This disaster was, in fact, the real deathblow to Rome’s greatness and from it dates the decline of the Roman power. It broke the tradition of civilization and culture which had grown from the small beginnings of the primitive Greeks and Etruscans more than two thousand years before. During all those two thousand years there had been a more or less steady and a scarcely interrupted development of the agriculture, manufactures, arts, skill, knowledge and power of the mass of humanity about the Mediterranean Sea; men who fought with shields and spears and swords, also with arrows and slings, believed in approximately the same sort of gods; wore clothing rather wrapped round them than upholstered on their bodies as with us; reclined on sofas at meals; lived mostly out of doors all the year round; built their houses about courtyards, and made rows of columns the chief feature of their architecture, and sheltering themselves in colonnades, sunny or shady according to the time of the year, the chief feature of their personal comfort. Up to the year of the great pestilence that civilization had prospered, had produced a long series of generals, inventors, architects, sculptors, painters, musicians, poets, authors, and orators. Everywhere men had shown self-confidence, capacity, originality, power and competence and had achieved success for two thousand years. The great pestilence of 166 so depleted the population that Rome never again pushed forward the boundaries of her Empire. Some lucky armies won occasional victories, but Rome never again put on the field an overwhelming army for foreign conquest, never again could fully man, even defensively, the long line of her frontiers. All classes of the people suffered, but most of all the rich, the well-to-do, the educated and the cultured classes of the towns and cities. And the main point of difference between the great pestilence and the others which had preceded it was the universality of its incidence. For two thousand years pestilence had occurred at intervals, but previously not everywhere at once.