped. praesentalis and patricius. The post by then far overshadowed that of Praetorian Prefect. Our document mouldered on in its pigeon-hole until such time as Ravenna fell to the Carolingians. When Charlemagne was crowned emperor in AD 800, he was faced with the question, not merely 'how does one run an empire?" (he was already doing that), but 'how does one run a Roman empire?" In these circumstances the associates and supporters of the Carolingian emperors will no doubt have been interested in any information to be found on the way that the Romans had governed. Is it not probable that they will have scoured, in particular, the buildings of Ravenna, which had been the capital of the western empire from 402, the capital of Theodoric, and the centre of east Roman administration of Italy from the time of Justinian's reconquest onwards? Some of the varied documents that were thus collected will have gone to form the codex Spirensis having been transferred to Germany for possible use by the Carolingian administration, who would naturally copy them. This would explain not only the appearance of the codex Spirensis in Germany, but also the very survival of such (for the most part) un-'literary' documents at all. Who else would wish to preserve them?