Romulus Augustus

Romulus Augustus was installed as emperor in 475 by his father, the military commander Orestes, after the expulsion of Julius Nepos. His authority was limited to Italy and was not recognised by the Eastern emperor.

In 476 Odoacer defeated Orestes and deposed Romulus, who was spared and sent into retirement. His deposition in 476 became the conventional endpoint of the Western Roman Empire, although Julius Nepos retained an imperial claim until 480.

Valerio Massimo Manfredi’s The Last Legion makes Romulus Augustus the young captive at the centre of its adventure: rescued after Odoacer’s coup, he is carried across a collapsing western empire towards Britain, where the story deliberately joins Rome’s last emperor to Arthurian legend. Gary Jennings’s Raptor places his deposition within a broader Gothic memoir, using the fall of the boy emperor as one stage in the transition from imperial Italy to Odoacer and Theodoric. Ian Hughes’s Patricians and Emperors reconstructs the shrinking political and military system that allowed Orestes to place Romulus on the throne and Odoacer to remove him in 476. Adrian Goldsworthy’s The Fall of the West treats that deposition not as a single magical endpoint but as the conventional marker of a much longer collapse of western central authority.