such lower depths that Spartacus and other leaders of rebellious slaves drew sufficient manpower to challenge and for a time even defeat the full military power of Rome.

5.  Built into the structure of Roman civilization was the potential of civil war.  The contradictions of mass slavery and poverty side by side with boundless leisure and abundance was only one side of the picture.  Each of the more distant provinces became a possible base from which ambitious governors or generals could wage wars of independent conquest at the expense of Roman authority.  Each newly subjugated people, smarting under defeat and the heavy hand which Rome laid on its dissidents and opponents, became a potential center for disaffection, conspiracy and rebellion against Roman authority.

6.  Conflicts over power succession, in the provinces, and more significantly in the mother city, added another aspect to the many sided pressures.  As there was no legal means of determining the succession, the end of each imperial reign offered the probability of military intervention.

7.  Deification of emperors, during the era of the Caesars, led to the denigration and degradation of the common man.  The fact that the common men of Rome were more and more likely to be poor slaves furthered the process and deepened the abyss between the haves and have-nots.

8.  Among the forces of disintegration operating in Rome none was more potent and more decisive than the numerical growth of the military and the increasing probability that any one of the growing contradictions and conflicts would lead to intervention by the military.  Roman emperors were dictators and their retention of authority was increasingly decided by the legions which were willing and able to fight for the perpetuation and extension of their authority.

9.  The extensive, complicated, elaborate structure of Roman civilization involved a persistent and implacable rise of overhead costs of food and raw materials, of production, of transportation, of the bureaucracy, including the military.  The area of Roman civilization increased arithmetically.  Overhead costs rose geometrically.  They were expressed in an empty treasury, rising taxes, inflation, expropriation, the degradation of the currency.

10.  Side by side with the rise in overhead costs went the increase of parasitism among the rich and among the poor.  Something-for-nothing was the order of the day.  Speculation was rampant.  Gambling was universal.  Instead of living by production of goods and services, Romans let the slaves do their work and lived by their wits.

11.  From top to bottom of Roman society negative forces replaced positive forces.  Self directed labor gave place to slavery; participation in productive activity yielded to parasitism; productivity was subordinated to destructivity; the spirit of