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
Historiography of the fall of the Western Roman Empire such as the consulship. The formal end of the Roman Empire on the West in AD 476 thus corresponds with the time in which the Empire and the title Emperor no longer had value. Historian Michael Rostovtzeff and economist Ludwig von Mises both argued that unsound economic policies played a key role in the impoverishment and decay of the Roman Empire. According to them, by the 2nd century AD, the Roman Empire had developed a complex market economy in which trade was relatively free. Tariffs were low and laws controlling the prices of foodstuffs and other commodities had little impact