It went on from bad to worse, so that Augustus, in
view of the general avoidance of legal marriage and resort to
concubinage with slaves, was compelled to impose penalties on the
unmarried--to enact that they should not inherit by will except from
relations. Not that the Roman women refrained from the gratification of
their desires; their depravity impelled them to such wicked practices as
cannot be named in a modern book. They actually reckoned the years, not
by the consuls, but by the men they had lived with. To be childless, and
therefore without the natural restraint of a family, was looked upon as
a singular felicity. Plutarch correctly touched the point when he said
that the Romans married to be heirs and not to have heirs. Of offences
that do not rise to the dignity of atrocity, but which excite our
loathing, such as gluttony and the most debauched luxury, the annals of
the times furnish disgusting proofs. It was said, "They eat that they
may vomit, and vomit that they may eat." At the taking of Perusium,
three hundred of the most distinguished citizens were solemnly
sacrificed at the altar of Divus Julius by Octavian! Are these the deeds
of civilized men, or the riotings of cannibals drunk with blood?

[Sidenote: The whole system is past cure.]

The higher classes on all sides exhibited a total extinction of moral
principle; the lower were practical atheists. Who can peruse the annals
of the emperors without being shocked at the manner in which men died,
meeting their fate with the obtuse tranquillity that characterizes
beasts? A centurion with a private mandate appears, and forthwith the
victim opens his veins and dies in a warm bath. At the best, all that
was done was to strike at the tyrant. Men despairingly acknowledged that
the system itself was utterly past cure.

[Sidenote: Testimony of Tacitus.]

That in these statements I do not exaggerate, hear what Tacitus says:
"The holy ceremonies of religion were violated; adultery reigning
without control; the adjacent islands filled with exiles; rocks and
desert places stained with clandestine murders, and Rome itself a
theatre of horrors, where nobility of descent and splendour of fortune
marked men out for destruction; where the vigour of mind that aimed at
civil dignities, and the modesty that declined them, were offences
without distinction; where virtue was a crime that led to certain ruin;
where the guilt of informers and the wages of their iniquity wer