Chapter CCCLXXXIV: Section 7 (12)

"The true Germanic people who occupied Gaul were the
Burgundians, the Visigoths, and the Franks. Many other people,
many other single bands of Vandals, Alani, Suevi, Saxons, &c.,
wandered over its territory; but of these, some only passed
over it, and the others were rapidly absorbed by it; these are
partial incursions which are without any historical
importance. The Burgundians, the Visigoths, and the Franks,
alone deserve to be counted among our ancestors. The
Burgundians definitively established themselves in Gaul
between the years 406 and 413; they occupied the country
between the Jura, the Saone, and the Duranee; Lyons was the
centre of their dominion. The Visigoths, between the years 412
and 450, spread themselves over the provinces bounded by the
Rhone, and even over the left bank of the Rhone to the south
of the Durance, the Loire, and the Pyrenees: their king
resided at Toulouse. The Franks, between the years 481 and
500, advanced in the north of Gaul, and established themselves
between the Rhine, the Scheldt, and the Loire, without
including Brittany and the western portions of Normandy;
Clovis had Soissons and Paris for his capitals. Thus, at the
end of the fifth century, was accomplished the definitive
occupation of the territory of Gaul by the three great German
tribes. The condition of Gaul was not exactly the same in its
various parts, and under the dominion of these three nations.
There were remarkable differences between them. The Franks
were far more foreign, German, and barbarous, than the
Burgundians and the Goths. Before their entrance into Gaul,
these last had had ancient relations with the Romans; they had
lived in the eastern empire, in Italy; they were familiar with
the Roman manners and population. We may say almost as much
for the Burgundians. Moreover, the two nations had long been
Christians. The Franks, on the contrary, arrived from Germany
in the condition of pagans and enemies. Those portions of Gaul
which they occupied became deeply sensible of this difference,
which is described with truth and vivacity in the seventh of
the 'Lectures upon the History of France,' of M. Augustin
Thierry. I am inclined, however, to believe that it was less
important than has been commonly supposed. If I do not err,
the Roman provinces differed more among themselves than did
the nations which had conquered them. You have already seen
how much more civilized was southern than northern Gaul, how
much more thickly covered with population, towns, monuments,
and roads. Had the Visigoths arrived in as barbarous a
condition as that of the Franks, their barbarism would yet
have been far less visible and less powerful in Gallia
Narbonensis and in Aquitania; Roman civilization would much
sooner have absorbed and altered them. This, I believe, is
what happened; and the different effects which accompanied the
three conquests resulted rather from the differences of the
conquered than from that of the conquerors."

_F. Guizot,
History of Civilization,
volume 2, lecture 8._

"The invasion of the barbarians was not like the torrent which
overwhelms, but rather like a slow, persistent force which
undermines, disintegrates, and crumbles. The Germans were not
strangers to the Roman Empire when they began their conquests.
… It is well known that many of the Roman Emperors were
barbarians who had been successful soldiers in the Imperial
army; that military colonies were established on the frontiers
composed of men of various races under the control of Roman
discipline; that the Goths, before they revolted against the
authority of the Emperor, were his chosen troops; that the
great Alaric was a Roman general; that the shores of the
Danube and the Rhine, which marked the limits of the Empire,
were lined with cities which were at the same time Roman
colonies and peopled with men of the Teutonic races. When the
barbarians did actually occupy the territory their movement
seems at first to have been characterized by a strange mixture
of force with a sentiment of awe and reverence for the Roman
name. In Italy and in Gaul they appropriated to themselves
two-thirds of the lands, but they sought to govern their
conquests by means of the Roman law and administration, a
machine which proved in their hands, by the way, a rather
clumsy means of government. They robbed the provincials of all
the movable property they possessed, but the suffering they
inflicted is said not to have been as great as that caused by
the exactions of the Roman taxgatherer. The number of armed
invaders has doubtless been exaggerated. The whole force of
the Burgundian tribe, whose territory, in the southeast of
modern France, extended to the Rhone at Avignon, did not, it
is said, exceed sixty thousand in all, while the armed bands
of Clovis, who changed the destinies not only of Gaul but of
Europe, were not greater than one-tenth of that number.
{2733}
The great change in their life was, as I have said, that they
ceased to be wanderers; they became, in a measure at least,
fixed to the soil; and in contrast with the Romans, they
preferred to live in the country and not in the towns. In this
they followed their Teutonic habits, little knowing what a
mighty change this new distribution of population was to cause
in the social condition of Europe. They retained, too, their
old military organization, and, after attempts more or less
successful to use the Roman administration for the ordinary
purposes of government, they abandoned it, and ruled the
countries they conquered by simple military force, under their
Dukes and Counts, the Romans generally being allowed in their
private relations to govern themselves by the forms of the
Roman law."

