The mood of the times is vividly described by Salvian of Marseilles, a monk who asserted that barbarian invasions were a scourge of God, but that even this was preferable to the rapaciousness of imperial taxation and the tyranny of local notables. The latter were considered to be on a par with brigands, as they were responsible for collecting taxes, a practice that barbarians were unaware of, at least according to the paradoxical Salvian in his De gubernatione Dei (On the Government of God, which was written around the middle of the fifth century). Thus the barbarian nations were idealized for their primitiveness, but also for their humility. As in the famous poem by Constantine Cavafy, “Waiting for the Barbarians,” the monks of Gaul seemed almost to perceive the barbarians as the solution to their problems, in the hope that the catastrophe would sweep away the representatives of a power that appeared increasingly weak, but, in spite of this, no less arrogant. That power was accompanied by dissolute customs and even images of a civilization that they no longer acknowledged as their own.

From Giusto Traina’s 428 AD: An Ordinary Year at the End of the Roman Empire, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2009 (first published in 2007), p. 73.