Characters

"He alone of the Romans disdained to enrich himself."

Half-Vandal by birth and wholly Roman by loyalty, Stilicho rose to become the supreme military commander of the West and guardian of the boy-emperor Honorius. For more than a decade he was the empire's indispensable man — defeating Alaric at Pollentia, crushing other invasions of Italy, and holding the crumbling West together by force of will and skillful diplomacy. He embodied the paradox of the late empire: a 'barbarian' general defending Roman civilization against other barbarians. His downfall was political, not military. Court intrigue, suspicion of his Vandal blood, and resentment of his power led Honorius to order his arrest and execution in 408. Stilicho submitted without resistance. With his death the West lost its only competent defender; the slaughter of the families of his Gothic soldiers drove tens of thousands into Alaric's army, and within two years Alaric — now unopposed — sacked Rome itself. Stilicho's murder is often seen as the moment the West threw away its last chance of survival.

"The thicker the hay, the easier it is mowed."

Alaric was the first king of the Visigoths and the man who did the unthinkable: he sacked Rome. He had served Rome as a federate commander and fought in its civil wars, but, denied the rank and lands he believed his people were owed, he turned to war. For years he maneuvered, negotiated, and raided across the Balkans and Italy, repeatedly checked by Stilicho but never destroyed. When Stilicho was murdered in 408 and the court of Honorius — secure behind the marshes of Ravenna — refused all his demands, Alaric finally marched on Rome. In August 410 his Visigoths entered the city and plundered it for three days, sparing the churches and most of the people but breaking forever the spell of Roman invulnerability. Alaric died of fever soon after, while planning to cross to Africa; his followers, legend holds, buried him with his treasure beneath the diverted course of the Busento River and killed the slaves who dug the grave to keep its location secret.

"But I have just fed him myself!"

Honorius became Western emperor as a child and remained, by most accounts, a feeble and ineffectual ruler throughout his long reign (393–423) — presiding from the safety of Ravenna while the empire disintegrated around him. His reign saw the barbarian flood across the Rhine, the rise and murder of his great protector Stilicho, and the sack of Rome itself in 410. He is the emblem of imperial impotence in the West's final century.

"Where I have passed, the grass will never grow again."

Attila ruled the Hunnic Empire at its terrifying height, commanding a steppe confederation that stretched from the Rhine to the Caspian and extracting vast tribute from both halves of the Roman world. Called the 'Scourge of God' by terrified Christians, he was a shrewd politician as well as a feared warlord, playing the two empires against each other and against their own barbarian subjects. In 451 he invaded Gaul and was checked by Aetius's Roman-Gothic coalition at the Catalaunian Plains — his first great defeat. Undaunted, he invaded Italy the next year, sacking Aquileia and other cities, before turning back; tradition credits Pope Leo I's famous meeting with persuading him to spare Rome, though plague, famine, and supply problems likely mattered more. Attila died suddenly in 453 — reportedly of a hemorrhage on his wedding night — and his empire, held together only by his personality, splintered within a few years, its subject peoples rising in revolt.

"The last of the Romans."

Flavius Aetius was the dominant military and political figure of the Western Empire's final generation of strength — 'the last of the Romans.' As a young man he had been a hostage among both the Goths and the Huns, and he used those connections brilliantly, hiring Hunnic mercenaries to win his power struggles and to hold Gaul together against Visigoths, Franks, and Burgundians. His supreme achievement was assembling the coalition that stopped Attila — his former allies — at the Catalaunian Plains in 451, the last great victory of Roman arms in the West. Yet his very success made him a threat to the emperor he served. In 454 the jealous Valentinian III stabbed Aetius to death with his own hand during an audience. A courtier reportedly told the emperor that he had 'cut off his right hand with his left'; within months Valentinian himself was assassinated, and the West's slide to extinction accelerated.

"Steer for the land of those with whom God is angry."

Genseric (Gaiseric) was the architect of the Vandal kingdom and one of the most effective enemies Rome ever faced. He led his people across the Strait of Gibraltar into Roman Africa, conquered its rich provinces, and in 439 seized Carthage — the West's second city and the source of Italy's grain. From there he built a powerful navy and made the western Mediterranean a Vandal lake, raiding the coasts of Italy, Sicily, and Greece for half a century. In 455 he crowned his career by sacking Rome itself, stripping the city of its remaining treasures over two weeks — a plunder so notorious it gave us the word 'vandalism.' He outmaneuvered or destroyed every Roman and Byzantine fleet sent against him, including a massive Eastern expedition in 468. Ruling for nearly fifty years, Genseric died in his bed in 477, having outlasted the Western Empire he had done so much to dismember.

"Let the East have its emperor; Italy will be ruled from Italy."

Odoacer was a Germanic officer in the Roman army of Italy who became the man to formally end the Western Empire. When the imperial strongman Orestes refused to grant the barbarian foederati the Italian land they demanded, they proclaimed Odoacer their king. He defeated and killed Orestes, deposed the boy-emperor Romulus Augustulus in 476, and — crucially — did not appoint a successor. Instead, Odoacer sent the imperial regalia to the Eastern emperor Zeno in Constantinople, declaring that the West no longer needed its own emperor, and ruled Italy as king under nominal Eastern overlordship. For seventeen years he governed competently, preserving Roman administration. His reign ended when the Eastern emperor unleashed Theodoric and the Ostrogoths against him; after a long war Theodoric invited Odoacer to a banquet of reconciliation in Ravenna and murdered him with his own hands in 493.

"The boy bore the names of Rome's founder and its first emperor, and reigned over the empire's end."

Romulus Augustulus — 'the little Augustus' — was the last emperor of the Western Roman Empire, a teenage figurehead installed by his father, the general Orestes, who held the real power. His reign lasted barely ten months. By bitter coincidence his names recalled both Romulus, the legendary founder of Rome, and Augustus, its first emperor, so that the empire ended under a boy who carried the names of its beginning. When Orestes refused the barbarian troops' demand for land, they rose under Odoacer, killed Orestes, and deposed the boy in September 476. Odoacer, finding no reason to harm a harmless youth, spared his life and granted him a comfortable pension and an estate in Campania, where Romulus vanishes from the historical record. His quiet retirement is a fitting epitaph for an empire that ended not with a battle but with an abdication.