The Republic had long been dead—now it was passing out of fashion too. “Shaggy simplicity is yesterday’s news. Rome’s made of gold,/And coins in all the wealth of the conquered globe.”37 Greatness might have cost the Romans their freedom, but it had given them the world. Under Augustus their legions had continued to display all the martial qualities of old—pushing back the empire’s frontiers, slaughtering barbarians—but to the urbane consumer back on the Campus Martius, it was only distant noise. War no longer disturbed his reckoning. Nor, much, did morality, or duty, or the past. Nor, even,
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