With Valentinian III., who had no children, the great line of Theodosius came to an end both in the East and in the West, for Pulcheria had died in 453.  In Constantinople Marcian continued to rule till 457, when he was succeeded by Leo I. the Thracian.  In Rome he who had so signally avenged himself, Petronius Maximus, a senator, sixty years of age, reigned during seventy days in which he was rather a prisoner than a monarch.  During those seventy days, whether moved by lust or revenge we know not, he attempted to make the widow of Valentinian his wife.  This brought all down, for Eudoxia, without a friend in the world, followed the fatal example of Honoria and called in the Vandal to her assistance.  And when Genseric was on his way to answer her from Carthage, the terrified City, by the hands of the imperial servants and the soldiers, tore the emperor limb from limb and flung what remained into the Tiber so that even burial was denied him.  But the Vandal came on, and in spite of Leo, as we know, sacked the City and departed—­to lose the mighty booty in the midst of the sea.

What are we to say of the years which follow, and what are we to say of those ghostly figures, which hover, always uncertainly and briefly, about the imperial throne after the assassination of Valentinian III. and the second sack of the City?  There was Avitus the Gaul (455-456), Majorian (457-461), Libius Severus (461-465), Anthemius (467-472), Olybrius (472), Glycerius (473-474), Julius Nepos (474-475), and at last the pitiful boy Romulus Augustulus (475-476).  Nothing can be said of them; they are less than shadows, and their empire, the material empire they represented, was no longer conscious of itself, was no longer a reality, but an hallucination, haunting the mind.  It is true that the chief seat of their government, if government it can be called, was Ravenna, and that the city is concerned with most of the incidents of those vague and confused years; the proclamations of Majorian, of Severus, of Glycerius, and of Romulus Augustulus, the abdication of the last and the fight in the pinewood in which his uncle Paulus was broken and Odoacer made himself master.  But they are, for the most part, the years of Ricimer the patrician, for they are full of his puppets.

This man is another Stilicho, another Aetius, a great and heroic soldier, but of a sinister and subtle policy without loyalty or scruple.  His is a figure that often appears about the death-bed of dying states, but his genius has not so often been matched.  The son of a Suevic father, his mother the daughter of Wallia, the successor and avenger of Ataulfus the Visigoth, he was the champion of the empire against the Vandal, that is to say, against her most relentless foe.  His success in this was the secret of his power.  Pondering the fate of his predecessors he determined he would not end as they did.  Therefore he determined to make whom he would emperor and to depose him when he had done with him; in a word, he meant to be the master as well as the saviour of Italy.  In this he was successful.  He deposed Avitus and caused him to be consecrated bishop of Placentia.  In his place he set a man of his own choice, Majorian, whom he raised to the empire on April 1, 457, in the camp at Columellae, at the sixth milestone, it seems, from Ravenna; and upon August 2,461, he caused him to be put to death near Tortona.