And his character was assailed simultaneously on another side with equally
mischievous effect. The conquest of Greece brought to Rome a taste for
knowledge and culture; but the culture seldom passed below the surface,
and knowledge bore but the old fruit which it had borne in Eden. The elder
Cato used to say that the Romans were like their slaves--the less Greek
they knew the better they were. They had believed in the gods with pious
simplicity. The Greeks introduced them to an Olympus of divinities whom
the practical Roman found that he must either abhor or deny to exist. The
"Virtues" which he had been taught to reverence had no place among the
graces of the new theology. Reverence Jupiter he could not, and it was
easy to persuade him that Jupiter was an illusion; that all religions were
but the creations of fancy, his own among them. Gods there might be, airy
beings in the deeps of space, engaged like men with their own enjoyments;
but to suppose that these high spirits fretted themselves with the affairs
of the puny beings that crawled upon the earth was a delusion of vanity.
Thus, while morality was assailed on one side by extraordinary
temptations, the religious sanction of it was undermined on the other.
The, Romans ceased to believe, and in losing their faith they became as
steel becomes when it is demagnetized; the spiritual quality was gone out
of them, and the high society of Rome itself became a society of powerful
animals with an enormous appetite for pleasure. Wealth poured in more and
more, and luxury grew more unbounded. Palaces sprang up in the city,
castles in the country, villas at pleasant places by the sea, and parks,
and fish-ponds, and game-preserves, and gardens, and vast retinues of
servants. When natural pleasures had been indulged in to satiety,
pleasures which were against nature were imported from the East to
stimulate the exhausted appetite. To make money--money by any means,
lawful or unlawful--became the universal passion. Even the most cultivated
patricians were coarse alike in their habits and their amusements. They
cared for art as dilettanti, but no schools either of sculpture or