Venus with such as this no love compels,
Who on the shady hill of Eryx dwells.
Eat the white shallots sent from Megara
Or garden herbs that aphrodisiac are,
Or eggs, or honey on Hymettus flowing,
Or nuts upon the sharp-leaved pine-trees growing.
Morality, especially sexual morality, descended to its most degenerative nadir in the period of the Roman Empire. The poets and satirists, the historians and the moralists all uniformly fulminate against the profligacies of Roman matrons, particularly in the upper social levels and in the court circles, and blast and condemn the utter licentiousness, lewdness, and abandonment of all restraints.
Seneca the philosopher asserts:
Anything assailed by countless desires is insecure. And the young and even more mature matrons, descendants of distinguished figures in the tumultuous sequence of Roman history, were exposed to every kind of inducement to laxity, every urgent temptation, domestically, publicly, and politically. There was a vogue of indiscriminate flirtation, highly skilled, ingeniously practiced, that led into violent passion and into adultery, into incest and multiple perversions. Lust became the primary satisfaction, and its consummation was the most common, the most clamant factor in the social frame.