Quotes from Steven Saylor

detachment from anger is one part of wisdom.

There was no arguing with a man's faith in the legends of his childhood.

When I was a boy, my grandfather taught me the list of kings: Romulus, Numa Pompilius, Tullus Hostilius, Ancus Marcius, Tarquinius the Elder, Servius Tullius. Tarquinius the Proud was to be the last, the very last, cast out and replaced forever by something called a republic. A mockery! A mistake! An experiment that failed! Today is the republic's final day. Tomorrow, men will shout in the Forum, 'All hail King Coriolanus!

There is nothing so unsure as the plans we make that rely on the sensible behavior of another human being.

What appalling tales we shall have to tell of the strange lands we visited; and of those lands, surely none was stranger or more barbaric than Rome!

I kept secrets from you. I let you believe a lie. I am an impious son. But I made my choice, as C(aesar) did, and once the Rubicon is crossed, there can be no turning back (Meto, Caesar's scribe, to his father Gordianus the Finder)

Now as I grow older, Meto, I grow less and less able to tolerate the stupidity of the people and the wickedness of their rulers. I have seen too much suffering created by ambitious men who care only for themselves.

In fact, I have quite a nice little library here in my gladiator's cubby." He reached into a basket and produced a scroll with ornately carved and gilded handles. "That must be quite a book, to justify such an elegant scroll," said Gaius. "Oh, it is. This is a copy of my father's private war journal, a daybook where he recorded his thoughts while he was stuck in darkest Pannonia. Marcus Aurelius, to Himself, I call it.

You know the Etruscan saying: 'Once grieving starts it never ends, so there's no point in grieving an hour earlier than you must.

Lucius, what do you fear? That we shall be tortured and killed? Every living thing must die, and there are things far worse than the suffering of physical pain. How much more terrible if we should comport ourselves disgracefully and lose our self-respect; then we should truly be damaged, and the harm would have been inflicted by ourselves.

At length Old Tiro returned, lifting the curtain for his master. How shall I describe Marcus Tullius Cicero? The beautiful all look alike, but a plain man is plain according to his own peculiarity.

As a historian, Titus saw a sad and bitter irony in such a twist of fortune, and he looked on the games themselves as yet another example of the futility of human affairs, the endless cycle of violence and larceny attended by empty promises, half-truths, and outright lies. The crowd, on the other hand, including his fellow senators, seemed merely to see the grand spectacle as it occurred in the moment.

Tell me, Philostratus, do you subscribe to the school of philosophy that holds mankind is in a state of continual decline, beginning with the supermen of a long-ago Golden Age and descending to the present, so that each generation is a little less hardy, a little less touched with the original fire of creation than the last, so that we dwindle in vigor and lifespan from father to son? In that case, I shall be lucky to live as long as Ã¢â'¬Â¦ as you.

Use the hook, you

Amazing, isn't it? In fact if not in name, the Roman Empire is being run by women. Legitimacy runs through the female line—from the emperor's wife to her sister, thence to her daughters, and only then to the young emperor and his cousin. No woman has exercised such power since Cleopatra, and even she pales in comparison. Cleopatra had Egypt, and Asia for a while, but Maesa and her daughters rule every province of the Roman Empire.

Like Cleopatra," observed Philostratus, "they reached such a pinnacle by using their connection to men: Cleopatra through Julius Caesar and Marc Antony, Domna through Severus, Maesa and her daughter through the two young cousins—one or both of them said to be the son of Caracalla. And now those boys rule jointly, since Antoninus adopted him and made him Caesar.

Alexander—a Syrian boy with a Greek name, now Caesar and heir to the throne. I can hear my father say, 'We are a long way from the days of the Divine Marcus.

The state is the emperor; the emperor is the state. The rest of us are like grains of sand on a beach: interchangeable, indistinguishable, inconsequential. A Roman citizen has no importance whatsoever, no matter how much some of us would like to pretend otherwise.

How old did you say you were, Lucius? Thirty-two?" Epaphroditus shook his head. "A dangerous age for a man—old enough to feel that he should be in charge of his destiny and to chafe against the constraints of living under an absolute ruler, but perhaps not yet old enough to discern the fine line that a man must tread if he's to survive the whims of Fortune.

Alexander proclaimed that he was not to be addressed as Dominus by his fellow Romans. He preferred to be called Imperator.

If Vespasian had a vice, it was greed. The emperor and his favorites had shamelessly exploited their positions to accrue enormous wealth, treating the Roman state as a moneymaking scheme for insiders. Vespasian famously put a tax on the city's latrinae, claiming a share of the money made by the sale of urine to fullers, who used it to clean wool. Thus the saying, "Even when you piss, the emperor takes a percentage.

Lucius laughed. "No one serves in the military to defend Roma: Roma is not under attack. Men join the legions to head for the outskirts of the empire and look for fresh lands to plunder. It's all about looting, isn't it? All the successful emperors looted something and brought the booty back to Roma.

Severus said to him, "I have been everything—and gained nothing." Everything and nothing: the remark had stopped Galen cold. In the end, did the material world and the realm of the senses amount to nothing, then? In the end, could it be that everything and nothing were the same?

I can't say I had an ideal father, and I'm not a father myself.