rdfs:comment
| - Valentinian III ( Placido Valentinianus Avingaparti, 419-455) was the last of the great fruit bat loony, eccentric, lascivious, kinky killing Roman Emperors stretching in a line back to Caligula and Nero. Spoilt by his mother Galla Placidia and indulged by a succession of corrupt favourites, Valentinian watched his inheritance crumble away as the barbarians carved out their own states at his empire's expense. The prospective brother-in-law of Attila the Hun, putative father-in-law of Genseric the Vandal and would-be inheritor of the Roman Empire in the East (rejected), Valentinian was a spectacular failure on all flow diagrams measuring success. He even let a bloke in a dress to save Rome from the Huns which is why you may have heard of Pope Leo the Great and not Emperor Valentinian the Fl
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abstract
| - Valentinian III ( Placido Valentinianus Avingaparti, 419-455) was the last of the great fruit bat loony, eccentric, lascivious, kinky killing Roman Emperors stretching in a line back to Caligula and Nero. Spoilt by his mother Galla Placidia and indulged by a succession of corrupt favourites, Valentinian watched his inheritance crumble away as the barbarians carved out their own states at his empire's expense. The prospective brother-in-law of Attila the Hun, putative father-in-law of Genseric the Vandal and would-be inheritor of the Roman Empire in the East (rejected), Valentinian was a spectacular failure on all flow diagrams measuring success. He even let a bloke in a dress to save Rome from the Huns which is why you may have heard of Pope Leo the Great and not Emperor Valentinian the Flop. It wasn't as if Valentinian got a particularly bad education. His father Emperor Constantius III had been a no-nonsense general but had died when Valentinian was two years old. Valentinian's mother Galla Placidia was by Roman standards, a remarkably well balanced and sharp (and hard) as nails. She had been on an involuntary tour of the Roman Empire with the Visigoths after Rome had been taken back in 410 but had been ransomed by her brother Honorius. In gratitude, Galla had named her eldest daughter (Justa Grata) Honoria after him and Valentinian after her grandfather - the humour-free zone emperor Valentinian I. When Galla Placidia became widowed a second time, her idiot brother developed the serious sibling groping disease. Galla left with her children to Constantinople. A couple of years later, Valentinian was back in Ravenna (the capital of the Western Roman Empire) as emperor. Uncle Honorius was long dead and buried, his imperial power usurped by an over ambitious civil servant called Ioannes. The six year old boy's first exercise of government business was to have his rival humiliated, mutilated and finally chopped up into very tiny pieces and filed under the heading 'Dead'.
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