The good faith of the elder Pliny, of Seneca and Juvenal, need not, indeed, be called in question. But the first two were men who led by preference an almost ascetic life. The satirist was a man whose culinary tastes were satisfied by the kid and eggs and asparagus of his little farm at Tibur.(396) And the simple abstemious habits of the south, which are largely the result of climate, tended to throw into more startling contrast any indulgence of superfluous appetite. It is true that the conquests which unlocked the hoarded treasures of eastern monarchies, gave a great shock to the hardy frugality and self-restraint of the old Roman character, just as the stern simplicity of Spartan breeding was imperilled by contact with the laxer life of the Hellespontine towns and the wealth of the Persian court.(397) The Roman aristocracy were for two centuries exposed to the same temptations as the treasures of the Incas offered to Pizarro,(398) or the treasures of the Moguls to Clive. In the wild licence, which prevailed in certain circles for more than a century, many a fortune and many a character were wrecked. Yet the result may easily be exaggerated. Extravagant luxury and self-indulgence is at all times only possible to a comparatively small number. And luxury, after all, is a relative term. The luxuries of one age often become the necessities of the next. There are many articles of food or dress, which free-trade and science have brought to the doors of our cottagers, which would have incurred the censure of the elder Pliny or of Seneca. There are aldermanic banquets in New York or the city of London in our own day, which far surpass, in costliness and variety, the banquets of Lucullus or the pontiff’s feast described by Macrobius. The wealth of Pallas, Narcissus, or Seneca, was only a fraction of many a fortune accumulated in the last thirty years in the United States.(399) The exaggerated idea of Roman riches and waste has been further heightened by the colossal extravagance of the worst emperors and a few of their boon companions and imitators. But we are apt to forget that these were the outbreaks of morbid and eccentric character, in which the last feeble restraints were sapped and swept away by the sense of having at command the resources of a world. Nero is expressly described by the historian as a lover of the impossible;(400) and both he and Caligula had floating before their disordered imaginations the dream of astounding triumphs, even over the most defiant forces and barriers of nature. There was much in the extravagance of their courtiers and imitators, springing from the same love of sensation and display. Rome was a city of gossip, and the ambition to be talked about, as the inventor of some new freak of prodigality, was probably the only ambition of the blasé spendthrift of the time.