A decade after this twilight epiphany Gibbon's restless pen evoked the collapse of the empire: "Odoacer was the first barbarian who reigned in Italy, over a people who had once asserted their just superiority above the rest of mankind.
"I can neither forget nor express the strong emotions which agitated my mind as I first trod, with lofty step, the ruins of the Forum," he later wrote. Gibbon resolved at that moment to undertake the great project he would call The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Thirteen centuries later, on a gloomy evening in 1764, gazing out from a perch on the Capitoline Hill, above the overgrown debris of central Rome, Edward Gibbon was seized with a sense of loss as he contemplated the collapse of a civilization. Europe would now become a continent of barbarian kingdoms - in embryo, the Europe of nation-states that exists today. The pretense of Western unity was abandoned.
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Odoacer understood full well that something had come to an end: he declared himself king of Italy, and sent the imperial regalia of the Western empire to Constantinople. (Imagine if the demise of America were to occur under a president named George.) But more than symbolism was at play. The historical symmetry is almost too good to be true - that the last emperor's name, Romulus, should also be that of Rome's founder. There would never be another emperor of the West. What changed was this: Odoacer was not recognized as legitimate by the eastern emperor, in Constantinople. In Italy the Roman bureaucracy continued to sputter along. Many regions had been autonomous for years, under barbarian rulers who gave lip service to the titular emperor. Rome itself wasn't touched on this occasion, and throughout the former empire life went on, little different for most people in 477 from what it had been in 475. Rome didn't "fall" the way Carthage had, six centuries earlier, when the Romans slaughtered the inhabitants and razed the city, or the way Berlin would, fifteen centuries later, blasted into rubble. There was no social implosion after he seized power, no rape and pillage. He was in fact well schooled in the ways of Rome, and he was a Christian, as most Romans by then were. Odoacer was scarcely less worthy of authority than many previous usurpers. He entered the city of Ravenna, then serving as an imperial capital, and deposed a youngster named Romulus Augustus, who had reigned as emperor for little more than a year. Odoacer captured and killed the imperial commander. The empire of the Romans in the West, its origins tracing back more than a thousand years, drew its last breath in 476 A.D., when a barbarian army led by a warrior named Odoacer, half Hun and half Scirian, defeated an imperial army that his barbarians had only a few months earlier been a part of. THE CAPITALS: Where Republic Meets Empire Are We Rome?: The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America
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