Chapter 1

Rome had passed the summits and stood looking into the dark valley of
fourteen hundred years. Behind her the graves of Caesar and Sallust
and Cicero and Catullus and Vergil and Horace; before her centuries of
madness and treading down; round about her a multitude sickening of
luxury, their houses filled with spoil, their mouths with folly, their
souls with discontent; above her only mystery and silence; in her
train, philosophers questioning if it were not better for a man had he
never been born--deeming life a misfortune and extinction the only
happiness; poets singing no more of "pleasantries and trifles," but
seeking favor with poor obscenities. Soon they were even to celebrate
the virtue of harlots, the integrity of thieves, the tenderness of
murderers, the justice of oppression. Leading the caravan were types
abhorrent and self-opposed--effeminate men, masculine women, cheerful
cynics, infidel priests, wealthy people with no credit, patricians,
honoring and yet despising the gods, hating and yet living on the
populace. Here was the spectacle of a republican empire, and an
emperor gathering power while he affected to disdain it.

The splendor of the capital had attracted from all nations the idle
rich, gamblers, speculators, voluptuaries, profligates, intriguers,
criminals. To such an extreme had luxury been carried that nothing was
too sacred, nothing too costly to be enjoyed. Digestion had become a
science, courtship an art, sleep a nightmare, comfort an
accomplishment, and the very act of living an industry. Almost one may
say that the gods lived only in the imagination of the ignorant and the
jests of the learned. In a growing patriciate home had become a
weariness, marriage a form, children a trouble, and the decline of
motherhood an alarming fact. Augustus tried the remedy of legislation.
Henceforth marriage became a duty to the state. As between men and
women, things were near a turning-point. Woman cannot long endure
scorn nor the absence of veneration. A law older than the tablets of
stone shall be her defence. Love is the price of motherhood. Soon or
late, unless it be mingled in some degree with her passion, the
wonderful gift is withdrawn and men cease to be born of her. Slowly,
both the bitterness and the understanding of its loss turn the world to
virtue. A new and lofty sentiment was appearing. Woman, weary of her
part in the human comedy, had begun to inspire a love sublime as the
miracle in which she is born to act.

Happily, there were good people in Rome, even noble families, with whom
sacrifice had still a sacred power, and who practised the four virtues
of honor, bravery, wisdom, and temperance. In rural Latium, rich and
poor clung to the old faith, and everywhere a