Romulus Augustulus

• 1. Introduction

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  Romulus Augustulus held the title of Roman emperor in the west for exactly ten months, from the 31st of October 475 to the 4th of September 476. He was, by most accounts, somewhere between ten and fifteen years old at the time. His name alone was enough to make later historians pause. He bore the name of Romulus, the legendary founder of Rome itself, and the name Augustus, the first man ever to rule the empire. That the final western emperor combined both names struck writers across the centuries as an almost unbearably neat coincidence. Edward Gibbon, writing in the late 18th century, put it plainly: "the appellations of the two great founders of the city and of the monarchy were thus strangely united in the last of their successors." But behind the poetry of the name lay a far stranger story. Who was this child? What series of events placed a ten-year-old boy on the throne of a crumbling empire? And what happened to him after a barbarian general ended his reign and simply... let him live?

• 2. A Collapsing West

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  After the death of emperor Theodosius I in 395, the Roman Empire was permanently divided into a western and an eastern administration. The Romans themselves never accepted this as a formal split; they still thought of it as one empire, typically with two rulers. But over the course of the 5th century, the west fell into catastrophic decline. In 410, the Visigoths under Alaric I sacked Rome. In 455, the Vandals sacked it again, and in the same year the last emperor of Theodosius's dynasty, Valentinian III, was deposed and killed. The Roman army had become deeply dependent on barbarian mercenaries, and the generals commanding those troops grew into the real power behind the western throne. A general named Ricimer, who lived roughly from 418 to 472, was perhaps the most powerful of them, installing and removing emperors at will. In the twenty years between Valentinian's murder and the rise of Romulus Augustus, eight different men ruled in the west. By 475, the western empire's reach had shrunk to Italy itself, plus Raetia and parts of Gaul. The reigning emperor that year was Julius Nepos, who had been in power for less than a year and had been appointed by the eastern emperors Leo I and Zeno rather than by any organic western support.

• 3. Orestes and the Usurpation

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  The man who dismantled Nepos's rule was Orestes, a remarkable figure even by the standards of the late empire. Earlier in his career, Orestes had served as a notarius, a kind of personal secretary, to the Hunnic king Attila. By 475, Nepos had appointed him patrician and magister militum, which amounted to commander-in-chief of the western forces. Nepos tasked Orestes with leading an army against rebelling Visigoths and Burgundians in southern Gaul. That army was multi-ethnic, packed with barbarian foederati, and those troops had grievances. Among them was a refusal by Nepos to grant them land. Orestes listened to his men, defied his orders, and on the 28th of August 475 marched his army into Ravenna, the western capital. Nepos fled across the Adriatic to Salona in Dalmatia and continued from there to claim the imperial title in exile. Despite controlling Italy, Orestes did not take the throne for himself. Why is not known. He may have been waiting for recognition from the eastern emperor Zeno, which never arrived. Instead, after a two-month interregnum, he placed his own son on the throne.

• 4. The Figurehead Emperor

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  Romulus Augustus was proclaimed emperor on the 31st of October 475, perhaps as young as ten years old. He was the last emperor to be proclaimed in the west. His coins bore the full style Dominus Noster Romulus Augustus Pius Felix Augustus, a formidable title for a child who, in practice, exercised no real power. His father Orestes retained the position of magister militum and ran imperial administration directly. The eastern emperor Zeno refused to recognise Romulus at all, partly because Julius Nepos, whom Zeno's predecessor Leo I had invested as emperor, was still alive and ruling in exile in Dalmatia. The nickname that stuck to Romulus in his own time was Augustulus, meaning "little Augustus," a derisive reference to his age. In Greek, his name was twisted further, into Momylus, meaning "little disgrace." No significant laws, policies, or inscriptions survive from his reign. The historian Ralph W. Mathisen, writing in 1997, considered him to have been "perhaps even the least significant" of the short-lived emperors near the end of the western empire. His father's refusal to grant the foederati soldiers land in Italy, a demand that had been escalating throughout the 470s, was the decision that ended everything.

