Notwithstanding this broadening movement in the moral domain, the last century of the Republic was marked by a great lowering of the earlier high moral standard and by a loss of some of the chief virtues of the primitive Roman type. There were many causes contributing to this moral degeneracy. Among these was the decay of institutions that had created or fostered the primitive moral type, and the growth of others, such as slavery and the gladiatorial games, which exercised a pernicious influence upon morality. Besides causes of this nature there were others which were the natural outcome of the career of conquest the Romans had led. The conquest of the world had imported into the Roman political and social system many alien elements unfavorable to morality, and had brought Roman civilization, on one side, into hurtful contact with the older and morally corrupt cultures of the Orient. In what follows we shall speak in some detail of the more important of these agencies, which in the later preimperial period undermined the originally sound morality of the Roman people. A first cause of the moral deterioration was the decay of the city constitution. We have seen that the free city state was the chief nursery of those patriotic virtues which constituted the cardinal moral qualities of the Roman ideal of character. But by the beginning of the last century preceding the Christian era various causes, chiefly, however, the mere widening of the Roman territory through conquest, had undermined the political institutions of Rome and had converted into mobs of the proletariat the public assemblies of citizens. The original constitution of the city had become an empty form, and the way had been paved for the setting up of monarchical government. With the passing of the city state those civic patriotic virtues which the discipline of the democratic city constitution had trained and developed, disappeared.[533] As the Christian Church, which was destined in the fullness of time to take the place of the city in the minds and hearts of men and become the object and inspirer of moral enthusiasm, had not yet come in with its new ideal of virtue, there ensued a sort of moral interregnum, such as usually marks transition periods in the history of states and races. [Sidenote: (_b_) The economic decay of the rural class] A second cause of the moral decline is to be found in the decay of the Italian peasantry. This economic revolution had its real starting point in the Hannibalic War. That protracted struggle, carried on largely in Italy itself, practically ruined the peasant class in many districts, and their little farms were absorbed by the growing estates of the great landholders--those _latifundia_ which Pliny later declared to have been the ruin of Italy.