To make money--money by any means,
lawful or unlawful--became the universal passion. Even the most cultivated
patricians were coarse alike in their habits and their amusements. They
cared for art as dilettanti, but no schools either of sculpture or
painting were formed among themselves. They decorated their porticos and
their saloons with the plunder of the East. The stage was never more than
an artificial taste with them; their delight was the delight of
barbarians, in spectacles, in athletic exercises, in horse-races and
chariot-races, in the combats of wild animals in the circus, combats of
men with beasts on choice occasions, and, as a rare excitement, in fights
between men and men, when select slaves trained as gladiators were matched
in pairs to kill each other. Moral habits are all-sufficient while they
last; but with rude strong natures they are but chains which hold the
passions prisoners. Let the chain break, and the released brute is but the
more powerful for evil from the force which his constitution has
inherited. Money! the cry was still money!--money was the one thought from
the highest senator to the poorest wretch who sold his vote in the
Comitia. For money judges gave unjust decrees and juries gave corrupt
verdicts. Governors held their provinces for one, two, or three years;
they went out bankrupt from extravagance, they returned with millions for
fresh riot.
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