The Last Western Emperor Shared a Name with the Founder of Rome

Romulus Augustus, better known as Romulus Augustulus, little Caesar. was a boy who “ruled” for about ten months from 475 to 476 AD.  He was little more than a figurehead for his father Orestes, a Roman aristocrat (of Germanic ancestry), who had maneuvered his way into a position of power in the court in Ravenna.

Julius Nepos had been the previous emperor in the West, and he was still around at the time of Augustulus, but he was content to run his province on the Dalmatian coast and leave the rest to others. By now the title of Western Roman Emperor was virtually meaningless. The only remaining areas of the empire were the Italian peninsula, along with some fragmentary lands in Gaul, Spain, and Croatia. Barbarian groups had already sacked Rome twice, and any real power was held by these tribes and not by the Roman court in Ravenna.

Little is known about the teen-aged Romulus Augustulus, but he was neither a gifted young man like Octavian nor the decadent fool like Elagabalus.  He was simply the wrong person in the wrong place at the wrong time. Coins were minted with his face, but he led no armies, and no monuments were built for him. He was an irrelevance.

The Germanic leader Odoacer knew this and, in 476, marched on Ravenna. Odoacer had been leading the Foederati, the barbarian contingents that by now made up almost the entire “Roman” army. He had all the real power and he knew it. Julius Nepos had allowed Odoacer to rise to prominence, and to be fair to Nepos, by the late 5th century, there was nothing unusual in this. It’s what happened next that was to make Odoacer a big name in late antiquity history. On arriving in Ravenna and finding no resistance, he met face-to-face with the so-called Emperor Romulus Augustus. However, the chronicles then say that Odoacer, "taking pity on his youth", spared Romulus' life. Odoacer carried out no bloody coup, nor did he take the imperial title because he knew that it had ceased to have any significance.  Instead, he recast himself as the first King of Italy, after which he granted Romulus an annual pension of 6,000 solidi and sent him to live with relatives in southern Italy.

Odoacer then got on with reshaping Italy, not in the mold of the old empire, but in the form of a new kingdom. The transformation was long overdue, and as a result, Odoacer was able to bring more stability to the time of his reign than the previous emperors had managed during the past eighty years.

So, as the barbarians broke through the walls of Rome, the last Western Roman Emperor did not go down in a battle, nor did he commit suicide.  He was deposed and sent home like a naughty schoolboy. This was final humiliation for a title which, from Scotland to Iraq, had once put fear in men’s hearts.