fication during life, came from the East, and
particularly from Egypt, which was at that period one of the most
corrupt countries on the face of the earth.

However, the veritable Roman nature still survived, and nobility of
soul was far from extinct. The lofty traditions of pride and virtue,
which were preserved in a few families, attained the imperial throne
with Nerva, and gave its splendor to the age of the Antonines, of
which Tacitus is the elegant historian. An age in which such, true and
noble natures as those of Quintilian, Tacitus, and Pliny the Younger
were produced need not be wholly despaired of. The corruption of the
surface did not extend to the great mass of seriousness and honor
which existed in the better Roman society, and many examples are yet
preserved of devotion to order, duty, peace, and solid integrity.
There were in the noble houses admirable wives and sisters. Was there
ever a more touching fate than that of the young and chaste Octavia,
the daughter of Claudius, and wife of Nero, remaining pure in the
midst of infamy, and slain at twenty-two years of age, without having
known a single joy? The epithets "castissimo," "univiro,"[6] are not
at all rare in the inscriptions. Some wives accompanied their husbands
into exile, and others shared their noble deaths. The ancient Roman
simplicity was not lost. The children were soberly and carefully
brought up. The most noble ladies worked with their own hands at
woolen fabrics, and the excesses of the toilet were almost unknown in
the higher families.

[Footnote 6: These epitaphs mean respectively "the most chaste" and
"the wife of one husband."]

The excellent statesmen who, so to speak, sprang from the earth under
Trajan, were not improvised. They had served in preceding reigns; but
they had enjoyed but little influence, and had been cast into the
shade by the freedmen and favorite slaves of the Emperor. Thus we find
men of the first ability occupying high posts under Nero. The
framework was good. The accession of bad emperors, disastrous as it
was, could not change at once the general tendency of affairs, and the
principles of the government. The empire, far from being in its decay,
was in the full strength of vigorous youth. Decay will come, but two
centuries later; and, strange to say, under much more worthy monarchs.
In its political phase the situation was analogous to that of France,
which, deprived by the revolution of any established rule fo