The Dissolution

The Sack, the Fleets, and the Last Soldier-Emperor455–468

The end came not as a fall but as a foreclosure schedule, and the compendium narrates its last two decades at the tempo the evidence keeps: by regime. Petronius Maximus, the senator behind both murders of 454–455, reigned seventy-eight days — long enough to force Valentinian's widow into marriage and thereby, the tradition says, to bring the fleet: Gaiseric, whose son was betrothed to Valentinian's daughter and whose treaty had died with the dynasty, sailed for Rome, and Maximus was stoned by the crowd as he fled the city he had not attempted to defend. The VANDAL SACK of June 455 was the sack of 410's methodical elder: fourteen days against three, unresisted, negotiated at the gates by Pope Leo to the sparing of fire and slaughter and executed as systematic asset-stripping — the palace plate, the temple treasures (the spoils of Jerusalem, resident since Titus's triumph in Book VI, shipped to Carthage: the compendium notes the relay), the gilded half of the Capitol's roof, the empress and her daughters carried to Africa as dynastic stock — and the Editor grades its damage as the ancients did: materially greater than Alaric's, humanly lighter, politically terminal, because it proved the capital could be emptied at will by sea. What remained of the West was governed, from 456, by the master of soldiers Ricimer — Suevic-Gothic by blood, barred by it from the purple, and for sixteen years the maker and breaker of the emperors the East would or would not recognize: Avitus (the Gallic senator raised by the Visigoths, deposed by Ricimer at Placentia 456), then the one reign this chapter must slow for. MAJORIAN (457–461) — Aetius's officer, the last western emperor to command armies in person, legislate seriously (his novels on tax-remission, curial protection, and the stripping of Rome's monuments for building-stone are the rump-state's most intelligent self-diagnosis), and attempt the only strategy that mattered: Africa. His three years assembled it — Gaul reconciled after a Burgundian-Gothic war, Spain's approaches cleared, and in the harbors of Cartagena a fleet of three hundred hulls for the crossing to Mauretania; in May 461 Gaiseric's agents, by treachery the sources assert and cannot specify, burned or took the fleet at anchor in the bay of Cartagena. Majorian, returning stripped of his instrument, was arrested by Ricimer at Tortona, deposed, and beheaded five days later — the Editor marks the judgment of the next generation's historian: Procopius's flat sentence that Majorian surpassed every emperor who had ruled the West; and the structural verdict: the West's last self-rescue died in a Spanish harbor, unfought. There followed the shadow-procession — Libius Severus (Ricimer's unrecognized cipher), two years of interregnum, then the eastern solution: ANTHEMIUS, Constantinople's candidate and son-in-law of its late emperor, installed in 467 with eastern money for the operation that is this volume's true final battle. The joint expedition of 468 was the ancient Mediterranean's last great amphibious effort — eleven hundred ships and a hundred thousand men by the transmitted figures, sixty-five thousand pounds of gold from the eastern treasury by its own later accounting, three converging forces (Marcellinus taking Sardinia, Heraclius landing from Egypt to take Tripolitania, the grand fleet under the emperor's brother-in-law Basiliscus for Carthage itself) — and at CAPE BON, forty miles from Carthage, Basiliscus anchored to await... the sources say a five-day truce Gaiseric requested and used: when the wind turned onshore, the fire-ships came down it into the packed anchorage by night, and the armada burned — the mastered sea lit end to end, the comes Joannes refusing Vandal quarter and leaping armored into the sea with the last recorded words of the Roman West's last offensive: that he would not surrender to dogs. Basiliscus fled to sanctuary in Constantinople; the eastern fisc did not attempt Africa again for sixty years; and the Editor closes the section on the volume's fiscal thesis, proven now in the negative twice: 461 and 468 were the war; everything after is probate.

476: The Notice468–476

The last eight years the compendium gives as the chronicle-tempo demands. Anthemius and Ricimer came to open war in 472 — the generalissimo besieging his emperor in Rome, taking it by storm in July (the city's third capture in the volume), Anthemius beheaded by Ricimer's Burgundian nephew Gundobad; Ricimer dead of hemorrhage forty days later, his puppet Olybrius following within months. Gaul meanwhile ended: the Visigoth Euric, having killed his brother for the throne in 466, read the 468 fire-light correctly, renounced the federate fiction, and took the diocese by open conquest — Arvernum (Clermont) holding four years under Sidonius's leadership and his brother-in-law Ecdicius's eighteen-horseman sorties, only to be traded to Euric in the treaty of 475 for a Provence the empire could no longer use: Sidonius's letters, the volume's last Roman voice in Gaul, curse the bargain from the bishop's house of a Gothic city. In Italy the Pannonian officer Orestes — once Attila's Latin secretary, the age's résumés being what they were — was made master of soldiers by the emperor Julius Nepos (the East's last nominee, 474), rose against him within the year, watched Nepos sail for Dalmatia, and crowned his own young son: Romulus, called Augustulus, the little Augustus, a boy whose name yoked the founder of the city to the founder of the empire and whose reign of ten months existed for one transaction. The army of Italy — by 476 substantially the federate remnants of Attila's dissolved world, Sciri, Heruls, Rugians, Torcilingi — demanded what every federate settlement in this volume had received: land, a third by the transmitted formula, in Italy itself; Orestes refused; and the soldiers found, as the compendium's armies always had, a commander who would not: Odoacer, a Scirian officer, son of Attila's envoy Edeco. Orestes was taken at Placentia and executed on 28 August; Ravenna fell within the week; and on 4 September 476 the boy-emperor abdicated before Odoacer, who — the sources agree on the mercy and the pension — spared him for his youth and beauty and retired him to the Lucullan villa on the bay of Naples with six thousand solidi a year: the last emperor of the West pensioned into the pleasure-palace of the Republic's most famous gourmet, a coincidence no dramatist would risk. What followed was the notice this volume's Proem promised: the Senate's embassy to Constantinople, returning the western imperial regalia with the declaration — preserved in Malchus's fragment — that the West no longer required a separate emperor, that one sufficed for both parts, and that Odoacer, who had taken the title of king, would administer Italy if granted the patrician rank; the eastern emperor Zeno, harboring Nepos and his own troubles, answered with a lawyer's ambiguity, and Italy proceeded. The Editor executes the grading the chapter has prepared: nothing fell in 476 — no battle was fought for the West's existence, no city burned for its end, the consuls continued, the Senate sat, the Roman population of Italy noticed chiefly a change of tax-recipient, and Nepos remained the lawful western emperor in Dalmatia until his murder in 480, which is the pedants' better date; the year's epochal weight was assigned a generation later, in the eastern chronicle of Marcellinus Comes — the western empire of the Roman people... perished with this Augustulus — written in the Constantinople of the 510s, where the demonstration that the West was finished and had been for decades served the ambitions of the emperor then preparing to reconquer it. The fall of the western Roman empire is, in its date, historiography; in its substance — the process this volume has audited, the provinces transferred, the fisc amputated, the army become its own successor — it was complete before the boy ever wore the diadem; and this compendium, which has graded eight centuries of victors' claims, closes its last political chapter by grading the ending itself: AGrade A as process, CGrade C as event, and DGrade D as the single dramatic moment posterity required and the sources decline to supply.