On August 24, 410 AD, the Visigoths under Alaric entered Rome through the Salarian Gate and spent three days sacking the city. It was the first time a foreign enemy had taken Rome in eight hundred years — since the Gauls in 390 BC — and the psychological shock of the event reverberated across the Mediterranean world in ways that exceeded its military or economic significance. Jerome, writing from Bethlehem, described the impact in terms usually reserved for cosmic events. Augustine, prompted by pagan Romans who blamed Christianity for the calamity, spent the next thirteen years writing the City of God in partial response to the question of what the sack meant. What it meant, in fact, was both more and less than the commentary of the time suggested.