Aetius killed by Valentinian
The Chronicle of Marcellinus Comes records under the consulship of Aetius and Studius (AD 454) that Aetius, whom it calls the great salvation of the Western state and a terror to King Attila, was slaughtered in the palace by the emperor Valentinian together with his friend Boethius.
What this does and does not establish
A Latin chronicle written at Constantinople c. 518-534, used through Mommsen's 1894 edition (MGH AA 11) as Internet Archive OCR text (page images not checked); the English is an AI working translation. The passage does not name the city. Mommsen's apparatus records the variants 'regi quondam' and 'Aetius patricius' in manuscript S and 'Boetio' in the manuscripts; his note at the foot of the page indicates that two of his manuscripts omit the year 454. The retained passage does not explicitly establish the site of the relevant act. No occurrence region is assigned.
- Read through an AI working translation.
- Region
- No region assigned This collection has not fixed where the act took place. It is not a statement that the place is unknown.
- Theme
- Politics and institutions
- Kind of record
- Placed in a year. A source places this in one year. It is listed under that year; no day precision is invented.
How it is dated
- Date reference
- Indiction/consul heading (OCR line 7202): '454 VII. AETII ET STVDII.'
- How we use it
- Placed in the consular year under which Marcellinus enters it (as numbered by the editor). The listing uses year precision. Any finer dating belongs to the quoted passage; the chronicle can misplace events.
The date reference is this project’s reading of the source’s date. It may give an era name, a reign or a calendar in a normalised form rather than in the source’s own words; the dating notes say what the source prints.
Dating notes from the research record
Consular year to AD 454 per the heading index marcellinus-headings.json (one indiction/consul heading per year in order, indiction expected 7, read 7), matching the AD years Mommsen prints in the margin.
File names and line numbers in these notes, and in the limits above, refer to the project’s retained copies of the cited sources. Names such as calendar_headers are the project’s calendar look-ups, and “the investigator” is the research step that prepared the record.
Sources and quoted text
Line and character numbers under “Location” refer to the project’s retained copy of the source. For database rows, “Edition” names the batch of rows that was fetched together.
Source 1 · Supports the statement
Marcellinus Comes, Chronicon (Latin), ed. Th. Mommsen, MGH Auctores antiquissimi 11 (Chronica minora II), 1894
Marcellinus Comes (6th-century, Constantinople); critical edition by Theodor Mommsen (1894)
Quoted text (Latin)
Aetius magna Occidentalis rei publicae
salus et regi Attilae terror a Valentiniano
imperatore cum Boethio amico in palatio
trucidaturAI working translation into English; not official or authoritative
Aetius, the great salvation of the Western commonwealth and a terror to King Attila, was slaughtered by the emperor Valentinian, together with his friend Boethius, in the palace
Source credit and reuse conditions recorded for this source: Source: Marcellinus Comes, Chronicon, ed. Th. Mommsen, MGH AA 11 (1894), Internet Archive OCR text. English renderings are AI working translations from the Latin.
Exact source version
e805805fe7b68265bd53e46c3152420178fa7275b1ed420804dfd243bfc628c9Checks and changes
Source checked 2026-11-05. An independent AI evidence review supports this bounded, attributed wording. That review does not guarantee historical truth. How records are checked
This is a corrected version of this record. During research, before this release, an earlier version was withdrawn after independent review and replaced by this one.
Revision sgap_auditfix_s1h_454_marc_1
Exact revision fingerprint
c9c9b22d086ef3d6084962519bc299bd1d3bc794e6f0f2aef5becbefffeab2ed