Quotes About Ancient

In modern states, the citizen is politically impotent. A citizen, it is true, may complain, make suggestions, or cause disruptions, but in the ancient world these were privileges that belonged to any slave.

The place that gave us the marathon also gave us philosophy. That place was the city-state of Athens in the fourth and fifth centuries BCE.

Why do all balls look like they're 150 years old?

The future has an ancient heart.

I want a hero: an uncommon want, When every year and month sends forth a new one, Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant, The age discovers he is not the true one; Of such as these I should not care to vaunt, I'll therefore take our ancient friend.

The pyramids themselves, doting with age, have forgotten the names of their founders.

I put my hand on the dark skin and felt the chill of centuries long gone. It was as if I had touched the Stone Age.

The Bible was written by barbarians in a barbarous, coarse and vulgar age.

There has never in human history been a culture where optimism and cynicism existed side by side on such a scale as this, not even ancient Rome.

Our language is an imperfect instrument created by ancient and ignorant men. It is an animistic language that invites us to talk about stability and constants, about similarities and normal and kinds, about magical transformations, quick cures, simple problems, and final solutions.

When the poet died, they brought his coffin to the city of glass. There was no door: the door was a thousand daggers, beyond the door an ancient world in ruins, glass now arrowheads, axes, pottery shards, dust. There were no windows: fingers of air reached for glass like a missing lover's face.

Assyrian qunnabu, meaning 'noise': it was thought the Assyrians used cannabis as an incense in religious ceremonies and were quite vocal after inhaling it.

The nomad had the age-old God-given way of life to offer, the way of Abel. The sons of Cain -for it was Cain who built the first villages -had possessions and power.

This is reported by Josephus, The Wars of the Jews, Book VI, pars. 28–30.

I love studying Ancient History and seeing how empires rise and fall, sowing the seeds of their own destruction.

The long-departed cave lion is more indigenous to the moor than I will ever be.

all the evidence from ancient Rome suggests that slavery as an institution was taken for granted, even by slaves. If they had a clearly formulated aim, the best guess is that Spartacus and his fellow escapees wanted to return to their various homes – in Spartacus' case probably Thrace in northern Greece; for others, Gaul. One thing is certain, though: they managed to hold out against Roman forces for an embarrassingly long time.

What I mean is that public speaking and oratory were not merely things that ancient women didn't do: they were exclusive practices and skills that defined masculinity as a gender. As we saw with Telemachus, to become a man (or at least an elite man) was to claim the right to speak. Public speech was a – if not the – defining attribute of maleness.

Rome was the only place in the ancient Mediterranean where the state took responsibility for the regular basic food supplies of its citizens.

Democracy' (demokratia) was rooted politically and linguistically in the Greek world. It was never a rallying cry at Rome, even in its limited ancient sense or even for the most radical of Roman popular politicians. In most of the conservative writing that survives, the word means something close to 'mob rule'. There is little point in asking how 'democratic' the politics of Republican Rome were: Romans fought for, and about, liberty, not democracy.

Custodial sentences were not the penalties of choice in the ancient world, prisons being little more than places where criminals were held before execution. Fines, exile and death made up the usual repertoire of Roman punishment.

THE LONG SIEGE, and final destruction, of Carthage in 146 BCE was gruesome even by ancient standards, with atrocities reported on both sides. The losers could be as spectacularly cruel as the victors.

despite the efforts of ancient writers to embellish them with dramatic appearances of the gods, uncanny omens and prophetic dreams – the reality of the surroundings was probably mundane. For us, 'to cross the Rubicon' has come to mean 'to pass the point of no return'. It did not mean that to Caesar.

Polybius more than 150 years earlier