Following up on “Are we declining from our decline?” and “The constant decline of civilization?”, here is one of my favorites historians, Sallust (86– c. 35 BCE), on how his generation of Romans is so much worse morally than the preceding ones. In The War with Catiline, he writes:
“Since the occasion has arisen to speak of the morals of our country, the nature of my theme seems to suggest that I go farther back and give a brief account of the institutions of our forefathers in peace and in war, how they governed the commonwealth, how great it was when they bequeathed it to us, and how by gradual changes it has ceased to be the noblest and best, and has become the worst and most vicious.”
About Rome’s forefathers: “good morals were cultivated at home and in the field; there was the greatest harmony and little or no avarice; justice and probity prevailed among them.” They “adorned the shrines of the gods with piety, their own homes with glory, while from the vanquished they took naught save the power of doing harm.”
But Rome now is a moral mess: “The men of to‑day, on the contrary, basest of creatures, with supreme wickedness are robbing our allies of all that those heroes in the hour of victory had left them; they act as though the one and only way to rule were to wrong.”
So I add Sallust to this updated, chronologically-listed series of Declinist quotations.
Source: The War with Catiline, sections 5, 9, and 12.
Related: Professor Hicks’s introduction to Philosophy of History.
Declinism isn’t what it used to be.
The growth of Rome was partly caused by its spiritual (though not spiritist) core. Success bred power, power sought other lands and peoples, and the only logical outcome was Julius Caesar, greatest of the Romans. We have no such leader today, but our decline comes through the Marxist core, using the Federal Reserve Bank, so the system can be bank-rupted and capitalism declared invalid. So long as influence may be bought, and that is a spiritual shortcoming, the ultimate purchase, political power (and its ability to make useless wars, for example, in the Middle East) will be paramount. If the principle of the “republic” has been abandoned, so has any aristocratic vestige thereto. The America of Washington, Jefferson, and Hamilton has degenerated into the ATLAS SHRUGGED type characters in D.C. And, has anyone see the latest info on Obama — that his real father (check out the pictures on Youtube and elsewhere) was Franklin Marshall Davis, a black Marxist in the Chicago Red Den? The marriage with the (intemperate) Kenyan was a fraud. Mommah liked to fornicate in the lowest possible surroundings!