I'm Patrick Weiman, and this is the Fall of Rome.

In the last few episodes of this show, we've kept the focus on the barbarians.

Specifically, we've followed the Goths as they moved from beyond the frontiers of the Roman Empire

to the Balkans and then to the sack of Rome itself in 410 AD.

We've striven to see events from their perspective to understand why they acted as they did,

and to understand the complex relationship that existed between the Empire and the barbarians on both

sides of the frontier. Now I took that perspective because, far too often, the barbarians play into the

story of the fall of the Roman Empire merely as the agents of chaos. Either they were the

destructive force that toppled an otherwise healthy state, or merely the tipping point that the

diseased rotten corpse of a once great empire needed to slip over the edge into full putrescence.

But the barbarians weren't an abstract force whose function was to move the world from one

stage of history to another. They were people, real people, who had hopes and dreams and aspirations,

who came from distinct cultures and societies and who lived real lives.

That's what I wanted to focus on in the beginning.

Now that we've done that, though, we can come back to the Roman Empire itself.

Specifically, there's one question that we need to address. Just how messed up was the later Roman

Empire anyway? In today's episode, we'll take a broad bird's eye view of the Empire as it existed

in the 4th century, between the Goths crossing of the Danube and their slow-motion rebellion.

We'll discuss the economy, the relationship between the various cities and localities that made

up the Empire and its central government, the army, and most importantly, how the emperor and the

state functioned. We're going to discuss how the Empire changed from its glory days in the first

and second century and why the third century was such a disaster. Most of all, we're going to try

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