The Germanic commander Odoacer deposed the young emperor Romulus Augustulus at Ravenna in Italy. Romulus is conventionally regarded as the last Western Roman emperor, although Julius Nepos retained a rival claim. The deposition became a symbolic date for the end of the Western Roman Empire and the beginning of medieval Europe.

The fall of Rome became a central image of transience, ruin and lost civilisation in European literature. It echoes through works by Petrarch, Shakespeare, Byron and later poets who used Roman remains to meditate upon the mortality of empires.