August 28 presents a curious dual anniversary, representative of the reversals of fortune that could afflict those ambitious of power and position during the disordered times of the fifth and sixth centuries. On August 28, 475, the Western Roman Emperor Julius Nepos fled by sea from the virtually impregnable imperial capital of Ravenna upon the approach from Rome up the Via Flaminia of the patrician and magister militum Orestes and an army of rebellious barbarian federates.

But Orestes’ triumph was a brief one. As Gibbon puts it, in his incomparable style: “By the abdication of Nepos, Orestes had now attained the summit of his ambitious hopes; but he soon discovered, before the end of the first year, that the lessons of perjury and ingratitude, which a rebel must inculcate, will be retorted against himself; and that the precarious sovereign of Italy was only permitted to choose whether he would be the slave or the victim of his Barbarian mercenaries.” (Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (J.B. Bury ed.), at IV, 52).

In more concrete terms, what occurred was that in mid-August of 476, the barbarian levies who by then composed the army of the Western Roman Empire demanded that a third of the lands of Italy should be made over to them for possession and settlement. Orestes rejected their demand, whereup the entire army mutinied and rallied to the standard of a huge barbarian named Odovacar, a Scyrian officer in the Guards. Orestes fled to Pavia, but the city was within a matter of days successively besieged, stormed, and taken. Orestes was executed on August 28, exactly a year to the day after Julius Nepos’s flight the year before. Odovacar did spare Orestes’ son, Romulus Augustulus, the titular Westerm Roman Emperor, pensioning him off to a once-luxurious villa on the Campanian coast near Misenum whose previous owners had included Marius, Lucullus, and the Emperor Tiberius.

Prior to his sudden elevation to supreme power and his equally precipitous fall, Orestes had a dramatic and unusual career. There is a sense in which Orestes, rather than Aetius, perhaps deserves the title of “The Last of the Romans”: for he was in fact of born of a high-ranking provincial Roman family in Pannonia. When Pannonia was ceded by the Empire to the Huns, he entered the service of Attila and rose to become his secretary and a principal political confidant of the Hunnish king. Orestes was often sent as an ambassador by the Huns to Rome and Ravenna. When Attila died in 453 and the Hunnish empire disintegrated, Orestes entered the service of the various Roman princes who succeeded Valentinian III. Because of his long residence among the barbarians, Gibbon writes, Orestes knew and understood the barbarians: “These troops had long been accustomed to reverence the character and authority of Orestes, who affected their manners, conversed with them in their own language, and was intimately connected with their national chieftains, by long habits of familiarity and friendship.” Orestes seems in fact to have been an able and principled man, whose rebellion against Julius Nepos perhaps simply reflected the unwillingness of westerners to accept an alien Emperor foisted on them by the Eastern Court.