About five or six hundred years after the founding of Rome came several disastrous wars which killed off a great majority of her sturdy fighters.  Rome was the victor in all of these wars, but she won them at tremendous cost to herself.  With the killing off of her best and bravest men, a great deal of the old time honesty was lost.  Very soon, we begin to hear of Roman governors who, when put in charge of conquered states, used their offices only to plunder the helpless inhabitants and to return to Rome after their terms were finished, laden with ill-gotten gains.  Roman morals, which formerly were very strict, began to grow more lax, and in general the Roman civilization showed signs of decay.

To the north and east of the Roman Empire dwelt a people who were to become the leaders of the new nations of Europe.  These were the free German tribes, which occupied the part of Europe bounded, roughly, by the rivers Danube and Rhine, the Baltic Sea, and the Carpathian Mountains.  In many ways they were much less civilized than the Romans.  They were clad in skins and furs instead of cloth.  They lived in rough huts and tents or in caves dug in the sides of a hill.  They, too, like the Romans, held human life cheap, and bloodshed and murder were common among them.  As a rule, the men scorned to work, leaving whatever labor there was, largely to the women, while they busied themselves in fighting and hunting, or, during their idle times, in gambling.  Nevertheless, these people, about the time that the Roman honesty began to disappear, had virtues more like those of the early Romans.  They were frank and honorable.  The men were faithful husbands and kind fathers, and their family life was very happy.  They were barbarous and rough, but those of them who were taken to Rome and learned the Roman civilization made finer, nobler men than Rome was producing about the time of which we speak.

[Illustration:  Germans Going Into Battle]

To the east of these German tribes were the Slavs, a people no better civilized, but not so warlike in their nature.  As the Germans, in later years, moved on to the west, the Slavs, in turn, moved westward and occupied much of the land which had been left vacant by the Germans.

[Illustration:  A Hun Warrior]

The inhabitants of western Europe, that is, France, Spain, and the British Isles, were largely Celts.  In fact, all Europe could be said to be divided up among four great peoples:  There were the Latins in Italy, the Celts in western Europe, the Germans in central Europe, and the Slavs to the east.  All of these four families were distantly related, as can be proved by the languages which they spoke.  The Greeks, while not belonging to any one of the four, were also distant cousins of both Germans and Latins.  Probably all five peoples are descended from one big family of tribes.