has the triumph of a hostile rule in Africa and Spain spelt disaster to
our civilization.

But if the gradualness of this process misled the Romans there were
other and equally potent reasons for their blindness. Most potent of all
was the fact that they mistook entirely the very nature of civilization
itself. All of them were making the same mistake. People who thought
that Rome could swallow barbarism and absorb it into her life without
diluting her own civilization; the people who ran about busily saying
that the barbarians were not such bad fellows after all, finding good
points in their regime with which to castigate the Romans and crying
that except ye become as little barbarians ye shall not attain
salvation; the people who did not observe in 476 that one half of the
Respublica Romanorum had ceased to exist and nourished themselves on the
fiction that the barbarian kings were exercising a power delegated from
the Emperor. All these people were deluded by the same error, the belief
that Rome (the civilization of their age) was not a mere historical fact
with a beginning and an end, but a condition of nature like the air they
breathed and the earth they tread _Ave Roma immortalis_, most
magnificent most disastrous of creeds!

The fact is that the Romans were blinded to what was happening to them
by the very perfection of the material culture which they had created.
All around them was solidity and comfort, a material existence which was
the very antithesis of barbarism. How could they foresee the day when
the Norman chronicler would marvel over the broken hypocausts of
Caerleon? How could they imagine that anything so solid might
conceivably disappear? Their roads grew better as their statesmanship
grew worse and central heating triumphed as civilization fell.