AD455 - the fall of the Roman west?

[Nathan Ross]

the soldiers and federates along the frontiers would do their jobs without knowledge of the person who actually ruled over them.

Yes - like that unfortunate garrison in the Life of Saint Severinus, hanging about on the Danube wondering why they hadn't been paid in ages!

It was a tough fabric to break, so to speak. The real break would be when some folks realise that there won't be any suppot from Italy anymore.

It seems as if what you're talking about here is a sort of cultural idea of Romanness, rather than the western empire as a political entity. Undoubtably people continued to feel Roman, and behave in a Roman way, following Roman political and cultural forms, long after the empire was a dead letter in the west.

But I think, as I said above, that what I'm arguing for here is a symbolic 'fall' - symbolism, particularly following Diocletian and Constantine, was an extremely important aspect of imperial power and authority: the godlike emperor, addressed always in terms of sycophantic flattery, with his face on the coins and his name on the laws, reflecting in his awesome majesty the divine order of the universe...

When that symbolic power and authority was gone, real political power went with it. The murder of two emperors in quick succession, coupled with the sack of Rome and the humbling of the aristocracy, would seem to represent a very clear terminus for that symbolic power, and the authority and respect that it implied.