Page:General History of Europe 1921.djvu/237

The Roman Empire at its Height 167 263. Luxury of the Rich Romans. The richer Romans lived in great luxury. The Roman ladies were adorned with diamonds, pearls, and rubies from India and clothed in silks from China. On their tables were new rare fruits, peaches, called "Persian apples," and apricots. We also first hear of sugar in this period, although it did not for a long time generally replace honey for sweetening food. Satirists, especially Juvenal (who lived in Tra- jan's time), wrote very bitterly of the extravagance and insolence of the rich of his day. 264. Decline of Literature. In spite of the educated public and the excellent libraries which were now to be found in Rome, the writers were inferior to those of the age of Augustus. Plutarch wrote in Greek his remarkable Lives oj Famous Men, which has charmed and inspired readers ever since. Tacitus prepared his- tories of recent events, which are celebrated . for compact style and penetrating estimates of the leading men of the period. But this is the last history of importance that we have, and little is known of the following period. . Science made no advance. The chief scientific writer was Pliny the Elder, who wrote a great encyclopedia called Natural History. In it he brought together all sorts of information he had collected from Greek writers, and he mixes much solid infor- mation with stories of mythical animals and men and of the magical properties of gems and plants. Yet Pliny's book was re^ garded during the Middle Ages as a great authority. Men grew more and more indifferent to science ; they made no new dis- coveries and forgot many of the old ones. 265. The Ptolemaic System. The last scientist of distinction that arose in Alexandria was Claudius Ptolemaeus, commonly called Ptolemy, who seems to have flourished in Hadrian's time or a little later. He wrote on geography and astronomy and summed up the previous discoveries of the Greeks so well that his books were regarded as the last word on the subjects until a few hundred years ago. He held that the sun revolved around the earth, and his explanation of the movements of the planets is known as the Ptolemaic system. It was not until the sixteenth century that,