Barack Who?
Any period rings with names soon forgotten, with the exception of those like Hitler or Gandhi who embody some larger evil or virtue. In our age such names as Obama, Sarkozy, Putin, and Bin Laden are paramount, but soon enough they’ll join in partial or total obscurity forgotten names from the past. One such is that of Odoacer, a name to conjure with if you were an inhabitant of Italy in the fifth century A.D., but known only to eccentrics, trivia pursuers, and historians now. Another such name is Romulus Augustulus, from the same period. The two were intimately connected, but we know slightly more about one than about the other. And that's still not much.
Odoacer, Transitional Figure
What we do know is that Odoacer was a Germanic tribal leader and career military man who rose to become leader of his federation, the Germanic tribes of Italy, before taking over the remnants of the Western Roman Empire in 476 A.D. His reign represents the end of Rome in the West and the transition between the last golden gleam of the world of Late Antiquity and the gathering grayness of the Early Middle Ages. In seizing power, he deposed the last emperor of Rome in the west, Romulus Augustulus, the half-Germanic, half-Roman son of one of Attila the Hun’s advisers who had himself snatched the throne from Romulus’s predecessor, the (forgotten, even then) Julius Nepo.
Romulus Augustulus, Boy Emperor
The boy ruler’s resonantly Roman name evoked past glory unjustified by his undistinguished rule: the first name that of Romulus, the mythical founder of Rome, the second that of the first, and arguably greatest, emperor of Rome, Augustus. The young neophyte (he was probably no more than 14 when he was crowned) was unjustly burdened by the expectations evoked by these names. He ruled for less than a year, during which time he became known as “Augustulus,” the suffix “-ulus” being a diminutive and, therefore, pejorative.
A Reign Soon Ended
Indeed, the little Augustulus has come to play a slightly ludicrous role in history. It is mainly because the sonorous Romanness of his name makes him so irresistible that most historians regard him as the last legitimate Western Emperor, like a neat bookend to a thousand years of Roman history. But in truth he was a usurper. Moreover, he did nothing. He fought no wars, erected no monuments, and left behind only his timorous profile on a handful of coins. If he is remembered at all, it is for reigning only ten months before Odoacer awarded him the order of the boot and took the imperial diadem from his hands.
A Surprisingly Peaceful Transition
But—unusually for those days, or ours--no blood was shed, and the change of administration from Roman to Barbaric rule, which now, in hindsight, seems so momentous, went virtually unnoticed by the populace at large, buffeted as they had been by upheavals and wars for too many years to care who called himself Emperor.
Not a Bad King, Really
In fact, Odoacer never did. He paid homage to the nominal all-Roman emperor, one Zeno, in faraway Constantinople, from whom he accepted the formal title “patricius”, or “patrician”; then--apart from presiding over a few land grabs, and engineering the odd assassination, all strictly business, of course--he turned into a fairly decent overlord. Certainly he treated his young predecessor Romulus with great courtesy, sending him into exile in Campania, in southern Italy, with an annual pension of (according to one account) 6,000 gold solidi.And the last emperor was given one of the great houses of his ex-Empire to spend the rest of his days in: the castle on the gulf of Naples built by Lucullus, the great general of the Republic, back in the days of true Roman glory.
Exit Romulus
So: What happened next? How many days did Romulus have left, and how did he spend them? We don’t know. History’s heavy curtain falls, and only through the rents made in it by Time do we catch a teasing glimpse of the light of forgotten lives. There were reports that a private citizen named Romulus founded a monastery in Campania sometime in the 480s or 490s, aided, it was alleged, by his mother; but here we enter medieval territory, where piety takes over from fact. Actually, the strongest evidence that Romulus lived on for many years comes from no less an authority than King Theodoric the Great, Odoacer’s successor (and assassin), who wrote a letter to a “Romulus” sometime between 507 and 511 to confirm resumption, or continuance, of a pension. This is confirmed by Cassiodorus, the great historian and chronicler, whose Victorian translator, Thomas Hodgkin, remarked parenthetically and almost wistfully, “It is surely possible that this is the dethroned Emperor. The name Romulus…was not a very common one in Rome.”
Cue the Novelist
But that’s where the last flicker dies out and the past fades to black. Did Romulus live to a ripe old age in prosperity and health? Or did he become a pious monk, tending the Lord's garden? We'll never know. And here’s where the novelist could take over from the historian, if he or she so chose. If I did, I'd go for the happy end, populating the aging ex-emperor’s household with dignity, sunlight, a bower heavy with fruit, loving children and grandchildren, and an honored legacy at variance with the mean footnote History has so far accorded him. But that's just me. The rest is History.
References:
The Collapse of the Roman Empire - Romulus
The Letters of Cassiodorus
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