THE ROMAN EMPIRE was in many ways the great and final achieve-
ment of the ancient Mediterranean world. It represented a high
degree of civilization and of accomplishment both peaceful and war-
like. Trade bound its far-flung domains together and supported the
great cities like Rome and Byzantium. North Africa and Sicily
poured out the wheat that fed the Roman populace. Painted Picts
in Scotland, blond Germans east of the Rhine, black Nubians from
the Upper Nile, and swarthy Persians in the Middle East all felt the
military might of Rome or chaffered and bartered with the outposts
of the empire.

But the western half of the empire, through governmental and
economic decay and barbarian invasions, fell slowly to pieces after
the beginning of the fifth century. The Eastern Empire, its center
at Byzantium (modern Istanbul), was to endure for a thousand years,
but the heirs of the future in the West were the new nations that
were gradually to emerge from the fusion of Roman and barbarian
cultures.

The new world of western Europe did not start with a clean slate.
It inherited much from Rome, and, while it destroyed, it also copied.
The manifold legacy from Rome included the Roman Catholic
Church, which preserved remnants of the old imperial organization.
It included the Latin tongue. It included the organization and
agricultural methods of great rural estates. It included towns and
villages, many of which were never abandoned. It included a sys-
tem of roads that was still in use when its makers were forgotten. It
included forms of political and social organization and of industry
and business. Roman coins were used in trade for centuries, and
long before they disappeared they were copied by the new peoples.
Many of the Roman ways of doing things were preserved at By-
zantium, and passed on to the West in a later day. Many of them

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