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 he criticized Eysenck for uncritically accepting Thornton's argument that Breuer's patient Anna O. suffered from tuberculous meningitis. Sybil Eysenck, discussing the book in her preface to its 2004 edition, wrote that its "real strength" was that it "not only cast doubt on traditional psychotherapy and psychoanalysis" but suggested behavior therapy as a viable alternative to them, a position in her view justified by subsequent research. She credited her husband with considerable courage in writing the book, and identified it as her favorite among his books. Decline and Fall of the Freudian Empire Decline and Fall of the Freudian Empire (1985;