AVITUS: THE GAULS THROW THE DICE AGAIN, 455–456

Writing 275 years later, Bede wrote that Valentinian III's murder brought the Roman Empire to an end, and the western Empire's last two decades can indeed make a sorry tale. The task before any emperor was ever more difficult, yet several occupants of the throne were capable men and possibilities existed to stabilise the situation or even reverse the process of the past fifty years. Contemporaries do not seem to have thought the Empire was finished. In a memorable scene towards the end of the 1968 British farce Carry on up the Khyber, the governor of a besieged town in the Raj holds a dinner-party for his associates. Despite rifle- and shellfire bringing the ceiling, plaster and paintings down around them, the party continues to maintain ‘stiff upper lip’. Affecting not to notice their situation, host and guests continue to behave according to all the most ludicrous rules of Victorian etiquette. The late Roman Gallic aristocracy often appear similarly ridiculous. The flourishing of Gallic letters in this period might be seen, in many ways plausibly enough, as a manifestation of a desire to look as much as possible like Roman aristocrats of old while political changes were bringing the world where such noblemen belonged crashing down around their ears. Bede's judgement looks reasonable enough with the benefit of hindsight and some of these Gallic aristocrats can seem to be wilfully refusing to read the writing on the wall.