Rule
As emperor, Nepos sought to consolidate the Western Empire's remaining holdings, which consisted of Italy, Illyria and the remaining parts of Roman Gaul. He was able to re-negotiate a recently concluded peace settlement with the Visigoths and their king Euric, under which he restored the Provence region of Gaul to imperial control in exchange for other, minor territories where the empire was unable to maintain firm control and their strategic position was less sustainable. But he was less successful in negotiating with Geiseric, the king of the Vandals, who was once again launching pirate attacks on the Italian coast. Having recently made peace with the Eastern Empire, Geiseric saw no need to make new concessions to the recently-appointed Augustus of the weakened and unstable West.
Nepos was, by all accounts, one of the more capable of the late Western Emperors, but he was unpopular with the Roman Senate, whose members disliked him for his close ties to the East. When Nepos made the mistake of appointing the untrustworthy but well-established Orestes as his magister militum, Nepos' lack of a solid core of support in Italy would work against him.
Read more about this topic: Julius Nepos
Famous quotes containing the word rule:
“If all political power be derived only from Adam, and be to descend only to his successive heirs, by the ordinance of God and divine institution, this is a right antecedent and paramount to all government; and therefore the positive laws of men cannot determine that, which is itself the foundation of all law and government, and is to receive its rule only from the law of God and nature.”
—John Locke (1632–1704)
“Great statesmen seem to direct and rule by a sort of power to put themselves in the place of the nation over which they are set, and may thus be said to possess the souls of poets at the same time they display the coarser sense and the more vulgar sagacity of practical men of business.”
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—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)