_C. J. Stillé,
Studies in Mediæval History,
chapter 2._

"The coming in of the Germans brought face to face the four
chief elements of our civilization: the Greek with its art and
science, much of it for the time forgotten; the Roman with its
political institutions and legal ideas, and furnishing the
empire as the common ground upon which all stood; the
Christian with its religious and moral ideas; and the German
with other political and legal ideas, and with a reinforcement
of fresh blood and life. By the end of the sixth century these
all existed side by side in the nominal Roman empire. It was
the work of the remaining centuries of the middle ages to
unite them into a single organic whole—the groundwork of
modern civilization. But the introduction of the last element,
the Germans, was a conquest—a conquest rendered possible by
the inability of the old civilization any longer to defend
itself against their attack. It is one of the miracles of
history that such a conquest should have occurred, the violent
occupation of the empire by the invasion of an inferior race,
with so little destruction of civilization, with so complete
an absorption, in the end, of the conqueror by the conquered.
It must be possible to point out some reasons why the conquest
of the ancient world by the Germans was so little what was to
be expected. In a single word, the reason is to be found in
the impression which the world they had conquered made upon
the Germans. They conquered it, and they treated it as a
conquered world. They destroyed and plundered what they
pleased, and it was not a little. They took possession of the
land and they set up their own tribal governments in place of
the Roman. And yet they recognized, in a way, even the worst
of them, their inferiority to the people they had overcome.
They found upon every side of them evidences of a command over
nature such as they had never acquired: cities, buildings,
roads, bridges, and ships; wealth and art, skill in mechanics
and skill in government, the like of which they had never
known; ideas firmly held that the Roman system of things was
divinely ordained and eternal; a church strongly organized and
with an imposing ceremonial, officered by venerable and
saintly men, and speaking with an overpowering positiveness
and an awful authority that did not yield before the strongest
barbarian king. The impression which these things made upon
the mind of the German must have been profound. In no other
way can the result be accounted for. Their conquest was a
physical conquest, and as a physical conquest it was complete,
but it scarcely went farther. In government and law there was
little change for the Roman; in religion and language, none at
all. Other things, schools and commercial arrangements for
instance, the Germans would have been glad to maintain at the
Roman level if they had known how. Half unconsciously they
adopted the belief in the divinely founded and eternal empire,
and in a vague way recognized its continuance after they had
overthrown it."

_G. B. Adams,
Civilization During the Middle Ages,
chapter 5._

See, also,
GAUL: A. D. 406-409, 5-8TH CENTURIES,
and 5-10TH CENTURIES.

ROME: A. D. 408-410.
The three sieges and
the sacking of the Imperial city by Alaric.
Death of the Gothic chieftain.

Having rid himself of the great minister and general whose
brain and arm were the only hope of his dissolving empire,
Honorius proceeded to purge his army and the state of
barbarians and heretics. He "removed all who professed
religious opinions different from his own, from every public
office; … and, to complete the purification of his army,
ordered a general massacre of all the women and children of
the barbarians, whom the soldiers in his service had delivered
up as hostages. In one day and hour these innocent victims
were given up to slaughter and their property to pillage.
These hostages had been left in all the Italian cities by the
barbarian confederates, as a guarantee for their fidelity to
Rome; when they learned that the whole had perished, in the
midst of peace, in contempt of all oaths, one furious and
terrific cry of vengeance arose, and 30,000 soldiers, who had
been the faithful servants of the empire, at once passed over
to the camp of Alaric [then in Illyria], and urged him to lead
them on to Rome. Alaric, in language the moderation of which
Honorius and his ministers ascribed to fear, demanded
reparation for the insults offered him, and strict observance
of the treaties concluded with him. The only answer he
obtained was couched in terms of fresh insult, and contained
an order to evacuate all the provinces of the empire." On this
provocation, Alaric crossed the Alps, in October, A. D. 408,
meeting no resistance till he reached Ravenna. He threatened
that city, at first, but the contemptible Emperor of the West
was safe in his fen-fastness, and the Goth marched on to Rome.
He "arrived before Rome [in the autumn of A. D. 408] 619 years
after that city had been threatened by Hannibal. During that
long interval her citizens had never looked down from her
walls upon the banner of an enemy [a foreign invader] waving
in their plains. … Alaric did not attempt to take Rome by
assault: he blockaded the gates, stopped the navigation of the
Tiber, and soon famine took possession of a city which was
eighteen miles in circumference and contained above a million
of inhabitants. … At length, the Romans had recourse to the
clemency of Alaric; and, by means of a ransom of five thousand
pounds of gold and a great quantity of precious effects, the
army was induced to retire into Tuscany." The standard of
Alaric was now joined by 40,000 barbarian slaves, who escaped
from their Italian masters, and by a large reinforcement of
Goths from the Danube, led by the brother-in-law of Alaric,
Ataulphus, or Athaulphus (Adolphus, in its modern form) by
name. The Visigothic king offered peace to the empire if it
would relinquish to him a kingdom in Noricum, Dalmatia and
Venetia, with a yearly payment of gold; in the end his demands
fell until they extended to Noricum, only.
{2734}
But the fatuous court at Ravenna refused all terms, and Alaric
marched back to Rome. Once more, however, he spared the
venerable capital, and sought to attain his ends by requiring
the senate to renounce allegiance to Honorius and to choose a
new emperor. He was obeyed and Priscus Attalus, the præfect of
the city, was formally invested with the purple. This new
Augustus made Alaric and Ataulphus his chief military
officers, and there was peace for a little time. But Attalus,
unhappily, took his elevation with seriousness and did not
recognize the commands that were hidden in the advice which he
got from his Gothic patron. Alaric found him to be a fool and
stripped his purple robe from his shoulders within less than a
year. Then, failing once more to negotiate terms of peace with
the worthless emperor shut up in Ravenna, he laid siege to
Rome for the third time—and the last. "On the 24th of April,
410, the year 1163 from the foundation of the august city, the
Salarian gate was opened to him in the night, and the capital
of the world, the queen of nations, was abandoned to the fury
of the Goths. Yet this fury was not without some tinge of
pity; Alaric granted a peculiar protection to the churches,
which were preserved from all insult, together with their
sacred treasures, and all those who had sought refuge within
their walls. While he abandoned the property of the Romans to
pillage, he took their lives under his protection; and it is
affirmed that only a single senator perished by the sword of
the barbarians. The number of plebeians who were sacrificed
appears not to have been thought a matter of sufficient
importance even to be mentioned. At the entrance of the Goths,
a small part of the city was given up to the flames; but
Alaric soon took precautions for the preservation of the rest
of the edifices. Above all, he had the generosity to withdraw
his army from Rome on the sixth day, and to march it into
Campania, loaded, however, with an immense booty. Eleven
centuries later, the army of the Constable de Bourbon showed
less veneration." Alaric survived the sack of Rome but a few
months, dying suddenly in the midst of preparations that he
made for invading Sicily. He was buried in the bed of the
little river Bisentium, which flows past the town of Cozenza,
the stream being diverted for the purpose and then turned back
to its course.

