Thus, in the society of Cato's great-grandson, the last shreds of traditional restraint had been contemptuously flung aside, and the dominant note was one of individual freedom and self-assertion. Inflamed by an insatiable thirst for novel forms of experience, members of the aristocracy let themselves go in a protracted orgy of extravagance and debauchery. The world was ransacked to provide the rarest and most exotic means for the satisfaction of the senses, and the last refinements of luxury and vice were introduced to titillate appetites already jaded by pleasure in its cruder forms. . . history and satire, developing about the same time, adopted a somewhat peevish and moralizing tone which, as it presently became conventional, was to be imitated by writers who, generations later, lashed at social evils which by their day were largely obsolete.
--Charles Norris Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture
File this under: Evidences We Are Rome.
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