We are now suffering the evils of a long peace. Luxury, more deadly than war, broods over the city, and avenges a conquered world.

Juvenal (Decimus Junius Juvenalis), writing in early imperial Rome (late 1st–early 2nd century CE), repeatedly attacks the moral and social consequences of empire: wealth from conquest, urban spectacle, and the erosion of traditional Roman austerity. This line comes from a passage lamenting how Rome’s victories and prolonged internal stability have produced a different kind of ruin—softness, greed, and corruption—more insidious than open warfare. The “city” is Rome, imagined as the center of a world-empire whose spoils have flooded the capital. Juvenal frames luxury as an avenging force that punishes Rome precisely because it has conquered so much.

The quote argues that peace can carry its own dangers: when external threats recede, a society may turn inward and decay through excess. Juvenal personifies “Luxury” as a predator hovering over Rome, suggesting that comfort and consumption can be “more deadly than war” because they corrode character, civic virtue, and social bonds without the clarifying urgency of conflict. The phrase “avenges a conquered world” implies an ironic reversal: Rome’s domination of others rebounds upon itself, as the spoils of conquest—wealth, imported tastes, and status competition—become instruments of moral defeat. It is a classic satiric paradox: victory breeds the conditions of decline.