The Historian Livy in about 29 B.C. speaks of Rome,

“…if any nation deserves the privilege of claiming a divine ancestry, that nation is our own; and so great is the glory won by the Roman people in their wars that, when they declared that Mars himself was their first parent and father of the man who founded their city, all of the nations of the world might well allow the claim as readily as they accept Rome’s imperial dominion.
These, however, are comparatively trivial matters and I set little store by them. I invite the reader’s attention to the much more serious consideration of the kind of lives our ancestors lived, of who were the men, and what the means both in politics and war by which Rome’s power was first acquired and subsequently expanded: I would then have him trace the process of our moral decline, to watch, first, allowed to lapse, then the rapidly increasing disintegration then the modern day when we can neither endure our vices nor face the remedies need to cure them…
I hope my passion for Rome’s past has not impaired my judgment; for I do honestly believe that no country has ever been greater of purer than ours or richer in good citizens and noble deeds; none has been free for so many generations from the vices of avarice and luxury; nowhere have thrift and plain living been for so long held in such esteem. Indeed, poverty, with us, went hand in hand with contentment. Of late years wealth has made us greedy, and self-indulgence has brought us, through every form of sensual excess, to be, if I may so put it, in love with death both individual and collective.