In AD476 the last emperor of Rome was overthrown in a coup orchestrated by a German general. The deposed emperor was little more than a child, the last and weakest of a series of puppet rulers on the Roman throne. It was a nice irony that his name was Romulus, the same as the legendary founder of the city.
There could be no better symbol of the decline and fall of an ancient superpower. More than a millennium after the foundation of the city, this second Romulus was no charismatic hero like the first – but such a juvenile nonentity that (as Adrian Goldsworthy puts it in The Fall of the West) he was not even “worth the trouble of killing.” He spent the rest of his life in subsidised retirement in south Italy.
It was a neat symmetry. But for most modern historians it has seemed rather too neat. From Gibbon on, they have questioned how significant the coup of AD476 was in marking the end of the ancient Roman empire. For one thing, since the 4th century that empire had been split in two. Although the city of Rome itself may have fallen in the 5th century, the eastern half of the empire, based in Constantinople, survived until 1453. We call this the “Byzantine empire,” but the “Byzantines” would have been horrified by this demeaning title. They called themselves Romans and traced their descent directly back to the first Romulus.
Besides, even in Italy, AD476 did not mark a clear break between classical antiquity and the Middle Ages. All kinds of “Roman” features remained long after the departure of the second Romulus. The Colosseum, that most visible symbol of Roman civilisation, was richly restored by Odoacer himself, the German general who ousted Romulus. And animal hunts (although not gladiatorial shows) were performed there well into the 6th century. On a more intellectual level, Boethius, one of the greatest philosophers of antiquity, in the tradition of Plato and Aristotle, was funded by the German rulers of Rome – although he was later (in time-honoured tradition) executed by them. As late as AD800, more than 300 years after the German coup, Charlemagne was taken seriously when he was crowned “Roman Emperor” in St Peter’s at Rome.
February 21, 2009
