Quotes from Steven Saylor

impressed. Commodus was the first emperor to be born heir to the throne—"born in the purple" as it was called in countries that had kings and royal dynasties—and he seemed completely at ease, behaving as if he had been emperor all his life.

Or at least that's what the emperor wants us to think. It's an old Roman ploy, pretending that an enemy is responsible for the start of a war we greatly desire to wage.

They say there's been no woman her equal since Cleopatra," said Philostratus. "Ah, Cleopatra!" said Galen. "Always the standard against whom any strong female is compared." "And not always as a compliment," noted Gaius, "since Cleopatra was the enemy of Rome, and came to a bad end.

We are disturbed not by events, but by the views which we take of them.' Is that not true, even of the death of loved ones?

There was no reasoning with a mortal who believed the whole world was wrong about everything, and only he and a handful of others were right—and not merely right but absolutely sure of their rightness because of an imaginary authority that could not be questioned.

Because, Lucius, without the discipline of philosophy to give rigour to their thinking, people can and will believe anything, no matter how absurd.

A man dies only once. The dread of death causes far more misery than the thing itself, and I shall not submit to it. It's only a short walk from here to the house of Lucius, and an even shorter walk from there to my house. I shall be perfectly safe.

The stakes are too high,' he said. 'High stakes, high rewards!' I said. Or as my warrior brother likes to say, 'No spirit, no splendor!

What would Apollonius of Tyana do?"—always his test for making a difficult decision—

The notion that anyone should be indefinitely locked away, even for the most horrible crime, is too cruel even for Roman tastes.

That's the problem with Domitian, isn't it?" said Lucius. "We never know what's real and what's not. All the city is a stage. Everything that happens is a spectacle put on by the emperor. One wonders if he himself knows any longer what's real.

This is America, after all, where a man's hygiene and sense of humor are more important than his pedigree.

Stoics like Marcus had long recommended such a practice—to concentrate entirely and exclusively on the present moment, and if that moment contained no physical suffering, then to be content.

But in Rome one's path is never entirely clear of enemies. When even a perfect stranger could prove to be Nemesis, no man can protect himself completely. What point is there in cowering away in another man's house, behind the spear of another man's guard? Fortune is the only true protection against death;

But the killers were not gladiators. They were ordinary people, and their victims were unarmed men and women and children, all savagely slaughtered without mercy.

mountainside and destroyed the hut in which the grain was

Bears?" Epaphroditus wrinkled his nose. "Everyone knows Prometheus was tormented by vultures. Every day they tore out his entrails, and every night he was miraculously healed, so that the ordeal was endlessly repeated." Martial laughed. "The trainer who can induce vultures to attack on command will be able to name any price! I suspect we'll see a lot of bears today.

perfect in itself, somehow connected with every other fragment, so that the whole was greater than the sum of its parts.

Then Hadrian laughed. "Listen to me! Did you hear that accent? Thicker than Trajan's! When I think of all those hours I spent with my elocution teachers, reading Cicero aloud until I was hoarse. Numa's balls, I haven't sounded so much like a Spaniard since I was a boy. That was so long ago. . . ." He closed his eyes and drifted off.

had rather save the life of one innocent citizen than take the lives of a thousand enemies," Antoninus had remarked. He had none of Hadrian's restlessness or brooding nature; he was known for a placid temperament and a gentle sense of humor. Under his benevolent rule, the bitterness that had marked the end of Hadrian's reign had almost faded from memory.

When politicians give up on liberty, it falls to poets to preserve it. Or to write its epitaph.

on and on, he wasn't the ranting sort

In politics, reality and appearance are of equal importance. You cannot attend to one and neglect the other. A man must determine both what he is, and what others believe him to be.

The strands (the gods) weave out of our mortal lives are like a pattern visible only from the heavens; we here on earth can only guess at their designs