_J. C. L. de Sismondi,
Fall of the Roman Empire,
chapter 6._

ALSO IN:
_E. Gibbon,
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,
chapter 31._

_T. Hodgkin,
Italy and Her Invaders,
book 1, chapter 7._

ROME: A. D. 409-414.
Invasion of Spain by the Vandals, Sueves and Alans.

See SPAIN: A. D. 409-414.

ROME: A. D. 410.
Abandonment of Britain.

See BRITAIN: A. D. 410.

ROME: A. D. 410-419.
Treaty with the Visigoths.
Their settlement in Aquitaine.
Founding of their kingdom of Toulouse.

See GOTHS (VISIGOTHS): A. D. 410-419.

ROME: A. D. 410-420.
The barbarian attack on Gaul joined by the Franks.

See FRANKS: A. D. 410-420.

ROME: A. D. 412-453.
Mixed Roman and barbarian administration in Gaul.

See GAUL: A. D. 412-453.

ROME: A. D. 423-450.
Death of Honorius.
Reign of Valentinian III. and his mother Placidia.
Legal separation of the Eastern and Western Empires.

The disastrous reign of Honorius, emperor of the West, was
ended by his death in 423. The nearest heir to the throne was
his infant nephew, Valentinian, son of his sister Placidia.
The latter, after being a captive in the hands of the Goths
and after sharing the Visigothic throne for some months, as
wife of king Ataulphus, had been restored to her brother on
her Gothic husband's death. Honorius forced her, then, to
marry his favorite, the successful general, Constantius, whom
he raised to the rank of Augustus and associated with himself
on the throne of the West. But Constantius soon died, leaving
his widow with two children—a daughter and a son. Presently,
on some quarrel with Honorius, Placidia withdrew from Ravenna
and took refuge at Constantinople, where her nephew Theodosius
occupied the Eastern throne. She and her children were there
when Honorius died, and in their absence the Western throne
was usurped by a rebel named John, or Joannes, the Notary, who
reigned nearly two years. With the aid of forces from the
Eastern Empire he was unseated and beheaded and the child
Valentinian was invested with the imperial purple, A. D. 425.
For the succeeding twenty-five years his mother, Placidia,
reigned in his name. As compensation to the court at
Constantinople for the material aid received from it, the rich
province of Dalmatia and the troubled provinces of Pannonia
and Noricum, were now severed from the West and ceded to the
Empire of the East. At the same time, the unity of the Roman
government was formally and finally dissolved. "By a positive
declaration, the validity of all future laws was limited to
the dominions of their peculiar author; unless he should think
proper to communicate them, subscribed with his own hand, for
the approbation of his independent colleague."

_E. Gibbon,
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,
chapter 33._

ALSO IN:
_J. B. Bury,
History of the Later Roman Empire,
chapters 6-8._

ROME: A. D. 428-439.
Conquests of the Vandals in Spain and Africa.

See VANDALS: A. D. 428; and 429-439.

ROME: A. D. 441-446.
Destructive invasion of the Eastern Empire by the Huns.
Cession of territory and payment of tribute to Attila.

See HUNS: A. D. 441-446.

ROME: A. D. 446.
The last appeal from Britain.

See BRITAIN: A. D. 446.

ROME: A. D. 451.
Great invasion of Gaul by the Huns.
Their defeat at Chalons.

See HUNS: A. D. 451.

ROME: A. D. 452.
Attila's invasion of Italy.
The frightful devastation of his hordes.
Origin of Venice.

See HUNS: A. D. 452;
and VENICE: A. D. 452.

ROME: A. D. 455.
Pillage of the city by the Vandals.

"The sufferings and the ignominy of the Roman empire were
increased by a new calamity which happened in the year of
Valentinian's death [murdered by an usurper, Petronius Maximus
A. D. 455]. Eudoxia, the widow of that emperor, who had
afterwards become [through compulsion] the wife of Maximus,
avenged the murder of her first husband by plotting against
her second; reckless how far she involved her country in the
ruin. She invited to Rome Genseric, king of the Vandals, who,
not content with having conquered and devastated Africa, made
every effort to give a new direction to the rapacity of his
subjects, by accustoming them to maritime warfare, or, more
properly speaking, piracy.
{2735}
His armed bands, who, issuing from the shores of the Baltic,
had marched over the half of Europe, conquering wherever they
went, embarked in vessels which they procured at Carthage, and
spread desolation over the coasts of Sicily and Italy. On the
12th of June, 455, they landed at Ostia. Maximus was killed in
a seditious tumult excited by his wife. Defence was
impossible; and, from the 15th to the 29th of June, the
ancient capital of the world was pillaged by the Vandals with
a degree of rapacity and cruelty to which Alaric and the Goths
had made no approach. The ships of the pirates were moored
along the quays of the Tiber, and were loaded with a booty
which it would have been impossible for the soldiers to carry
off by land."

