“On the last, cold day of December in the dying year we count as 406, the river Rhine froze solid, providing the natural bridge that hundreds of thousands of hungry men, women, and children had been waiting for. They were the barbari-to the Romans an undistinguished, matted mass of Others, not terrifying, just troublemakers, annoyances, things one would rather not have to deal with – non-Romans…What set them on the move was agriculture, which they had learned from their Roman neighbors. As the barbarian societies to the north of the empire turned from the nomadic ways for the hunter for to the settled ways of the farmer, a seasonally predictable store of grain caused the inevitable population explosion.” “The citizens of the City of Rome, therefore, could not believe it when toward the end of the first decade of the fifth century, they woke to find Alaric, king of the Visigoths, and all his forces parked at their gates.” [purchase How the Irish Saved Civilization]
March 9, 2005, 1:02 pm
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