The Historians' History of the World 06 [The Early Roman Empire]

The deputies of the senate were received at Constantinople with some marks of displeasure and indignation; and when they were admitted to the audience of Zeno, he sternly reproached them with their treatment of the two emperors, Anthemius and Nepos, whom the East had successively granted to the prayers of Italy. “The first,” continued he, “you have murdered, the second you have expelled; but the second is still alive, and whilst he lives he is your lawful sovereign.” But the prudent Zeno soon deserted the hopeless cause of his abdicated colleague. His vanity was gratified by the title of sole emperor, and by the statues erected to his honour in the several quarters of Rome; he entertained a friendly, though ambiguous, correspondence with the patrician Odoacer; and he gratefully accepted the imperial ensigns, the sacred ornaments of the throne and palace, which the barbarian was not unwilling to remove from the sight of the people.

In the space of twenty years since the death of Valentinian nine emperors had successively disappeared; and the son of Orestes, a youth recommended only by his beauty, would be the least entitled to the notice of posterity if his reign, which was marked by the extinction of the Roman Empire in the West, did not leave a memorable era in the history of mankind. The patrician Orestes had married the daughter of Count Romulus, of Petovio in Noricum. The name of Augustus, notwithstanding the jealousy of power, was known at Aquileia as a familiar surname; and the appellations of the two great founders of the city and of the monarchy were thus strangely united in the last of their successors. The son of Orestes assumed and disgraced the names of Romulus Augustus; but the first was corrupted into Momylus by the Greeks, and the second has been changed by the Latins into the contemptible diminutive Augustulus. The life of this inoffensive youth was spared by the generous clemency of Odoacer, who fixed his annual allowance at six thousand pieces of gold, and assigned the castle of Lucullus, in Campania, for the place of his exile or retirement.c

A REVIEW OF THE BARBARIAN ADVANCE

[150-268 A.D.]

There were two ways to Europe for the Indo-Germanic tribes,—south and north of the Black Sea. First the Hellenic and Italic tribes came over the sea and settled in the two countries lying near them and connected by islands, which form the southeastern limits of one continent—Greece and Italy.[71] The peoples in these beautiful countries quickly attained to a wonderful state of civilisation, isolated for more than a thousand years from northern Europe. This was the period of classical antiquity which, for its art and literature, its statecraft and military system, unrivalled almost up to the present day, has become the best school of later mankind.

The second way from Asia to Europe lay north of the Pontus, and was far longer and more fraught with weariness and danger than the first; thus it was all the more adapted to the strengthening both of body and spirit. At the northwest corner of the Black Sea it divided into a south and a north road. Along the former, by the Danube between the Alps and the Carpathians, the Celts migrated; later, along the second, north of the Carpathians, the Germanic tribes entered western Europe, and were soon followed by the Slavonic. Rome was already at the height of its empire over the world when the first conflict took place between the Romans and the Germanic tribes. The contact of the two races was of course that of a rude primitive people with the members of a civilised state. Rome at first tried the system of gradual repulse by the attack and subjection of the Germans. When this policy was defeated by the battle fought by Varus, she adopted the system of frontier protection, which lasted nearly two centuries.