‘As soon as riches came to be held in honour, and brought glory, imperium, and power, virtue began to grow dull; poverty was seen as disgraceful, innocence as malevolence. Therefore because of wealth, our youths were seized by luxury, greed and pride; they stole and squandered; reckoning their own property of little worth, they coveted other peoples’; contemptuous of modesty and chastity, of everything divine or human, they were without thought or restraint.’–The senator and historian Sallust, writing in the late forties BC.
