The throne remained vacant for nearly two years, during which the Vandals harassed the miserable remnant of the great Empire. At length the chief commander in Italy, Ricimer, sought the aid of the Eastern Empire, and the alliance was sealed by the Eastern court sending one of its wealthiest and, by birth, most illustrious nobles, Anthemius, to occupy the throne. His Empress was Euphemia, daughter of the Emperor Marcian by his first wife. But her name, and the names of her father and her children, are all that we find recorded concerning her, and we need not dwell on the failures and quarrels, or the last faint flicker of Roman paganism, which characterized his inauspicious reign. Within four years he quarrelled with Ricimer, and his life was trodden out on the streets of Rome.
For a few months Placidia, the daughter of Eudoxia, then occupies the throne. At Constantinople, to which she went with her mother from her Vandal captivity, she married the wealthy noble Olybrius. He had fled from Rome when it was looted by the Vandals, and had little mind to exchange the safe luxury of Constantinople for its uneasy throne when Ricimer offered it to him. It is said that Placidia impelled him. It was a fatal adventure. They entered Rome in the train of Ricimer’s troops, but Olybrius succumbed to that atmosphere of death in a few months, and we have not time to discern the features of Eudoxia’s daughter before she sinks into the large category of obscure Imperial widows. His successor, Glycerius, a puppet of the chief commander, seems to have had no wife. A competitor appeared immediately, and he exchanged the uncertain sceptre of the Western Empire for the solid crozier of a bishop.
One faint and shadowy Empress crosses the scene before the curtain falls. Once more the Eastern court had provided Italy—which was now the Western Roman Empire—with a ruler. Julius Nepos set up his court at Ravenna, and had for Empress a niece of Verina, the Empress of the East. But the barbarian leaders of the barbarian army—the only army that remained in the service of Rome—resented the Eastern intruder, and marched on Ravenna. Nepos fled ignominiously; and one reads with interest, though not without reserve, that he was put to death by his predecessor, Bishop Glycerius. The fate of his wife is unknown, and the last Empress of the Western provinces entirely escapes our search.
The tattered purple was offered to the commander Orestes. He refused it, and allowed them to place it on the shoulders of his young son (476). The name of this pretty and innocuous boy united, as if in mockery, the names of Romulus and Augustus. To later times his pathetic figure is known as Augustulus. His father was slain by the troops immediately afterwards, because he refused to distribute one-third of the soil of Italy between them. The Empire was now a mere phrase; Rome a plaything of the barbarians whom it had cowed for five or six hundred years. Odoacer, the latest leader of the troops, bade the child put off his purple mantle and begone, and some time afterwards—so low had Rome fallen that the year of this impressive consummation cannot accurately be determined—forced the Senate to abolish the Imperial succession in the West. Italy became the kingdom of a barbarian. Britain, Gaul, Germany, and Spain were turned into the battle-grounds of those fierce tribes who, after the violence and darkness of the Middle Ages, would in their turn scatter the seed of civilization over the earth. The gallery of Western Empresses was closed by the irrevocable hand of fate, and the long, quaint gallery of the Byzantine Empresses was thrown open.
FOOTNOTES
[1] The title “Empress” was unknown to the Romans. “Imperator” was a name of military command. The special use of it in connexion with Octavian and his successors was that it was given for life. The more novel title “Augustus” was extended to Livia, who later became “Augusta.”
[2] Pliny places her birth in the year 54 B.C., but Dio says 57 B.C., and this date is confirmed by Tacitus.
[3] Improperly, because it is not a distinctive name, but common to the emperors. Livia and Octavia received the title of “Augusta” a few years later, yet even Livia is rarely known by it.
[4] “Non nisi plena nave tollo vectorem.”
[5] Writers often convey the impression that Julia indulged even her most vicious inclinations in the Rostra, but Dio merely speaks of “revelling” and “carousing”: ὥστε καὶ ἐν τῇ ἀγορᾷ καὶ ἐπ’ αὐτοῦ γε τοῦ βήματος κωμάζειν νύκτως καὶ συμπίνειν. The emptying of a cup of Falernian wine in the Rostra, on some occasion of especial devilry or intoxication, may be all that is meant.