clined in spirit and taste, and was
directed to frivolous subjects. Christianity had not become a power
sufficiently strong to change or modify the corrupt institutions
controlled by the powerful classes. The expensive luxury of the nobles was
almost incredible. The most distant provinces were ransacked for game,
fish, and fowl for the tables of the great. Usury was practiced at a
ruinous rate. Every thing was measured by the money standard. Art was
prostituted to please degraded tastes. There was no dignity of character;
women were degraded; only passing vanities made any impression on
egotistical classes; games and festivals were multiplied; gladiatorial
sports outraged humanity; the descendants of the proudest families prided
themselves chiefly on their puerile frivolities; the worst rites of
paganism were practiced; slaves performed the most important functions;
the circus and the theatre were engrossing pleasures; the baths were the
resort of the idle and the luxurious, who almost lived in them, and were
scenes of disgraceful orgies; great extravagance in dress and ornaments
was universal; the pleasures of the table degenerated to riotous excesses;
cooks, buffoons, and dancers received more consideration than scholars and
philosophers; everybody worshiped the shrine of mammon; all science was
directed to utilities that demoralized; sensualism reigned triumphant, and
the people lived as if there were no God.

(M1104) Such a state must prepare the way for violence, and when external
dangers came there were not sufficient virtues to meet them. But the
decline was gradual, and dangers were still at a distance. Both nature and
art were the objects of perpetual panegyric, and the worldly and sensual
Romans dreamed only of a millennium of protracted joys.

The last experiment of a constitutional empire was succeeded by
undisguised military despotism, and no one now desired or expected the
restoration of the republic. The Senate was servile and submissive, the
people had no voice in public affairs, and the prefects of the imperial
guard were the recognized lieutenants and often masters of the emperors.

(M1105) Pertinax succeeded to the sceptre of Commodus, a wise and good
man, and great hopes were entertained of a beneficent reign, when they
were suddenly blasted by a sedition of the praetorians, only eighty-six
days after the death of Commodus, and these guards publicly sold the
empire to Didius Julianus, a wealthy sena