Meanwhile, the size of the barbarian groupings had greatly increased since Caesar’s legions first encountered Germania. No longer scattered into dozens of small tribes, the Goths and others had gradually consolidated into mobile ‘supergroups’ that could field 10,000 to 30,000 warriors each. Heather argues that this process of political consolidation was in fact made possible by the Roman empire itself: trade with barbarian tribes made them richer, while access to Roman weapons and better awareness of the rewards at stake led chiefs to amalgamate their clans by force and intimidation, until by the 4th century the tribes had developed into semi-sophisticated and populous client kingdoms. The Huns may have set it swinging, but the hammer that smashed the empire was inadvertently forged by the empire itself.
Most of this is convincing, but not all of it. Even if the empire had only a moderate number of troops available, it wasn’t exactly ‘overwhelmed by a deluge of barbarians’, as Gibbon put it: the barbarians arrived group by group, separated by months or years. Surely a healthy Western empire would have rallied its field armies and defeated each of the war bands in turn? Yet from 406 to 409 the barbarians were able to invade both Gaul and then Spain without any centrally co-ordinated opposition being offered. If the Romans were distracted by dealing with various usurpers (which they were, the rebellion of Constantine III in Britain and Gaul being the most serious of these), then the empire suffered from, at minimum, a fatal political flaw. Perhaps even more significant, there must have been a perception of Roman weakness among the barbarians, because the fact is that many Germanic tribes decided that the Huns were more to be feared than the Romans.
Heather stubbornly rejects the word ‘weaknesses’, but he admits to the empire’s ‘limitations’; among them, a chronic political uncertainty that generated brief periods of stability ‘punctuated by periods of brutal infighting, often ending in civil war’. This was the case from the beginning, and thus does not represent ‘decline’. But in rightly opposing the declinist thesis, Heather and Ward-Perkins have left us with a startling new image: that of an imperial colossus that conquered or dominated all of its neighbours for 500 years — until its neighbours grew strong too, discovered its pre-existing vulnerabilities... and pushed it over.
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