gloom of a heartless immorality seemed to settle down with unusual
weight; there have been many places where, under the gaslight of an
artificial system, vice has seemed to acquire an unusual audacity; but
never probably was there any age or any place where the worst forms of
wickedness were practiced with a more unblushing effrontery than in the
city of Rome under the government of the Caesars. A deeply-seated
corruption seemed to have fastened upon the very vitals of the national
existence. It is surely a lesson of deep moral significance that just as
they became most polished in their luxury they became most vile in their
manner of life. Horace had already bewailed that "the age of our
fathers, worse than that of our grandsires, has produced us who are yet
baser, and who are doomed to give birth to a still more degraded
offspring." But fifty years later it seemed to Juvenal that in his times
the very final goal of iniquity had been attained, and he exclaims, in a
burst of despair, that "posterity will add _nothing_ to our immorality;
our descendents can but do and desire the same crimes as ourselves." He
who would see but for a moment and afar off to what the Gentile world
had sunk, at the very period when Christianity began to spread, may form
some faint and shuddering conception from the picture of it drawn in the
Epistle to the Romans.

We ought to realize this fact if we would judge of Seneca aright. Let us
then glance at the condition of the society in the midst of which he
lived. Happily we can but glance at it. The worst cannot be told. Crimes
may be spoken of; but things monstrous and inhuman should for ever be
concealed. We can but stand at the cavern's mouth, and cast a single ray
of light into its dark depths. Were we to enter, our lamp would be
quenched by the foul things which would cluster round it.

In the age of Augustus began that "long slow agony," that melancholy