Roman historical tradition began with the founding of the city by Romulus in 753 BC, with Vergil’s heavily embroidered prequel to that story firmly in everyone’s mind. The reign of Augustus drew a bright, sharp line through history, as the story of the man who separated the old world of republican liberty falling into chaos from the new world of imperial repression well-curtained by the appearance of tradition. From that moment forward, the Augusto-Vergilian propaganda of empire (imperium sine fine, “a rule that knows no bounds,” is how Vergil had Jupiter himself put it) dominated the landscape. Rome mastered the whole of the known Mediterranean world, barbarians lay beyond to the north; deserts lay to the south; and the mysterious, insidious, luxurious, treacherous east sheltered people whose moral failures offset any claims to civilization. Good times kept the barbarians and easterners at bay; bad times let them slip their leashes and go on a rampage.
Marcellinus, a Roman who never went to Rome, could not see the progression and evolution of his own governmental system. The palace-based rule in Constantinople of the fifth and sixth centuries represents governance radically transformed from anything Rome knew before Diocletian and resembles any earlier period of Roman history in name only. This blindness was clearly on display in the book On Magistracies of John the Lydian. Nothing made him prouder than the continuity of offices and traditions from ancient times to the present. He was fooling himself balkan tours.
The city of Constantinople
Now, nothing about Marcellinus’s own way of doing history ensured it a long readership. The foreground of his story is the city of Constantinople, with its earthquakes, its bread riots, its portents, and the splendid sight of a tame tiger sent to Theodosius II by the “province of India”—a gesture from some potentate of the east. But there is not much more than that kind of vignette to be had at best. Modern taste prefers narrative to episode and story to chronicle, and the work would be only a documentary of taste and a record of scattered events were it not for one passage that reports the year 476:
In the fourteenth indiction, when Basiliscus and Armatus were consuls, the tyrant Basiliscus made his son Marcus Caesar and dared to rise up against the catholic faith, swollen full of the monophysite treachery. Basiliscus and his son and his wife Zenonida were sent into exile, when Zeno returned to his former throne, and in the city which is called Leminis in the province of Cappadocia he was thrust away and perished of hunger. Odoacer the king of the Goths held Rome; Odoacer murdered Orestes there; Odoacer condemned Augustulus the son of Orestes with the penalty of exile to the castle of Lucullus in Campania.
So far the facts, or one version of them. Then Marcellinus adds a comment atypical for him:
The western empire of the Roman nation, which in the seven hundred ninth year of the founding of the city Octavian Augustus seized as first of the Augusti, perished along with this Augustulus, in the 522nd year of the succeeding emperors of the realm. From then on, Gothic kings held Rome Justinian banned any teaching of law privately.
All the textbooks that give 476 as the year of the “fall of the Roman empire” base their claim on this paragraph. But what does it really tell us?
Zeno in his Henotikon
The world that Justin now faced was shaped, to a large extent, by how he and others remembered the fifth century. Zeno and Anastasius had taken the wrong tack. Religiously, they sided with the monophysites, Zeno in his Henotikon, Anastasius in his sympathies and policies; politically, they had surrendered the west to Theoderic and the other kings beyond. But now, strong men were taking control and their enthusiasm for restoration of the past would dominate policy for a generation. The Acacian schism that had separated Rome and Constantinople since the Romans objected to the Henotikon was now being healed, and Chalcedonian Christianity was back in control in Constantinople. Less obviously, the future held a series of vastly overweening military campaigns, staged from Constantinople, each seeking restoration and regeneration of the old models of empire, each doomed to disaster. But history had to be rewritten first.
And so Marcellinus, voice of Justinian’s court, chose the moment of illegitimacy: 476. It had its merits, in a keenly perverted way: 476 makes sense as the year when the bad days of the fifth century came to an end and Odoacer’s reign marked the beginning of better days, just as Theoderic’s reign would mark their flourishing but also, alas, their culmination. The irrelevance of emperors in residence was trivial by comparison to the good that these men did in the west in those decades.
