Soon they were even to celebrate
the virtue of harlots, the integrity of thieves, the tenderness of
murderers, the justice of oppression. Leading the caravan were types
abhorrent and self-opposed--effeminate men, masculine women, cheerful
cynics, infidel priests, wealthy people with no credit, patricians,
honoring and yet despising the gods, hating and yet living on the
populace. Here was the spectacle of a republican empire, and an
emperor gathering power while he affected to disdain it.
The splendor of the capital had attracted from all nations the idle
rich, gamblers, speculators, voluptuaries, profligates, intriguers,
criminals. To such an extreme had luxury been carried that nothing was
too sacred, nothing too costly to be enjoyed. Digestion had become a
science, courtship an art, sleep a nightmare, comfort an
accomplishment, and the very act of living an industry. Almost one may
say that the gods lived only in the imagination of the ignorant and the
jests of the learned. In a growing patriciate home had become a
weariness, marriage a form, children a trouble, and the decline of
motherhood an alarming fact.
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