Quotes from Elizabeth Speller

He had long been indifferent to which side won; he wished only that one or the other would do so decisively while he was still alive.

The Romans learned what European armies were to discover hundreds of years later: that the best-trained and best-equipped fighting force in the world might come to grief against partisans fighting on their own territory and for a cause for which they would willingly sacrifice themselves and their families.

When the shot came, the rooks rose outward from their roost with coarse cries of alarm, but in a few minutes they returned, settling back into the bare branches until the first light of dawn.

Conservative Romans thought, as have conservatives ever since, that there was something unmanly about overdeveloped aesthetic interests. They exemplified what might be called a 'muscular paganism' – a cast of religion that was to resurface, notably, in the nineteenth century, this time with Christ, not Jupiter, as its figurehead.

Not every wealthy man might choose a public life, but anyone who chose public life must be a wealthy man. Corruption, coercion and predation ensured the determined could acquire fortunes. Augustus, while still a teenager, had amassed enough money to support a private army. Ambitious men gathered the support of peers and bestowed patronage on numerous clients. Patronage, indeed, was at the heart of the whole system.

By the time of his death, his implicit rejection of many traditional Roman values and a commitment to and admiration for the older culture had imposed a lasting Greek renaissance on the greater part of the empire. To Hadrian, it was the ultimate imperial triumph: a fine and realistic use of the resources of a conquered power and a glorious fusion of two great cultures.

That Hadrian's profound Hellenophilia and his love of travelling, the two major driving impulses of his reign, were closely linked is clear. That his early experiences of Greece were formative in a different way – one which was to have considerable resonances for his spiritual curiosity and what was perhaps an innate predisposition to melancholy – is less well known.

Caligula was not noticeably antisemitic; he treated the Jews no worse than he did other envoys. Nevertheless, as the emissaries traipsed after the emperor while he amused himself by asking them why they refused to eat pork and demanding they set up a statue to him in the Temple in Jerusalem and recognise him as a god, they cannot have felt optimistic that their arguments would be given full consideration.

To be a religious man in the second century was to be a man of power, not of self-denial and a democratic spirit. (Hence, in part, the eventually perceived threat of the cult of Christ – and to others, of course, its attraction.)

Hadrian's successor Antoninus Pius ruled for twenty-three years, nor did he undertake any expedition other than the visiting of his estates in Campania, averring that the entourage of an emperor, even one over frugal, was a burdensome thing to the provinces. SCRIPTOTES HISTORIAE AUGUSTAE, ANTONINUS PIUS, 7. 4–12.

There was an instructive contrast between the fate of Judea and the fortunes of more accommodating communities. Cooperation might bring all manner of benefits, from protection against attack to the amassing of individual fortune; nonconformity would be put down with brutal and uncompromising rigour. In the 130s the implicit was made explicit and the Jews became an object lesson in the price of disobedience.

In Alexandria were parks and gardens, palaces, shrines and a zoo. The city was rich in sights to please even the most jaded traveller, and its architecture laid out its cultural and intellectual claims to pre-eminence. The pharaoh-emperor's arrival was the most extraordinary occasion most Egyptians would ever see.

The key to Hadrian's behaviour, and to the subsequent integration of a style of rule, may be found in his relationship with the past. He was a broadly read man and a passionate, if nostalgic, historian, and the innovations of his reign as well as the strategies he adopted to consolidate power were all consistent with his pervasive sense of the past. His own immediate experience, infused with a broad knowledge of Mediterranean history, shaped the future of his empire.

one century after the death of Christ he raised a very ordinary, if beautiful, Greek boy to be the last pagan god of ancient Rome.

Of the twelve Caesars of the first century CE, six were bloodily assassinated, or were forced to commit suicide, at least two of them in their own palaces in Rome. A further three were the subject of lurid posthumous rumours as to the manner of their deaths, and of the remaining three, only one ruled for more than two years.

The huntsman of the Libyan desert, the discerning art collector, the tolerant intellectual, disappeared, and in their place Hadrian emerged as a model of Roman power responding to perceived threat with absolute ruthlessness. Generosity became irresolution, tolerance turned into suppression, pragmatism into punitively enforced proscription.

History and speculation have placed Antinous at Hadrian's side as the one great attachment of the emperor's life, the loss of whom caused this mature, sophisticated and highly experienced ruler to allow himself to be subsumed by grief.

Greeks were so much a part of the Roman world that, in the surviving texts, they are often more visible by the shadow they cast than by their actual written presence.

A belief in Antinous' posthumous power seems to have exceeded even the formal declaration of his new status. Although there was greater resistance to the acceptance of an emperor's sexual partner as a god in the more urbane society of Rome, in the Greek east Hadrian's own philhellenism assured the new god's absorption into the Greek pantheon from the moment the emperor decided on his deification.

peaceful empire Hadrian inherited was by no means long-established, and the recent past provided both lessons for would-be tyrants and examples of successful, survivable, rule. At the time of Hadrian's birth Rome was ruled by the benign and thrifty Vespasian, whose most notorious deed was taxing urinals.

Trust no one, Julius said, and live without fear; love and torture make betrayers of us all.

Today, without its exotic carapace, the exterior is a reddish brick within which the arches and buttresses that made such a feat of engineering possible are clearly visible. They have their own beauty; through such structural expertise the Pantheon has been in constant use for 1,875 years.

If a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world, during which the condition of the race were most happy and most prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus.

Near this spot are deposited the remains of one who possessed Beauty without Vanity, Strength without Insolence, Courage without Ferocity, and all the Virtues of Man without his Vices. This praise, which would be unmeaning Flattery, if inscribed over human ashes, is but a just Tribute to the Memory of BOATSWAIN, a Dog.