Quotes from Tom Holland

At a time when Maecenas, that celebrated arbiter of taste, was busy introducing the heated swimming pool to Rome, the Princeps's house struck those familiar with top-end properties as 'notable neither for scale nor style'.

In 1215, a statute was promulgated in the name of the pope, legally affirming the independence of Paris' university from the bishop. A year earlier, a similar measure had established the legal status of the colleges that, over the preceding decades, had begun to appear in the English town of Oxford. Universities were soon mushrooming across Christendom. Not merely tolerated, the methods of enquiry pioneered by Abelard had been institutionalised.

Edited by Alcuin himself, these were written to be as user-friendly as possible. No longer did words run into one another. Capital letters were deployed to signal the start of new sentences. For the first time, a single stroke like a lightning-flash was introduced to indicate doubt: the question mark.

Vast and implacable, like a kraken of the deep undisturbed by storms raging across the ocean surface, the apparatus of empire still coiled its prodigious tentacles, ready to flex and squeeze its victims tightly, as it had ever done.

The fish fanciers, sitting by their ponds and gazing into their depths, were tracing shadows darker than they understood.

Everyone knew that Syrians were 'natural businessmen, and the greediest of mortals'.

Virtus, the quality of a vir, was the ultimate Roman ideal, that lustrous fusion of energy and courage which the Romans themselves identified as their chiefest strength.

True strength manifested itself not in the exercise of power, but in the willingness to give it up. So Tolkien, as a Christian, believed. It was why, in the last year of

Here, amid the murk of such contradictory opinions, was ample opportunity for Augustus to consolidate his position yet further. Who better qualified than the Restorer of the Republic, after all, to realise the full potential of hypocrisy?

For since we see in Christ some things so human that they appear to share in every aspect in the common frailty of humanity, and some things so divine that they are manifestly the expression of the primal and ineffable nature of the Divine, the narrowness of human understanding is inadequate to cope. Overcome with amazement and admiration, it knows not where to turn.

Whether cheering on boxers in back streets, sporting a battered sunhat or roaring with laughter at the sight of a hunchback, Imperator Caesar Augustus retained just a hint of the provincial.

While Antony had gazed in sorrow at his fallen adversary on the battlefield of Philippi, his youthful colleague had shed no tears. Instead, ordering Brutus's corpse decapitated, he had packed the head off to Rome. There, with pointed symbolism, it had been placed at the foot of the statue where Caesar had died.

In 313, issuing a proclamation that for the first time gave a legal standing to Christianity, he coyly refused to name 'the divinity who sits in heaven'.54 The vagueness was deliberate. Christ or Apollo, Constantine wished to leave the choice of whom his subjects identified as 'the supreme divinity'55 to them. Where there were divisions, he aimed to blur.

Now, speaking as men no longer dared to speak, his daughter had fearlessly arraigned the Triumvirs themselves. 'Why should we women pay taxes,' Hortensia had demanded, 'when we have no part in the honours, the commands, the rule of the state?'23 To this question, the Triumvirs had responded by having the women driven from the Forum; but such was their embarrassment that they did eventually, with much bad grace, agree to a tax cut.

When the Senate met for the first time a week after the funeral, on 17 September, it was to confirm that the dead Princeps was indeed to be worshipped as a god. His wife was appointed his priest. This, in a city where all the priesthoods except for those of Vesta were monopolised by men, was unprecedented. Astonishingly, Livia was even given a lictor.

We always want what we're not allowed.'20 Ovid, in offering this sage observation, was putting his finger on a mocking truth. Forbidden fruit tasted the sweetest. 'Prohibitions, trust me, only encourage bad behaviour.

Tiberius was badly prone to spots. Tall, muscular and well proportioned, with piercing eyes that could supposedly see in the dark, and sporting the mullet that had long marked the Claudians as tonsorial trendsetters, he was by any reckoning handsome – except for the pimples. They would suddenly erupt all over his cheeks in a violent rash. Good-looking though he was, he never could stop the acne.

Geography could not be bucked. Their bogs and trees shrouded in a perpetual drizzle, Germans were the spawn of their environment. The gods, who had considerately endowed Rome with a climate ideally suited to the growth of a mighty city, had doomed the inhabitants of the chilly North to a backwardness that was at once torpid and ferocious, dull and intemperate. Landscape, weather, people: Germany was unredeemably savage.

The wedding ring was Christ's own foreskin, removed when he had been circumcised as a child, and still wet with his holy blood.

that God was closer to the weak than to the mighty, to the poor than to the rich. Any beggar, any criminal, might be Christ. 'So the last will be first, and the first last.

Beautiful, dignified and pathetic, she was precisely the kind of woman whom the Roman people loved.

similar feat. A single deft stroke

The oath of duty spoken by a legionary, the sacramentum, was of a peculiarly fearsome order, and to break it a terrible thing. The men who swore it, although granted by its terms a licence denied civilians to fight and kill, were simultaneously deprived of rights that were the essence of citizenship.

Yet there was, in this same exercise of clemency, more than a whiff of what made so many of his peers resent and detest him. Merciful he may have been – but mercy was properly the virtue of a master. Caesar felt no call to apologise for his dominance.