_J. C. L. de Sismondi,
Fall of the Roman Empire,
chapter 8 (volume 1)._

"On the whole, it is clear from the accounts of all the
chroniclers that Gaiseric's [or Genseric's] pillage of Rome,
though insulting and impoverishing to the last degree, was in
no sense destructive to the Queen of cities. Whatever he may
have done in Africa, in Rome he waged no war on architecture,
being far too well employed in storing away gold and silver
and precious stones, and all manner of costly merchandise in
those insatiable hulks which were riding at anchor by Ostia.
Therefore, when you stand in the Forum of Rome or look upon
the grass-grown hill which was once the glorious Palatine,
blame if you like the Ostrogoth, the Byzantine, the Lombard,
above all, the Norman, and the Roman baron of the Middle Ages,
for the heart-breaking ruin that you see there, but leave the
Vandal uncensured, for, notwithstanding the stigma conveyed in
the word 'vandalism,' he is not guilty here."

_T. Hodgkin,
Italy and Her Invaders,
book 3, chapter 2 (volume 2)._

ROME: A. D. 455-476.
Barbarian masters and imperial puppets.
From Count Ricimer to Odoacer.
The ending of the line of Roman Emperors in the West,
called commonly the Fall of the Western Empire.

"After the death of Valentinian III., the unworthy grandson of
the great Theodosius [March 16, A. D. 455], the first thought
of the barbarian chiefs was, not to destroy or usurp the
Imperial name, but to secure to themselves the nomination of
the emperor. Avitus, chosen in Gaul under the influence of the
West Gothic King of Toulouse, Theoderic II., was accepted for
a time as the western emperor, by the Roman Senate and by the
Court of Constantinople. But another barbarian, Ricimer the
Sueve, ambitious, successful, and popular, had succeeded to
the command of the 'federated' foreign bands which formed the
strength of the imperial army in Italy. Ricimer would not be a
king, but he adopted as a settled policy the expedient, or the
insulting jest, of Alaric. … He deposed Avitus, and probably
murdered him. Under his direction, the Senate chose Majorian.
Majorian was too able, too public-spirited, perhaps too
independent, for the barbarian Patrician; Majorian, at a
moment of ill-fortune was deposed and got rid of." After
Majorian, one Severus (A. D. 461-467), and after Severus a
Greek, Anthemius (A. D. 467-472), nominated at Constantinople,
wore the purple at the command of Count Ricimer. When, after
five years of sovereignty, Anthemius quarreled with his
barbarian master, the latter chose a new emperor—the senator
Olybrius—and conducted him with an army to the gates of Rome,
in which the imperial court had once more settled itself.
Anthemius, supported by the majority of the senate and people,
resisted, and Rome sustained a siege of three months. It was
taken by storm, on the 11th of July, A. D. 472, and suffered
every outrage at the hands of the merciless victors. Anthemius
was slain and his enemy, Ricimer, died a few weeks later.
Olybrius followed the latter to the grave in October.
Ricimer's place was filled by his nephew, a refugee Burgundian
king, Gundobad, who chose for emperor an unfortunate officer
of the imperial guard, named Glycerius. Glycerius allowed
himself to be deposed the next year by Julius Nepos and
accepted a bishopric in place of the throne; but later
circumstances gave the emperor-bishop an opportunity to
assassinate his supplanter and he did not hesitate to do so.
By this time, the real power had passed to another barbarian
"patrician" and general, Orestes, former secretary of Attila,
and Orestes proclaimed his own son emperor. To this son "by a
strange chance, as if in mockery of his fortune, had been
given the names of the first king and the first emperor of
Rome, Romulus Augustus, soon turned in derision into the
diminutive 'Augustulus.' But Orestes failed to play the part
of Ricimer. A younger and more daring barbarian adventurer,
Odoacer the Herule, or Rugian, bid higher for the allegiance
of the army. Orestes was slain, and the young emperor was left
to the mercy of Odoacer. In singular and significant contrast
to the common usage when a pretender fell, Romulus Augustulus
was spared. He was made to abdicate in legal form; and the
Roman Senate, at the dictation of Odoacer, officially
signified to the Eastern emperor, Zeno, their resolution that
the separate Western Empire should cease, and their
recognition of the one emperor at Constantinople, who should
be supreme over West and East. Amid the ruin of the empire and
the state, the dethroned emperor passed his days, in such
luxurious ease as the times allowed, at the Villa of Lucullus
at Misenum; and Odoacer, taking the Teutonic title of king,
sent to the emperor at Constantinople the imperial crown and
robe which were to be worn no more at Rome or Ravenna for more
than three hundred years. Thus in the year 476 ended the Roman
empire, or rather, the line of Roman emperors, in the West."

_R. W. Church,
Beginning of the Middle Ages,
chapter 1._

"When, at Odoacer's bidding, Romulus Augustulus, the boy whom
a whim of fate had chosen to be the last native Cæsar of Rome,
had formally announced his resignation to the senate, a
deputation from that body proceeded to the Eastern court to
lay the insignia of royalty at the feet of the Eastern Emperor
Zeno. The West, they declared, no longer required an Emperor
of its own; one monarch sufficed for the world; Odoacer was
qualified by his wisdom and courage to be the protector of
their state, and upon him Zeno was entreated to confer the
title of patrician and the administration of the Italian
provinces. The Emperor granted what he could not refuse, and
Odoacer, taking the title of King ['not king of Italy, as is
often said'—foot-note], continued the consular office,
respected the civil and ecclesiastical institutions of his
subjects, and ruled for fourteen years as the nominal vicar of
the Eastern Emperor.
{2736}
There was thus legally no extinction of the Western Empire at
all, but only a reunion of East and West. In form, and to some
extent also in the belief of men, things now reverted to their
state during the first two centuries of the Empire, save that
Byzantium instead of Rome was the centre of the civil
government. The joint tenancy which had been conceived by
Diocletian, carried further by Constantine, renewed under
Valentinian I. and again at the death of Theodosius, had come
to an end; once more did a single Emperor sway the sceptre of
the world, and head an undivided Catholic Church."

