He recurs frequently to the subject in isolated
passages, but never collects the facts, into a focus, with a view of
deducing their real meaning. Yet the point is second to none in
importance. Its elucidation throws more light on the fall of Rome than
any other considerations whatever. The question is, Whether Rome was
conquered by the barbarians in the ordinary sense of the word,
conquered. We know that it was not, and Gibbon knew that it was not.
Yet perhaps most people rise from reading his book with an impression
that the empire succumbed to the invasion of the barbarians, as
Carthage, Gaul, and Greece had succumbed to the invasion of the
Romans; that the struggle lay between classic Rome and outside
uncivilised foes; and that after two centuries of hard fighting the
latter were victorious. The fact that the struggle lay between
barbarians, who were within and friendly to the empire, and barbarians
who were without it, and hostile rather to their more fortunate
brethren, than to the empire which employed them, is implicitly
involved in Gibbon's narrative, but it is not explicitly brought out.
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