the luxury they sought in their quest to contemplate the spirit inexorably pulled the Romans toward activities that catered to the flesh. As often happens, luxury led to excess, in terms of both gluttony and sexual orgies. The pornographic images that adorn everything from clay oil lamps to the walls of Roman villas are ample evidence of the sexual obsession of the Romans by the time of the Empire. And the higher up the social scale, the more perverse and extreme the sexual activities often became. As evidence of this, consider Caligula, the only Roman emperor who had a biographical film about
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