As far, then, as sobriety and temperance are concerned, we cannot confront our ancestors with too haughty a mien. And what shall we say about the purity of our customs? That is a much more difficult problem, perhaps an absolutely insoluble one. At least I, for my part, do not feel myself competent to solve it. To judge from Greco-Latin literature and art, one would say that in the ancient world, with the exception of a few countries and certain epochs, such as the centuries during which Rome was controlled by a puritan aristocracy, the customs of both men and women were very free and easy. But literature and art often afford untrustworthy evidence on which to base a judgment as to the customs of an epoch. For vice, wrong, and crime, though they may shock the moral sense, are more interesting subjects for art than are virtue and honesty. In short, literature and art always seek to describe what is rare, exceptional, and dramatic. Therefore, if we wish to judge the moral state of an epoch from its literature and art, we must know how far and in what degree the faults and vices described or chosen for artistic representation are common, what is the rule, and how many are the exceptions. And how are we to find this out? We shall have to know the moral state of the epoch, and literature will not help us to this knowledge. Anybody who judged Paris from the novels or dramas which deal with Parisian life would be forced to conclude that the French metropolis spends the whole of its time in amorous adventures. But anyone who _knows_ Paris is aware, what is after all an _a priori_ supposition, that love occupies in its life a very much less prominent place than in its literature; and that the writers of dramas and novels go to love for their subject by preference, because love admits of more attractive treatment than do struggles for money or the rivalries of political ambitions and the crosses of the intellectual life. For the rest, when we wish to judge the customs of an epoch or of a people, we must not forget that it is not always the epochs or the nations which lament most loudly the depravity of customs that are the most corrupt. Far from it! Often the epochs which bewail their own vices most bitterly are those in which the moral conscience is still lively and robust and, therefore, protests against the evil. The epochs which are dumb, and seem most virtuous, have often reached such a pitch of depravity, that they have become indifferent to the evil.