Behold the wilder luxury of Rome,
    From Africk furniture, slaves, tables come,
    And purple carpets made in Africk loom. 
    Thus their estates run out, while all around
    The sot-companions in their wine are drown’d;
    The souldier loads, neglected is his sword,
    With all his spoils the dearly noble board: 
    Rome’s appetite grows witty, and what’s caught
    In Sicily, to their boards are living brought: 
    But stomachs gorg’d, (a dearer luxury)
    Must with expensive sauce new hunger buy. 
    The Phasian banks, the birds all eaten, gone,
    With their forsaken trees in silence moan,
    And have no musick but the winds alone. 
    In Mars’s Field no less a frenzie reigns,
    Where brib’d assemblies make a prey of gains. 
    Their servile votes obey the chink of gold,
    A people and a senate to be sold! 
    The senate’s self, which should our rights maintain,
    From their free spirits, stoop to sordid gain,
    The power of right by gold corrupted dies,
    And trampled majesty beneath it lies: 
    Cato’s pretence the giddy rout neglect,
    Yet did not him, but him they rais’d deject: 
    Who, tho’ he won, with conscious blushes stands,
    Asham’d o’ th’ Power he took from worthier hands. 
    O manners, ruin, and the people’s shame! 
    He suffer’d not alone, the Roman name,
    Virtue and honour to their period came. 
    Thus wretched Rome does her own ruin share,
    At once the merchant, and at once the ware,
    All lands are mortgag’d, and all persons bound,
    And in the use the principal is drown’d. 
    Thus debt’s a feaver, and like that disease,
    Bred in our bowels, by unfelt degrees
    Will through our thirsty vitals ev’ry member seize
    Wild tumults now to arms for succour call,
    (For what may dare and never fear a fall.)
    Wasted by riot, wealth’s a putrid sore,
    That only wounds can its lost strength restore. 
    What rules of reason, or soft gentle ways,
    Rome from this lethargy of vice can raise? 
    Where such mild arts can no impression make,
    War, tumult, noise and fury must awake. 
    Fortune one age with three great chiefs supply’d,
    Who different ways, by the sword that rais’d ’em dy’d;
    Crassus’s blood, Asia; Africk, Pompey’s shed;
    In thankless Rome, the murder’d Caesar bled. 
    Thus as one soil alone too narrow were,
    Their glorious dust, and great remains to bear,
    O’re all the earth their scatter’d ruin lyes;
    Such honours to the mighty dead arise. 
    ’Twixt Naples and Puteoli there is,
    Deep in the gaping earth, a dark abys,
    Where runs the raging black Cocytus stream,
    That from its waters sends a sulphurous stream,
    Which spreads its fury round the blasted green,
    O’re all the fatal compass of its breath,