Story“Latest news from the fall of Rome” (6/6). The deposition of the last Roman emperor of the West, Romulus Augustule, in 476 does not mark a brutal break for his contemporaries, witnesses of the slow erasure of their civilization.
Here there is no trace of disasters, fires or desolation. If we look at things from Rome, the story of the Ve century is that of a series of disasters that led to the collapse. But seen from Ravenna, in northeastern Italy, the impression is quite different. What dominates is rather the feeling that the drama has unfolded very slowly, and that the Empire has fallen asleep, like this city which was once the capital of the world before slowly emerging from history, almost without realizing it.
To better imagine the place as it was in the year 402, when the emperors of the West decided to set up their court there rather than in Milan or Trier (in present-day Germany, near the border with the Luxembourg), too exposed, you have to make a little effort of the imagination. Indeed, the city, located nowadays several kilometers inland, was then in the center of a lagoon, crossed by canals. This is even the reason why it was decided to establish the court there: in these troubled times, choosing such an environment was the assurance of relative tranquility. Because if the Barbarians, over time, had acquired a certain know-how in matters of siege, they were still poor sailors.
A successful bet: Ravenna was not besieged; but, for the rest, we cannot say that the barbarians remained at a distance. The latter knew very well how to dismount and participate in the confused intrigues which marked the last two decades of the Western Roman Empire, until the final fall.
“Aestheticizing the twilight”
According to tradition, the decisive date would be September 4, 476. On this day, a barbarian leader named Odoacre removes his imperial adornments from Romulus Augustule, the 14-year-old child who has occupied the throne for a few months. Moved by his youth, he spared him and sent him to spend peaceful days further south, in Campania, with a comfortable life annuity. So, in both pathetic and derisory fashion, the empire of Augustus and Constantine would have collapsed.
If we stick to contemporary texts, these evacuate in a few lines the deposition of Romulus Augustule. Some even ignore it completely. Surprising for an event supposed to have changed the face of the world … Were the chroniclers myopic to the point of not perceiving the scope of this moment of change, like a Louis XVI writing in his diary, on the evening of the 14th July 1789, a laconic “nothing”?
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