Revelation 18:21

Rome's fall will be irrevocable and sudden and violent, as a powerful angel shows dramatically by seizing a huge boulder and flinging it into the sea. Cf. the analogous description of Babylon's collapse in Sib. Or. ver. 158, 163, 174. The reiterated emphasis on Roman luxury is notable. Later literature, as Friedländer observes (Revelation 3:9-17), tended to a conventional exaggeration of the luxurious civilisation under the Empire; judged by modern standards, at any rate, it was not particularly extravagant. This denunciation of wealth and ease, however, is apposite in a source which reflects the age of Nero, since it was under Nero, rather than under Vespasian or Domitian, that Roman luxury during the first century of our era reached its zenith. The oracle breathes the scorn felt by simple provincials for the capital's wanton splendour, and indeed for the sins of a pleasure-loving civilisation. But it is religious poetry, not a prose transcript of the contemporary commercial situation. Cf. Dill's Roman Society, pp. 32 f., 66 f.