Our sires’ age was worse than our grandsires’. We their sons are more worthless than they: so in our turn we shall give the world a progeny yet more corrupt.

This sentiment is voiced by the Roman poet Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus) in the Augustan age, a period marked by civil wars’ aftermath and an official program of moral and social “restoration” under Augustus. In his Odes Horace repeatedly contrasts an idealized earlier Rome with what he depicts as contemporary decline—luxury, impiety, and civic disorder—echoing a common Roman topos that each generation degenerates further from ancestral virtue. The line occurs in a poem that laments moral decay and anticipates still worse corruption in the next generation, aligning with broader Augustan-era anxieties about family, fertility, and traditional mores.

The quote expresses a pessimistic theory of historical and moral decline: each generation inherits a world already worsened by its predecessors and then compounds the damage. Horace’s rhetoric is deliberately sweeping—“more worthless,” “yet more corrupt”—to dramatize a perceived collapse of civic virtue and self-restraint. Beyond mere nostalgia, the passage functions as moral exhortation: by naming degeneration as a generational chain, it implicitly challenges the present to break it. The line also illustrates how ancient writers used “decline” narratives to interpret political upheaval and social change, turning private ethics (family, piety, moderation) into a diagnosis of public crisis.