The Fall of Rome

The fall of Rome was not from a military siege; it was not from a military defeat; it was over a pay dispute between the young Emperor, Romulus Augustulus, and the general of the palatini, the magister militem in praesenti, by the name of Odoacer. He controlled what has sometimes been referred to as the Palace Guard, but it was much more than that. It was the part of the Field Army, the mobile army of the western Empire, stationed in central Italy, i.e. in and around Rome and Ravenna.

The fall of Rome was also a dispute between two principals: Odoacer, who was a Germanic Ostrogoth, and the Patrician Orestes, the Emperor's father, a Roman from Pannonia. Both Orestes and Odoacer's father, parenthetically, had served in Attila's court before it self-destructed. Legend even has it that the little Odoacer and the littler Romulus were both presented to Attila the Hun, a scene reproduced towards the end of my novel, Attila as Told to His Scribes, (available here as an e-book).

The fall of Rome might not have happened if the Senate had responded to Orestes' appeal, instead of giving in to Odoacer's demands, which is why the presence of a ruling selfish class was fatal. The fall of Rome also illuminates why a state should not depend on mercenaries, especially for troops protecting the capital.

The magister militem Odoacer demanded better pay for his troops, in the form of grants of land, estates, in central Italy. German troops had been granted large swathes of land in Gaul and Spain in the 80 years before 476, and had established largely independent kingdoms there, but no land had yet been granted in Italy, which was why Orestes refused to give in. He appealed to the Senate to raise the pay for the troops. Since some of the wealthy individual Senators earned incomes ($15-20 million per year at the current exchange) greater than the amount in question, his appeal was not unreasonable. But they refused. Instead, the Senators negotiated directly with Odoacer and they did so knowing that they had to come to an agreement quickly.

Why? Because Orestes had also appealed for help from the Roman Emperor in Constantinople (the eastern Roman Empire), and Emperor Zeno was about to send troops. The Senators knew that in the eastern half of the Empire, Senators were taxed. Rather than face a similar fate, they supported Odoacer, who announced the end of the western Roman Empire and his assumption of the title: King of Italy. The Senators thought, wrongly, that they could simply continue on as they had before.

What the Senators didn't realize was that the fall of Rome was only the beginning of a process that would end with almost all of their families gone, their riches dispersed, and Italy plunged into chaos for hundreds of years. The Senate did continue to meet for another sixty years, but except for its one pivotal moment in 476, the Senate had not exercised any power for many hundreds of years, having handed it over to the strongmen who called themselves Emperor, and now King.

The Senate had taken its one independent action: to cooperate in the fall of Rome.