personal purity.

In the earlier civilization, the Greeks, however
genuine their reverence for the gods, do not seem to
have supposed any part of their duty to the gods to
consist in keeping their bodies untainted. Exquisite as
was their sense of beauty, of beauty of mind as well as
beauty of form, with all their loftiness and their nobleness,
with their ready love of moral excellence in some
of its manifestations, as fortitude, or devotion to liberty
and to home, they had little or no idea of what we
mean by morality. With a few rare exceptions, pollution,
too detestable to be even named among ourselves,
was of familiar and daily occurrence among their
greatest men; was no reproach to philosopher or to statesman;
and was not supposed to be incompatible, and
was not, in fact, incompatible with any of those especial
excellences which we so admire in the Greeks.

Among the Romans (that is, the early Romans of
the republic), there was a sufficiently austere morality.
A public officer of state, whose business was to inquire
into the private lives of the citizens, and to punish
offences against morals, is a phenomenon which we
have seen only once on this planet. There was never
a people before, and there has been none since, with
sufficient virtue to endure it. But the Roman morality
is not lovely for its own sake, nor excellent in itself.
It is obedience to law, practised and valued, loved
for what resulted from it, for the strength and rigid
endurance which it gave, but not loved for itself. The
Roman nature was fierce, rugged, almost brutal; and
it submitted to restraint as stern as itself, as long as
the energy of the old spirit endured. But as soon as
the energy grew slack, when the religion was no
longer believed, and taste, as it was called, came in,
and there was no more danger to face, and the world
was at their feet, all was swept away as before a whirlwind;
there was no loveliness in virtue to make it
desired, and the Rome of the Censors presents, in its
later age, a picture of enormous sensuality, of the
coarsest animal desire, with means unlimited to gratify
it. In Latin literature, as little as in the Greek, is
there any sense of the beauty of purity. Moral essays
on temperance we may find, and praise enough of the
wise man whose passions and whose appetites are
trained into obedience to reason. But this is no more
than the philosophy of the old Roman life, which got
itself expressed in words when m