The creation of any empire is comprehensible only in terms of the passion that carries it along, exceeds its historical dimension and returns to a cosmic dimension that is common to the whole of time. Great historical phases are only established in and as history by a passion that is the foundation and the cancellation of their historicity. The peoples who were called Barbarians were only called this for the way in which their upheaval of history was felt to be a cosmic and natural happening, beyond history in as much as it did not issue from history and expected nothing from it either. They were “all or nothing” in the pure state; they demonstrated at one and the same time the fact of having nothing to lose and everything to gain; they were the mixture of the origin and the end of the times; they were the irruption of the cosmic as such within the very core of history.