“…8 Whatever one thinks of this, the fact is that 'western aristocracies long outlived the Imperial government', seeking their own accommodation with Barbarian rulers (Wormald 1976, 224;Werner 1984, 302;Chastagnol 1966, 48-56). If the disintegration of the Western empire sounded the death-knell of an integrated imperial aristocracy of the kind that had emerged under Constantine, transforming the senate into a purely Italian body and choking off the sources of renewal of a living senatorial tradition (Chastagnol 1978), it also reflected the dispersive tendencies of aristocratic networks that had never been more than loosely integrated into a shifting imperial centre. The rapid consolidation of the Western upper classes in the fourth century was followed by their gradual but sustained erosion in the fifth and sixth, as a unified state disintegrated under the pressure of barbarian migrations, settlement and conquest.…”