_J. Bryce,
The Holy Roman Empire,
chapter 3._

ALSO IN:
_T. Hodgkin,
Italy and Her Invaders,
book 3, chapters 4-8._

_J. B. Bury,
History of the Later Roman Empire,
preface and book 3, chapter 5 (volume 1)._

ROME: A. D. 476.
Causes of the decay of the Empire
and the significance of its fall in the West.

"Thus in the year 476 ended the Roman empire, or rather, the
line of Roman emperors, in the West. Thus it had become clear
that the foundations of human life and society, which had
seemed under the first emperors eternal, had given way. The
Roman empire was not the 'last word' in the history of the
world; but either the world was in danger of falling into
chaos, or else new forms of life were yet to appear, new ideas
of government and national existence were to struggle with the
old for the mastery. The world was not falling into chaos.
Europe, which seemed to have lost its guidance and its hope of
civilization in losing the empire, was on the threshold of a
history far grander than that of Rome, and was about to start
in a career of civilization to which that of Rome was rude and
unprogressive. In the great break-up of the empire in the
West, some parts of its system lasted, others disappeared.
What lasted was the idea of municipal government, the
Christian Church, the obstinate evil of slavery. What
disappeared was the central power, the imperial and universal
Roman citizenship, the exclusive rule of the Roman law, the
old Roman paganism, the Roman administration, the Roman
schools of literature. Part of these revived; the idea of
central power under Charles the Great, and Otto his great
successor; the appreciation of law, though not exclusively
Roman law; the schools of learning. And under these conditions
the new nations—some of mixed races, as in France, Spain, and
Italy; others simple and homogeneous, as in Germany, England,
and the Scandinavian peninsula —begin their apprenticeship of
civilization."

_R. W. Church,
The Beginning of the Middle Ages,
chapter 1._

"The simple facts of the fall of the Empire are these. The
Imperial system had been established … to protect the
frontier. This it did for two centuries with eminent success.
But in the reign of Marcus Aurelius … there occurred an
invasion of the Marcomanni, which was not repulsed without
great difficulty, and which excited a deep alarm and
foreboding throughout the Empire. In the third century the
hostile powers on every frontier began to appear more
formidable. The German tribes, in whose discord Tacitus saw
the safety of the Empire, present themselves now no longer in
separate feebleness, but in powerful confederations. We hear
no more the insignificant names of Chatti and Chauci; the
history of the third century is full of Alemanni, Franks, and
Goths. On the eastern frontier, the long decayed power of the
Parthians now gives place to a revived and vigorous Persian
Empire. The forces of the Empire are more and more taxed to
defend it from these powerful enemies. … It is evident that
the Roman world would not have steadily receded through
centuries before the barbaric, had it not been decidedly
inferior in force. To explain, then, the fall of the Empire,
it is necessary to explain the inferiority in force of the
Romans to the barbarians. This inferiority of the Romans, it
is to be remembered, was a new thing. At an earlier time they
had been manifestly superior. When the region of barbarism was
much larger; when it included warlike and aggressive nations
now lost to it, such as the Gauls; and when, on the other
hand, the Romans drew their armies from a much smaller area,
and organized them much less elaborately, the balance had
inclined decidedly the other way. In those times the Roman
world, in spite of occasional reverses, had on the whole
steadily encroached on the barbaric. … Either, therefore, a
vast increase of power must have taken place in the barbaric
world, or a vast internal decay in the Roman. Now the barbaric
world had actually received two considerable accessions of
force. It had gained considerably, through what influences we
can only conjecture, in the power and habit of co-operation.
As I have said before, in the third century we meet with large
confederations of Germans, whereas before we read only of
isolated tribes. Together with this capacity of confederation
we can easily believe that the Germans had acquired new
intelligence, civilization, and military skill. Moreover, it
is practically to be considered as a great increase of
aggressive force, that in the middle of the fourth century
they were threatened in their original settlements by the
Huns. The impulse of desperation which drove them against the
Roman frontier was felt by the Romans as a new force acquired
by the enemy. But we shall soon see that other and more
considerable momenta must have been required to turn the
scale. … We are forced, … to the conclusion that the Roman
Empire, in the midst of its greatness and civilization, must
have been in a stationary and unprogressive, if not a decaying
condition. Now what can have been the cause of this
unproductiveness or decay? It has been common to suppose a
moral degeneration in the Romans, caused by luxury and
excessive good fortune. To support this it is easy to quote
the satirists and cynics of the imperial time, and to refer to
such accounts as Ammianus gives of the mingled effeminacy and
brutality of the aristocracy of the capital in the fourth
century. But the history of the wars between Rome and the
barbaric world does not show us the proofs we might expect of
this decay of spirit. We do not find the Romans ceasing to be
victorious in the field, and beginning to show themselves
inferior in valor to their enemies. The luxury of the capital
could not affect the army. … Nor can it be said that luxury
corrupted the generals, and through them the army. On the
contrary, the Empire produced a remarkable series of capable
generals. … Whatever the remote and ultimate cause may have
been, the immediate cause to which the fall of the Empire can
be traced is a physical, not a moral, decay.
{2737}
In valor, discipline, and science, the Roman armies remained
what they had always been, and the peasant emperors of
Illyricum were worthy successors of Cincinnatus and Caius
Marius. But the problem was how to replenish those armies. Men
were wanting; the Empire perished for want of men. The proof
of this is in the fact that the contest with barbarism was
carried on by the help of barbarian soldiers. … It must have
been because the Empire could not furnish soldiers for its own
defence, that it was driven to the strange expedient of
turning its enemies and plunderers into its defenders. … Nor
was it only in the army that the Empire was compelled to
borrow men from barbarism. To cultivate the fields whole
tribes were borrowed. From the time of Marcus Aurelius, it was
a practice to grant lands within the Empire, sometimes to
prisoners of war, sometimes to tribes applying for admission.
… The want of any principle of increase in the Roman
population is attested at a much earlier time. In the second
century before Christ, Polybius bears witness to it; and the
returns of the census from the Second Punic War to the time of
Augustus show no steady increase in the number of citizens
that cannot be accounted for by the extension of citizenship
to new classes. … Precisely as we think of marriage, the Roman
of Imperial times thought of celibacy,—that is, as the most
comfortable but the most expensive condition of life. Marriage
with us is a pleasure for which a man must be content to pay;
with the Romans it was an excellent pecuniary investment, but
an intolerably disagreeable one. Here lay, at least in the
judgment of Augustus, the root of the evil. To inquire into
the causes of this aversion to marriage in this place would
lead me too far. We must be content to assume that, owing
partly to this cause and partly to the prudential check of
infanticide, the Roman population seems to have been in
ordinary times almost stationary. The same phenomenon had
shown itself in Greece before its conquest by the Romans.
There the population had even greatly declined; and the shrewd
Polybius explains that it was not owing to war or plague, but
mainly to a general repugnance to marriage, and reluctance to
rear large families, caused by an extravagantly high standard
of comfort. … Perhaps enough has now been said to explain that
great enigma, which so much bewilders the reader of Gibbon;
namely, the sharp contrast between the age of the Autonines
and the age which followed it. A century of unparalleled
tranquillity and virtuous government is followed immediately
by a period of hopeless ruin and dissolution. A century of
rest is followed, not by renewed vigor, but by incurable
exhaustion. Some principle of decay must clearly have been at
work, but what principle? We answer: it was a period of
sterility or barrenness in human beings; the human harvest was
bad. And among the causes of this barrenness we find, in the
more barbarous nations, the enfeeblement produced by the
too-abrupt introduction of civilization, and universally the
absence of industrial habits, and the disposition to
listlessness which belongs to the military character."

