Note 43 — T. FLAVIUS VESPASIANUS. TITUS. DOMITIANUS.

Posthumous Works, vol. XIII. p. 68. “The Romans, from a narrow, moral, easy, comfortable, bourgeois state had risen to the broad range of the dominion of the world, without losing their narrow-mindedness.—To the same source we may trace their luxury. Underbred men who acquire a great fortune, will always make a ridiculous use of it: their pleasures, their pomp, their profusion, will be absurd and overdone. Hence also arises that fondness for the Strange, the Innumerable, the Immense. Their theatres which turn round with the spectators; the second population of statues, with which the town was thronged, as well as the gigantic bowl in after times, in which the large fish was to be kept entire, are all of the same origin: even the insolence and cruelty of their tyrants mostly partakes of the absurd.”