'AS early as the time of Cicero and Varro,' says Gibbon, 'it
was the opinion of the Roman augurs that the twelve
vultures which Romulus had seen represented the twelve
centuries assigned for the fatal period of his city.' This pro-
phecy, as we learn from writers of the age, such as the poet
Claudian, filled men's minds with gloomy apprehensions when
the twelfth century of Rome's existence was drawing to its close,
and 'even posterity must acknowledge with some surprise
that the interpretation of an accidental or fabulous circum-
stance has been seriously verified by the downfall of the
Western Empire.'

The traditional date of the founding of Rome is 753 B.C.,
and if we hold that its Empire ended with the capture of the
city by the Vandal Gaiseric and the death of Valentinian III,
the last Emperor of the great Theodosian dynasty, both of
which events occurred in A.D. 455, the fulfilment of the predic-
tion will certainly appear surprising. Nor need it wholly
shatter our faith in ancient auguries if we feel compelled to
defer the date of the final downfall for some twenty-one years,
during which brief period no less than nine so-called Emperors
assumed the purple: one the assassin of Valentinian, the next
the nominee of the Visigoth king at Arles, five others the
puppets of the barbarian general Ricimer, another an obscure
palace official elected by a Burgundian noble, and the ninth
the son of a Pannonian soldier in Attila's army--the 'inoffen-
sive youth,' as Gibbon calls him, who had inherited or assumed
the high-sounding names of Romulus Augustus (derisively
or pityingly belittled into Momullus Augustulus), and whom
in 476 the barbarian Odovacar deposed and with contemptuous

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