Odoacer's Donation To Pierius
Odoacer is the first ruler of Italy for whom the original text of any of his legal acts has survived. This is a grant by Odoacer to Pierius of properties in Sicily near Syracuse and on the island of Melita in Dalmatia, worth in total 690 solidi. The grant itself was made 18 March 488, but this document, which is on papyrus, was written shortly afterwards. The opening section is missing and the text is in two parts, one now in the Biblioteca Nazionale in Naples and the other in the Austrian National Library in Vienna, but the bulk of the act itself and the subscriptions by witnesses and officials survive.
Pierius, comes domesticorum, was given these properties as a reward for his achievements in the war against Theodoric. None of the parties involved in this transaction—not Pierius, Odoacer, nor the witnesses—could foresee that the recipient would die the following year in the battle of the Adda River.
Pierius' grant is the lone surviving document which has survived from the civic scriptorium of Syracuse prior to the Byzantine reconquest. Scipione Maffei made the unconfirmed assertion that both pieces were owned by the poet Giovanni Gioviano Pontano; it had already lost the beginning by then. The second part is known to have been in the possession of Cardinal Pasquale de Aragon during the 1660s, but Tjäder notes the two parts were reunited at the library of the Monastery of San Paolo in Naples in 1702. In 1718, the second part was presented to Emperor Charles VI in 1718, through whom that fragment found its way to Vienna.
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