Except, perhaps, in some chapters of Italian history, as, for
example, among the most profligate of the Papal houses, and amongst some
of the Florentine princes, we find hardly any parallel to the atrocities
of Caligula and Nero; nor indeed was Tiberius much (if at all) behind
them, though otherwise so wary and cautious in his conduct. The same tenor
of licentiousness beyond the needs of the individual, the same craving
after the marvellous and the stupendous in guilt, is continually emerging
in succeeding emperors--in Vitellius, in Domitian, in Commodus, in
Caracalla--every where, in short, where it was not overruled by one of two
causes, either by original goodness of nature too powerful to be mastered
by ordinary seductions, (and in some cases removed from their influence by
an early apprenticeship to camps,) or by the terrors of an exemplary ruin
immediately preceding. For such a determinate tendency to the enormous and
the anomalous, sufficient causes must exist. What were they?
In the first place, we may observe that the people of Rome in that age
were generally more corrupt by many degrees than has been usually supposed
possible.
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