It had behind it a long tradition of thought and of intellectual achievement, the legacy of Greece, to which it had in turn made its own contribution.

The Roman world was a world of schools and universities, writers, and builders.

The barbarian world was a world in which mind was in its infancy and its infancy was long.

The battle sagas of the race, which have all but disappeared or have survived only as legends worked up in a later age; the few rude laws which were needed to regulate personal relationships, this was hardly civilization in the Roman sense.

King Chilperic, trying to make verses in the style of Sedulius, though he could not distinguish between a long foot and a short and they all hobbled; Charlemagne himself, going to bed with his slate under his pillow in order to practice in the watches of the night that art of writing which he never mastered; what have they in common with Julius Caesar and Marcus Aurelius and that great Julian called the Apostate?
They sum up in their very persons the whole wide gulf that yawned between Germany and Rome.
Rome and the barbarians were thus not only protagonists but two different attitudes to life, civilization and barbarism.