Bkiii:Vi Moral Decadence

Romans, though you’re guiltless, you’ll still expiate your fathers’ sins, till you’ve restored the temples, and the tumbling shrines of all the gods, and their images, soiled with black smoke. You rule because you are lower than the gods you worship: all things begin with them: credit them with the outcome. Neglected gods have made many woes for sad Italy. Already Parthians, and Monaeses and Pacorus, have crushed our inauspicious assaults, and laugh now to have added our spoils to their meagre treasures. Dacians and Ethiopians almost toppled the City, mired in civil war, the last feared for their fleet of ships, and the others who are best known for their flying arrows. Our age, fertile in its wickedness, has first defiled the marriage bed, our offspring, and homes: disaster’s stream has flowed from this source through the people and the fatherland. The young girl early takes delight in learning Greek dances, in being dressed with all the arts, and soon meditates sinful affairs, with every fibre of her new being: later at her husband’s dinners she searches for younger lovers, doesn’t mind to whom she grants all her swift illicit pleasures when the lights are far removed, but she rises, openly, when ordered to do so, and not without her husband’s knowledge, whether it’s for some peddler, or Spanish ship’s captain, an extravagant buyer of her shame. The young men who stained the Punic Sea with blood they were not born of such parentage, those who struck at Pyrrhus, and struck at great Antiochus, and fearful Hannibal: they were a virile crowd of rustic soldiers, taught to turn the furrow with a Sabine hoe, to bring in the firewood they had cut at the instruction of their strict mothers. when the sun had lengthened the mountain shadows, and lifted the yokes from the weary bullocks, bringing a welcome time of rest, with the departure of his chariot. What do the harmful days not render less? Worse than our grandparents’ generation, our parents’ then produced us, even worse, and soon to bear still more sinful children.