“In Rome that ancient world ended from overpopulation. “Rome was a marketplace of borrowed gods and conquered peoples, a two-tiered throng, on earth and in heaven, a swinishness that bound itself up in a triple knot, like twisted bowels. Dacians, Herulians, Scythians, Sarmatians, Hyperboreans, heavy, spokeless wheels, eyes wallowing in fat, bestiality, double chins, fish fed on the flesh of learned slaves, illiterate emperors. There were more people in the world than ever again, and they were squeezed into the passageways of the Coliseum and suffered. “And then into the glut of this gold and
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