at absorbing and exclusive passion for politics and war, which had been its power. Society life, pleasure, amateur philosophy and literature, mysticism, and, above all, sports, dissipated in a thousand directions its energy and activity. Too many young men were to be found in the nobility who, like Nero, preferred singing, dancing, and driving, to caring for their clients or enduring the troubles of public office.
Augustus and Tiberius had done their utmost to strengthen the great Latin principle of parsimony in public and private life: in order to set a good example they had lived very simply; they had caused new sumptuary laws to be passed and tried to enforce the old ones; they had spent the State moneys, not for the keeping of artists and writers, nor for the building of monuments of useless size, but to build the great roads of the Empire, to strengthen the frontiers; they had made the public treasure into an aid fund for all suffering cities, stricken by earthquake, fire, or flood. And yet the Oriental influence, so favourable to unproductive and luxurious expenditure, gained ground steadily. The merchant of Syrian and Egyptian objects de luxe, in spite of the sumptuary laws, found a yearly increasing patronage in all the cities of Italy. The exactingness of the
