The date when the population of the Empire had become predominantly of Mediterranean and Oriental blood, due to the introduction of slaves from the east and the wastage of Italian blood in war, coincides with the establishment of the Empire under Augustus and the last Republican patriots represent the final protest of the old patrician Nordic strain. For the most part they refused to abdicate their right to rule in favor of manumitted slaves and imperial favorites and they fell in battle and sword in hand. The Romans died out but the slaves survived and their descendants form the great majority of the south Italians of to-day.
In the last days of the Republic, Cæsar was the leader of the mob, the Plebs, which by that time had ceased to be of Roman blood. Pompey’s party represented the remnants of the old native Roman aristocracy and was defeated at Pharsalia not by Cæsar’s plebeian clients but by his Nordic legionaries from Gaul. Cassius and Brutus were the last successors of Pompey and their overthrow at Philippi was the final death blow to the Republican party; with them the native Roman families disappear almost entirely.
The decline of the Romans and for that matter of the native Italians began with the Punic Wars when in addition to the Romans who fell in battle a large portion of the country population of Italy was destroyed by Hannibal. Native Romans suffered greatly in the Social and Servile Wars as well as in the civil conflicts between the factions of Sylla, who led the Patricians, and Marius who represented the Plebs. Bloody proscriptions of the rival parties followed alternately the victory of one side and then of the other and under the tyranny of the Emperors of the first century also the old Roman stock was the greatest sufferer until it practically vanished from the scene.
Voluntary childlessness was the most potent cause of the decline under the Empire and when we read of the abject servility of bearers of proud names in the days of Nero and Caligula, we must remember that they could not rally to their standard followers among the Plebs. They had only the choice of submission or suicide and many chose the latter alternative. The abjectness of the Roman spirit under the Empire is thus to be explained by a change in race.
With the expanding dominion of Rome the native elements of vigor were drawn year after year into the legions and spent their active years in wars or in garrisons, while the slaves and those unfit for military duty stayed home and bred. In the present great war while the native Americans are at the front fighting the aliens and immigrants are allowed to increase without check and the parallel is a close one.
Slaves began to be imported into Italy in numbers in the second century B. C. to work the large plantations—latifundia—of the wealthy Romans. This importation of slaves and the ultimate extension of the Roman citizenship to their manumitted descendants and to inferior races throughout the growing Empire and the losses in internal and foreign wars, ruined the state. In America we find another close parallel in the Civil War and the subsequent granting of citizenship to Negroes and to ever increasing numbers of immigrants of plebeian, servile or Oriental races, who throughout history have shown little capacity to create, organize or even to comprehend Republican institutions.
In Rome, when this change in blood was substantially complete, the state could no longer be operated under Republican forms of government and the Empire arose to take its place. At the beginning the Empire was clothed in the garb of republicanism in deference to such Roman elements as still persisted in the Senate and among the Patricians but ultimately these external forms were discarded and the state became virtually a pure despotism.
The new population understood little and cared less for the institutions of the ancient Republic but they were jealous of their own rights of “Bread and the Circus”—“panem et circenses”—and there began to appear in place of the old Roman religion the mystic rites of Eastern countries so welcome to the plebeian and uneducated soul. The Emperors to please the vulgar erected from time to time new shrines to strange gods utterly unknown to the Romans of the early Republic. In America, also, strange temples, which would have been abhorrent to our Colonial ancestors, are multiplying and our streets and parks are turned over to monuments to foreign “patriots,” designed not to please the artistic sense of the passer-by but to gratify the national preference of some alien element in the electorate.
These comments on the change of race in Rome at the beginning of our era are not mere speculation. An examination of many thousands of Roman columbaria or funeral urns and the names inscribed thereon show quite clearly that as early as the first century of our era eighty to ninety per cent of the urban population of the Roman Empire was of servile extraction and that about seven-eighths of this slave population was drawn from districts within the boundaries of the Empire and very largely from the countries bordering on the eastern Mediterranean. Few names are found which indicate that their bearers came from Gaul or the countries beyond the Alps. These Nordic barbarians were of more use in the legions than as household servants.
At the beginning of the Christian era the entire Levant and countries adjoining it in Asia Minor, Syria and Egypt had been so thoroughly hellenized that many of their inhabitants bore Greek names. It was from these countries and from northern Africa that the slave population of Rome was drawn. Their descendants were the most important element in the Roman melting pot and even to-day form the predominant element in the population of Italy south of the Apennines. When the Nordic barbarians a few centuries later poured in, these Romanized Orientals disappeared temporarily from view under the rule of the vigorous northerners but they have steadily absorbed the latter until the Nordic elements in Italy now are to be found chiefly in the Lombard plains and the region of the Alps.