The general depopulation of subject Greece is thus perfectly intelligible. The "race" had not lost reproductive power; and even its newer artificial methods of checking numbers were not immeasurably more active than simple infanticide or exposure had been in the palmy days. In the ages of expansion the whole Hellenic world in nearly all its cities and all its islands swarmed with a relatively energetic population, who won from conditions often in large part unpropitious a sufficiency of subsistence on which to build by the hands of slaves a wonderful world of art. To these conditions they were limited by racial hostilities; everywhere there was substantial though convulsive equipoise among their own warring forces, and between those of their frontier communities and the surrounding "barbarians." The conquest of Alexander (heralded and invited by the campaign of the Ten Thousand) at one blow broke up this equipoise: organised Greek capacity, once forcibly unified, triumphed over the now lower civilisations of Egypt and the East, and Greek population at once began to find its economic level in the easier conditions of some of the conquered lands. They flocked to Egypt and elsewhere in the Mediterranean basin as they do at the present time, for similar economic reasons. Nothing could now restore the old conditions; but the Roman conquest and tyranny forced on the disintegration till Greece proper was but the glorious shell of the life of the past, inhabited by handfuls of a semi-alien population, grown in a sense psychically degenerate under evil psychic conditions. In the lower strata of this population began the spread of Christianity, passing sporadically from Syria to the Greek cities, as at the same time to Egypt and Rome. A new conception of life was generated on the plane that typified it. § 3 It is a great testimony to the value of sheer peace that in the Roman Empire of the second century, with an incurable economic malady, as it were, eating into its nerve centres, and with no better provision for the higher life than the schools of rhetoric and the endowments of the Greek philosophic chairs, there was yet evolved a system of law and administration which, even under the frightful chances of imperial succession, sustained for centuries a vast empire, and imposed itself as a model on the very barbarism that overthrew it. And it is this system which connects for us the life conditions of Greece as the Romans held it, with its artistic shell almost intact despite all the Roman plunder,[282] and those of the strangely un-Hellenic Greek-speaking world which we know as Byzantium, with its capital at Constantinople.