A thorough knowledge of the details of the most corrupt and abandoned state of society recorded in history may be had by a perusal of the Annals of Tacitus and the Satires of Juvenal. The Sixth Satire is a withering arraignment of Roman profligacy and wickedness. "To see the world in its worst estate," says Professor Jowett, "we turn to the age of the satirists and of Tacitus, when all the different streams of evil, coming from east, west, north, south, the vices of barbarism and the vices of civilization, remnants of ancient cults, and the latest refinements of luxury and impurity, met and mingled on the banks of the Tiber." Rome was the heart of the empire that pumped its filthy blood from the center to the extremities, and received from the provinces a return current of immorality and corruption. Juvenal complains that Long since the stream that wanton Syria laves, Has disembogued its filth in Tiber's waves. Grecian literature and manners were the main cause of Roman dissoluteness. The grandfather of Cicero is said to have made this declaration: "A Roman's wickedness increases in proportion to his acquaintance with Greek authors." It is undeniably true that the domestic immorality of the Greeks exercised a most baneful influence upon the social life of the Romans. Both at Athens and in Sparta marriage was regarded as the means to an end, the procreation of children as worshipers of the gods and citizens of the state. In this fundamental purpose were involved, the Greeks believed, the mission and the destiny of woman. Marriage was not so much a sacred institution, as it was a convenient arrangement whereby property rights were regulated and soldiers were provided for the army and the navy. This view was entertained by both the Athenians and the Spartans. The code of Lycurgus regulated the family relations to the end that healthy, vigorous children might be born to a military commonwealth. The Spartan maidens were required to exercise in the palestra, almost naked, in the presence of men and strangers. And so loose and extravagant were the ideas of conjugal fidelity among the Spartans that it was not regarded as an improper thing to borrow another man's wife for the purpose of procreating children, if there had already been born to the legitimate husband all the children that he desired. This we learn from Xenophon[158] and from Polybius,[159] who assure us that it often happened that as many as four Spartans had one woman, in common, for a wife. "Already in the time of Socrates, the wives of Sparta had reached the height of disrepute for their wantonness throughout the whole of Greece; Aristotle says that they lived in unbridled licentiousness; and, indeed, it is a distinctive feature in the female character there, that publicly and shamelessly they would speed a well-known seducer of a woman of rank by wishing him success, and charging him to think only of endowing Sparta with brave boys."[160]