The Hulk and the Emperor

The Silver Age Marvel comics sometimes read like a fever dream.   This friendly fellow above is Tyrannus, a mad immortal living underground after being banished by Merlin, first appearing in Incredible Hulk #5 back in 1963. Tyrannus was just one of many various aliens, other-dimensional beings, or just weird humans, that tried to conquer the world back then.  How did the Hulk end up learning his plans for world domination?  Well, Tyrannus made it easy - for whatever reason, he spied Betty Ross during his surveillance of the surface world and decides to disguise himself as an archaeologist and then capture Betty.
What may surprise you is that the Hulk goes after Tyrannus... and is beaten multiple times!  Yes, the actual hero of the story is Rick Jones, the irresponsible teen that caused the Hulk to exist in the first place, who manages to use his powers as a perfectly-ordinary person to rescue Betty and then tell the Hulk.  Once Betty is safe, he goes on a rampage and destroys Tyrannus' underground lair, and they all go home.  Typical for the time, the story is compressed into a whirlwind single comic; also, despite having an entire cavern collapse on him, Tyrannus continued to make appearances in the Marvel Universe.  There's one more bizarre part of all this, but we'll get to that in a moment.

Let's turn to real world history. The traditional fall of the Roman Empire is usually marked as 476 AD, when the last Emperor of the Western Roman Empire, Romulus Augustulus, was deposed by Odoacer, a German officer.  Because Odoacer declined to take the title of Emperor, this is why this was used by traditional historians (especially Edward Gibbon) as the end.  However, in reality Romulus had been "Emperor" less than a year in Ravenna (Rome hadn't been the capital in over 70 years) and was placed on the throne by his father; the reigning emperor, Nepos, fled to Dalmatia, and he and the prior "Emperor" had both been placed on the throne by the Eastern Empire (aka the Byzantines); they declared the 'office' of the Western Emperor vacant in 480.  The last truly independent Emperor had been Majorian, who was assassinated in 461... and in fact, Majorian had set up the semi-autonomous remnant state in modern-day northern France that is noteworthy in that the rulership as Emperor was claimed there as well (and rejected) after Romulus' fall, and that the state fell to Clovis, the first ruler of what would eventually be France; years later, Charlemagne convinced the Roman Catholic Church to bestow the title of "Roman Emperor" on him (which, considering the Byzantine Empire still existed, helped create the church schism between East and West) which the "Holy Roman Empire" held onto until Napoleon finally broke them up in 1806 (naturally claiming the title for himself, for all the good it did him).  And poor Romulus?  While his father, considered the true ruler, was executed by Odoacer, Romulus was simply sent into exile and vanished from history.

So if you made it this far, I suppose the question you have is... what on earth does this have to do with the Hulk?
The answer is simple: that guy at the top - Tyrannus - is Romulus Augustulus.  The last Roman Emperor.
So, why use such an unknown historical personage, rather than - say - a Nero, or Caesar, or Marc Anthony?  Ah, that's the beauty of the Silver Age.   You might as well ask why a supervillain called the Conquistador (with his real name being "Orlando Furio") decided to base his world conquest operations in Dunfee, Illinois.

You would think that he'd be based in Florida, right?