CHAP. III. the Western Empire. A.D. 408. In the history of the last days of the Western Empire, Last days of two points deserve special remark: its continued union with the Eastern branch, and the way in which its ideal dignity was respected while its representatives were despised. Stilicho was the last statesman who could have saved it. After his death, and after the City had been captured by Alarich in A.D. 410, the fall of the Western throne, though delayed for two generations by traditional reverence, became practically certain. While one by one the provinces were abandoned by the central government, left either to be occupied by invading tribes or to maintain a precarious independence, like Britain and the Armorican cities, by means of municipal unions, Italy lay at the mercy of the barbarian auxiliaries and was governed by their leaders. The degenerate line of Theodosius might have seemed to reign by hereditary right, but after their extinction in Valentinian III it was from the haughty Ricimer, general of the barbarian troops, that each phantom Emperor - Maximus, Avitus, Majorian, Anthemius, Olybrius received the purple only to be stripped of it when he presumed to forget his dependence. Though the division between Arcadius and Honorius had definitely severed the two realms for administrative purposes, they were still deemed to constitute a single Empire, and the rulers of the East interfered more than once to raise to the Western throne princes they could not protect upon it. Ricimer's insolence quailed before the shadowy grandeur of the imperial title: his ambition, and that of Gundobald his successor, were bounded by the name of Patrician. The bolder genius of Odoacer, commander of the barbarian A.D. 395. * Odoacer or Odovacar, as it seems his name ought to be written, is usually, but incorrectly, described as a King of the Heruli, who led his people into Italy and overthrew the Empire of the West; others call him King of the Rugii, or Skyrri, or Turcilingi, or even of the Goths, for the name 'Goth' was sometimes used to denote the Teutonic invaders generally. The truth A.D. 476. auxiliaries, resolved to abolish an empty pageant, and ex- CHAP. III. tinguish the title and office of Emperor in the West. Yet over him too the spell had power; and as the Gaulish warrior had gazed on the silent majesty of the senate in a deserted city, so the Herulian revered the power before which the world had bowed, and though there was no force to check or to affright him, shrank from grasping in his own barbarian hand the sceptre of the Caesars. When, at Its extinction Odoacer's bidding, Romulus, nicknamed Augustulus, the by Odoacer, boy whom a whim of fate had chosen to be the last native Caesar of Rome, had formally announced his resignation to the senate, a deputation from that body proceeded to the Eastern court to lay the insignia of royalty at the feet of the reigning Emperor Zeno. The West, they declared, no longer required an Emperor of its own: one monarch sufficed for the world; Odoacer was qualified by his wisdom and courage to be the protector of their state, and upon him Zeno was entreated to confer the title of Patrician and the administration of the Italian provinces." The Emperor, though he reminded the Senate that their request ought rather to have been made to the lately dispossessed Western Emperor Julius Nepos, granted what he could not refuse, and wrote to Odoacer, address seems to be that he was not a king at all, but the son of a Skyrrian chieftain (Edecon, possibly the same Edecon as the one whom Attila sent as an envoy to Constantinople), whose personal merits made him chosen by the barbarian auxiliaries to be their leader. The Skyrri were a small tribe, apparently akin to the more powerful Heruli, whose name is often extended to them. ... - Αύγουστος ὁ ̓Ορέστου υἱὸς ἀκούσας Ζήνωνα πάλιν τὴν βασιλείαν ἀνακεκτῆσθαι τῆς ἕω. . . . ἠνάγκασε τὴν βουλὴν ἀποστεῖλαι πρεσβείαν Ζήνωνι σημαίνουσαν ὡς ἰδίας μὲν αὐτοῖς βασιλείας οὐ δέοι, κοινὸς δὲ ἀποχρήσει μόνος ὢν αὐτοκράτωρ ἐπ ̓ ἀμφοτέροις τοῖς πέρασι, τὸν μέντοι ̓Οδόαχον ὑπ ̓ αὐτῶν προβεβλῆσθαι ἱκανὸν ὄντα σώζειν τὰ παρ' αὐτοῖς πράγματα πολιτικὴν ἐχὼν νοῦν καὶ σύνεσιν ὁμοῦ καὶ μάχιμον, καὶ δεῖσθαι τοῦ Ζήνωνος πατρικίου τε αὐτῷ ἀποστεῖλαι ἀξίαν καὶ τὴν τῶν ̓Ιτάλων τουτῷ ἐφεῖναι διοίκησιν. — Corp. Scr. Hist. Byzant., vol. xix. p. 235 (Excerpta e Malchi Hist.). CHAP. III. ing him as Patrician. Assuming the title of King,* Odoacer continued the consular office, respected the civil and ecclesiastical institutions of his subjects, and ruled for fourteen years under the nominal suzerainty of the Eastern Emperor. There was thus legally no extinction of the Western Empire at all, but only a reunion of East and West. In form, and to some extent also in the belief of men, things now reverted to their state during the first two centuries of the Empire, save that New Rome on the Bosphorus instead of Old Rome on the Tiber was the centre of the civil government. The joint tenancy which had been conceived by Diocletian, carried further by Constantine, renewed under Valentinian I and again at the death of Theodosius, had come to an end; once more did a single Emperor