live without restraint in shameful luxury._
If the famous Scipio Nasica were now alive, who was once your pontiff,
and was unanimously chosen by the senate, when, in the panic created
by the Punic war, they sought for the best citizen to entertain the
Phrygian goddess, he would curb this shamelessness of yours, though
you would perhaps scarcely dare to look upon the countenance of such
a man. For why in your calamities do you complain of Christianity,
unless because you desire to enjoy your luxurious licence unrestrained,
and to lead an abandoned and profligate life without the interruption
of any uneasiness or disaster? For certainly your desire for peace,
and prosperity, and plenty is not prompted by any purpose of using
these blessings honestly, that is to say, with moderation, sobriety,
temperance, and piety; for your purpose rather is to run riot in an
endless variety of sottish pleasures, and thus to generate from your
prosperity a moral pestilence which will prove a thousand-fold more
disastrous than the fiercest enemies. It was such a calamity as this
that Scipio, your chief pontiff, your best man in the judgment of the
whole senate, feared when he refused to agree to the destruction of
Carthage, Rome's rival; and opposed Cato, who advised its destruction.
He feared security, that enemy of weak minds, and he perceived that
a wholesome fear would be a fit guardian for the citizens. And he
was not mistaken: the event proved how wisely he had spoken. For
when Carthage was destroyed, and the Roman republic delivered from
its great cause of anxiety, a crowd of disastrous evils forthwith
resulted from the prosperous condition of things. First concord was
weakened, and destroyed by fierce and bloody seditions; then followed,
by a concatenation of baleful causes, civil wars, which brought in
their train such massacres, such bloodshed, such lawless and cruel
proscription and plunder, that those Romans who, in the days of their
virtue, had expected injury only at the hands of their enemies, now
that their virtue was lost, suffered greater cruelties at the hands of
their fellow-citizens. The lust of rule, which with other vices existed
among the Romans in more unmitigated intensity than among any other
people, after it had taken possession of the more powerful few, subdued
under its yoke the rest, worn and wearied.