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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    acy of the city-bred men showed itself exteriorly in the use of fine raiment and ointments, in the shaving of the face and even the depilation of the whole body.’ At Carthage things were even worse. There and throughout Roman Africa, peo- ple were said to have all the vices in a superior degree. Many men became women in face, walk, and dress; and what Clement of Alexandria called “ preposterous Venus ” 1* was practised. openly.14 As for the women, matrons could not by their dress be distinguished from courtesans.1° Amot.; other things revived to-day, they dyed their hair yellow.1° In general, “luxury has deranged everything,” a Christian Father com- plained: “men play the part of women, and women that of men, contrary to nature; women are at once wives and hus- bands; and their promiscuous lechery is a public institution.” ** Already by the latter half of the third century the Romans of Italy, where the peasant conscripts often cut off their thumbs to avoid military service **— a practice not unknown to-day,— would willingly have left the defence of the empire to the outer provinces, and a party of the emperor Gallienus seems to have desired letting the provinces become independent and take care of themselves; and when Aurelian abolished that policy and reconquered the provinces that had separated, at the same time restoring the currency, the city rose up in rebellion. A little later, the emperor Probus, having pacified the Roman world for the last time, fell into the error some good people at the present day entertain, of thinking that soon there would be no more need of soldiers. Accordingly he set them to the use- est etiam incessu ipso ultra muliebrem mollitiem fluentibus; sed ut illi antiqui viri solebant, inter lusum ac festa tempora, virilem in modum tripudiare, non facturi detrimentum, etiam si ab hostibus. suis spectarentur,” De Tranquillitate Animi, c. 15. 12 The last by means of pitch-plasters: see Clement of Alexandria, Paeda- gogus, III. 3; cf. Tertullian, De Cultu Feminarum, I1. 8. Clement remarks that “the bushy hair of the ‘barbarians has something fearful in it,” loc. cit. Cf. Alexander Walker: “They were bearded Romans who conquered the then beardless Greeks; they were bearded Goths who conquered the then beardless Romans,” Beauty (American ed.) p. 218. 13 Paedagogus, II. 10. 14 Salvianus, VII.; cf. Clement again, op. cit., III. 3. 15 Tertullian, Apologeticus, c. 6. 16 Tertullian, De Cultu Feminarum, II. 6; Cyprian, On the Dress of Vir- gins, c. 16. Also men, according to Clement, loc. cit. 17 Clement, Joc. cit. 18 Ammianus Marcellinus, XV. 12; Codex Theod. VII. xiii. 4, 5, to.