XIII. For why should I mention those displays of extravagance, which
can be believed by none but those who have seen them; as that mountains
have been leveled, and seas covered with edifices,[74] by many private
citizens; men whom I consider to have made a sport of their wealth,[75]
since they were impatient to squander disreputably what they might have
enjoyed with honor.

But the love of irregular gratification, open debauchery, and all
kinds of luxury,[76] had spread abroad with no less force. Men forgot
their sex; women threw off all the restraints of modesty. To gratify
appetite, they sought for every kind of production by land and by sea;
they slept before there was any inclination for sleep; they no longer
waited to feel hunger, thirst, cold,[77] or fatigue, but anticipated
them all by luxurious indulgence. Such propensities drove the youth,
when their patrimonies were exhausted, to criminal practices; for
their minds, impregnated with evil habits, could not easily abstain
from gratifying their passions, and were thus the more inordinately
devoted in every way to rapacity and extravagance.

XIV. In so populous and so corrupt a city, Catiline, as it was very
easy to do, kept about him, like a body-guard, crowds of the
unprincipled and desperate. For all those shameless, libertine, and
profligate characters, who had dissipated their patrimonies by
gaming,[78] luxury, and sensuality; all who had contracted heavy
debts, to purchase immunity for their crimes or offenses; all
assassins[79] or sacrilegious persons from every quarter, convicted or
dreading conviction for their evil deeds; all, besides, whom their
tongue or their hand maintained by perjury or civil bloodshed; all, in
fine, whom wickedness, poverty, or a guilty conscience disquieted,
were the associates and intimate friends of Catiline. And if any one,