Orestes (army master)

Orestes (* before 430; † August 28, 476 ) was a late antique diplomat and military in the late 5th century.

Life

Orestes was the son of a certain Tatulus and had a brother named Paul. He came from the province of Pannonia , which was largely under the rule of the Huns since 433 . As secretary ( notarius ) and envoy to Attila , king of the Huns , he enjoyed his trust. Orestes repeatedly traveled to the court of the Eastern Roman emperor Theodosius II and received an Eastern Roman embassy with Attila in 448/49, including the historian Priskosbelonged, who wrote a detailed (still largely preserved today) report on this trip. Since Orestes held a relatively high position in 448/49, he was probably born before 430. He was married to the daughter of a Western Roman high official named Romulus, who arrived on behalf of Flavius ​​Aëtius as Western Roman ambassador (together with Tatulus) at about the same time as the Priscus' embassy at the Hunnenhof.

After Attila's death in 453 his track is lost. Orestes then served in Western Roman services, became Patricius and finally in 475 magister militum ("army master") and thus commander in chief in Italy. In August 475 Orestes overthrew the Western Roman Emperor Julius Nepos ; he fled to the province of Dalmatia and ruled there as the last official emperor of West Rome until his death in 480. On October 31, 475, Orestes raised his son Romulus Augustus , later called "Augustulus" ("Emperor"), to be emperor , although the real rulers were Orestes and his brother Paul.

When the “barbaric” auxiliary troops - a regular Roman army practically no longer existed at that time - demanded settlement land in Italy in the summer of 476, Orestes refused. Thereupon they rose against him on August 23, 476 under the leadership of the officer Odoacer ; shortly afterwards Orestes was beaten and killed near Placentia in northern Italy.

A few days later, his brother Paul was murdered in Ravenna . Orestes' son Romulus Augustulus , the eponymous hero of Dürrenmatt's comedy Romulus the Great , was spared and only deposed. The Western Roman Empire was now effectively extinct, although this event hardly attracted much attention from contemporaries and Julius Nepos lived until 480.

literature

• Wilhelm Enßlin : Orestes 12. In: Paulys Realencyclopädie der classischen Antiquity Science (RE). Volume XVIII, 1, Stuttgart 1939, Col. 1012 f.
• Peter Heather : The Fall of the Roman Empire. A new History of Rome and the Barbarians. Macmillan, London et al. 2005, ISBN 0-333-98914-7 , p. 565 (Index, sv Orestes ).
• Dirk Henning: Periclitans res Publica. Empire and elites in the crisis of the Western Roman Empire 454 / 5–493 (= Historia individual writings. Vol. 133). Steiner, Stuttgart 1999, ISBN 3-515-07485-6 (at the same time: Marburg, University, dissertation, 1998).
• John Robert Martindale: Orestes. In: The Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire (PLRE). Volume 2, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1980, ISBN 0-521-20159-4 , pp. 811-812.
• Otto Seeck : History of the fall of the ancient world. Volume 6. Metzler, Stuttgart 1920, pp. 377-380.