To cure this sickness of population the Roman rulers knew no other way than to dose it with barbarian vigour.  Just a small injection to begin with and then more and more till in the end the blood that flowed in its veins was not Roman but barbarian.  In came the Germans to settle the frontier, to till the fields, to enlist first in the auxiliaries and then in the legions, to fill the great offices of state.  The army is barbarized, and a modern writer, Mr Moss, has quoted most effectively the complaint of the Egyptian mother clamouring to get back her son who (as she says) has gone off with the barbarians—­he means that he has enlisted in the Roman legions.  The legions are barbarized and they barbarize the Emperor.  For them he is no longer the majestic embodiment of law, he is their leader, their Fuehrer, and they raise him on their shields.  And side by side with the barbarization of the army goes the barbarization of civil manners too.  In 397 Honorius has to pass an edict forbidding the wearing of German fashions within the precincts of Rome.  And in the end, half barbarian themselves, they have only barbarians to defend them against barbarism.

Such was the general picture of the great ruin of civilization amidst which the Romans of the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries lived.  What then did it feel like to live at a time when civilization was going down before the forces of barbarism?  Did people realize what was happening?  Did the gloom of the Dark Ages cast its shadow before?  It so happens that we can answer these questions very clearly if we fix our eyes on one particular part of the Empire, the famous and highly civilized province of Gaul.  We can catch the decline at three points because in three consecutive centuries, Gallo-Roman writers have left us a picture of their life and times.  In the fourth century we have Ausonius, in the fifth Sidonius Apollinarius, in the sixth Gregory of Tours and Fortunatus, a stranger from Italy, who made his home in Poitiers.  They show us Auvergne and the Bordelais in the evening light.  The fourth, the fifth, and the sixth centuries—­going, going, gone!

2.  AUSONIUS

Going!  This is the world of Ausonius, south-western France in the latter half of the fourth century, ’an Indian summer between ages of storm and wreckage’.  Ausonius himself is a scholar and a gentleman, the friend alike of the pagan Symmachus and of St Paulinus of Nela.  He is for thirty years professor of rhetoric in the university of Bordeaux, for some time tutor to a prince, praetorian prefect of Gaul, consul, and in his last years just an old man contentedly living on his estates.  His most famous poem is a description of the Moselle, which for all its literary affectations evokes most magically the smiling countryside which was the background of his life.  High above the river on either bank stand the villas and country houses, with their courts and lawns and pillared porticos, and the hot baths from which, if you will, you can