When Death Birds Fly

“The Roman empire is beheaded; in the one City, the whole world dies… All things are doomed to die… every work of man is destroyed by age… but who would have believed that Rome would crumble, at once the mother and tomb of her children. She who enslaved… is herself a slave.”

– St. Jerome, A.D. 415

“Gaul was lost to the Empire. If the ruling class of Auvergne held out against Euric the Visigoth… it was for the sake of the new-won independence rather than from loyalty to Rome. Further north, Syagrius, son of Aegidius, animated by the same spirit, became a de facto ‘king’ of Gaul between the Somme and the Loire.”

-Larousse Encyclopedia of Ancient and Medieval History