Down to the day on which Flavius Odoacer deposed Augustulus there was always at Rome or Ravenna a prince who represented in clear heritage the imperial succession that descended from Octavian and Trajan and Constantine. His crown might be fragile, his life in constant danger; his word might be less powerful in Italy than that of some barbarian Ricimer or Gundobad who stood behind the throne. Nevertheless, he was brought into real contact with his subjects, and was a visible, tangible personage whose will and character still made some difference in the governance of the state. The weakest Glycerius or Olybrius never sank into being a mere puppet, like an eighth century king of the Franks, or a seventeenth century Mikado. Moreover, there was till the last a possibility—even, perchance, a probability—that there would arise some strong emperor who would free himself from the power of his German prime minister. Majorian nearly succeeded in doing so; and the stories of the falls of the Goths, Gainas and Aspar, in the East show that such an attempt was not a hopeless undertaking. But when Odoacer seized the throne from the boy Augustulus, and became with the consent, if not the goodwill, of the Constantinopolitan Caesar, the sole representative in the West of the imperial system, a very grave change took place in the status of the empire. [Sidenote: Practical meaning of Odoacer’s position.] Flavius Odoacer was something far more than a patrician ruling as the representative of an absentee emperor. He was not only the successor of Ricimer, but the predecessor of Theodoric and Alboin. For, beside being a Roman official, he was a German king, raised on the shield and hailed as ‘Thiudans’ by the whole Teutonic horde who now represented the old legions of the West. If he never took the title of ‘king of Italy,’ it was because territorial appellations of the kind were not yet known. Euric and Gaiseric, his contemporaries, called themselves Kings of the Visigoths and Vandals, not of Spain and Africa. And so Odoacer being king of a land and an army, but not of a nation, may have been somewhat at a loss how to set forth his royal appellation. He would not have deigned to call himself ‘king of the Italians;’ to call himself king of the Scyrri or Turcilingi, or any other of the tribes who furnished part of his host, would have been to assume an inadequate name. Puzzled contemporary chroniclers sometimes called him king of the Goths, though he himself never used such a title.