d 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 have said) of whom
we know nothing? Or was it that fatal combination of Spain and Africa,
when the Vandals ensconced themselves in both provinces by 428 and the
Vandal fleet (with Majorca and the islands for its bases) cut off Rome
from her corn supplies and broke the backbone of ancient civilization,
which was the Mediterranean sea? Not o