Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
"No one seems to have recorded much of anything that Severus did. He was simply another one of Ricimer’s faces, and he only remained in place for four years. In 465, he died in Rome, either of sickness or of poison, and for eighteen months Ricimer did not bother to push for the appointment of another emperor. The idea of a legitimate Roman emperor in the west was suddenly revealed for what it was: a myth which helped the Romans pretend that a disintegrating realm, now consisting of little more than the peninsula of Italy, still had some vital connection with the glory of the past; a useful fiction which disguised the truth that to be Roman and to be barbarian were now one and the same." [Bauer: Medieval World, p. 135]