Quotes About History

Very few towns or cities are founded at a stroke, by a single individual. They are usually the product of gradual changes in population, in patterns of settlement, social organisation and sense of identity. Most 'foundations' are retrospective constructions, projecting back into the distant past a microcosm, or imagined primitive version, of the later city.

This one commemorates a man called Lucius Cornelius Scipio Barbatus (the last name means 'bearded', 'long-beard' or perhaps 'beardy')

The Christian texts of the third, fourth and fifth centuries CE are some of the most extreme examples ever of the rewriting of history to fit the agenda of the winners.

SPQR is still plastered over the city of Rome, on everything from manhole covers to rubbish bins. It can be traced back to the lifetime of Cicero, making it one of the most enduring acronyms in history. It has predictably prompted parody. 'Sono Pazzi Questi Romani' is an Italian favourite: 'These Romans are mad'.

This historical scepticism is healthy. But it misses the bigger point: that whatever the view of Suetonius and other ancient writers, the qualities and characters of the individual emperors did not matter very much to most inhabitants of the empire, or to the essential structure of Roman history and its major developments.

Rome had been under the rule of a mad sadist somewhere between a clinical psychopath and a Stalin.

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.

By comparison, one controversial consul in 59 BCE got off lightly: he was merely pelted with excrement and spent the rest of his year of office barricaded at home.

letters of Cicero

Viajar por el imperio no solo significaba atravesar zonas horarias tal como lo entendemos nosotros, sino moverse entre formas completamente distintas de calcular las fechas o las horas del día (es un auténtico misterio comprender cómo manejaban la agenda).

Polybius more than 150 years earlier

In fact, the modern word 'candidate' derives from the Latin candidatus, which means 'whitened' and refers to the specially whitened togas that Romans wore during election campaigns, to impress the voters.

In reality, the whole process must have been more gradual than that story suggests, and messier. The 'Republic' was born slowly, over a period of decades, if not centuries. It was reinvented many times over.

if they are bearded, they are after 117 CE. This

SPQR is still plastered over the city of Rome, on everything from manhole covers to rubbish bins. It can be traced back to the lifetime of Cicero, making it one of the most enduring acronyms in history.

some historians reckon that, by the second century CE, the majority of the free citizen population of the city of Rome had slaves somewhere in their ancestry.

That is partly because of the new ways of looking at the old evidence, and the different questions we choose to put to it. It is a dangerous myth that we are better historians than our predecessors. We are not. But we come to Roman history with different priorities

a reminder that the body beautiful was not so very far from the body brutalised.

The history of art is about how we look. It is not only about the men and women who – with their paints and pencils, their clays and chisels – created the images that fill our world, from cheap trinkets to 'priceless masterpieces'. It is even more about the generations of humankind who have used, interpreted, argued over and given meaning to those images.

Nonetheless, whatever mystery surrounds them, the Olmec have left us a powerful in-your-face reminder that across the world, when people first made art they made it about themselves. From the very beginning art has been about us.

In 63 BCE the city of Rome was a vast metropolis of more than a million inhabitants, larger than any other in Europe before the nineteenth century; and, although as yet it had no emperors, it ruled over an empire stretching from Spain to Syria, from the South of France to the Sahara. It was a sprawling mixture of luxury and filth, liberty and

The Greek city-states were as keen on winning battles as the Romans were, and most had little to do with the brief Athenian democratic experiment.

is a dangerous myth that we are better historians than our predecessors.

At a very rough guess there might have been between 1.5 and 2 million slaves in Italy in the middle of the first century BCE, making up perhaps 20 per cent of the total population. They