Honorius held the Western Roman throne from 402 to 423, ruling from the imperial capital at Ravenna rather than Rome itself^[2]. His reign coincided with one of the gravest crises the Western Empire had faced: in 410, Alaric and his Visigoths besieged and sacked Rome, an event so shocking to contemporaries that St Jerome, hearing of it in Bethlehem, wrote that he could barely believe the city that had conquered the world could itself fall, calling Rome at once the mother and the grave of her peoples^[2]. The city would not see direct imperial control restored for over a century, and Rome's fall to the Visigoths marked a turning point after which, in the words of one architectural historian, the Roman empire ceased in any real sense to have much to do with Rome itself^[2].

Honorius is remembered in later tradition chiefly for his apparent detachment from the catastrophe unfolding around him, an emperor associated in popular memory with trivial pastimes rather than the defence of his empire. This characterisation, whatever its precise historical accuracy, made him an attractive subject for nineteenth-century painters interested in scenes of imperial decadence and neglect, a genre that let artists dramatise the gap between the appearance of power and its collapse.

Waterhouse painted this subject early in his career, exhibiting it at the Royal Academy at a point when large-scale historical and mythological canvases, drawing on Roman, Greek and classical subjects, made up the bulk of his output through the 1880s. Only later did he turn more decisively toward the literary and Arthurian material, drawn especially from Tennyson, that produced his best-known later works, including The Lady of Shalott, though he continued moving between classical, literary and legendary subjects for the rest of his career rather than settling permanently on any one of them.