The question remains: Is 378 really a year of epochal importance, the end of antiquity and the beginning of the Middle Ages? Often when one looks more closely, boundaries become less clear, breaks seem less drastic. One often discovers that the great changes actually had begun earlier and that the past, for its part, took a good long while to die. Nonetheless, the battle of Adrianople marks an abrupt, dramatic acceleration in the process by which the Roman Empire opened its borders to barbarian immigration, a process that had already been going on for some time and transforming society, the army, and the very government of the empire.

From Alessandro Barbero’s The Day of the Barbarians: The Battle that Led to the Fall of the Roman Empire, New York: Walker, 2007 (first published in 2005), pp. 144-145.