ROLE OF DEPOPULATION—REGNAULT. 595 
devastations persist, and innumerable herds perpetuate the work of 
destruction. During every summer malaria rages. Only the Ionian 
Islands, which have always remained wooded, rich, and densely 
populated, can convey an idea of what ancient Greece once was.! 
Next to the decadence of Greece may be considered that of Italy. 
Among the manifold causes which brought about the fall of the 
Roman Empire may be pointed one of the same order as that which 
prevailed in ancient Greece. After the Roman conquests the allure- 
ments of the city of Rome attracted to it the rural population, ? and 
the depopulated lands were acquired by the patricians. Large estates 
or “‘latifundia”’ were thus formed, and the iniquitous réle which they 
played is related by ancient writers, without being explained. Here, 
as in Greece, the scarcity of laborers gave rise to pastoral industry; 
the herds were a “husbandry of which Jupiter defrayed all the ex- 
penses’’; the meat sold well. Then, the ‘‘caniculi’”’ system of drains, 
which had been established by the first cultivators in the flat clayey 
plains of Latium, were neglected and became obstructed. Their very 
existence was so far forgotten that no Latin work mentions them. 
Swamps formed, and at the close of the first century B. C. the popu- 
lation of these regions was decimated by malaria. 
It was not, as has been claimed, in consequence of wars that these 
lands were impoverished and ravaged with the plague. Enemies 
might ruin the crops, the farms; but they would not engage in many 
long months of labor needed to destroy a work of such magnitude as 
the ‘‘caniculi.” After peace the peasants would resume their agri- 
cultural pursuits. They would not abandon fertile lands, unless their 
mentality was changed. Instances of the courageous persistence of 
the peasant when he is attached to the land are numerous in history. 
Thus, after the conquest of Algiers, the plains of Metidja, which were 
occupied by the Arabian herders, were dotted with stagnant pools 
and ravaged by malaria; the French peasants who set out to cultivate 
the land were all attacked with fever and many of them died; others 
continued the work, and after a time the crops absorbed the waters 
and that country is now healthy and prosperous. It was therefore 
not the infertility and insalubrity which drove the Roman peasants 
from these lands, but, on the contrary, the peasants, having lost their 
attachment to the land, left the country and the lands became sterile 
and unhealthful. 
Italy is at present overpopulated, for the families are large, and 
the fertile plains of Campania, Apulia, and Tuscany, which in Roman 
1 J have furnished numerous facts in support of this theory in ‘‘La décadence de la Gréce expliquée par 
la déforestation et l’impaludisme” (Presse médicale, Sept. 22, 1909, No. 76), and ‘‘Le déboisement et la 
malaria en Gréce”’ (Le Naturaliste, Paris, 1910, p. 262). 
2 As causes of the depopulation and decadence of the Roman Empire might also be cited the low birth 
rate, but we are poorly informed on this subject. Certain it is that Augustus promulgated the Pappia . 
Poppoea law, which deprived celibates of the right of inheritance and allowed the childless married people 
only half ofit. But these laws were directed only against the upper classes. 
