Ravenna is captured within week and Romulus Augustus is deposed.
This act has been cited as the end of the Western Roman Empire, although Romulus' deposition does not cause any significant disruption at this time.
Rome has already lost its hegemony over the provinces, Germanics dominate the Roman army and Germanic generals like Odoacer have long been the real powers behind the throne.
Italy will suffer far greater devastation in the next century when Emperor Justinian I re-conquers it.
Eighteenth-century historian Edward Gibbon will attach great significance to this event due to Odoacer's foreign birth.
Gibbon's romantic description of the events of 476 as the fall of the Western Roman Empire will remain influential for two centuries until modern scholarship discredits this view.
Nevertheless, Odoacer's defeat of Orestes and his son are sometimes still used to demarcate the transition from Classical Antiquity to the Middle Ages, or Late Antiquity.
According to the Anonymus Valesianus, Odoacer was moved by Romulus' youth and his beauty to not only spare his life but give him a pension of six thousand solidii and sent him to Campania to live with his relatives.
