The Western Roman Empire in 400 AD by Shuaaa2 for Wikipedia “Western Roman Empire” under licence https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

(3) WESTERN ROMAN EMPIRE

(395 – 476 AD)

That “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, retreating to the breath of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear and naked shingles of the world”.

We’re still at the surface of the Roman Empire iceberg – in the fundamental continuity from the classical Roman Empire, after its formal division into de facto separate eastern and western empires in 395 AD (although they still saw themselves as the one empire) – with the latter pretty much falling stillborn from that division, somehow limping through the 81 years of its sorry existence until the barbarians clubbed it on the head and put it out of its misery.

We’re a long way from the Rome that made the Mediterranean their Mare Nostrum, along with making everything else part of their Pax Romana. Hell, Rome wasn’t even the capital of the western empire from 402 AD – that was Ravenna and historians should really call it the Ravennan empire rather than add insult to the injury to the western empire’s ignominious decline.

Indeed, there’s been a video meme to this effect – with Ryan Gosling’s sad sack of a beaten character from Blade Runner 2049 standing in for the western empire, in contrast to Ryan Gosling’s exuberant showboating Ken from the Barbie film standing in for the eastern empire.

Or for that matter, a meme of that heartfelt scene from Avengers: Endgame with Thor back from the future seeing his mother one last time in the past – Freya as the Roman empire in the 2nd century saying sadly to Thor as the Roman empire from the 5th century “The future has not been kind to you, has it?”

I exaggerate for rhetorical effect, but it’s not hard to see the eastern empire abandoning the western empire as a hopelessly lost cause or an act of cutthroat triage, much like the western empire then did with Britain.

And perhaps I exaggerate the plight of the western empire, but not by much. While I tend to see the western Roman empire as doomed with just too many things coming together against it – not least too many barbarians – it might have at least endured longer or better than it did, but for two of the worst emperors in Roman history, compounded by the length of their reigns somehow enduring for most of it, nearly 60 years or so between them.

I am of course talking about Emperors Honorius and Valentinian III, although they might as well have been the same emperor, given how uncannily similar they were – with each of them betraying the loyal subordinate who was the one holding things together and stabbing that man in the back, Stilicho for Honorius and Aetius for Valentinian III (literally for the stabbing in the back part), each with one of the two notorious sacks of Rome following shortly afterwards, the Visigoths for Honorius and the Vandals for Valentinian III.

On the other hand, there was also Emperor Majorian reigning from 457 to 461 AD – the empire’s last best hope for someone like Aurelian two centuries earlier to pull it out of its spiral of doom, as Majorian defeated all of Rome’s enemies he fought even in that twilight of the empire, until he too was betrayed and assassinated. After that, it was all downhill into the Dark Age, until the last western emperor was deposed in 476 AD.

Yet for all that, it still is what I see as the Roman Empire proper, even if much diminished. And as I observed in my Top 10 Empires, I just have a particular interest in empires holding the line against all odds as they decline and fall. And let’s face it – even as a shadow of its former self, I still see it as being able to take any of the others below it in the top ten, hence the ranking.