nicious to the force of the State; he had
come back far more powerful, and ruled the Empire. Husbands, burdened
by the excessive expenses, by the too frequent infidelities, by the
tyrannical caprices of their wives, in vain regretted the good old
time when husbands were absolute masters; the invading feminism
weakened everywhere the strength of the aristocratic and military
traditions.

So contradiction was everywhere. The Republic had still its old
aristocratic constitution, but the nobility was no longer spurred by
that 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 desire
for public spectacles increased, even in secondary cities. The Italian
people were losing their peasant's petty avarice and growing fond
of things monumental and colossal, which was the great folly of the
Orient. They found the monuments of Rome poor; everywhere, even in
modest _municipia_, they demanded immense theatres, great temples,
monumental basilicas, spacious forums, adorned with statues. In spite
of the principles insisted upon with so much vigour by Augustus and
Tiberius, public finances had, thanks to the weak Claudius and the
extravagant Messalina, already gone through a period of great waste
and disorder.

These c