gs TE. MARTIN P, NILSSON 

Oscan-Umbrian tribes, and soon afterwards the Celts of the Po valley, 
were merged in the Roman nation and enlarged and invigorated it. 
The new task, the Romanising not of a single country but of the 
Empire, of a world, was gigantic and needed a proportionately in- 
creasing birth-rate. | 
But this scheme failed. We see in our own days how the fall of 
the birth-rate commences in the upper classes and soon spreads down 
to the lower. This decline seems to be common to all high culture, 
at least the same phenomenon appeared among the civilized popula- 
tions of the Empire, the Greeks and the Romans. As to Greece the 
statements of Potypius and PrurarcH are well-known. Potypius 
says, in the middle of the second century B. C., that childless marri- 
ages were common and that the population was diminishing, although 
neither pestilence nor war had checked the increase. PLurarcx, at 
the end of the first century A. D., states that the whole of Greece 
would not be able to raise the 3,000 soldiers that the little town of 
Megara had sent to the battle of Salamis. 
For Rome and Italy the testimony is abundant that the birth- 
rate declined during the earlier years of the Empire. In the country 
the decline reached back into the Republican age, and was connected 
with agrarian problems. The class of small farmers, from which 
Rome had once drawn her irresistible armies, was expelled by the 
formation of great estates cultivated by slaves. This is once of the 
best known features of that age. 
The bonds of matrimony were slackened, the birth and education 
of children were felt to be burdensome. In ancient times the parents 
had a right to expose children whom they did not desire to educate. 
Where the supply of food is scarce among primitive peoples this may 
be excused. Among a civilized people, when economic egotism has 
obliterated the natural feelings of the parents, it is nothing but legali- 
zed infanticide. This stain on ancient culture, however, did not have 
any considerable influence on the number of the population Most 
of the exposed babies were picked up by slave-hunters; they lived, 
though in the debased condition of slaves. A more important feature 
was that the educated classes were decimated in this manner. : The 
ancients also knew other less revolting means of checking the birth- 
rate, the effect of which may safely be supposed to have been much 
greater. These expedients are often mentioned in the medical litera- 
ture of the period, and many seem to have looked on them as some 
extreme feminists do to-day °. 
