Hi everybody, welcome to another episode of The Fall of Rome.

As always, I'm your host, Patrick Weiman.

Thank you for joining me today.

The Roman Empire that Theodosius the Great bequeathed to his two feckless sons, the ten-year-old

Anorius and the West and the seventeen-year-old Arcadius in the East, appeared for all intents

and purposes to be a stable one.

Sure, there were some issues.

It was just coming out of a vicious civil war that pitted the armies of the two halves

of the Empire against each other, and Northern Gaul and especially Britain had been slipping

away for some time, but essentially everything else was working as it should.

The centralized, top-heavy, and bureaucratic Empire whose outlines' diocletian had implemented

a century before were still functioning as they should have, at least superficially.

Beneath the surface, though, things weren't looking quite so rosy.

There was a reason, or more precisely, there were a few reasons why it took just 80 years

after this point for the western half of the Roman Empire to disappear entirely as a political

unit.

Last time, we took a narrative look at the political end of the Empire in the West, focusing

on events and the people at the very top of the food chain, the Emperor's generals

and kings, and what they did over the course of the fifth century that contributed to this

political disintegration.

By 476, there simply wasn't an Empire left in the West.

For lords of various ethnic stripes were building the foundations of new kingdoms throughout

...