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The immorality of the ancient Romans is a commonplace in modern representations of Roman antiquity. In nineteenth-century history painting, twentieth-century sword and sandal movies and twenty-first-century TV shows alike, inebriated Roman voluptuaries lounge on their couches surrounded by gleaming marble, while they savour exotic foods and grope scantily dressed women and boys.Romans behaving badly certainly have box-office appeal but the details of their excesses in the modern imaginary are deeply rooted in the preoccupations of cultural commentators in Roman antiquity. The speeches of Cicero, the histories of Sallust, Livy and Tacitus, the philosophical works of Seneca, the Elder Pliny’s observations about the natural world – all these texts (and more) return obsessively to the vices of their authors’ fellow Romans, charting their sexual misbehaviour, their insatiable desire for luxury, their inability to subordinate their own pleasure to the public good.

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Introduction to the Cambridge Classical Classics edition

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Introduction to the Cambridge Classical Classics edition

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