hey, all. this is just something i wanted to explore.
now, i don't know too terribly much about Ancient Rome outside of the broad strokes, but one that i do know at least a little about is Flavius Aetius, the Roman general who defeated Attila. while looking up Aetius some time ago, i got some more in-depth information on his death: namely, that it was a conspiracy against him by the Roman Emperor himself, Valentinian III, with his rivals Petronius Maximus and Heraclius. after the fact, though, Maximus turned against the other two and counter-conspired two Hunnic friends of Aetius, Optila and Thraustila, and they successfully murdered Valentinian and Heraclius because not a single one of the soldiers at the scene did anything to stop them--they were all loyal followers of Aetius.
as i understand it, the ultimate reason that Aetius was assassinated was because Maximus and Heraclius convinced Valentinian that he had dynastic ambitions. what does everyone think it would take to prevent this conspiracy from taking place (the obvious answer is for Maximus and/or Heraclius to die first, but that's rather vague) and what the effects of it would be if Aetius wasn't killed? admittedly, he was in his 60s in an era when that's about as old as you'd get, but ya never know...