CONCLUSION

These were the men who lived through the centuries of Roman fall and Barbarian triumph, and who by virtue of their elevated position, their learning, and talents, should have seen, if not foretold, the course of events.  And yet as one contemplates the world of Ausonius and Sidonius (for by the time of Gregory of Tours it was already dead) one is, I think, impelled to ask oneself the question why they were apparently so blind to what was happening.  The big country houses go on having their luncheon and tennis parties, the little professors in the universities go on giving their lectures and writing their books; games are increasingly popular and the theatres are always full.  Ausonius has seen the Germans overrun Gaul once, but he never speaks of a danger that may recur.  Sidonius lives in a world already half barbarian, yet in the year before the Western Empire falls he is still dreaming of the consulship for his son.  Why did they not realize the magnitude of the disaster that was befalling them?  This is indeed a question almost as absorbing as the question why their civilization fell, for au fond it is perhaps the same question.  Several answers may be suggested in explanation.

In the first place the process of disintegration was a slow one, for the whole tempo of life was slow and what might take decades in our own time took centuries then.  It is only because we can look back from the vantage point of a much later age that we can see the inexorable pattern which events are forming, so that we long to cry to these dead people down the corridor of the ages, warning them to make a stand before it is too late, hearing no answering echo, ‘Physician, heal thyself!’ They suffered from the fatal myopia of contemporaries.  It was the affairs of the moment that occupied them; for them it was the danger of the moment that must be averted and they did not recognize that each compromise and each defeat was a link in the chain dragging them over the abyss.

At what point did barbarism within become a wasting disease?  Yet from the first skinclad German taken into a legion to the great barbarian patricians of Italy, making and unmaking emperors, the chain is unbroken.  At what point in the assault from without did the attack become fatal?  Was it the withdrawal from Dacia in 270—­allow the barbarians their sphere of influence in the east of Europe, fling them the last-won recruit to Romania and they will be satiated and leave the west alone?  Was it the settlement of the Goths as foederati within the Empire in 382 and the beginning of that compromise between the Roman empire and the Germans which, as Bury says, masked the transition from the rule of one to the rule of the other, from federate states within the Empire to independent states replacing it?  Was this policy of appeasement the fatal error?  Was it the removal of the legions from Britain, a distant people (as a Roman senator might