In proportion to the luxury of the age
were its misery and its exhaustion. The mad pursuit of pleasure was the
death and degradation of all true happiness. Suicide--suicide out of
pure _ennui_ and discontent at a life overflowing with every possible
means of indulgence--was extraordinarily prevalent. The Stoic
philosophy, especially as we see it represented in the tragedies
attributed to Seneca, rang with the glorification of it. Men ran to
death because their mode of life had left them no other refuge. They
died because it seemed so tedious and so superfluous to be seeing and
doing and saying the same things over and over again; and because they
had exhausted the very possibility of the only pleasures of which they
had left themselves capable. The satirical epigram of Destouches,--
"Ci-git Jean Rosbif, ecuyer,
Qui se pendit pour se desennuyer,"
was literally and strictly true of many Romans during this epoch.
Marcellinus, a young and wealthy noble, starved himself, and then had
himself suffocated in a warm bath, merely because he was attacked with a
perfectly curable illness.
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