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By Root 1039 0

of the western emperor, Honorius. But Stilicho, to fill his desperate needs for military manpower, had recruited thousands of barbarian troops into the Roman army, and a rumor spread that he planned to overthrow the eastern emperor and put his own barbarian son in control. Although the historical evidence suggests that Stilicho was a loyal Roman to the end, the rumor was believed. Honorius divorced Stilicho's daughter. Roman soldiers mutinied, killing Stilicho's supporters and launching a series of pogroms against his barbarian troops, whose families were massacred in cold blood and whose property was confiscated. In August of 408, Stilicho himself was decapitated.

Enmity escalated, and the destruction of Rome came with astonishing rapidity. “[D]isliked and despised,” the Germans “retaliated by hating the people whose glories they had once hoped to share.” Outraged Germans once loyal to the empire turned against the Romans, throwing their lot in with rebellious forces. Stilicho's barbarian soldiers joined forces with the Gothic king Alaric, who laid siege to Rome itself in the autumn of 408 and sacked it in 410. In 419 the Visigoths overran Gaul. In 439, the Vandals took Carthage and much of Roman North Africa; in 455 they sacked Rome again.

By 476 the western Roman Empire was no more. In its place was an assortment of warlike “barbarian” kingdoms, the distant precursors of the modern European nations. The eastern Roman Empire, with its capital at Constantinople, lasted another thousand years. But this Byzantine Empire—fervently intolerant of religious dissent, riven by ecclesiastical infighting, and continually besieged by Persians, Slavs, and later Muslims—never approached the grandeur of ancient Rome.36

A century ago, when racial theories were more in vogue, some historians argued that Rome fell because the “pure” Roman stock had been polluted and diluted by the blood of Rome's conquered peoples. If I am right, just the opposite is true.

Rome thrived so long as it was able to enlist, absorb, reward, and intermix peoples of diverse ethnicities, religions, and backgrounds. At the Roman Empire's peak, Africans, Spaniards, Britons, and Gauls alike could rise to the highest echelons of power— indeed, could even become emperor—as long as they assimilated. The empire sank when it let in peoples that it failed to assimilate, either because they were unassimilable or because their culture and habits exceeded the limits of Roman tolerance. Out of a mixture of religious and ethnic intolerance, Rome sparked wars and internal rebellions it could not win. It was precisely when the empire sought to maintain the “purity” of Roman blood, culture, and religion—replicating the mistake that Claudius and later Gibbon imputed to ancient Athens and Sparta—that Rome spiraled downward into disintegration and oblivion.

THREE

The Mixed-Blooded Tang Dynasty

When I was a girl in West Lafayette, Indiana, my father told me that I was descended from a demigod. This may sound hard to believe, but it turns out that my great-grandfather was a revered statesman and philanthropist in the Fujian province of China. After his death, when tiny ghost sprites—or in my father's words, Chinese leprechauns—were sighted dancing on his grave, his fellow villagers declared him a deity (lo-han).

Thirty years later, I repeated this story to my own daughters, and in the summer of 1999 my husband and I took them to China to visit Tangdong, where my great-grandfather had lived. Based on my father's descriptions, I was expecting a worn but graceful mansion on the South China Sea, overlooking acres of white sand. On a clear day, supposedly, one could see all the way to Taiwan.

After a sweltering two-hour taxi ride from the city of Xiamen, we arrived at Tangdong. It was indeed a seaside village, and there was white sand—but no mansion. Instead, scattered all over the beach were huge piles of stinking oyster shells, rising up thirty or forty feet in the air. Except for a few scrawny chickens, the village seemed completely deserted. Whatever its past glories,