Roman society throughout the first century of the pagan Empire, as mirrored in the literature of the period, presents a picture of frightful moral degeneracy. This state of things was largely an inheritance from the Republic. It was the continuation of that moral decline which began in the second century B.C., and some of the contributing causes of which, such as slavery, the spectacles of the amphitheater, the free distribution of corn, together with contact with the dissolute civilizations of the Orient, were considered briefly in the preceding pages. Since all these causes of moral degradation were still at work in the society of the early Empire, and as fresh agencies of malign influence were added to them, it was inevitable that the moral anarchy should not only continue but should grow worse. The definitive establishment of the Empire and the passing of the liberal institutions of the Republic changed wholly the atmosphere in which had been nourished the virtues of Republican Rome. Political liberty was dead, and all true civic activity, which had been the very breath of life to the citizen of the ancient city, had come to an end. In the new world that was forming there was no room for the exercise of those patriotic virtues which had made the early history of Rome so great, and had given her the rule of the world.[545] One wholly fresh cause of moral debasement was the personal character of several of the occupants of the imperial throne during the first century of the Empire. The Oriental extravagancies and coarse debaucheries which disgraced the court of a Claudius, a Caligula, or a Nero, communicated their virus to every part of the social body. Never did the proverb, “As court, so people,” have such justification. At the same time the tyranny which marked the rule of more than one of the emperors instituted a demoralizing terror like that of the proscriptions of the Civil Wars. Under the influence of the frightful persecutions of their order, the senatorial aristocracy, with moral fiber now relaxed and corroded by effeminate luxury, lost seemingly all those virtues which earlier had characterized their class, and was transformed into a body at times sycophantic, cringing, and base almost beyond belief. But it is doubtful if any other aristocracy which history has known would have stood the test any better. The French nobility of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, excluded from participation in political affairs by the divine-right monarchy, and made servile dependents of the court, exhibited almost as depressing a spectacle of moral degeneracy as did the higher Roman classes under the more frightful tyranny of the early Cæsars. [Sidenote: The old and the new]