Quotes from Tom Holland

Their delight in posing as aliens, as transients, made a boast out of what should properly have been a cause of shame. 'To them, a homeland is a foreign country, and a foreign country a homeland

Like unmixed wine, the dictatorship had a taste that was intoxicating and perilous.

The dictator himself cast his reforms as a restoration, the sweeping away of clutter. Yet clutter was the essence of the Republic

In the Arab world, at any rate, to doubt the traditional account of Islam's origins has been to risk death threats, prosecution for apostasy, or even defenestration.61

It was as though the problems of the Republic bored the man appointed to solve them, as though Rome herself were now too small a stage for his ambitions

Time erodes both steel and stone.' So Ovid had written in the months before his death.

the rabbis of Palestine were acknowledged to hold the advantage over those of Mesopotamia in several distinctive ways: they were more open to those who were not themselves scholars; they were better able to incinerate those who displeased them with a single glare; and they were more obsessively alert to the menace posed by menstruating women.

The unspeakable rituals of the heathen, who might think nothing of sacrificing a horse and then making sport with its phallus, were echoed in grim tales of Christian women transforming themselves into equine form, and revelling in the bestial.

T]here [is] no limit to what might not be achieved by an alliance between an imperial monarchy and revelations, if truly believed to be heaven-sent, of a prophet.

Enthusiasts for empire argued that Rome had a civilizing mission; that because her values and institutions were self-evidently superior to those of barbarians, she had a duty to propagate them; that only once the whole globe had been subjected to her rule could there be a universal peace.

Achievement was worthy of praise and honor, but excessive achievement was pernicious and a threat to the state.

Only a few prefer liberty—the majority seek nothing more than fair masters. Sallust, Histories

The news, when it leaked out, caused outrage and horror in Rome. The Republic was never so dangerous as when it believed that its security was at stake. The Romans rarely went to war, not even against the most negligible foe, without somehow first convincing themselves that their preemptive strikes were defensive in nature.

Of all Rome's seven hills, however, the Palatine was the most exclusive by far.

The dull mind rises to the truth through material

Another woman, "whose face no one had ever seen outside the door of her house and who had never walked during the day in the city,"2 had torn off her headscarf, the better to reproach the king. Yusuf, in his fury, had ordered her daughter and granddaughter killed before her, their blood poured down her throat, and then her own head to be sent flying.

So highly did the Roman people prize this ideal of the common good that their name for it – res publica – served as shorthand for their entire system of government.

The heroes of the Iliad, favourites of the gods, golden and predatory, had scorned the weak and downtrodden. So too, for all the honour that Julian paid them, had philosophers. The starving deserved no sympathy. Beggars were best rounded up and deported. Pity risked undermining a wise man's self-control. Only fellow citizens of good character who, through no fault of their own, had fallen on evil days might conceivably merit assistance.

One day perhaps, when the records of the twentieth century AD have grown as fragmentary as those of ancient Rome, a history of the Second World War will be written that relies solely upon the broadcasts of Hitler and the memoirs of Churchill. It will be one cut off from whole dimensions of experience: no letters from the front, no combatants' diaries.

The Romans themselves had always dreaded that this might be their destiny. As Sallust, their first great historian, put it, "There can be no doubting that Fortune is the mistress of all she surveys, the creature of her own caprices, choosing to broadcast the fame of one man while leaving that of another in darkness, without any regard for the scale of what they might both have achieved.

That you feel something to be right may have its cause in your never having thought much about yourself and having blindly accepted what has been labelled right since your childhood.' —Friedrich Nietzsche

Human nature is universally imbued with a desire for liberty, and a hatred for servitude. Caesar, Gallic Wars Only a few prefer liberty—the majority seek nothing more than fair masters. Sallust, Histories

All status was relative. What value would freedom have in a world where everyone was free? Even the poorest citizen could know himself to be immeasurably the superior of even the best-treated slave.

The dimensions opened up by this decision were not exclusively those of the afterlife, however. The enthronement as archbishop of Canterbury of a scholar who had studied in Syria provided converts in Britain with the glimpse of a thrillingly exotic world.