_J. R. Seeley,
Roman Imperialism,
pages 47-61._

"At no period within the sphere of historic records was the
commonwealth of Rome anything but an oligarchy of warriors and
slave-owners, who indemnified themselves for the restraint
imposed on them by their equals in the forum by aggression
abroad and tyranny in their households. The causes of its
decline seem to have little connexion with the form of
government established in the first and second centuries. They
were in full operation before the fall of the Republic, though
their baneful effects were disguised and perhaps retarded by
outward successes, by extended conquests, and increasing
supplies of tribute or plunder. The general decline of
population throughout the ancient world may be dated even from
the second century before our era. The last age of the
Republic was perhaps the period of the most rapid exhaustion
of the human race; but its dissolution was arrested under
Augustus, when the population recovered for a time in some
quarters of the empire, and remained at least stationary in
others. The curse of slavery could not but make itself felt
again, and demanded the destined catastrophe. Whatever evil we
ascribe to the despotism of the Cæsars, we must remark that it
was Slavery that rendered political freedom and constitutional
government impossible. Slavery fostered in Rome, as previously
at Athens, the spirit of selfishness and sensuality, of
lawlessness and insolence, which cannot consist with political
equality, with political justice, with political moderation.
The tyranny of the emperors was … only the tyranny of every
noble extended and intensified. The empire became no more than
an ergastulum or barracoon [slave prison] on a vast scale,
commensurate with the dominions of the greatest of Roman
slaveholders. … We have noticed already the pestilence which
befell Italy and many of the provinces in the reign of
Aurelius. There is reason to believe that this scourge was no
common disorder, that it was of a type new at least in the
West, and that, as a new morbific agent, its ravages were more
lasting, as well as more severe, than those of an ordinary
sickness. … At another time, when the stamina of ancient life
were healthier and stronger, such a visitation might possibly
have come and gone, and, however fatal at the moment, have
left no lasting traces; but periods seem to occur in national
existence when there is no constitutional power of rallying
under casual disorders. The sickness which in the youth of the
commonwealth would have dispelled its morbid humours and
fortified its system, may have proved fatal to its advancing
years, and precipitated a hale old age into palsied
decrepitude. The vital powers of the empire possessed no
elasticity; every blow now told upon it with increasing force;
the blows it slowly or impatiently returned were given by the
hands of hired barbarians, not by the strength of its own
right arm. Not sickness alone, but famines, earthquakes, and
conflagrations, fell in rapid succession upon the capital and
the provinces. Such casualties may have occurred at other
periods not less frequently or disastrously; but these were
observed, while the others passed unnoticed, because the
courage of the nation was now broken no less than its physical
vigour, and, distressed and terrified, it beheld in every
natural disorder the stroke of fate, the token of its destined
dissolution. Nor indeed was the alarm unfounded. These
transient faintings and sicknesses were too truly the symptoms
of approaching collapse. The long line of northern frontier,
from Odessus to the island of the Batavi, was skirted by a
fringe of fire, and through the lurid glare loomed the
wrathful faces of myriads, Germans, Scythians, and Sarmatians,
all armed for the onslaught in sympathy or concert."

