Romulus Augustulus - Later Life

Later Life

The ultimate fate of Romulus is unknown. The Anonymus Valesianus wrote that Odoacer, "taking pity on his youth", spared Romulus' life and granted him an annual pension of 6,000 solidi before sending him to live with relatives in Campania. Jordanes and Marcellinus Comes say Odoacer exiled Romulus to Campania but do not mention any reward from the Germanic king.

The sources do agree that Romulus took up residence in the Lucullan Villa, an ancient castle originally built by Lucullus in Campania. From here, contemporary histories fall silent. In the History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon notes that the disciples of Saint Severinus of Noricum were invited by a "Neapolitan lady" to bring his body to the villa in 488 "in the place of Augustulus, who was probably no more." The villa was converted into a monastery before 500 to hold the saint's remains.

Cassiodorus, then a secretary to Theodoric the Great, wrote a letter to a "Romulus" in 507 confirming a pension. Thomas Hodgkin, a translator of Cassiodorus' works, wrote in 1886 that it was "surely possible" the Romulus in the letter was the same person as the last western emperor. The letter would match the description of Odoacer's coup in the Anonymus Valesianus, and Romulus could have been alive in the early sixth century. But Cassiodorus does not supply any details about his correspondent or the size and nature of his pension, and Jordanes, whose history of the period abridges an earlier work by Cassiodorus, makes no mention of a pension.