Quotes from Bryan Ward-Perkins

With the fall of the empire, Art, Philosophy and decent drains all vanished from the West.

In my opinion, the key internal element in Rome's success or failure was the economic well-being of its taxpayers. This was because the empire relied for its security on a professional army, which in turn relied on adequate funding.

A hung jury, however, suggests that any decline was not overwhelming; and, in common with most historians, I believe the empire was still very powerful at the end of the fourth century. Unfortunately, a series of disasters was soon to change things.

The almost total disappearance of coinage from daily use in the post-Roman West is further powerful evidence of a remarkable change in levels of economic sophistication.

The new Late Antiquity is in part a deliberate corrective to a previous bias, which assumed that the entire Roman world declined in the fifth century, because this is what happened in the West. Relocating the centre of the world in the fourth to eighth centuries to Egypt, the Levant, and Persia is a stimulating challenge to our mental framework and cultural expectations.

There is, however, an obvious problem in imposing, on the basis of eastern evidence, a flourishing Late Antiquity on the whole of the late Roman and post-Roman worlds. In the 'bad old days' western decline at the end of Antiquity was imposed on the eastern provinces. Now, instead of all the different regions of the empire being allowed to float free (some flourishing in the fifth to eighth centuries, others not), a new and equally distorting template is being imposed westwards.

For the Germanic peoples, unity or disunity was the crucial variable in military strength; while for the Romans, as we have seen, it was the abundance or shortage of cash.