On August 28, 476, Odoacer’s forces captured and executed Orestes at Placentia. The clash that began with land demands ended with a general’s blood on the cobbles. The road to Ravenna lay open.
What Happened
The refusal had been given; the proclamation had been made. Odoacer moved quickly to remove the man who still embodied resistance. Orestes—general, kingmaker, father of the boy‑emperor—chose Placentia (Piacenza) as a position to block the path to Ravenna. The Po’s bridges and the town’s stout works offered hope. Odoacer offered force [7][11][12].
The federate army marched along the river roads, standards dark against late summer fields. The clash outside Placentia was decisive. Orestes’ troops, loyal but outnumbered, broke under the charge. The sound was familiar by now: the crash of shields, the cry of the beaten, the ring of blades against mail. Captured, Orestes was executed on August 28, 476. Anonymus Valesianus gives the date and the cold logic—remove the organizer to end organized resistance [7][11][12].
Placentia’s streets, with their Roman grid and quiet courtyards, felt the tremor pass through: a brief occupation, a public death, and then a column turning east. The color of war—dust‑dun cloaks, the red splash of a standard—faded as Odoacer’s men formed again on the road to Ravenna. The capital, ringed by marsh and moat, still sheltered Romulus and the Senate.
This was not civil war on the old Roman scale—no dual consular armies, no grand battles across provinces. It was the targeted application of a king’s force to remove a rival and secure a capital. The Senate read the message in the dispatches that followed and prepared to receive a victor who promised continuity and calm [7][11].
With Orestes dead, the architecture of resistance collapsed. His brother Paulus would be killed soon after near Ravenna, removing another node in the network. The road was clear, and the last Western emperor had no army to command.
The distance from Placentia to Ravenna is not long. The future of Italy would cross it in days.
Why This Matters
Orestes’ execution removed the final obstacle to Odoacer’s control of Italy. It demonstrated that the contest of 476 was not for symbols but for the chain of command and land distribution. With the general gone, Odoacer could take Ravenna and dictate terms to the Senate and the boy who wore purple [7][11][12].
The event underscores the theme of strongmen and decoupled authority. Orestes had raised an emperor; Odoacer executed the emperor‑maker. The locus of sovereignty had already migrated to the man who could win at Placentia. The law would catch up within a week, with Romulus’ deposition [11][12].
In the broader narrative, August 28 sits between the army’s acclamation of a king and the Senate’s acceptance of the new order. It shows how quickly the military‑political crisis resolved once the army chose. The Senate would make that choice legal; Anonymus Valesianus would make it memorable in a few spare lines.
For historians, the precision of dates—August 23, August 28, September 4—compresses a century of attrition into a fortnight of decisions. The Western Empire died as it had lived lately: at the edge of the Po, between a shrinking treasury and a soldier’s spear [7][11][12].
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