CHAPTER VI
THE BARBARIC DISRUPTION OF THE EMPIRE[1]
The Latinizing of northern Italy, Spain, and Gaul was part of the expansion of Roman dominion. Throughout these lands, alien peoples submitted to the Roman order and acquired new traits from the training of its discipline. Voluntarily or under compulsion they exchanged their institutions and customs for those of Roman Italy, and their native tongues for Latin. The education and culture of the upper classes became identical with that gained in the schools about the Forum, and Roman literature was the literature which they studied and produced. In a greater or less degree their characters were Latinized, while their traditions were abandoned for those of Rome. Yet, although Romanized and Latinized, these peoples were not Roman. Their culture was acquired, their characters were changed, yet with old traits surviving. In character and faculties, as in geographical position, they were intermediate, and in rôle they were mediatorial. Much of what they had received, and what they had themselves become, they perforce transmitted to the ruder humanity which, as the Empire weakened, pressed in, serving, plundering, murdering, and finally amalgamating with these provincials. The surviving Latin culture passed to the mingled populations which were turning to inchoate Romance nations in Italy, Spain, and Gaul. Likewise Christianity, Romanized, paganized, barbarized, had been accepted through these countries. And now these mingled peoples, these inchoate Romance nations, were to accomplish a broader mediation in extending
- ↑ Cf. Hodgkin, Italy and her Invaders, 8 vols.; Villari, The Barbarian Invasions of Italy, 2 vols.
