"It is characteristic of economically complex and socially sophisticated societies to remember their humble origins nostalgically or to envy the simpler life of country dwellers; this tendency is observable in almost every urban society from 9th-century Baghdad to 20th-century America. Romans writing under the Empire often indulged in such feelings regarding the smaller and simpler Rome of the Republic and imagined that it had been a time of 'purity' in politics and personal morality."
