The Last Legion from the publication of British historian Edward Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in the late 18th Century. At the time of his proclamation as Emperor, Romulus Augustus was 16, older than portrayed in the film. Upon being captured by Odoacer, the boy usurper was seen to be a victim of his father. He was spared and sent to live in comfortable retirement in southern Italy. There was a struggle for control of the Eastern Roman Empire at the time but the Emperor alluded to would probably have been Zeno (explicit in the novel). In
Decline and Fall of the Freudian Empire as a popularization of Eysenck's articles and books criticizing psychoanalysis, and wrote that it was "not really meant for academic consumption." He criticized Eysenck's account of psychoanalytic therapy, writing that it bore little resemblance to modern psychoanalytic therapy, and wrote that Eysenck evaluated psychoanalysis using experimental evidence that was not methodologically adequate, or which in some cases actually provided weak support for psychoanalytic concepts such as repression. The psychologist Stephen Frosh described "Decline and Fall of the Freudian Empire" as one of a number of books in which Eysenck acted as a "propagandist" for the view that psychoanalysis is unscientific