Benjamin Olson
Hero
What do you consider the Roman empire to be?
While the traditional date of September 4, 476, when Odoacer deposed Romulus Augustulus, has many caveats, it is a good of an exact date as you will get for a long, complicated historical process like the fall of the Western Empire. No specific alternative late 5th century date has a sufficiently superior claim to be worth dispensing with tradition over. If, like me, you consider the Roman Empire to be defined as the Latin speaking empire centered around the city of Rome that's a solid way to think of its fall.
The continuing adventures of the Grecophone Eastern empire are the major complicating factor. Certainly, in spite of the formal trappings of Romanness, when the Byzantine empire fell in the 15th century it was not really the Roman empire as it is generally concieved anymore except as a matter of legal and political fiction, but at what point in the intervening centuries did it cease to be sufficiently Roman to "really be the same empire" is a question that can not be answered on a general level. You can focus on some particular element of Roman society and possibly get firm dates for when you feel it ended, but on a general level the Eastern half of the empire didn't fall, it gradually transformed into a different imperial animal that eventually fell.
While the traditional date of September 4, 476, when Odoacer deposed Romulus Augustulus, has many caveats, it is a good of an exact date as you will get for a long, complicated historical process like the fall of the Western Empire. No specific alternative late 5th century date has a sufficiently superior claim to be worth dispensing with tradition over. If, like me, you consider the Roman Empire to be defined as the Latin speaking empire centered around the city of Rome that's a solid way to think of its fall.
The continuing adventures of the Grecophone Eastern empire are the major complicating factor. Certainly, in spite of the formal trappings of Romanness, when the Byzantine empire fell in the 15th century it was not really the Roman empire as it is generally concieved anymore except as a matter of legal and political fiction, but at what point in the intervening centuries did it cease to be sufficiently Roman to "really be the same empire" is a question that can not be answered on a general level. You can focus on some particular element of Roman society and possibly get firm dates for when you feel it ended, but on a general level the Eastern half of the empire didn't fall, it gradually transformed into a different imperial animal that eventually fell.
or ERE remnants in Trebizond, the Greek islands etc.
