ABSTRACT
ALTHOUGH, until the time of the great barbarian invasions, the frontiers remained inviolate, domestic peace was rarely undisturbed. It was only to be more or less assured under Augustus and the Antonines. The flatterers of Antoninus Pius said in the middle of the second century, in the best years of his reign, that “the universe is making merry and the earth is an immense pleasure-garden” and an annalist found it possible to write that ” all the provinces are prospering” without doing violence to the truth: but, throughout the four centuries which we are considering here, the princes to whom such homage could be rendered were indeed rare. Factors of disturbance and causes for anxiety multiplied incessantly from the middle of the reign of Marcus Aurelius, for work could not be carried on and trade could not develop in the prodigious turmoil of civil wars, devastations and persecutions which visited the Empire in the phase of terror that lasted until the final partition. The internecine struggles, the clash of arms, seditions and the pillaging of towns paralysed production and the economic crisis itself contributed with inevitable logic to turn the Roman world into a ready prey for all aggressors.
