anonymity of the city crowd. The progress of science raised the authority of
the test tube over that of the crosier; the mechanization of economic
production suggested mechanistic materialistic philosophies; education
spread religious doubts; morality lost more and more of its supernatural
supports. The old agricultural moral code began to die.
In our time, as in the times of Socrates (d. 399 B.C.) [Socrates (470?-399
B.C.)] and Augustus (d. A.D. 14), war has added to the forces making for
moral laxity. After the violence and social disruption of the Peloponnesian
War Alcibiades [Alcibiades (c. 450-404 B.C.)] felt free to flout the moral
code of his ancestors, and Thrasymachus [Thrasymachus (fl. 5th century
B.C.)] could announce that might was the only right. After the wars of
Marius [Marius, Caius (157-86 B.C.)] and Sulla [Sulla, Lucius Cornelius
(138-78 B.C.)], Caesar and Pompey [Pompey the Great (106-48 B.C.)],
Antony and Octavius, “Rome was full of men who had lost their economic
footing and their moral stability: soldiers who had tasted adventure and had
learned to kill; citizens who had seen their savings consumed in the taxes
and inflation caused by war;… women dizzy with freedom, multiplying
divorces, abortions, and adulteries… A shallow sophistication prided itself
upon its pessimism and cynicism.”
It is almost a picture of European
and American cities after two world wars.
History offers some consolation by reminding us that sin has flourished
in every age. Even our generation has not yet rivaled the popularity of
homosexualism in ancient Greece or Rome or Renaissance Italy. “The
humanists wrote about it with a kind of scholarly affection, and Ariosto
[Ariosto, Lodovico (1474-1533)] judged that they were all addicted to it”;
Aretino [Aretino, Pietro (1492-1556)] asked the Duke of Mantua [Mantua,
Duke of (fl. c. 1520-50)] to send him an attractive boy.
Prostitution has
been perennial and universal, from the state-regulated brothels of
Assyria
to the “night clubs” of West-European and American cities
today. In the University of Wittenberg in 1544, according to Luther, “the
race of girls is getting bold, and run after the fellows into their rooms and
