I promised myself a treat some time ago that I would read Gibbons. Fascinating and very surprising. I'm a little more than half-way through an abridged version (over 1,000 pages). I'm well into the early history of the Roman and Byzantine church.
The church and state had a very cozy and corrupt relationship which had little to do with religion. They both tended to use each other, often for personal enrichment. The state, thanks primarily to Constantine, always seemed to have the upper hand.
The state/church shamelessly plundered the empire and filled its offices with morally corrupt individuals. Justice was grossly unjust with bribery and extortion commonplace. My full verdict is still out however, but what I thought I knew is being confirmed by Gibbons. Rome was a rotten apple, pretty and shiny on the outside and filled with worms on the inside.
Gibbon was a hater of the Church and that badly colored his scholarship.
It didn’t help stability of the Empire, in a cultural sense, when they didn’t have a believe in an Afterlife.
SO...they took what pleasures they could in their daily life (fornication, bribery, theft) in the form of anything that immediately feels good and yields immediate results.
Not a good recipe for long-term social stability, eh?