patronage of some senatorial landholder and became his tenants. And he did
not hesitate to afford them an illegal protection against the local
authorities. Complaints by the latter to higher officials secured little
redress for they were themselves proprietors and sided with those of their
own class. The power of the state was thus nullified by its chief servants
and the landed aristocracy became the heirs of the empire.

*Resume.* The transformation which society underwent during the empire may
be aptly described as the transition from a regime of individual
initiative to a regime of status, that is, from one in which the position
of an individual in society was mainly determined by his own volition to
one in which this was fixed by the accident of his birth. The population
of the empire was divided into a number of sharply defined castes, each of
which was compelled to play a definite role in the life of the state. The
sons of senators, soldiers, _curiales_, _corporati_, and _coloni_ had to
follow in their fathers' walks of life, and each sought to escape from the
tasks to which he was born. In the eyes of the government _collegiati_,
_curiales_, and _coloni_ existed solely to pay taxes for the support of
the bureaucracy and the army. The consequence was the attempted flight of
the population to the army, civil service, the church or the wilderness.
Private industry languished, commerce declined, the fields lay untilled; a
general feeling of hopelessness paralyzed all initiative. And when the
barbarians began to occupy the provinces they encountered no national
resistance; rather were they looked upon as deliverers from the burdensome
yoke of Rome.

CHAPTER XXIII

THE GERMANIC OCCUPATION OF ITALY AND THE WESTERN PROVINCES: 395-493 A. D.

I. GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE PERIOD

*The partition of the empire.* With the death of Theodosius the Great the
empire passed to his sons, Arcadius a youth of eighteen, whom he had left
in Constantinople, and Honorius a boy of eleven, whom he had designated as
the Augustus for the West. However, in the East the government was really
in the hands of Rufinus, the pretorian prefect of Illyricum, while an even
greater influence was exercised in the West by Stilicho, the Vandal master
of the soldiers, whom Theodosius had selected as regent for the young
Honorius. The rivalry of these two ambitious men, and the attempt of