sway the sceptre of the world, and head an undivided Catholic Church. To those who lived at the time, this year (A.D. 476) was no such epoch as it has since become, nor was any impression made on men's minds. commensurate with the real significance of the event. It is, indeed, one of the most striking instances in history of a change whose magnitude was not perceived until long after it occurred. For though the cessation of an Emperor reigning in the West did not destroy the Empire in idea, nor wholly even in fact, its consequences were from the first immense. It hastened the developement of a Latin as opposed to Greek and Oriental forms of Christianity it emancipated the Popes: it gave a new character * Not king of Italy, as is often said. The barbarian kings did not for several centuries employ territorial titles; Rex Angliae is not seen till Henry I: Rex Franciae not till Henry IV (of France), and Jordanes and Cassiodorus tell us that Odoacer never so much as assumed the insignia of royalty; but there is a coin on which he appears as 'rex.' As to Odoacer and the occurrences of A.D. 476, cf. Hodgkin, Italy and her Invaders, vol. ii. p. 518 sqq. z Statues of Zeno as reigning Emperor were set up in Rome. to the projects and government of the Teutonic rulers of CHAP. III. the Western countries. But the importance of remembering its formal aspect to those who witnessed it will be felt as we approach the era when the Empire was revived by Charles the Frank. Odoacer's monarchy was not more oppressive than were Odoacer. those of the barbarian kings who were reigning in Gaul, Spain, and Africa. But the confederated mercenary troops who supported it were a loose swarm of predatory tribes: themselves without cohesion, they could take no firm root in Italy. Under his rule no progress seems to have been made towards the reorganization of society; and the first real attempt to blend the peoples and maintain the traditions of Roman wisdom in the hands of a new and vigorous race was reserved for a more famous chieftain, the greatest of all the barbarian conquerors, the forerunner of the first barbarian Emperor, Theodorich the Ostrogoth. The aim of his reign, though he professed Theodorich, deference to the Eastern court which had favoured the A.D. 493526. invasion in which he overthrew Odoacer, and whose titular supremacy he did not reject, was the establishment of what would have become a national monarchy in Italy. Brought up as a hostage in the court of Constantinople, he learned to know the advantages of an orderly and cultivated society and the principles by which it must be maintained; called in early manhood to roam as a warriorchief over the plains of the Danube, he acquired along with the arts of command a sense of the superiority of Nil deest nobis imperio vestro famulantibus,' writes Theodorich to Zeno: So to Anastasius I, ‘Pati vos non credimus inter utrasque respublicas quarum semper unum corpus sub antiquis principiis fuisse declaratur aliquid discordiae permanere. . . . Romani regni unum velle, una semper opinio sit' (Cassiod. Variar. i. 1). Cf. Jordanes, De Rebus Geticis, cap. 57. So in a letter to the Emperor Anastasius Regnum nostrum imitatio vestri' (Cassiod. Variar. i. 1). CHAP. III. his own people in valour and energy and truth. When the defeat and death of Odoacer had left both Italy and Sicily at his mercy, he sought no further conquest, easy as it would have been to tear away new provinces from the Eastern realm, but strove only to preserve and strengthen the ancient polity of Rome, to breathe into her decaying institutions the spirit of a fresh life, and without endangering the military supremacy of his own Goths, to conciliate by indulgence and gradually raise to the level of their masters the degenerate population of Italy. The Gothic nation appears from the first less cruel in war and more sage in council than any of their Germanic brethren: all that was noble among them shone forth now in the rule of the greatest of the Amals. From his palace at Verona, commemorated in the song of the Nibelungs, he issued equal laws for Roman and Goth, and bade the intruder, if he must occupy part of the lands, at least respect the goods and the person of his fellow subject. Jurisprudence and administration remained in native hands two annual consuls, one named by Theodorich, the other by the Eastern monarch, presented an image of the ancient state; and while agriculture and the arts revived in the provinces, Rome herself celebrated the visits of a master who provided for the wants of her people and preserved with care the monuments of her former splendour.d With peace and plenty men's minds took hope, and the study of letters revived. The last gleam of classical literature gilds the reign of the barbarian. с By the consolidation of the two races under one wise bUnde et paene omnibus barbaris Gothi sapientiores exstiterunt Graecisque paene consimiles.' — Jord. cap. 5. • See Note II at the end. d He restored some of the buildings which were already falling to ruin in the Roman Forum. Bricks stamped with his name were found in 1902 near the south-west end of the recently uncovered floor of the Basilica Aemilia. |