Italy: skin-clothed now, but destined before
long to enrich many men with costly gifts". The name of this young
recruit was Odovacar.[47]

[Footnote 46: "Vale". "Vade".]

[Footnote 47: This is the form of the name used by contemporary
historians; Odoacer is a later and less authentic form.]

Odovacar probably entered Italy about 465. He attached himself to the
party of Ricimer, and before long became a conspicuous captain of
_foederati_ After the death of Ricimer (18th August, 472), there was a
series of rapid revolutions in the Roman State. Olybrius, the then
reigning nonentity, died in October of the same year.

(June, 474) After five months' interregnum, a yet more shadowy shadow,
Glycerius, succeeded him, and after fifteen months of rule was thrust
from the throne by Julius Nepos, who had married the niece of Verina,
the mischief-making Augusta of the East, and who was, therefore,
supported by all the moral influence of Constantinople.

Nepos, after fourteen months of Empire, in which he distinguished
himself only by the loss of some (Oct.,475) Gaulish provinces to the
Visigoths, was in his turn dethroned by the Master of the Soldiery,
Orestes, who had once held a subordinate situation in the court of
Attila. Nepos fled to Dalmatia, which was probably his native land, and
lived there for four years after his dethronement, still keeping up some
at least of the state which belonged to a Roman Emperor.

We know very little of the pretexts for these rapid revolutions, or the
circumstances attending them, but there cannot be much doubt that the
army was the chief agent in what, to borrow a phrase from modern
Spanish politics, were a series of _pronunciamentos_. For some reason
which is dim to us, Orestes, though a full-blooded Roman citizen, did
not set the diadem on his own head, but placed it on that of his son, a
handsome boy of some fourteen or fifteen years, named Romulus, and
nicknamed "the little Augustus". For himself, he took the dignity of
"Patrician", which had been so long worn by Ricimer, and was associated
in men's minds with the practical mastery of the Empire. But a ruler who
has been raised to the throne by military sedition soon finds that the
authors of his elevation are the most exacting of masters. The
_foederati,_ who knew themselves now absolute arbiters of the destiny of
the Empire, and who had the same craving for a settlement within its
borders which we have met with more than once among t