the storm had not yet come. Storms, indeed, had come; but they had
been partial and local. One cannot look into the pages of Gibbon,
without seeing that the normal condition of the empire was one of
revolt, civil war, invasion--Pretenders, like Carausius and Allectus
in Britain, setting themselves up as emperors for awhile--Bands of
brigands, like the Bagaudae of Gaul, and the Circumcelliones of
Africa, wandering about, desperate with hunger and revenge, to slay
and pillage--Teutonic tribes making forays on the frontier, enlisted
into the Roman armies, and bought off, or hired to keep back the
tribes behind them, and perish by their brethren's swords.

What kept the empire standing, paradoxical as it may seem, was its
own innate weakness. From within, at least, it could not be
overthrown. The masses were too crushed to rise. Without unity,
purpose, courage, they submitted to inevitable misery as to rain and
thunder. At most they destroyed their own children from poverty, or,
as in Egypt, fled by thousands into the caves and quarries, and
turned monks and hermits; while the upper classes, equally without
unity or purpose, said each to himself, 'Let us eat and drink, for
to-morrow we die.'

The state of things at Rome, and after the rise of Byzantium under
Constantine at Byzantium likewise, was one altogether fantastic,
abnormal, utterly unlike anything that we have seen, or can imagine
to ourselves without great effort. I know no better method of
illustrating it, than quoting, from Mr. Sheppard's excellent book,
The Fall of Rome and the Rise of New Nationalities, a passage in
which he transfers the whole comi-tragedy from Italy of old to
England in 1861.