The decadence of art was again caused by the influences of
exterior barbarism, which in the declining physical and
moral forces of the empire became its military prop and
material support.

(c) Roman art had originally the same general qualities
and perfections, wherever found; within the boundaries
established by the ocean, by the Irish Channel, the high-
lands of Scotland, the Rhine, Danube, the Black Sea, and
by the Syrian, Arabian, and African Deserts. Throughout
this area it represented the civilization of the peoples of
the given countries at a given time, and essentially it did
not represent the importation or intrusion of objects due
to military conquest and foreign colonization or the erec-
tion of buildings by foreign and oppressive rulers. The
"Romans" of the given time were all the freemen of all
these countries.

(d) The two factors of Roman art and Roman civiliza-
tion were originally the technical and industrial arts of the
oriental world as molded and transformed by Phenician or
Etruscan and Greek style and influences, and secondly the
Greek civilization itself, as independently developed in all
the territories east of Italy, which subsequently became
provinces of the empire, and which remained in civilization
after that political change as they had been before.

(e) Among the countries of the Western Mediterranean,
North Africa, Spain, and Southern France had experienced
foreign civilizing influences through Phenicians or Greeks,
or both, before the Roman power was established in them.
The countries most distinctly colonized and civilized by
the native Romans alone, after the time of Roman imperial
power began, were Northern France, England, Southern
and Western Germany, and Hungary.

(f) Roman art or civilization was that of the Italians at

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