THE EMPIRE AND THE BARBARIANSmoral factors or individuals, we need to be fully aware how far such judge-
ments have been conditioned by the education and cultural background of
the writers.
The erosion of the westLate antiquity was a time of profound change, and if the impact of the bar-
barians was at times a matter of military confl ict, it was also characterized
by a gradual movement and seepage of new peoples into the former impe-
rial territories. Even if we give up the old-established model of enormous
numbers of invaders swamping the existing population, the effects of these
changes were fundamental. No state in history can survive unchanged for
ever; all are dependent on external factors as well as internal ones and so it
was with Rome.^69 Since the reasons for this continuous migration of northern
peoples remain obscure, one might be tempted to conclude that the volumi-
nous historical literature on ‘decline and fall’ has in fact failed in its attempt
to explain the end of the Roman empire in the west. But simple explanations
are always inadequate for complex historical change. The negative attitudes
of the Romans themselves towards barbarians, and their own tendency to see
the problem in very black and white terms contributed largely to the problems
and made serious integration and acculturation of barbarians more diffi cult.
At the same time the process of barbarian settlement in the western prov-
inces, whether ad hoc or offi cially encouraged, and the recruitment of barbar-
ian troops in the Roman army, brought profound changes to social, economic
and military structures which were in many cases already precarious, the nature
of which was not readily understood by contemporaries and which they had
few means of controlling. It was not a matter simply of invasion or confl ict,
but of development and dynamic relations. But we must also remember that
the east in the fi fth century, even while undergoing similar processes to those
in the west, and facing similar dangers, supported a strengthened civilian gov-
ernment and increasingly prosperous economy, and kept its administrative
and military structures suffi ciently in place to be able to launch offensive wars
in the west on a large scale under Justinian; this fact alone should be enough
to make us remember the critical importance of context and local differences
in explaining historical change.