I should explain, first, that the empire had been ending for a long time before it ended.
I am sixty-four years old. I have been a member of the Roman Senate since I was thirty, which means I have been a senator through the reigns of eleven emperors of the West, some of whom lasted months, one of whom lasted twelve days. I have seen the currency debased and the army reduced and the provinces ceded one by one to federates and kings who were technically our allies and practically our successors. I have watched the city of Rome — not this city, Ravenna, which has been the effective capital of the West for seventy years, but the city on the Tiber, the eternal city — decline from the city of a million people it once was to something smaller and quieter and more frightened.
What happened on September 4th, 476 — I want to be accurate about this — was not an ending. It was a formality. It was the formal acknowledgment of something that had been true for decades.
Romulus Augustus
The boy who abdicated was sixteen years old. His father was Orestes, a general who had served at various times under both Eastern and Western courts and who, in August of 475, had deposed the previous emperor — Nepos, Julius Nepos, a man of actual competence who fled to Dalmatia and continued to call himself emperor for six more years — and installed his own son on the throne.
I met Romulus twice. He was a handsome boy with an education and no power. The empire he technically ruled extended, by 476, to Italy and nothing more. Britain had been gone for seventy years. Africa — the richest province of the West, the grain supply of Rome — had been the Vandal kingdom for forty years. Gaul was Visigoth and Burgundian and Frankish. Spain was Visigoth. The boy on the throne of the eternal empire ruled a peninsula.
Odoacer was the commander of the foederati — the Germanic troops who comprised most of the actual army of the West. They had not been paid. The promise that they would be given land in Italy — a third of the peninsula — had not been fulfilled. In late August, Odoacer's troops proclaimed him king. In early September, he marched to Ravenna.
The Abdication
There was no battle. I want to be very clear about this, because the histories will not be clear. There was no last stand, no desperate defense, no burning of the city. Orestes had already been captured and killed at Piacenza. Romulus, alone in the palace, sent envoys to Odoacer and negotiated his life and a pension in exchange for the imperial regalia and his resignation.
On September 4th, in the presence of the Senate — I was present, in the third row, in my formal toga, which I had not worn for a state occasion in two years — Romulus Augustus removed the diadem and the purple robe and handed them to Odoacer's representatives. He spoke briefly; he was sixteen and frightened and he spoke briefly. He was then escorted out of the palace and out of Ravenna to a comfortable exile in the Castello di Lucullano in Campania, where he would live for many years on his pension, unmolested, forgotten.
The regalia were packed and sent to Constantinople. The message that accompanied them told the Eastern Emperor Zeno that the West no longer needed an emperor of its own, that one emperor for the whole empire was sufficient, that Odoacer would rule Italy on Zeno's behalf.
Zeno, in Constantinople, was not pleased. But he was also not in a position to do anything about it. He acknowledged Odoacer as a patrician and de facto ruler of Italy and went about his business.
The Morning After
I walked through Ravenna on the morning of September 5th. The market was open. The birds were in the trees. A man was repairing a wall near the forum. Children were in the street.
I have been told, in the years since, that this day was the end of a civilization. That September 4, 476 was the moment when Rome ended and the Dark Ages began. I understand why later historians needed such a date — history requires punctuation, a clear line between one era and the next — but I want to tell you what it felt like from inside the day.
It felt like a Thursday.
The civilization that was "ending" had been ending for a hundred years. The roads that Rome had built were still there; they would remain for centuries. The Latin that Rome had spread across the West was still being spoken; it would become Italian and French and Spanish and Portuguese. The law codes that Roman jurists had compiled were still in use; they would form the foundation of most European legal systems. The bishops of the Western church — whose institution was young and vigorous when the empire was old and exhausted — were already the most effective administrators in most of the former provinces.
What ended on September 4th was a boy in a purple robe. What continued was everything else.
What I Remember
I remember the silence in the chamber when Romulus removed the diadem. Not the silence of grief — the silence of people who have been waiting for something to be official that has been true for years, and for whom the formality produces not surprise but a kind of release. We had been carrying the weight of the pretense — that there was still a Roman Empire of the West, that this mattered, that the boy in Ravenna was a successor to Augustus and Trajan and Marcus Aurelius — and the weight was released in that silence.
We were Romans. We remained Romans, under Odoacer, as we had been Romans under the last dozen emperors. What Rome was had always been less about the man in the palace than about the language we spoke and the law we kept and the roads we used and the faith we practiced in the churches that would outlast every government for centuries to come.
I am sixty-four years old and I have been a Roman senator my entire adult life and I will die a Roman, whatever that means now, which is a question I leave to people younger than me to answer, because they will have to live in whatever the answer becomes.
Narrator's note: Marcus Flavius Anicius is fictional. The events — Orestes's coup, the abdication of Romulus Augustus, Odoacer's settlement, the dispatch of regalia to Constantinople — are drawn from the chronicles of Cassiodorus, Jordanes, and the anonymus Excerpta Valesiana, analyzed in Bryan Ward-Perkins's The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization (2005) and Peter Heather's The Fall of the Roman Empire (2006).