ABSTRACT
The most famous remains the classic work by the English antiquarian, Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and fall of the Roman Empire, published in six volumes between 1776 and 1788. Gibbon's fame, however, rests entirely on his prose, for his explanation that Christianity sapped the martial spirit, vigor, and personnel of Rome is almost universally rejected these days by historians. In addition to emphasizing continuity and gradual change, the modern version of the migration thesis is certainly a more politically correct way to portray Germans than as berserk-eyed, invariably destructive "barbarians". Ward-Perkins emphasized that there was little love lost between the Romans and the Germanic "barbarians". While the Roman historians, the pagan Tacitus and the Christian Salvian did give somewhat flattering depictions of the Germans, the purpose of this was primarily to shock their civilized readers by holding up the better moral behavior of the "barbarians".
