It should seem, however, that there are certain limits beyond which it is impossible to push the real improvements arising from wealth and opulence.In a simple age, the free intercourse of the sexes is attended with no bad consequences; but in opulent and luxurious nations, it gives rise to licentious and dissolute manners, inconsistent with good order, and with the general interest of society.The love of pleasure, when carried to excess, is apt to weaken and destroy those passions which it endeavours to gratify, and to pervert those appetites which nature has bestowed upon mankind for the most beneficial purposes.The natural tendency, therefore, of great luxury and dissipation is to diminish the rank and dignity of the women, by preventing all refinement in their connection with the other sex, and rendering them only subservient to the purposes of animal enjoyment.
Prima peregrinos obscena pecunia mores Intulit; et turpi fregerunt secula lux?
Divitiae molles.Quid enim Venus ebria curat?
The voluptuousness of the Eastern nations, arising from a degree of advancement in the arts joined, perhaps, to the effect of their climate, and the facility with which they are able to procure subsistence, has introduced the practice of polygamy; by which the women are reduced into a state of slavery and confinement, and a great proportion of the inhabitants are employed in such offices as render them incapable of contributing, either to the population, or to the useful improvements of the country.(35*)The excessive opulence of Rome, about the end of the commonwealth, and after the establishment of the despotism, gave rise to a degree of debauchery of which we have no example in any other European nation.This did not introduce polygamy, which was repugnant to the regular and well established police of a former period; though Julius Caesar is said to have prepared a law by which the emperor should be allowed to have as many wives as he thought fit.But the luxury of the people, being restrained in this way, came to be the more indulged in every other; and the common prostitution of the women was carried to a height that must have been extremely unfavourable to the multiplication of the species; while the liberty of divorce was so much extended and abused, that, among persons of condition, marriage became a very slight and transient connection.(36*)The frequency of divorce, among the Romans, was attended with bad consequences, which were felt in every part of their domestic economy.As the husband and wife had a separation constantly in view, they could repose little confidence in each other, but were continually occupied by separate considerations of interest.In such a situation, they were not likely to form a strong attachment, or to bestow much attention to the joint concerns of their family.So far otherwise, the practice of stealing from each other, in expectation of a divorce, became so general that it was not branded with the name of theft, but, like other fashionable vices, received a softening appellation.(37*)The bad agreement between married persons, together with the common infidelity of the wife, had a natural tendency to alienate the affections of a father from his children, and led him, in many cases, not only to neglect their education, but even to deprive them of their paternal inheritance.This appears to have been one great cause of that propensity, discovered by the people, to convey their estates by will; which, from the many statutes that were made, and the equitable decisions of judges that were given, in order to rectify the abuse, has rendered that branch of the Roman law, relating to testaments, more extensive and complicated than any other.The frequency of such deeds, to the prejudice of the heirs at law, created swarms of those legacy hunters,(38*) whose trade, as we learn from Horace, afforded the most infallible means of growing rich; and the same circumstance gave also great encouragement to the forgery or falsification of wills, a species of fraud which is much taken notice of by the writers of those times, and which has been improperly regarded as one of the general effects of opulence and luxury.(39*)In those voluptuous ages of Rome, it should seem that the inhabitants were too much dissipated by pleasure to feel any violent passion for an individual, and the correspondence of the sexes was too undistinguishing to be attended with much delicacy of sentiment.It may accordingly be remarked, that the writers of the Augustan age, who have afforded so many models of composition in other branches, have left no work of imagination, describing the manners of their own countrymen, in which love is supposed to be productive of any tragical, or very serious effects.Neither that part of the Eneid which relates to the death of Dido, nor the love-epistles of Ovid, both of which are founded upon events in a remote age, and in distant countries, can properly be considered as exceptions to what is here alleged.It also merits attention that when the Roman poets have occasion to represent their own sentiments in this particular, the subject of their description, not to mention more regular appetites, is either the love of a concubine, or an intrigue with a married woman.This is not less apparent from the grave and tender elegies of Tibullus and Propertius, than from the gay and more licentious writings of Horace, of Ovid, and of Catullus.The style of those compositions, and the manners from which it was derived, while they degraded the women of virtue, contributed, no doubt, to exalt the character of a kept-mistress.The different situation of modern nations, in this respect, is perhaps the reason why they have no term corresponding to that of amica in Latin.