• 5. The Fall

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  The barbarian foederati stationed in Italy in 476 were composed mainly of Herules, Scirians, and Turcilingians. Their leader was Odoacer, a barbarian officer whose tribal origin is uncertain. There was a personal thread connecting the two camps: Orestes had once worked alongside Odoacer's father Edeko at the court of Attila. When Orestes refused the foederati's demand for Italian land, Odoacer led them into open revolt. On the 28th of August 476, Odoacer defeated Orestes in battle at Ticinum, captured him, and had him executed. On the 4th of September, Odoacer's forces took Ravenna. During the fighting, Orestes's brother Paulus, who had served as his deputy, was killed. Romulus was captured and deposed. According to the 5th-century eastern Roman historian Malchus, Odoacer may have compelled the boy, as his final act as emperor, to personally send the western imperial regalia to Zeno in Constantinople along with a letter stating that the empire no longer required a ruler in the west and that a single emperor in Constantinople would suffice. Odoacer then assumed control of Italy as its first king and sent his nominal allegiance to Zeno. Though Zeno urged Odoacer to accept Nepos back as emperor, Odoacer minted coins in Nepos's name while never actually allowing him to return to Italy. Nepos was murdered in 480.

• 6. Life After the Throne

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  Odoacer spared Romulus because of, in the written record's own words, his "youth and beauty." The deposed emperor was granted an annual pension of 6,000 solidi, the equivalent of what a wealthy Roman senator would normally receive, and was sent to live at the Castellum Lucullanum near Naples in Campania. The fortress took its name from the consul and general Lucius Licinius Lucullus, who had originally built it in the 60s BC. It had later served as the retirement villa of Tiberius, Rome's second emperor. By the time Romulus arrived, it had likely been fortified and was functioning as a small administrative and military centre. Romulus was accompanied by a large retinue and surviving relatives. He may have been alive as late as 507 or 511, when Theodoric the Great, Odoacer's successor as king of Italy, wrote a letter to a "Romulus" confirming a pension arrangement originally made by a praetorian prefect named Petrus Marcellinus Felix Liberius. Thomas Hodgkin, translating the letter in 1886, argued that the absence of any title or honorific in Theodoric's address strengthened the identification with Romulus Augustus. The letter's tone, as if neither king nor scribe knew how to address a former emperor, sets it apart from almost every other preserved letter of Theodoric's reign. Romulus is not mentioned at all in accounts of the eastern Roman invasion of Italy in the mid-530s, suggesting he had died before that conflict began, likely before reaching his mid-forties.

• 7. What His Name Came to Mean

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  The tradition of treating Romulus Augustulus as the last western emperor began not among modern historians but among eastern Roman writers in the early 6th century. The earliest known writer to take this position was Marcellinus Comes, who died around 534. His account was stark: the western empire had begun with Octavian Augustus and ended, after five hundred and twenty-two years, with this Augustulus. Later eastern Roman writers Procopius and Jordanes, both writing in the 6th century, held the same view. That consensus has never entirely settled, however. Some modern historians, including Ralph W. Mathisen and Marjeta Sasel Kos, argue that Julius Nepos was the actual last western emperor, since he continued to rule in exile in Dalmatia with eastern backing until his murder in 480, while Romulus was never recognised in Constantinople. Others point to claimants who followed: a Moorish dux named Masties, operating in North Africa from roughly 477 to 516, claimed imperial authority; two Roman usurpers named Burdunellus in 496 and Petrus in 506 rose from the Ebro valley in Visigothic Hispania. What gave Romulus Augustulus his lasting symbolic weight was not the substance of his reign but the accident of his name. Gibbon's verdict, that he "assumed and disgraced the names of Romulus and Augustus," captures the paradox. The monastery that may have been founded with his help at Castellum Lucullanum in the 480s or 490s, dedicated to Saint Severinus of Noricum, continued as an active institution through the papacy of Gregory I and remained standing until the 10th century, long outlasting the empire whose last figurehead may have helped to build it.