The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization

by Bryan Ward-Perkins

It has rightly been observed that the deposition in 476 of the last emperor resident in Italy, Romulus Augustulus, caused remarkably little stir: the great historian of Antiquity, Momigliano, called it the ‘noiseless fall of an empire’.39 But the principal reason why this event passed almost unnoticed was because contemporaries knew that the western empire, and with it autonomous Roman power, had already disappeared in all but name. Jerome, in writing the empire’s epitaph in 410, was decidedly premature; but it is hard to dispute the gloomy picture from the 440s and 450s of Salvian and of the Chronicler. These men were well aware of the disasters that had engulfed the West; and they would have been astonished by the modern mirage of an accommodating and peaceful fifth century.