Politics & Power Quote by Thomas Bulfinch

Bulfinch opens with a calm, almost bookkeeping sentence, then smuggles in a worldview. The phrase "about five centuries after Christ" plants the timeline inside a Christian calendar, not a neutral one, quietly treating Christianity as the organizing axis of history. That choice isn’t just pious habit; it frames Rome’s collapse as a turning point in a providential narrative: after the empire recedes, a kind of civilizational light goes out in the north.

"Decline of the Roman power" is doing ideological work, too. It softens catastrophe into an inevitability - not a violent unravelling but a natural ebb. Bulfinch’s diction turns Rome into a metonym for order itself. When that order withdraws, Northern Europe is "left" - passive voice that implies abandonment - "almost destitute of a national government". "Destitute" is moralized scarcity, the language of poverty applied to political structure, and it sneaks in a 19th-century assumption that the nation-state is the baseline unit of legitimacy.

Context matters: Bulfinch wrote in an era when Victorian and early American readers consumed the classical past as both entertainment and instruction. His larger project often funnels myth and history into a readable genealogy of "Western" civilization. So the subtext here is a civilizing arc: Rome as administrative parent, the north as a political orphanage until it grows into nations. It’s less a description than a stage direction for how the reader should feel about the so-called Dark Ages - not merely different, but lacking.