“I invite the reader's attention to...the process of
our moral decline, to watch, first, the sinking of the foundations of morality
as the old teaching was allowed to lapse, then the rapidly increasing
disintegration, then the final collapse of the whole edifice, and the dark
dawning of our modern day when we can neither endure our vices nor face the
remedies needed to cure them.”—Roman historian Titus Livius, known as Livy (59
BC-17 AD), The History of Early Rome, Book One: Rome Under the Kings, translated
by Aubrey de Selincourt
The image accompanying this post is a still from the
classic Stanley Kubrick film Spartacus, with
Laurence Olivier (center) as the ambitious politician-general Crassus. Immoral
(the “oyster-and-snails” scene between Olivier and Tony Curtis captures the
tone, if not the literal fact, of this real-life sybarite), Crassus made his
fortune through…real estate speculation—buying
burnt and collapsed buildings, then exploiting slave labor to rebuild them.
Surely, no such example of unapologetic avarice, decadence and
power hunger could exist today, could it?
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