goes with the pomp and circumstance of war. So the
individuality in the mass was lost in the aggrandizement of the
few. Independence was swallowed up in ambition and patriotism
came to have a new meaning, being transferred from hearth and
home to the camp and the army.

In the subsequent history of Rome, we have now to consider only
a single factor, the reversal of selection." In Rome's
conquests, Vir, the real man, went forth to battle and foreign
invasion; Homo, the human being, remained on the farm and in
the workshop and begat the new generations. "Vir gave place to
Homo," says the Latin author. Men of good stock were replaced
by the sons of slaves and camp-followers, the riff-raff of
those the army sucked in but could not use.

The Fall of Rome was due not to luxury, effeminacy or
corruption, not to Nero's or Caligula's wickedness, nor to the
futility of Constantine's descendants. It began at Philippi,
where the spirit of domination overcame the spirit of freedom.
It was forecast still earlier in the rise of consuls and
triumvirs incident to the thinning out of the sturdy and
self-sufficient strains who brooked no arbitrary rule. While
the best men were falling in war, civil or foreign, or remained
behind in faraway colonies, the stock at home went on repeating
its weakling parentage. A condition significant in Roman
history is marked by the gradual swelling of the mob, with the
rise in authority of the Emperor who was the mob's exponent.
Increase of arbitrary power went with the growing weakness of
the Romans themselves. Always the "Emperor" serves as a sort of
historical barometer by which to measure the abasement of the