Gold as with money as gold is actual money does not fall short of being the victim of inflation or deflation. Due to rising costs of living gold takes on the shadow of being a commodity rather than that of money. What happens is when the value of gold exceeds what it is really worth; you have inflation that causes an unstable economy where the people contained within that particular economy began to suffer. The earliest know inflation circumstance can be seen in between the year 307 to 324 AD. At the time the roman coin named Denary was used. According to the scrolls obtained by archeological excavations, the price of a single pound of gold rapidly rose from 100,000 denary to 300,000 denary. It seems the runaway inflation hit the Roman Empire slight after 324 AD as according to the same batch of scrolls discovered and analyzed the price of a single pound of gold was valued at a staggering 2 million denary. This would be one of the earliest recorded runaway inflation scenarios recorded in the planet.
This runaway inflation is still seemingly on the run and shows up now and again throughout every economical system, in every government or sovereign without mercy, destroying everything in its path and resetting the entire economy of that nation or sovereign. Buying gold during bad economical times or during social unrest drives the inflation into rapture. This trait can be seen as people exchange their cash for gold or other precious metals such as silver and gold to avoid losing value from the paper money they hold.
In the instance of the inflation that was partly responsible for the fall of the roman empire could also be due to the factor that when the Eastern invaders were demanding gold for protection against other barbaric invasions and sackings people were trading everything they had for gold and leaving the roman empire to safer places with the gold. The lack of gold within the region started sky rocketing the value of old as the situation becomes urgent. This is still the same modus operandi that inflation has against any economy or commodity including that of precious metals. The positive side of the situation about gold is that it never has lost its value but only increased in value over the last five thousand years.
A recent article written by the St Louis Federal Reserve goes into further details regarding the fall of the Roman Empire due to an inflationary collapse of the currency with a dictatorship government. More information on this paper can be found here.