I do not say that the people in that century were happy or contented, or even generally prosperous.  How could they be happy or prosperous when monsters and tyrants sat on the throne of Augustus and Trajan?  How could they be contented when there was such a vast inequality of condition,—­when slaves were more numerous than freemen,—­when most of the women were guarded and oppressed,—­when scarcely a man felt secure of the virtue of his wife, or a wife of the fidelity of her husband,—­when there was no relief from corroding sorrows but in the sports of the amphitheatre and circus, or some form of demoralizing excitement or public spectacle,—­when the great mass were ground down by poverty and insult, and the few who were rich and favored were satiated with pleasure, ennued, and broken down by dissipation,—­when there was no hope in this world or in the next, no true consolation in sickness or in misfortune, except among the Christians, who fled by thousands to desert places to escape the contaminating vices of society?

But if the people were not happy or fortunate as a general thing, they anticipated no overwhelming calamities; the outward signs of prosperity remained,—­all the glories of art, all the wonders of imperial and senatorial magnificence; the people were fed and amused at the expense of the State; the colosseum was still daily crowded with its eighty-seven thousand spectators, and large hogs were still roasted whole at senatorial banquets, and wines were still drunk which had been stored one hundred years.  The “dark-skinned daughters of Isis” still sported unmolested in wanton mien with the priests of Cybele in their discordant cries.  The streets still were filled with the worshippers of Bacchus and Venus, with barbaric captives and their Teuton priests, with chariots and horses, with richly apparelled young men, and fashionable ladies in quest of new perfumes.  The various places of amusement were still thronged with giddy youth and gouty old men who would have felt insulted had any one told them that the most precious thing they had was the most neglected.  Everywhere, as in the time of Trajan, were unrestricted pleasures and unrestricted trades.  What cared the shopkeepers and the carpenters and the bakers whether a Commodus or a Severus reigned?  They were safe.  It was only great nobles who were in danger of being robbed or killed by grasping emperors.  The people, on the whole, lived for one hundred years after the accession of Commodus as they did under Trajan and Marcus Aurelius.  True, there had been great calamities during this hundred years.  There had been terrible plagues and pestilences:  in some of these as many as five thousand people died daily in Rome alone.  There were tumults and revolts; there were wars and massacres; there was often the reign of monsters or idiots.  Yet even as late as the reign of Aurelian, ninety years after the death of Aurelius, the Empire was thought to be eternal; nor was any triumph ever