First the victories of Claudius and Aurelian, and then the statesmanship of Constantine, had stayed for a century the tide of Northern war, but now the Empire was again reduced to fight for its existence.  Its rulers seemed to understand the crisis.  The East was drained of all available troops, and Sebastian the Manichee, the old enemy of Athanasius, was placed in command.  Gratian hurried Thraceward with the Gaulish legions, and at last Valens thought it time to leave his pleasant home at Antioch for the field of war.  Evil omens beset his march, but no omen could be worse than his own impulsive rashness.  With a little prudence, such a force as he had gathered round the walls of Hadrianople was an overmatch for any hordes of barbarians.  But Valens determined to storm the Gothic camp without waiting for his Western colleague.  Rugged ground and tracts of burning grass delayed his march, so that it was long past noon before he neared the line of waggons, later still before the Gothic trumpet sounded.  But the Roman army was in hopeless rout at sundown.  The Goths came down ‘like a thunderbolt on the mountain tops,’ and all was lost.  Far into the night the slaughtering went on.  Sebastian fell, the Emperor was never heard of more, and full two-thirds of the Roman army perished in a scene of unequalled horror since the butchery of Cannae.

[Sidenote:  Results of the battle.]

Beneath that crushing blow the everlasting Empire shook from end to end.  The whole power of the East had been mustered with a painful effort to the struggle, and the whole power of the East had been shattered in a summer’s day.  For the first time since the days of Gallienus, the Empire could place no army in the field.  But Claudius and Aurelian had not fought in vain, nor were the hundred years of respite lost.  If the dominion of Western Europe was transferred for ever to the Northern nations, the walls of Constantinople had risen to bar their eastward march, and Christianity had shown its power to awe their boldest spirits.  The Empire of the Christian East withstood the shock of Hadrianople—­only the heathen West sank under it.  When once the old barriers of civilization on the Danube and the Rhine were broken through, the barbarians poured in for centuries like a flood of mighty waters overflowing.  Not till the Northman and the Magyar had found their limit at the siege of Paris [Sidenote:  888.] and the battle of the Lechfeld [Sidenote:  955.] could Europe feel secure.  The Roman Empire and the Christian Church alone rode out the storm which overthrew the ancient world.  But the Christian Church was founded on the ever-living Rock, the Roman Empire rooted deep in history.  Arianism was a thing of yesterday and had no principle of life, and therefore it vanished in the crash of Hadrianople.  The Homoean supremacy had come to rest almost wholly on imperial misbelief.  The mob of the capital might be in its favour, and the virtues of isolated bishops