As Gibbon implied, Toynbee affirmed, and everyone else widely believes, they epitomized the “external” dimension of the fall of the empire. This perception is obviously true inasmuch as barbarians are, by definition, foreigners. Yet to acknowledge the ethnic or cultural distinctiveness of barbarians is not necessarily to maintain – as many historians have tended to do in recent years – that the Roman Empire, or part of it, was overcome by pressure from outside its borders. The dualism of internal and external causation has its classic statement in Polybius’s meditation on the fall of states, written in the second century B.C.: “And it is also all too evident that ruin and change are hanging over everything. The necessity of nature is enough to convince us of this. Now there are two ways in which any type of state may die. One is the ruin which comes from outside; the other, in contrast, is the internal crisis.
Posted on: Sat, 21 Sep 2013 17:03:57 +0000
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