Whatever were the real causes of the downfall of the ancient civilization, its immediate instrument was the fury of the barbarian invasions, directed again and again against the institutions in which it was embodied. First one came down upon the devoted Empire, and then another; and “that which the palmer worm left, the locust ate; and what the locust left, the mildew destroyed.” Nay, this succession of assaults did not merely carry on and finish the process of destruction, but rather undid the promise and actual prospect of recovery. In the interval between blow and blow, there was a direct tendency to a revival of what had been trodden down, and a restoration of what had been defaced; and that, not only from any such reaction as might take place in the afflicted population itself, when the crisis was over, but from the incipient domestication of the conqueror, and the introduction of a new and vigorous element into the party and cause of civilization. The fierce soldier was vanquished by the captive of his sword and bow. The beauty of the southern climate, the richness of its productions, the material splendour of its cities, the majesty of the imperial organization, the spontaneous precision of a routine administration, the influence of religion upon the imagination and the affections, antiquity, rule, name, prescription, and territory, presented to him in visible and recognized forms,—in a word, the conservative power proper to establishments,—awed, overcame, and won, the sensitive and noble savage. “Order is heaven’s first law,” and bears upon it the impress of divinity; and it has an especial power over those minds which have had least experience of it. The Goth not only took pay, and sought refuge, from the Empire, but, still more, when, instead of dependent, he was lord and master, he found himself absorbed into and assimilated with the civilization, upon which he had violently thrust himself. Had he been left in possession, great revolutions certainly, but not dissolution, would have been the destiny of the social framework; and the tradition of science and of the arts of life would have been unbroken.
Thus, in the midst of the awful events which were then in progress, there were intervals of respite and of hope. The day of wrath seemed to be passing away; things began to look up, and the sun was on the point of coming out again. Statesmen, who watched the signs of the times, perhaps began to say, that at last they did think that the worst was over, and that there were good grounds for looking hopefully at the state of affairs. Adolphus, the successor of Alaric, took on himself the obligations of a Roman general, assumed the Roman dress, accepted the Emperor’s sister in marriage, and opposed in arms the fiercer barbarians who had overrun Spain. The Sons of Theodoric the Visigoth were taught Virgil and Roman Law in the schools of Gaul. Theodoric, the Ostrogoth, anxiously preserved the ancient monuments of Rome, and ornamented the cities of Italy with new edifices; he revived agriculture, promoted commerce, and patronized literature. But the Goth was not to retain the booty which the Roman had been obliged to relinquish; he had soon, in company with his former foe, to repel the Vandal, the Hun, or the Frank; or, weakened from within, to yield to the younger assailants who were to succeed him. Then the whole work of civilization had to begin again—if indeed there was to be a new beginning; or rather there was not life enough left in its poor remains, to vivify the fresh mass of barbarism which fell heavily upon it, or even to save itself from a final extinction. As great Cæsar fell, not under one, but under twenty strokes; so it was only by many a cleaving, many a shattering blow, “scalpri frequentis ictibus et tunsione plurimâ,” that the existing fabric of the old world, to which Cæsar, more than any other, had given name and form, was battered down. It was the accumulation, the reiteration of calamities, in every quarter and through a long period, by “the rain falling, and the floods coming, and the winds blowing and breaking upon that house,” that it fell, “and great was the fall thereof.”
The judgments of God were upon the earth, and “the clouds returned after the rain;” and as a thunder cloud careers around the sky, and condenses suddenly here or there, and repeats its violence when it seems to have been spent, so was it with the descent of the North upon the South. There was scarcely a province of the great Empire, but twice or thrice had to sustain attack, invasion, or occupation, from the barbarian. Till the termination of the reign of the Antonines, for a hundred and fifty years, the long peace continued, which the Prince of Peace brought with Him; then a fitful century of cloud and sunshine, hope and fear, suspense and affliction; till at length, just at the middle of the third century of our era, the trumpet sounded, and the time of visitation began. The tremendous period opened in a great pestilence, and in an eruption of the barbarians both on the East and on the West. The pestilence lasted for fifteen years; and, though sooner brought to an end than that more awful pestilence in St. Gregory’s day with which the season of judgment closed, yet in that fifteen years it made its way into every region and city of the Empire. Many cities were emptied; Rome at one time lost 5,000 inhabitants daily, Alexandria lost half her population. As to the barbarians, the Franks on the West descended into Spain; and the Goths on the East into Asia Minor.