Life was terrible in its fears and in its pleasures. If the poets drew Ages of Gold in the latter days of the Republic, now the philosophers and historians looked away to a "State of Nature," to times and places where greed and civilization were unknown. In those happy days, says Seneca, they enjoyed Nature in common; the stronger had not laid his hand upon the weaker; weapons lay unused, and human hands, unstained by human blood, turned all the hatred they felt upon the wild beasts; they knew quiet nights without a sigh, while the stars moved onward above them and the splendid pageant of Night; they drank from the stream and knew no water-pipes, and their meadows were beautiful without art; their home was Nature and not terrible; while our abodes form the greatest part of our terror.[7] In Germany, writes Tacitus, the marriage-bond is strict; there are no shows to tempt virtue; adultery is rare; none there makes a jest of vice, _nec corrumpere et corrumpi seculum vocatur_; none but virgins marry and they marry to bear big children and to suckle them, _sera invenum venus eoque inexhausta pubertas_; and the children inherit the sturdy frames of their parents.[8] But whatever their dreams of the Ideal, the actual was {37} around them, and men had to accommodate themselves to it. In France before the Revolution, men spoke of the government as "despotism tempered by epigrams," and the happy phrase is as true of Imperial Rome. "Verses of unknown authorship reached the public and provoked" Tiberius,[9] who complained of the "circles and dinner-parties." Now and again the authors were discovered and were punished sufficiently. The tone of the society that produced them lives for ever in the _Annals_ of Tacitus. It is worth noting how men and women turned to Tacitus and Seneca during the French Revolution and found their own experience written in their books.[10] Others unpacked their hearts with words in tyrannicide declamations and imitations of Greek tragedy. Juvenal laughs at the crowded class-room busy killing tyrants,--waiting himself till they were dead. The tragedies got nearer the mark. Here are a few lines from some of Seneca's own:-- Who bids all pay one penalty of death Knows not a tyrant's trade. Nay, vary it-- Forbid the wretch to die, and slay the happy. (_H.F._ 515.) And is there none to teach them stealth and sin? Why! then the throne will! (_Thyestes_ 313.) Let him who serves a king, fling justice forth, Send every scruple packing from his heart; Shame is no minister to wait on kings. (_Phaedra_ 436.)