13 For why should I
mention those displays of extravagance, which can be believed by none but those
who have seen them; as that mountains have been leveled, and seas covered with
edifices, by many private citizens; men whom I consider to have made a sport of
their wealth, since they were impatient to squander disreputably what they
might have enjoyed with honor.
But the love of irregular gratification, open debauchery, and all kinds of
luxury, had spread abroad with no less force. Men forgot their sex; women threw
off all the restraints of modesty. To gratify appetite, they sought for every
kind of production by land and by sea; they slept before there vas any
inclination for sleep; they no longer waited to feel hunger, thirst, cold, or
fatigue, but anticipated them all by luxurious indulgence. Such propensities
drove the youth, when their patrimonies were exhausted, to criminal practices;
for their minds, impregnated with evil habits, could not easily abstain from
gratifying their passions, and were thus the more inordinately devoted in every
way to rapacity and extravagance.
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