From the beginning of the INTRODUCTION Why did the civilisation of ancient Greece and Rome decay and die ? That is a question which must occur to every mind that studies the history of classical civilisation. Why did that former period of knowledge and culture, of vast intellectual and artistic achievement, fail to pass by a direct path of ascent into our modern civilisation? We know that there were intellects at work in the world then which were not separated by any real gulf of difference from the intellects that have crowned our modern civilisation. In every purely intellectual point the great men of that period were not inferior to the great men of modern times— or, at any rate, were not utterly inferior to them. In poetry— epic, lyric, dramatic— Greece and Rome have left us models which we have barely surpassed. In sculpture we have never reached the perfection of Greece. Of classical painting we possess next to nothing, and we know so little that it would be rash to claim for the modem world an overwhelming superiority of craftsmanship. In architecture we may look proudly on Chartres or Ely; but, with thoughts of the Parthenon and of the temples of Paestum, we dare not claim an intrinsic superiority for Christian architecture. And even in the latter days of the great epoch of Greco -Roman civilisation, Tacitus, that most perfect craftsman of prose literature, gave the world in his Annals a work that some of us may well think has never been equaled. Why did this civilisation collapse utterly, as though the superstructure was too heavy for the foundation? The advancing waves of barbarism, we are told, broke through the barriers, and spread like a rising tide of savagery over the Roman world. Yes, but why did that happen at this period? Have we any real reason — a reason, that is, that we have not reached ex post facto — for supposing that barbarian Power was greater in the fourth and following centuries of our era than in the hundred years that centre round the principate of Augustus? We read of the irresistible stream of immigration pouring in from the east, and beating upon the barriers of the Empire. Yet the Byzantine Empire, which might seem to have been more at the mercy of the barbarians, succeeded in keeping a tottering head above the waves for yet another thousand years. Indeed, every reader knows that this is not a sufficient and convincing answer. We all know that Roman civilisation was rotten to the core; that the evil came from within, not from without; that the Roman world was weakening all the time, and could at last do nothing against barbarians whom Caesar and his legions would have swept away like chaff. It has been the same with every civilisation that has been evolved in the countless ages of written and unwritten history. Greece and Rome only followed in the tracks of Nineveh and Babylon. Does the same fate lie before us in spite of the seeming strength and solidarity of the civilisation that to-day is en- compassing all the world? No doubt, to any unimportant provincial governor of classical Rome, the idea that Roman civilisation could pass away, and melt into the barbarism which we find, say, in the seventh century would have seemed preposterous; in just the same way it would seem preposterous to a modern colonial governor that the totality of modern civilisation could fade within a few centuries into a soulless, unproductive savagery. Yet that is what happened to Rome, and that is what analogy tells us may happen to our own culture.