The Continuator of Marcellinus

Abstract Marcellinus wrote his chronicle as a continuation of that of Jerome from 379 to 518 and later updated it to 534. Just as Marcellinus continued Jerome, Marcellinus was himself continued by an unknown author, at least to 548 and probably into the 550s. This author is usually called the ‘Continuator’ of Marcellinus and his work the Additamentum. The Additamentum is preserved in the arche-typal manuscript T (= Auel. T. 2. 26, Bodleian Library, Oxford) and the fourteenth-century manuscript descended from it called R (= Cod. Par. La,t, 4870, Paris) which breaks off slightly before the end of T which itself breaks off in 548. As was the pattern with chronicle manuscripts, the manuscript sequence of Jerome Marcellinus-Continuator constituted a continuous universal chronicle, created in the late sixth century, covering the totality of human history right up to the 550s. Earlier editions of Marcellinus also contain a continuation of the Additamentum itself to 558, but this was attributed in error to Marcellinus by Onophrio Panvinio in his edition (1558). It is actually part of the twelfth-century chronicle of Hermann of Reichenau.’ The Additamentum is a significant document in so far as it pro vides a representation of recent history to be set beside other con temporary representations, most notably those of Procopius and Jordanes. Indeed, the scholarly attention it has so far attracted has been mainly because of its evident correspondence to the Romana of Jordanes which was written in Constantinople in 55r. The relation to the texts of Jordanes has brought the Additamentum into the centre of research on the Vivarian manuscripts of Cassiodorus, as well as on the political stance of the Italian emigres in Constantinople in 550-1.2 Yet, it has never really been examined in its own right.