“They eat,” said Seneca, “and then they vomit; they vomit, and then they eat.”  But even in this matter we cannot tell anything like the worst facts about—­

     “Their sumptuous gluttonies and gorgeous feasts
      On citron tables and Atlantic stone,
      Their wines of Setia, Gales, and Falerne,
      Chios, and Crete, and how they quaff in gold,
      Crystal, and myrrhine cups, embossed with gems
      And studs of pearl.” [19]

Still less can we pretend to describe the unblushing and unutterable degradation of this period as it is revealed to us by the poets and the satirists.  “All things,” says Seneca, “are full of iniquity and vice; more crime is committed than can be remedied by restraint.  We struggle in a huge contest of criminality:  daily the passion for sin is greater, the shame in committing it is less....  Wickedness is no longer committed in secret:  it flaunts before our eyes, and

“The citron board, the bowl embossed with gems,
... whatever is known
Of rarest acquisition; Tyrian garbs,
Neptunian Albion’s high testaceous food,
And flavoured Chian wines, with incense fumed,
To slake patrician thirst:  for these their rights
In the vile atreets they prostitute for sale,
Their ancient rights, their dignities, their laws,
Their native glorious freedom.

has been sent forth so openly into public sight, and has prevailed so completely in the breast of all, that innocence is not rare, but non-existent.”

[Footnote 19:  Compare the lines in Dyer’s little-remembered Ruins of Rome.]

IV.  And it was an age of deep sadness.  That it should have been so is an instructive and solemn lesson.  In proportion to the luxury of the age were its misery and its exhaustion.  The mad pursuit of pleasure was the death and degradation of all true happiness.  Suicide—­suicide out of pure ennui and discontent at a life overflowing with every possible means of indulgence—­was extraordinarily prevalent.  The Stoic philosophy, especially as we see it represented in the tragedies attributed to Seneca, rang with the glorification of it.  Men ran to death because their mode of life had left them no other refuge.  They died because it seemed so tedious and so superfluous to be seeing and doing and saying the same things over and over again; and because they had exhausted the very possibility of the only pleasures of which they had left themselves capable.  The satirical epigram of Destouches,—­

     “Ci-git Jean Rosbif, ecuyer,
      Qui se pendit pour se desennuyer,”

was literally and strictly true of many Romans during this epoch.  Marcellinus, a young and wealthy noble, starved himself, and then had himself suffocated in a warm bath, merely because he was attacked with a perfectly curable illness.  The philosophy which alone professed itself able to heal men’s sorrows applauded the supposed courage of a voluntary death, and it was of too abstract, too fantastic, and too purely theoretical a character to furnish them with any real or lasting consolations.  No sentiment caused more surprise to the Roman world than the famous one preserved in the fragment of Maecenas,—­