From Livy, we learn about Rome’s pivotal wars against the Samnites, the Carthaginians, and other peoples of the Italian Peninsula. It was predominantly a military power for which “[w]ar brought lands, tributes and slaves; slaves, tribute and lands supplied the materiel for war” (Anderson 1974, p. 62). However, by the time of Cato the Younger, the republic had functioned so well for so long that a lot of people took its ability to survive for granted. Reading previous volumes of Hereditas may well be a good way to start such investigations. In his 1944 book, Caesar and Christ, Will Durant summarized one of the monumental lessons of Rome: “A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself within. He may well be culpable in that regard; I don’t know.

Facts show that this is manifestly erroneous.” (pp. Instead recruits must be taken from elsewhere, which “vigorously contributed to the immixture of barbarians and provincials in the governing classes”. Jesper Svenbro, a classical philologist specialising in Ancient Greek, has given a detailed description of the personal and historical background to Nilsson's writings on Race Biology (Svenbro 2007), and I make free use of his findings below. This applies for example to the scathing comment on “extreme feminists” advocating birth control to the detriment for society at large, and the criticism of “cosmopolitanism” for its lack of understanding that racial mixing is deleterious (I do not think that the word here stands as a more or less hidden reference to “Jewish thinking” as is often the case in later ideological writings). The article can be read as indicating strong support from the classical human sciences to the ambitious new science of genetics.

Here are 10 reasons for the fall of Rome. Twice a week we compile our most fascinating features and deliver them straight to you. The fall of Rome was – according to Nilsson – caused by the mixing of the races within the Empire. The earliest known Roman historian with surviving works to his name, he is best known for his writings about Catiline’s conspiracy to snuff out the Republic and make himself the ruler of Rome.

Then, at the beginning of the fifth century, the Roman power‐system collapsed. The fall of the Han Dynasty happened around 220 CE, whereas The Roman Empire’s fall happened around 476 CE.

It is sufficient to say that in it he wishes to “convey a concrete idea not only of how many races, peoples, and languages were contained in the Roman Empire, but also of how radically different most of them were”. Referring to an earlier period in Roman history, Nilsson writes, for example, that “the kindred Oscan–Umbrian tribes, and soon afterwards the Celts of the Po valley, were merged in the Roman nation and enlarged and invigorated it”. The fact is however that internal factors including social, economic and political problems were the reason for the, the Roman Empire which was quite powerful at one point, collapsed in this same era.