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The barbarian confederates, discontented and unwilling to give their allegiance to this Greek, rebelled and under Orestes their general marched upon Ravenna. Julius Nepos fled by ship to Dalmatia and Orestes in Ravenna proclaimed his young son Romulus Augustulus emperor. But those barbarian mercenaries were not to be so easily satisfied.
The great change was wrought in about five hundred years, by the Empire, from the City of the Republic to what had become the City of the Middle Age; between the reign of Augustus, first Emperor, and the deposition of the last Emperor, Romulus Augustulus, by Odoacer, Rome's hired Pomeranian general.
Theodosius, by his first wife, had two sons, Arcadius, who afterwards reigned in the east, and Honorius, whose western reign was so much illustrated by Stilicho. For the seven shadows who succeeded, from Avitus and Majorian to Julius Nepos and Romulus Augustulus, were in no proper sense Roman emperors, they were not even emperors of the West, but had a limited kingdom in the Italian peninsula.
The greatest figure in all history suddenly springs out of the dim chaos and shines in undying glory, the figure of a man so great that the office he held means Empire, and the mere name he bore means Emperor today in four empires, Cæsar, Kaiser, Czar, Kaisár, a man of so vast power that the history of humanity for centuries after him was the history of those who were chosen to fill his place the history of nearly half the twelve centuries foretold by the augur Attus, from Romulus, first King, to Romulus Augustulus, last Emperor.
In the space of fifty years the self-appointed Apostle of Absolutism and the self-appointed Apostle of Peace, the Augustus and the Augustulus of the regime that was wont to speak contemptuously to European Foreign Offices in the beautiful French phrases of Prince Gorchakov, have fallen victims, each after his kind, to their shadowy and dreadful familiar, to the phantom, part ghoul, part Djinn, part Old Man of the Sea, with beak and claws and a double head, looking greedily both east and west on the confines of two continents.
During these twenty years, the East and the West were finally severed, and Italy was ruled by barbaric chieftains, and their domination permanently secured. The successive reigns of Maximus, Avitus, Majorian, Severus, Anthemius, Olybrius, Glycerius, Nepos, and Augustulus, nine emperors in twenty one years, suggests nothing but disorder and revolution.
Already at the time of Constantine, Rome had a rival, Byzantium; disruption followed with Honorius; and then some ten emperors sufficed for decomposition to be complete, for the bones of the dying prey to be picked clean, the end coming with Romulus Augustulus, the sorry creature whose name is, so to say, a mockery of the whole glorious history, a buffet for both the founder of Rome and the founder of the empire.
At his solicitation they rose in arms against the obscure Greek, who presumed to claim their obedience; and when Orestes, from some secret motive, declined the purple, they consented, with the same facility, to acknowledge his son Augustulus as the emperor of the West.
Such an event occurred only a few years after the events described under the preceding trumpets. With her political strength and resources exhausted, Rome could no longer maintain a separate existence, and Odoacer, king of the Heruli, overthrew Momyllus Augustulus, the last of the Roman line of emperors, and caused himself to be proclaimed king of Italy in A.D. 476.
Before he became king he had been a general in the army of Romulus Augustulus, the Western Roman Emperor. The soldiers of the army were not satisfied with their pay, and when they asked for more they did not get it. Then they drove Romulus Augustulus from the throne, and chose Odoacer to succeed him. But Odoacer would not take the name of emperor.
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