THE BARBARIAN INVASIONS 93 where Roman culture had the strongest hold in the fifth century. A vivid picture is drawn for us of the wreck and ruin of H the ancient world by Salvian, a Christian clergyman of the time. He holds that the Roman world richly Salvian ' s deserves the multifold calamities that have be- picture of fallen it, because of the immoral lives of the ls age majority of Christians who are not a whit better than the barbarians, although the latter are ignorant pagans or here- tics who cannot be expected to have as high standards as the orthodox and cultured Christians of the Empire. He charges that, even while cities are being besieged by the barbarians, Christians of long standing get drunk within the walls and that honored Christians who are decrepit with age" continue slaves to gluttony and lasciviousness J when their cities are on the very verge of being sacked. The barbarous Goths are models of chastity compared to the lustful Christians of Aquitania, and the Vandals did away with the public prostitutes of Roman Carthage. " Nothing is left to us of the peace and prosperity of our ancestors
- except the crimes that have ruined that prosperity."
j Salvian's moral indignation is perhaps somewhat over- drawn ; his language is very rhetorical ; and his sweeping charges of universal immorality are probably exaggerated, and partly due to his prejudice against circuses and thea- ters, which Christian society had generally retained from the pagan past. But he seems well informed and sometimes speaks with the assurance of personal experience, and many of his statements are corroborated from other sources. He tells us how fathers, in order to get a little protection for themselves, give up their property to the great and power- ful, so that their sons lose their inheritance and have no lands. Yet the government still holds them liable to taxa- tion. These and many others who have fled from their lands to escape invaders or tax-collectors, have no course left but to become the coloni of rich landowners, losing their liberty as w ell as their property and becoming transformed from men into swine as if by the wand of Circe. He himself,
