Rome's last Western emperor was deposed in 476 — or 480

Romulus Augustulus, the teenager usually called the last emperor of the Western Roman Empire, was deposed at Ravenna on 4 September 476 by the Germanic general Odoacer, who made himself king of Italy instead of installing a new emperor. The boy had reigned for about ten months as a front for his father, Orestes, who had fled to Pavia and was killed at Placentia (Piacenza) that August.

His name was a small historical joke, echoing both Rome’s founder and its first emperor. “Augustulus” — “little Augustus” — was a nickname that mocked, or perhaps simply noted, his youth.

Was Romulus really the last Western emperor?

Not in the eyes of Constantinople. Romulus owed his throne to a coup in which Orestes drove out the reigning emperor, Julius Nepos, who fled across the Adriatic to Dalmatia and kept his claim. When Odoacer sought the patronage of the eastern emperor Zeno, Zeno persisted in recognising Nepos as emperor of the West. Only when Nepos was killed near Salona by two of his own officers in 480 did the Western line actually lapse, which gives 480 a fair claim to be the real end date.

The year 476 stuck because it ended emperors in Italy itself, not because anything collapsed that day; the eastern empire endured until the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453.

What happened to Romulus?

He was spared, and generously. The Anonymus Valesianus, an early chronicle of the period, says Odoacer pitied his tender years and, “because of his beauty”, granted him an income of 6,000 gold pieces, then sent him to live as a free man with his relatives in Campania. His place of exile lay near modern Naples.

There the record goes quiet. The deposed emperor, still drawing his pension, is thought to have lived on into the early sixth century — long enough to see the Ostrogoths replace Odoacer — while Rome itself, sacked by the Visigoths in 410, had already lost its aura of invulnerability.