The climax of civilisation / by Correa Moylan Walsh.

  • Correa Moylan Walsh
Date:
1917
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The climax of civilisation / by Correa Moylan Walsh. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    first man in Naples. Men are worth, he is made to say, what they have, and honours are paid to them accordingly. He was proud, too, of his ignorance, and wished to have engraved on his tomb that he had not frequented the philosophers ; which is equivalent to saying he had not had a college education, and did not regret it. People now-a-days, Petronius makes an- other of his characters say, admire a lump of gold more than a statue by the greatest master.’ As time wore on, high offices came to be rated according to the size of their salaries or of the fees they brought in, and on gravestones we find in- scriptions to the effect that the defunct was a hundred, a two hundred, a three hundred thousand sesterce man.1® We to-day also are wont to think that the well-known saying “ Make money — honestly if you can, but make it” is an American witticism. Yet it comes from Horace.® Money, Horace also said, must be got first of all, virtue being of secondary importance.?? - And Juvenal added that money does not reek, whatever be its source, since nobody inquires where you got it, so long as you have it.2!. That it is odourless, had already been hinted by Vespasian.2* Yet to a few, at least, the nose was delicate.?3 . A phenomenon accompanying this outburst of plutocracy was the appearance of women in politics. For some time past the old restraints upon women had been relaxing, and the old household industries were falling into desuetude.24 As long before as toward the end of the third century B. c. the old cus- tomary relations had so far broken down that a law (the Oppian) was needed to restore some of the earlier simplicity. 17 Satyricon, cc. 71, 77, 88. 18 While this was writing, a New York newspaper published a full-page account of a certain scientist under the caption “One of America’s hun- dred-thousand-a-year men.” This sum in dollars is several times larger than the largest the ancients boasted of. 19 Fp, I. 1. 65-66 20 Tb, 53-4. 21 Sat. XIV. 204-5, 207. 22 Suetonius, V espasian, 23. 23 Thus, at least in Greece, somewhat earlier in a corresponding period, Crates, the best of the Cynics, advised that not all gifts should be received, as it was shameful for virtue to be supported by wickedness: see Mullach’s Fragmenta Philosophorum Graecorum, ii. 338. 24,A notice of this change, at least among the upper classes, consut- mated by the middle of the first century A.D., may be seen in Columella’s De Re Rustica, XII. Praefatio.