Quotes from Tom Holland

A perpetual forge of idols.'35 So Calvin had described the human mind.

Admirers who sought to praise him in heroic terms found themselves reduced to hailing his baldness: "his forehead gleams like silver."22

When you encounter the unbelievers, blows to necks it shall be until, once you have routed them, you are to tighten their fetters.

Spirits flung down from heaven at the beginning of time still stalked the earth, hunting human prey;

Every member of every tribe was entitled to his vote, but since this had to be delivered in person at the Ovile the practical effect was to ensure that only the wealthiest out-of-towner could afford to travel to Rome to exercise his right. Inevitably, this served to skew the voting in favor of the rich.

two years into Tiberius's reign, the Senate had ordered all astrologers out of Italy. Particularly prominent ones risked being thrown off a cliff.

The state had the right to know everything, for the Romans believed that even "personal tastes and appetites should be subject to surveillance and review."4 It was knowledge, intrusive knowledge, that provided the Republic with its surest foundations.

Prohibitions, trust me, only encourage bad behaviour.

The paradox, though, was already evident: that the more solidly the foundations of an English state were cemented together, so the harder did it become to present the island as a single realm. Seen in this light, Athelstan's conquest of York, the feat which had first served to project the power of the West Saxon monarchy deep into the north of Britain, can be seen as the decisive event in the making of Scotland as well as of England. There

At the heart of the crisis lay the simple fact that Caesar, if he were permitted to progress seamlessly from Gaul to a second consulship, would at no stage be a private citizen. This, to many, was intolerable—for only a private citizen could be brought to trial.

What had begun as a feud of the kind that had always existed in the Republic—indeed, had formed the essence of its politics—was now spreading a contagion of bitterness and antagonism far beyond the ranks of the two rival factions.

Sasanian monarchy and the fabled Kayanid

January 10, the seven-hundred-and-fifth year since the foundation of Rome, the forty-ninth before the birth of Christ.

the complete lack of interest he had always shown in forcing himself on male partners marked Claudius out as a true eccentric. Not that people particularly disapproved – for it was the way of the world that different men had different foibles, and just as some might prefer blondes and others brunettes, so were there a few who only ever fucked females, and a few who only ever fucked males.

there had been offered to the Jews a precious reassurance:

These are the objects of my prayers. A plot of land – not so very large. A garden, a spring beside the house, its water ever-flowing, and a small wood on a slope.

The concept of the 'secular', first planted by Augustine, and tended by Columbanus, had attained a spectacular bloom. Gregory and his fellow reformers did not invent the distinction between religio and the saeculum, between the sacred and the profane; but they did render it something fundamental to the future of the West, 'for the first time and permanently'.16 A decisive moment.

Set strictures on a person all you like, but the mind remains adulterous.

You cannot regulate desire.

Decisive too was the increasing acceptance of another key demand of the reformers: that the clergy distinguish themselves from the great mass of the Christian people—the laicus, or 'laity'—by embracing celibacy. By 1148, when yet another papal decree banning priests from having wives or concubines was promulgated, the response of many was to roll their eyes. 'Futile and ludicrous—for who does not know already that it is unlawful?

In the mountains north-west of Athens, at Delphi, there stood an oracle; and so teasing were its revelations, so ambiguous and riddling its pronouncements, that Apollo, the god who inspired them, was hailed as Loxias—'the Oblique One'. A deity less like Ahura Mazda it would have been hard to imagine.

The conviction that God was a warrior bound by a timeless covenant to the defence of a particular people was one that he had abandoned after his first vision of Christ. It was a new covenant that he had preached. The Son of God, by becoming mortal, had redeemed all humanity. Not as a leader of armies, not as the conqueror of Caesars, but as a victim the Messiah had come. The message was as novel as it was shocking—and was to prove well suited to an age of trauma.

Raised from scratch on sandbanks, the city lacked deep roots. No wonder, to Roman eyes, that it had such a harlot character. Without custom there could be no shame, and without shame anything became possible. A people whose traditions had withered would become prey to the most repellent and degrading habits.

Coloured marble, pompous avenues, urban planning: what were these, if not the prerogatives of kings? No one, in a free republic, could be permitted such sinister grandstanding. This was why, in the last feverish decade before the crossing of the Rubicon, the sudden appearance in Rome of a rash of grandiose monuments had served as portents of the Republic's ruin.