nomic cohesion and was menaced by the barbarians
who were in the end to overwhelm it. The territory of the Roman Empire
had at its height stretched from the lands bordering the North Sea to
the lands on the northern fringes of the Sahara, and from the Atlantic
coast of Europe to the central Asiatic Steppes; it comprised most of the
regions of the former Hellenic, Iranian, and Phoenician empires, and it
either ruled or kept in check great clusters of peoples and
principalities beyond its Gallic and north African frontiers. From these
farthest frontiers Rome of the fourth century had retreated and was
still retreating.

Within its frontiers great currents of inter-regional commerce had in
earlier centuries flowed along the routes which bound all the provinces
of the Empire to Rome and most of the provinces to each other. But from
the third century onwards the economic unity of the Empire was in
dissolution, and by the fifth century most of the great currents of
inter-regional trade had ceased to flow, and provinces and districts had
been thrown upon themselves and their own resources. And with the wealth
of the provinces reduced, their commerce restricted, the great
provincial cities also declined in population, wealth, political power.

Yet to its very last days the Empire endeavoured to defend its frontiers
against the converging barbarians. Not only did the Barbarian Conquests,
like all conquests, threaten destruction and ruin, but the way of life
the barbarians stood for was the very denial of what Roman civilization
had been, though alas, was gradually ceasing to be.

However, it was not in material things, that the contemporaries found,
or should have found the sharpest conflict between Rome and the
barbarian prospects before it. Above all Roman civilization was a
civilization of the mind. It had behind it a long tradition of thought
and of intellectual achievement, the legacy of Greece, to which it had
in turn made its own contribution. The Roman world was a world of
schools and universities, writers, and builders. The barbarian world was
a world in which mind was in its infancy and its infancy was long. The
battle sagas of the race, which have all but disappeared or have
survived only as legends worked up in a later age; the few rude laws
which were needed to regulate personal relationships, this was hardly
civilization in the Roman sense. King Chilperic, trying to make verses
in the style of Sedulius, though he