Note 232-12 — Chapter II
John J. (John Joseph) Lalor translation
Gibbon, History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ch. 27. What a parallel between this later Roman luxury and the literary taste represented for instance by Seneca!
Let any one who would embrace the three periods of luxury in one view, compare the funeral ceremonies of the Greek age of chivalry (Homer, Il.), with those in Thucyd. (II, 34, ff.), Demosth. (Lept., 499 seq.), and the interment of Alexander the Great and, of his friend Hephaestion (Diodor., XVII, 115, XVIII, 26 ff.) Sullas (Serv. ad Virgil, Æneid VI, 861. Plutarch, Sulla, 38), and that of the wife of the emperor Nero (Plin., H. N. XII, 41). Roscher, loc. cit. 66 ff.