In our general survey of the fifth century in the West, we have passed but lightly over the most striking event of its earlier years, the taking of the Roman city by the Goth. Before the century was out, Rome had become used to capture and plunder. Gaiseric and Ricimer had harried her more fiercely than ever Alaric had done. As an event, as an incident, none in the whole history of the world was ever fitted to make a deeper impression on men’s minds than the first Teutonic capture of Rome. For the purposes of the preacher and the moralist it was all that the preachers and moralists of the time painted it. But on the actual course of events it had little effect. And why? Because the world had so largely become Rome that the momentary woes of the city which had once alone been Rome were of comparatively little moment. The invasion of Italy by Alaric led indirectly to those invasions of Gaul and Spain which laid the foundations of the modern world; but his actual sack of Rome had no effect on the busy series of revolutions which followed on those invasions. So it was with that other event of the later half of the century in which so many have so strangely seen the end of the Roman Empire, the boundary line between ancient and modern history. It was doubtless an impressive fact, we see in the annals of the time that it was an impressive fact, when Emperors ceased to reign either at Rome or at Ravenna. But as the news that the Roman Empire had come to an end would have sounded very strange at Constantinople, so it would have sounded no less strange at Soissons or at Salona. It did not greatly touch the Roman realm of Syagrius in northern Gaul that Italy had acknowledged Zeno as sole Emperor, and that he was represented in the Italian diocese by the patrician Odowakar. That those decent formalities veiled a revolution by which the reigning Emperor had been set aside by a chief of barbarian mercenaries was nothing new or wonderful. The only difference between the revolution of 476 and a crowd of earlier revolutions was that Odowakar found that it suited his purpose to acknowledge the nominal superiority of an absent sovereign rather than to reign in the name of a present puppet of his own creation. Presently it was found convenient at Constantinople to brand the patrician as a tyrant, and to grant a new commission to another Teutonic leader to displace him and to rule in his stead. The personal greatness of Theodoric overshadowed Emperor and Empire; from his palace at Ravenna, by one title or another, by direct dominion, as guardian, as elder kinsman, as representative of the Roman power, as head by natural selection of the whole Teutonic world, he ruled over all the western lands save one; and even to the conquering Frank he could say, Thus far shalt thou come and no further. In true majesty such a position was more than Imperial; moreover there was nothing in the rule of Theodoric which touched the Roman life of Italy.