x 
THE RACE PROBLEM OF THE 
ROMAN EMPIRE 
BY MARTIN P. NILSSON 
LUND 

he fall of the Roman Empire is the greatest tragedy of history. 
States have been wiped out and peoples crushed before and 
since, but the fall of the Roman Empire implied also the fall of the 
only great and world-wide culture that existed before that to which 
we belong. Humanity returned to much more primitive conditions 
of social and economic life, not to speak of education and culture. 
Different causes of the rapid disappearance of the glory that was 
Rome have been sought for. They need not be discussed here. 
There is more than one cause, and it will be difficult and misleading 
to reduce them to a single and common formula. That there is also 
a problem of the biological order was first pointed out by Professor 
Seeck’. His views are an outcome of the typical popular Darwinism of 
the time in which he wrote. The cruelty and suspiciousness of the em- 
perors removed and killed all persons who, by their mental qualities, 
capacity, and energy, raised themselves above the average. Through 
an artificial, inverted selection independence and originality were 
stamped out and a servile people bred. The possibility of such a 
process cannot be denied but to attain to any result it would have 
to be carried’ out on a large scale and over a protracted period, since 
the population of the Empire is considered to have amounted to 
about 100 millions *. Proportionally to this, the number of the vic- 
lims of the emperors’ cruelly was very small, and their extinction 
cannot have had any considerable effect on the stock of the popula- 
tion of the Empire. In reality the thesis of Professor SEEcK cannot 
be maintained. But the problem is there, and I think that it can 
be approached more safely in the light of modern research. 
There are great innate differences between the races of humanity: 
some have more natural ability than others. Sometimes it has been 
Ihe fashion to deny this, and to contend that a people with all its 
peculiarities is the result of its environments, the milieu, and the 
