city-states was over, and that the limited, ‘self-sufficient’ community would not long maintain its independence.  He urged his countrymen to pursue a policy of peaceful penetration in Western Asia, as the Greeks were soon to do under the successors of Alexander.  But the prejudice against industrialism was very strong.  Greece in the fifth century remained a poor country; her exports were not more than enough to pay for the food of her existing population; and that population had to be artificially restricted.  The Greeks were an exceptionally healthy and long-lived race; their great men for the most part lived to ages which have no parallel until the nineteenth century.  The infant death-rate from natural causes may have been rather high, as it is in modern Greece, but it was augmented by systematic infanticide.  The Greek father had an absolute right to decide whether a new-comer was to be admitted to the family.  In Ephesus alone of Greek cities a parent was compelled to prove that he was too poor to rear a child before he was allowed to get rid of it.[10] Even Hesiod, centuries earlier, advises a father not to bring up more than one son, and daughters were sacrificed more frequently than sons.  The usual practice was to expose the infant in a jar; anyone who thought it worth while might rescue the baby and bring it up as a slave.  But this was not often done.  At Gela, in Sicily, there are 233 ‘potted’ burials in an excavated graveyard, out of a total of 570.[11] The proportion of female infants exposed must have been very large.  The evidence of literature is supported by such letters as this from a husband at Oxyrhynchus:  ’When—­good luck to you—­your child is born, if it is a male, let it live; if a female, expose it.’[12] Besides infanticide, abortion was freely practised, and without blame.[13] The Greek citizen married rather late; but as his bride was usually in her ’teens this would not affect the birth-rate.  Nor need we attach much importance, as a factor in checking population, to the characteristic Greek vice, nor to prostitution, which throughout antiquity was incredibly cheap and visited by no physical penalty.  As for slaves, Xenophon recommends that they should be allowed to have children as a reward for good conduct.[14]

A rapid decline in population set in under the successors of Alexander.  Polybius ascribes it to selfishness and a high standard of comfort, which is doubtless true of the upper and middle classes;[15] but the depopulation of rural Greece can hardly be so accounted for.  Perhaps the forests were cut down, and the rainfall diminished.  It was the general impression that the soil was far less productive than formerly.  The decay of the Hellenic race was accelerated after the Roman conquest, until the old stock became almost extinct.  This disappearance of the most gifted race that ever inhabited our planet is one of the strangest catastrophes of history, and is full of warnings for the modern sociologist.  Industrial slavery, indifference to parenthood, and addiction to club-life were certainly three of the main causes, unless we prefer to regard the two last as symptoms of hopelessness about the future.