On one occasion

On one occasion when the Noble Order the Knights, from whom the senators were chosen, complained of the severity of his laws against bachelors, he summoned the entire order into the Market Place for a lecture. When he had them assembled there he divided them up into two groups, the married and the unmarried. The unmarried were a very much larger group than the married and he addressed separate speeches to each group, He worked himself up into a great passion with the unmarried, calling the beasts and brigands and, by a queer figure of speech, murderers of their posterity. By this time Augustus was an old man with all the petulance and crankiness of an old man who has been at the head odd affairs all his life. He asked them, had they an hallucination that they were Vestal Virgins ? At lest Vestal Virgins slept alone, which was more than they did. Would they, pray, explain why instead of sharing their beds with decent women of their own class and begetting healthy children, they squandered all their virile energy on greasy slaves-girls and nasty Asiatic-Greek prostitutes? And if he were to believe what he heard , the partner of their nightly bed-play was more often one of those creatures of loathsome profession whom he would not even name, lest the admission of their existence in the City should he construed as a condonation of it. If he had his way a man who shirked his social obligations and at the same time lived a life of sexual debauch should be subject to the same dreadful penalties as a Vestal who forgets her vows- to be buried alive.
From the book ‘I Claudius’, by Robert Graves