_C. Merivale,
History of the Romans under the Empire,
chapter 18 (volume 7)._

{2738}

"Under the humane pretext of gratifying the world with a
flattering title, an Antoninus, in one of his edicts, called
by the name of Roman citizens the tributaries of the Roman
empire, those men whom a proconsul might legally torture, flog
with rods, or crush with labour and taxes. Thus the power of
that formerly inviolable title, before which the most
shameless tyranny stopped short, was contradicted; thus
perished that ancient safety-cry which made the executioners
fall back; I am a Roman citizen. From that period Rome no
longer existed; there was a court and provinces: we do not
understand by that word what it now signifies in the vulgar
languages, but what it signified primitively in the Roman
language, a country conquered by arms; we mean to say, that
the primitive distinction between conquering Rome and those it
had conquered, then became established between the men in the
palace and those out of the palace; that Rome itself lived
only for one family, and a handful of courtiers, as formerly
the nations it had conquered had only lived by it. It was then
that the name of subjugated, subjecti, which our language has
corrupted into that of subjects, was transported from the
conquered inhabitants of the East or Gaul, to the victorious
inhabitants of Italy, attached in future to the yoke of a
small number of men, as these had been attached to their yoke;
the property of those men, as well as the others, had been
their property, worthy, in a word, of the degrading title of
subjects, subjecti, which must be taken literally. Such was
the order of things which had been gradually forming since the
time of Augustus; each emperor gloried in hastening the moment
of its perfection; Constantine gave it the finishing stroke.
He effaced the name of Rome from the Roman standards, and put
in its place the symbol of the religion which the empire had
just embraced. He degraded the revered name of the civil
magistrature below the domestic offices of his house. An
inspector of the wardrobe took precedence of the consuls. The
aspect of Rome importuned him; he thought he saw the image of
liberty still engraved on its old walls; fear drove him
thence; he fled to the coasts of Byzantia, and there built
Constantinople, placing the sea as a barrier between the new
city of the Cæsars and the ancient city of the Brutus. If Rome
had been the home of independence, Constantinople was the home
of slavery; from thence issued the dogmas of passive obedience
to the Church and throne; there was but one right—that of the
empire; but one duty—that of obedience. The general name of
citizen, which was equivalent, in language, to men living
under the same law, was replaced by epithets graduated
according to the credit of the powerful or the cowardice of
the weak. The qualifications of Eminence, Royal Highness, and
Reverence, were bestowed on what was lowest and most
despicable in the world. The empire, like a private domain,
was transmitted to children, wives, and sons-in-law; it was
given, bequeathed, substituted; the universe was exhausting
itself for the establishment of the family; taxes increased
immoderately; Constantinople alone was exempted; that
privilege of Roman liberty was the price of its infamy. The
rest of the cities and nations were treated like beasts of
burden, which are used without scruple, flogged when they are
restive, and killed when there is cause to fear them. Witness
the population of Antioch, condemned to death by the pious
Theodosius; and that of Thessalonica, entirely massacred by
him for a tax refused, and an unfortunate creature secured
from the justice of his provosts. Meanwhile savage and free
nations armed against the enslaved world, as if to chastise it
for its baseness. Italy, oppressed by the empire, soon found
pitiless revengers in its heart. Rome was menaced by the
Goths. The people, weary of the imperial yoke, did not defend
themselves. The men of the country, still imbued with the old
Roman manners and religion, those men, the only ones whose
arms were still robust and souls capable of pride, rejoiced to
see among them free men and gods resembling the ancient gods
of Italy. Stilico, the general to whom the empire entrusted
its defence, appeared at the foot of the Alps; he called to
arms, and no one arose; he promised liberty to the slaves, he
lavished the treasures of the fisc; and out of the immense
extent of the empire, he only assembled 40,000 men, the fifth
part of the warriors that Hannibal had encountered at the
gates of free Rome."

_A. Thierry,
Narratives of the Merovingian Era
and Historical Essays, essay 13._

"It was not the division into two empires, nor merely the
power of external enemies, that destroyed the domination of
Rome. Republican Rome had ended in monarchy by the decadence
of her institutions and customs, by the very effect of her
victories and conquests, by the necessity of giving to this
immense dominion a dominus. But after she had begun to submit
to the reality of a monarchy, she retained the worship of
republican forms. The Empire was for a long time a piece of
hypocrisy; for it did not dare to give to its rulers the first
condition of stability, a law of succession. The death of
every emperor was followed by troubles, and the choice of a
master of the world was often left to chance. At length the
monarchy had to be organized, but thenceforth it was absolute,
without restraint or opposition. Its proposed aim was to
exploit the world, an aim which in practice was carried to an
extreme. Hence it exhausted the orbis romanus."

_E. Lavisse,
General View of the Political History of Europe,
chapter 1._

ROME: A. D. 486.
The last Roman sovereignty in Gaul.

See GAUL: A. D. 457-486.

ROME: A. D. 488.
Theodoric the king of the Ostrogoths authorized and
commissioned by the Emperor Zeno to conquer a kingdom in Italy.

See GOTHS (OSTROGOTHS): A. D. 473-488.

ROME: A. D. 488-526.
The Ostrogothic kingdom of Theodoric.

