Characters and Events of Roman History | Page 4

physical self-indulgence, but
among the facts they cite to prove this dismal vice, many would seem to us innocent
enough. It was judged by them a scandalous proof of gluttony and as insensate luxury,
that at a certain period there should be fetched from as far as the Pontus, certain sausages
and certain salted fish that were, it appears, very good; and that there should be
introduced into Italy from Greece the delicate art of fattening fowls. Even to drink Greek
wines seemed for a long time at Rome the caprice of an almost crazy luxury. As late as
18 B.C., Augustus made a sumptuary law that forbade spending for banquets on
work-days more than two hundred sesterces (ten dollars); allowed three hundred sesterces
(fifteen dollars) for the days of the Kalends, the Ides, and the Nones; and one thousand
sesterces (fifty dollars) for nuptial banquets. It is clear, then, that the lords of the world
banqueted in state at an expense that to us would seem modest indeed. And the women of
ancient times, accused so sharply by the men of ruining them by their foolish
extravagances, would cut a poor figure for elegant ostentation in comparison with
modern dames of fashion. For example, silk, even in the most prosperous times, was
considered a stuff, as we should say, for millionaires; only a few very rich women wore it;
and, moreover, moralists detested it, because it revealed too clearly the form of the body.
Lollia Paulina passed into history because she possessed jewels worth several million

francs: there are to-day too many Lollia Paulinas for any one of them to hope to buy
immortality at so cheap a rate.
I should reach the same conclusions if I could show you what the Roman writers really
meant by corruption in their accounts of the relations between the sexes. It is not possible
here to make critical analyses of texts and facts concerning this material, for reasons that
you readily divine; but it would be easy to prove that also in this respect posterity has
seen the evil much larger than it was.
Why, then, did the ancient writers bewail luxury, inclination to pleasure,
prodigality--things all comprised in the notorious "corruption"--in so much the livelier
fashion than do moderns, although they lived in a world which, being poorer and more
simple, could amuse itself, make display, and indulge in dissipation so much less than we
do? This is one of the chief questions of Roman history, and I flatter myself not to have
entirely wasted work in writing my book [1] above all, because I hope to have
contributed a little, if not actually to solve this question, at least to illuminate it; because
in so doing I believe I have found a kind of key that opens at the same time many
mysteries in Roman history and in contemporary life. The ancient writers and moralists
wrote so much of Roman corruption, because--nearer in this, as in so many other things,
to the vivid actuality--they understood that wars, revolutions, the great spectacular events
that are accomplished in sight of the world, do not form all the life of peoples; that these
occurrences, on the contrary, are but the ultimate, exterior explanation, the external
irradiation, or the final explosion of an internal force that is acting constantly in the
family, in private habit, in the moral and intellectual disposition of the individual. They
understood that all the changes, internal and external, in a nation, are bound together and
in part depend on one very common fact, which is everlasting and universal, and which
everybody may observe if he will but look about him--on the increase of wants, the
enlargement of ideas, the shifting of habits, the advance of luxury, the increase of
expense that is caused by every generation.
[Footnote 1: The Greatness and Decline of Rome. 5 vols. New York and London.];
Look around you to-day: in every family you may easily observe the same phenomenon.
A man has been born in a certain social condition and has succeeded during his youth and
vigour in adding to his original fortune. Little by little as he was growing rich, his needs
and his luxuries increased. When a certain point was reached, he stopped. The men are
few who can indefinitely augment their particular wants, or keep changing their habits
throughout their lives, even after the disappearance of vigour and virile elasticity. The
increase of wants and of luxury, the change of habits, continues, instead, in the new
generation, in the children, who began to live in the ease which their fathers won after
long effort and fatigue, and in maturer age; who, in short, started where the previous
generation left off, and therefore wish to gain yet new enjoyments, different from and
greater