In regard to the lack of historical records of the time, I will again quote Hodgkin, who, in his monumental work on _Italy and Her Invaders_, has himself done so much to make good the deficiency: “It is perhaps not surprising that in Italy itself there should have been during the fifth century an utter absence of the instinct which leads men to record for the benefit of posterity events which are going on around them. When history was making itself at such breathless speed and in such terrible fashion, the leisure, the inclination, the presence of mind necessary for writing history might well be wanting. He who would under happier auspices have filled up the interval between the bath and the tennis court by reclining on the couch in the winter portico of his villa and there languidly dictating to his slave the true story of the abdication of Avitus, or the death of Anthemius, was himself now a slave keeping sheep in the wilderness under a Numidian sun or shrinking under the blows of one of the rough soldiers of Gaiseric.” Hodgkin finds it more difficult to understand “why the learned and leisurely provincial of Greece, whose country for nearly a century and a half (395-539) escaped the horrors of hostile invasion, and who had to inspire them the grandest literary traditions in the world, should have left unwritten the story of the downfall of Rome.” “The fact seems to be,” he goes on to say, “that at this time all that was left of literary instinct and historiographic power in the world had concentrated itself on theological (we cannot call it religious) controversy, and what tons of worthless material the ecclesiastical historians and controversialists of the time have left us!... Blind, most of them, to the meaning of the mighty drama which was being enacted on the stage of the world ... they have left us scarcely a hint as to the inner history of the vast revolution which settled the Teuton in the lands of the Latin.... One man alone gives us that detailed information concerning the thoughts, characters, persons of the actors in the great drama which can make the dry bones of the chronologer live. This is Caius Sollius Apollinaris Sidonius, man of letters, imperial functionary, country gentleman, and bishop, who, notwithstanding much manifest weakness of character and a sort of epigrammatic dulness of style, is still the most interesting literary figure of the fifth century.”[3]