The truth is that, if we are not misled by the hasty generalizations and plebeian diatribes which Juvenal, in his “Satires,” founds upon the dubious bits of gossip that he picked up on the fringe of Roman society, and against which historians now warn us, there was much the same diversity of conduct in the early Empire as in most of the corresponding periods of luxury. The wealthier women of Rome assuredly fell far short of the cloistered virtue of the maid and the matron of Greece; but Greece had only succeeded in maintaining that standard of domestic virtue in its wives and daughters by cultivating a high caste of courtesans for their roaming husbands. It may be admitted, too, that the Roman woman was morally inferior to the wife of the Egyptian noble, and to the wife of the noble or the wealthy merchant of Babylonia. But the patrician women, even of Cæsarean Rome, will compare with the women of most of the later civilizations at the same stage of development; at the stage, that is to say, when the nation relaxes from the strain of empire-making, and its veins are flushed with the wealth of its conquests. I would instance the women of the early Teutonic nations as soon as they settle on southern Europe; the women of Italy in the early Middle Ages; the women of England under the Stuarts and, after a later expansion, under the Georges; the women of France under Louis XIII and Louis XIV; the women of Russia in the nineteenth century. At Rome, in spite of the positive insistence on vice of Caligula, Messalina, and Nero, in spite of their determined effort to weed out the good, we have found virtue and courage springing up afresh in each generation. We now come to a period when, three centuries before the fall of Rome, the Empire is purged of its exceptional corruption, and character assumes the normal diversity that it has in any old and wealthy civilization. The city of Rome was assuredly vicious and in decay. But the city was not the Empire, as those rhetoricians forget who talk of its entire demoralization. Rome had been drenched with degrading agencies for half a century; but there was a quite normal amount of stout will and high character in the provinces, and this is now infused more freely into the metropolis. It is only by a similar influx of sounder blood from the provinces that any great city survives the feverish waste of its tissue. The remedy was retarded in Rome because the provincials, even of Italy, but especially of Gaul and Spain, were of alien race. Rome jealously remembered that it was the conqueror; the rest were the conquered. Under Vespasian, however, the provincials were admitted more freely, and with the accession of a Spaniard, Trajan, the process increased.