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 than those that they obtained without trouble through the efforts of the preceding generation. It is this little common drama, which we see re-enacted in every family and in which every one of us has been and will be an actor—to-day as a young radical who innovates customs, to-morrow as an old conservative, out-of-date and malcontent in the eyes of the young; a drama, petty and common, which no one longer regards, so frequent is it and so frivolous it seems, but which, instead, is one of the greatest motive forces in human history—in greater or less degree, under different forms, active in all times and operating everywhere. On account of it no generation can live quietly on the wealth gathered, with the ideas discovered by antecedent generations, but is constrained to create new ideas, to make new and greater wealth by all the means at its disposal—by war and conquest, by agriculture and industry, by religion and science. On account of it, families, classes, nations, that do not succeed in adding to their possessions, are destined to be impoverished, because, wants increasing, it is necessary, in order to satisfy them, to consume the accumulated capital, to make debts, and, little by little, to go to ruin. Because of this ambition, ever reborn, classes renew themselves in every nation. Opulent families after a few generations are gradually impoverished; they decay and disappear, and from the multitudinous poor arise new families, creating the new élite which continues under differing forms the doings and traditions of the old. Because of this unrest, the earth is always stirred up by a fervour for deeds or adventure—attempts that take shape according to the age: now peoples make war on each other, now they rend themselves in revolutions, now they seek new lands, explore, conquer, exploit; again they perfect arts and industries, enlarge commerce, cultivate the earth with greater assiduity; and yet again, in the ages more laborious, like ours, they do all these things at the same time—an activity immense and continuous. But its motive force is always the need of the new generations, that, starting from the point at which their predecessors had arrived, desire to advance yet farther—to enjoy, to know, to possess yet more.

The ancient writers understood this thoroughly: what they called "corruption" was but the change in customs and wants, proceeding from generation to generation, and in its essence the same as that which takes place about us to-day. The avaritia of which they complained so much, was the greed and impatience to make money that we see to-day setting all classes beside themselves, from noble to day-labourer; the ambitio that appeared to the ancients to animate so frantically even the classes that ought to have been most immune, was what we call getting there—the craze to rise at any cost to a condition higher than that in which one was born, which so many writers, moralists, statesmen, judge, rightly or wrongly, to be one of the most dangerous maladies of the modern world. Luxuria was the desire to augment personal conveniences, luxuries, pleasures—the same passion that stirs Europe and America to-day from top to bottom, in city and country. Without doubt, wealth grew in ancient Rome and grows to-day; men were bent on making money in the last two centuries of the Republic, and to-day they rush headlong into the delirious struggle for gold; for reasons and motives, however, and with arms and