The Romans had a difficult relationship with the kind of luxury and excess that we think of as indicators of moral and social decadence. But in many ways they revelled in such luxury. Readily accepting the financial rewards of empire, they spent huge sums on their own benefits. Whether in the colossal public games in the amphitheatre and the circus, in the opulent imperial bath complexes, or in extravagant private villas, Romans of all social levels delighted in the very best that life was thought to offer. Chapter 1 examines how far the evidence supports this somewhat melodramatic view of Rome by looking at the ways in which luxury spread in the Roman world. It also looks at the ways this growth in luxury compelled the Romans to create new concepts to understand the phenomenon. Luxury was almost never seen as a simple index of increased wealth. Rather, it raised all manner of moral issues among Rome’s ruling classes, many of which long outlived the end of the Roman empire itself.

In the middle of the eighteenth century, the German rationalist philosopher Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten originated the ‘science’ of aesthetics as a means of analysing sensuous responses to art and nature. By the end of the century, in his Critique of Judgment (1790), Immanuel Kant demonstrated that aesthetic preferences or judgments of taste operated outside the realm of reason but could nonetheless be subjected to categorical treatment. The relationship between this aesthetic tradition and decadence is an intimate and complex one. Both the stock figure of the aesthete and the aestheticism of ‘art for art’s sake’ are classic decadent tropes with obvious sources in figures such as Théophile Gautier, Walter Pater, and Joris-Karl Huysmans. Yet the connections between aesthetics and decadence are more conflicted than might first appear: historically, aesthetics has served both as a site for the theorization of decadence and as the basis of an attempt to limit it, as in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. The purpose of this chapter is to examine these intricate ties.