[jobim]

From Will & Ariel Durant's epic work:

What had caused this fall in population? Above all, family limitation. Practiced first by
the educated classes, it had not seeped down to a proletariat named for its fertility; by
a.d. 100 it had reached the agricultural classes. Though branded as a crime,
infanticide flourished as poverty grew. Sexual excesses may have reduced human
fertility; the avoidance or deferment of marriage had a like effect, and the making of
eunuchs increased as Oriental customs flowed in to the West.

The rapidly breeding Germans could not understand the classic culture, did not accept
it, did not transmit it; the rapidly breeding Orientals were mostly of a mind to destroy
that culture; the Romans, possessing it, sacrificed it to the comforts of sterility. Rome
was conquered not by barbarian invasion from without, but by barbarian multiplication
within.

Moral decay contributed to the dissolution. Men had now, in the middle and upper
classes, the means to yield to temptation, and only expediency to restrain them. Urban
congestion multiplied contacts and frustrated surveillance; immigration brought
together a hundred cultures whose differences rubbed themselves out into indifference.
Moral and esthetic standards were lowered by the magnetism of the mass; and sex ran
riot in freedom while political liberty decayed.

A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself within.
The essential causes of Rome’s decline lay in her people, her morals, her class
struggle, her failing trade, her bureaucratic despotism, her stifling taxes, her
consuming wars.

[Dick Vomer]

I have all the volumes from Our Oriental heritage to the Age of Napolean.

I’ve read large parts of them and realize how short changed students are now in college.