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Luxuria is a major theme in Seneca’s prose works. Being linked with desire, which lies at the root of each and every vice according to Stoic philosophy, it combines most vices into one, and thus represents a sort of archenemy of philosophical life. Men subjected to luxuria live a life against nature, subverting every rule; they are enslaved by their stomach, the vilest of organs, and this shows that they have lost their human connotations to wear beast attitudes. Luxuria itself is often personified as a powerful woman, who dwells in Baiae, a famous vacation place in Campania. Her champions are degraded, notorious figures such as Marc Antony, Apicius, and Maecenas; her opponents are less famous, as Q. Aelius Tubero, a loser in politics, and Scipio Aemilianus, but only after his political defeat. Healing this vice is almost impossible, because temptations arise everywhere, and this vice, far from representing an annihilation of reason, uses it for its aims, showing inventive and creative skills. Indeed, people devoted to luxuria show much more commitment to their aims than those involved in philosophy.

This chapter offers a view on etymological and semantic issues concerning luxuria. This word is linked to the ideas of desire, excess, and deviation from a standard, and is strictly related to other passions, such as greed and ambition, and secondarily lust. The Roman narrative constructs luxuria as a vice coming from the East, as a consequence of military conquests, and describes it as a cause of fatal decline. This view can be traced back to Greek historiographical discussion of tryphe (in Thucydides, Herodotus, and Polybius) and to philosophical taxonomies of vices (in Plato and the Stoics). Geographically, luxuria’s preferred location switches from Sybaris in Greek authors to Capua and Baiae in Roman ones. Specific features of Roman luxuria are the spread of the concept through several literary genres, most of them in prose; the relevance of its social aspects; the focus on banquets, with particular attention related to fish dishes and tableware; and the diachronic shift of the concept from a mainly economical to an erotic meaning.

This chapter provides a history of the term and concept of luxuria from the origin of Latin literature (Cato the Elder) to the late first century ce (Pliny the Elder, Quintilian), with a specific section on sumptuary laws. The analysis is conducted through a close reading of several passages, with attention to each author’s peculiarities, to the specifics of certain periods (e.g. the Augustan Age), and to literary genres, especially historiography and satire. Besides the pervasiveness of some commonplaces, which are particularly frequent in historiography (luxuria as a vice came from the East, expressed in banquets, linked to greed and waste of money, and as a cause of fatal decline), and of some recurrent historical examples (Cleopatra and Marc Antony, Apicius, and so on), some other conclusions can also be drawn: satire generally avoids this term, even if dealing with the subject, in that it is more focused on the phenomenology of vices than on labelling them; poetry, and especially Augustan poetry, does not talk about luxuria, which was a compromising subject if considered in light of the emperor’s propaganda; epic poetry ignores it, with the exception of Lucan, whose moralistic concern shows affinities with historiography.