r fumes. The latter intoxicated Caligula so sheerly that he invited
the moon to share his couch. Thereafter, the palace of the Caesars became a
vast court in which the wives and daughters of the nobility assisted at
perversions which a Ministry of Pleasure devised, and where Rome abandoned
whatever she had held holy, the innocence of girlhood, patrician pride,
everything, shame included.

In post-pagan convulsions there was much that was very vile. But there is
one aspect of evil which subsequent barbarism reproved, and in which Rome
delighted. It was the symbolized shapes of sin, open and public, for
which in modern speech there is no name, and which were then omnipresent,
sung in verse, exhibited on the stage, paraded in the streets, put on the
amulets that girls and matrons wore, put in the nursery, consecrated by
custom, art, religion, and since recovered from disinterred Pompeii. "The
mouth," said Quintillian, "does not dare describe what the eyes behold."
Rome that had made _orbs_ and _urbs_ synonymous was being conquered by the
turpitudes of the quelled.

"I have told of the Prince," said Suetonius, "I will tell now of the
Beast." It was his privilege. He wrote in Latin. In English it is not
possible. Gautier declared that the inexpressible does not exist. Even his
pen might have balked, had he tried it on the imperial orgy. The ulcer
that ravaged Sylla, gangrened a throne, and decomposed a world. Less
violent under Tiberius than under Caligula, under Nero the fever rose to
the brain and added delirium to it. In reading accounts of the epoch you
feel as though you were assisting at the spectacle of a gigantic asylum,
from which the keepers are gone, and of which the inmates are omnipotent.
But, in spite of the virulence of the virus, the athletic constitution of
the empire, joined to its native element of might, resisted the disease so
potently that one must assume that there was there a vitality which no
other people had had, a hardiness that enabled Rome to survive excesses in
which Nineveh and Babylon fainted. From the disease itself Rome might have
recovered. It was the delirium that brought her down. That delirium,
mounting always, increased under Commodus, heightened under Caracalla, and
reached its crisis in Heliogabalus. Thereafter, for a while it waned only
to flame again under Diocletian. The virus remained. To extirpate it the
earth had to produce new races. Already they were on their way.

Meanwhile,