The Day Rome Fell

4 September 476 CE

On a small September morning in 476 CE a teenage emperor took off his purple and handed it to a soldier. No thunderbolt, no sack of the city—just a quiet exchange that later writers turned into an apocalypse. The Day Rome Fell reads that moment closely: the boy on the throne, the practical bargains that followed, and the surprising durability of law, Senate, and ritual when the title of emperor stopped being decisive. Think of rust—slow, inevitable, altering surface and mechanism alike—and you have the book’s guiding image.

This is not a catalogue of ruins. It is a close, clear lens on how political forms unravel while institutions and ideas persist, how the East kept calling itself Rome, and how memory made a fall into a story. Lively, concise, and sharply argumentative, JD Arden’s account will change how you imagine endings—and what survives them.