It was in the autumn of the year 488 that Theodoric,
commissioned by the Eastern Emperor, Zeno, to wrest Italy from
Odoacer (or Odovacar), broke up his camp or settlement on the
Danube, in the neighborhood of Sistova, and moved towards the
west. The movement was a national migration—of wives and
children as well as of warriors—and the total number is
estimated at not less than 200,000. Following the course of
the Danube, the Gothic host met with no opposition until it
came to Singidunum, near the junction of the Save. There, on
the banks of a stream called the Ulca, they fought a great
battle with the Gepidæ, who held possession of Pannonia, and
who disputed their advance.
{2739}
Victorious in this encounter, Theodoric pushed on, along the
course of the Save; but the movement of his cumbrous train was
so slow and the hardships of the march so great, that nearly a
year passed before he had surmounted the passes of the Julian
Alps and entered Italy. He found Odoacer waiting to give him
battle on the Isonzo; but the forces of the latter were not
courageous enough or not faithful enough for their duty, and
the invading Goths forced the passage of the stream on the
28th of August, 489. Odoacer retreated to Verona, followed by
Theodoric, and there, on the 30th of September, a great and
terrible battle was fought, from which not many of the Rugian
and Herulian troops of Odoacer escaped. Odoacer, himself, with
some followers, got clear of the rout and made their way to
the safe stronghold of Ravenna. For a time, Odoacer's cause
seemed abandoned by all who had supported him; but it was a
treacherous show of submission to the victor. Theodoric, ere
long, found reactions at work which recruited the forces of
his opponent and diminished his own. He was driven to retreat
to Ticinum (Pavia) for the winter. But having solicited and
received aid from the Visigoths of southern Gaul, he regained,
in the summer of 490 (August 11) in a battle on the Adda, not
far from Milan, all the ground that he had lost, and more.
Odoacer was now driven again into Ravenna, and shut up within
its walls by a blockade which was endured until February in
the third year afterwards (493), when famine compelled a
surrender. Theodoric promised life to his rival and respect to
his royal dignity; but he no sooner had the old self-crowned
king Odoacer in his power than he slew him with his own hand.
Notwithstanding this savagery in the inauguration of it, the
reign of the Ostrogothic king in Italy appears to have been,
on the whole, wise and just, with more approximation to the
chivalric half-civilization of later mediæval times than
appears in the government of any of his Gothic or German
neighbors. "Although Theoderic did not care to run the risk of
offending both his Goths and the Court of Constantinople by
calling himself Cæsar or Emperor, yet those titles would have
exactly expressed the character of his rule—so far at least as
his Roman subjects were concerned. When the Emperor Anastasius
in 497 acknowledged him as ruler of Italy, he sent him the
purple cloak and the diadem of the Western emperors; and the
act showed that Anastasius quite understood the difference
between Theodoric's government and that of Odovacar. In fact,
though not in name, the Western empire had been restored with
much the same institutions it had under the best of the
Cæsars." The reign of Theodoric, dating it, as he did, from
his first victory on Italian soil, was thirty-seven years in
duration. When he died, August 30, A. D. 526, he left to his
grandson, Athalaric, a kingdom which extended, beyond Italy,
over Rhætia, Noricum, Pannonia and Illyricum (the modern
Austrian empire south and west of the Danube), together with
Provence in southern Gaul and a district north of it embracing
much of modern Dauphiné. His government extended, likewise,
over the Visigothic kingdom, as guardian of its young king,
his grandson. But this great kingdom of the heroic Ostrogoth
was not destined to endure. One who lived the common measure
of life might have seen the beginning of it and the end. It
vanished in one quarter of a century after he who founded it
was laid away in his great tomb at Ravenna, leaving nothing to
later history which can be counted as a survival of it,—not
even a known remnant of the Ostrogothic race.

_H. Bradley,
Story of the Goths,
chapters 16-20._

"Theodoric professed a great reverence for the Roman
civilization. He had asked for and obtained from the Emperor
Anastasius the imperial insignia that Odovakar had
disdainfully sent back to Constantinople, and he gave up the
dress of the barbarians for the Roman purple. Although he
lived at Ravenna he was accustomed to consult the Roman
senate, to whom he wrote: 'We desire, conscript fathers, that
the genius of liberty may look with favor upon your assembly.'
He established a consul of the West, three prætorian prefects,
and three dioceses,—that of northern Italy, that of Rome, and
that of Gaul. He retained the municipal government, but
appointed the decurions himself. He reduced the severity of
the taxes, and his palace was always open to those who wished
to complain of the iniquities of the judges. … Thus a
barbarian gave back to Italy the prosperity which she had lost
under the emperors. The public buildings, aqueducts, theatres,
and baths were repaired, and palaces and churches were built.
The uncultivated lands were cleared and companies were formed
to drain the Pontine marshes and the marshes of Spoleto. The
iron mines of Dalmatia and a gold mine in Bruttii were worked.
The coasts were protected from pirates by numerous flotillas.
The population increased greatly. Theodoric, though he did not
know how to write, gathered around him the best literary merit
of the time,—Boethius, the bishop Ennodius, and Cassiodorus.
The latter, whom he made his minister, has left us twelve
books of letters. Theodoric seems in many ways like a first
sketch of Charlemagne. Though himself an Arian, he respected
the rights of the Catholics from the first. … When, however,
the Emperor Justin I. persecuted the Arians in the East, he
threatened to retaliate, and as a great commotion was observed
among his Italian subjects, he believed that a conspiracy was
being formed against himself. … The prefect Symmachus and his
son-in-law, Boethius, were implicated. Theodoric confined them
in the tower of Pavia, and it was there that Boethius wrote
his great work, The Consolations of Philosophy. They were both
executed in 525. Theodoric, however, finally recognized their
innocence, and felt such great regret that his reason is said
to have been unbalanced and that remorse hastened his end."

_V. Duruy,
History of the Middle Ages,
book 1, chapter 3._