Immortality

Under such circumstances, as a matter of course, morality and family life were treated as antiquated things among all ranks of society.  To be poor was not merely the sorest disgrace and the worst crime, but the only disgrace and the only crime:  for money the statesman sold the state, and the burgess sold his freedom; the post of the officer and the vote of the juryman were to be had for money; for money the lady of quality surrendered her person as well as the common courtesan; falsifying of documents and perjuries had become so common that in a popular poet of this age an oath is called “the plaster for debts.”  Men had forgotten what honesty was; a person who refused a bribe was regarded not as an upright man, but as a personal foe.  The criminal statistics of all times and countries will hardly furnish a parallel to the dreadful picture of crimes—­so varied, so horrible, and so unnatural—­which the trial of Aulus Cluentius unrolls before us in the bosom of one of the most respected families of an Italian country town.

Friendship

But while at the bottom of the national life the slime was thus constantly accumulating more and more deleteriously and deeply, so much the more smooth and glittering was the surface, overlaid with the varnish of polished manners and universal friendship.  All the world interchanged visits; so that in the houses of quality it was necessary to admit the persons presenting themselves every morning for the levee in a certain order fixed by the master or occasionally by the attendant in waiting, and to give audience only to the more notable one by one, while the rest were more summarily admitted partly in groups, partly en masse at the close—­a distinction which Gaius Gracchus, in this too paving the way for the new monarchy, is said to have introduced.  The interchange of letters of courtesy was carried to as great an extent as the visits of courtesy; “friendly” letters flew over land and sea between persons who had neither personal relations nor business with each other, whereas proper and formal business-letters scarcely occur except where the letter is addressed to a corporation.  In like manner invitations to dinner, the customary new year’s presents, the domestic festivals, were divested of their proper character and converted almost into public ceremonials; even death itself did not release the Roman from these attentions to his countless “neighbours,” but in order to die with due respectability he had to provide each of them at any rate with a keepsake.  Just as in certain circles of our mercantile world, the genuine intimacy of family ties and family friendships had so totally vanished from the Rome of that day that the whole intercourse of business and acquaintance could be garnished with forms and flourishes which had lost all meaning, and thus by degrees the reality came to be superseded by that spectral shadow of “friendship,” which holds by no means the least place among the various evil spirits brooding over the proscriptions and civil wars of this age.