8. Indomitable persistence in the pursuit of major objectives.

9. After the reigns of Julius Caesar and Augustus, concentrating
power in a single person and his chosen brain trust,
using that power to further aggrandize the Roman Empire
and Roman Civilization.

This category is not complete. It aims to answer the basic question: In
a situation where a thousand contestants entered the knock-down and
drag-out struggle, first for survival and then for supremacy, what
qualities or qualifications enabled Romans to win the laurel crown of
victory?

Paralleling the up-building forces that established Roman supremacy were
counter-forces which undermined and eventually destroyed the Roman
Empire and Roman civilization:

1. The growth of city life at the expense of rural existence.
At the outset of its life cycle, Rome was essentially rural.
At the end of the cycle Roman culture was turning its
back upon ruralism and moving into a culture that was
to be chiefly urban during an entire millennium. In that
millennium Rome, her associates and dependencies, experimented
with a culture that was essentially urban, but
encircled, dependent and eventually replaced by a culture
that was essentially rural.

2. During the millennium between 600 B.C. and 500 A.D.
the Romans and their associates succeeded in bringing
large parts of Europe, Asia and Africa under their control,
but the control was so rigid and temporary that tribalism
and local nationalisms broke loose from the fetters of central
authority and coercive integration, shattering the
structure of Roman civilization and its structural core--the
Roman Empire. Instead of resulting in closer cooperation,
the strategy and tactics of the Roman builders and
organizers led to contradictions, bitter feuds, civil strife,
independence movements which combined with expansionist
diplomacy and periodic wars to discourage, frustrate
and eventually to eliminate peace, order and planned
progress.

2. The spread of chattel slavery had a profound effect upon
the texture of Roman life. At the outset Roman family
farms housed the bulk of the population. During the cycle
of Roman civilization unnumbered millions of captives
were seized in the course of military operations and reduced
to slavery. By the end of the Roman cycle the
work-load of agriculture, commerce, industry, mining,
tran