Romulus Augustulus, the last emperor of the western Roman Empire, by Odoacer The Goth

[Valin]

The Last Emperor


The reign of the last Roman Emperor ended on September 4, 476 AD. Sure, there were still Emperors in the eastern half of the Empire, and there were living pretenders and then later guys who thought they were "Roman" Emperors -- Charlemagne, a bunch of German "Holy Romans", Cola di Rienzi, Napoleon, and Mussolini, to name a few -- but the last real Roman Emperor that anyone recognized was Romulus Augustus. He was routinely called Romulus Augustulus ("Little Romulus Augustus") because of his youth. Romulus Augustus, you will note, was, ironically, a combination of the names of Romulus, Rome's founder and first King, and the assumed title of Augustus, which had been given by the Senate to Octavian, Rome's first Emperor.

Little Romulus was installed in October of 475 AD, after Julius Nepos, who himself had been recently emplaced by the Eastern Emperor, was deposed. Julius Nepos had made three simple mistakes: first, he thought he new how to rule, second he appointed a Barbarian as his military commander-in-chief, and third, he relied on the Eastern Emperor to keep him in power. When the first mistake was revealed, Orestes, the new barbarian commander-in-chief and the father of Romulus Augustus, chased Nepos to Ravenna (by then a sometimes capital of the West) and then completely off the peninsula to Dalmatia. The Eastern Empire said it was all illegal but did nothing to reverse the situation.

So who was this Orestes who put his fourteen-year-old son on the Western Imperial throne. You're not going to believe it, but it's true: he was a former Staff Assistant to Attila (yes, the Hun!) Why, you might ask, did Nepos replace the previous "Master of Soldiers," a Patrician from Gaul named Ecdicius with Attila's staffer? Nobody knows for sure, but it certainly was a dumb move worthy of the late Western Empire.

The reign of Romulus Augustulus was short -- only ten months -- and not even long enough for his dad to establish a lasting bogus lineage of the Orestean family. And, as could be expected, the reign had a bloody end. Another barbarian, named Odovacar (or Odoacer in some sources -- long assumed to be a Goth, but called a "Skyrian" in contemporary accounts) showed up at Ravenna in mid-476 AD with a strong force of mutinous soldiers from Orestes' own army. Odovacar quickly defeated and executed Orestes and the rest of his clique. Little Romulus was spared because of his tender years and was sent to live with relatives as a virtual prisoner on an imperial estate near Naples. It is recorded that he and his mother (identified only by the generic "barbarian female" name Barbaria) later founded a long-lived and successful monastery in the area. The only other notice of the later life of Romulus is that he twice had to renegotiate with Theodoric, Odovacar's Ostrogothic successor, the pension that Odovacar had granted him.

(Snip)


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