Quotes About History

A woman did not take her husband's name or fall entirely under his legal authority. After the death of her father, an adult woman could own property in her own right, buy and sell, inherit or make a will and free slaves – many of the rights that women in Britain did not gain till the 1870s.

whatever the views 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.

Who could be so indifferent or so idle that they did not want to find out how, and under what kind of political organisation, almost the whole of the inhabited world was conquered and fell under the sole power of the Romans in less than fifty-three years, something previously unparalleled?' Who indeed?

He sums this up in a pithy sentence: 'They called it, in their ignorance, "civilisation", but it was really part of their enslavement' ('Humanitas vocabatur, cum pars servitutis esset').

Para conseguir su imperio, los romanos no aplastaron brutalmente a pueblos inocentes que se ocupaban de sus propios asuntos en pacífica armonía hasta que las legiones aparecieron en el horizonte

in most circumstances, ancient weapons were much better at wounding than killing outright; death followed later, by infection).

There is no earlier period in the history of the West that it is possible to get to know quite so well or so intimately (we have nothing like such rich and varied evidence from classical Athens). It is not for more than a millennium, in the world of Renaissance Florence, that we find any

The simple reason that, in the 60s CE, Saint Peter was crucified while Saint Paul enjoyed the privilege of being beheaded was that Paul was a Roman citizen.

Los emperadores romanos y sus consejeros nunca resolvieron el problema de la sucesión. Fueron derrotados en parte por la biología, en parte por las persistentes incertidumbres y desacuerdos sobre la mejor manera de transmitir la herencia. La

Fear of the enemy, so this argument went, had been good for Rome; without any significant external threat, 'the path of virtue was abandoned for that of corruption

If Caesar really did advocate life imprisonment in 63 BCE, then it was probably the first time in Western history that this was mooted as an alternative to the death penalty, without success.

Cicero had the men summarily executed, with not even a show trial. Triumphantly, he announced their deaths to the cheering crowd in a famous one-word euphemism: vixere, 'they have lived' – that is, 'they're dead'.

According to Suetonius, Vespasian continued his down-to-earth line in self-deprecating wit right up until his last words: 'Oh dear, I think I'm becoming a god …' The whole process of becoming, or not becoming, a god is the theme of a long skit probably written in the mid 50s CE by Lucius Annaeus Seneca

The name 'Romulus' is itself a give-away. Although Romans usually assumed that he had lent his name to his newly established city, we are now fairly confident that the opposite was the case: 'Romulus' was an imaginative construction out of 'Roma'. 'Romulus' was merely the archetypal 'Mr Rome'. Besides

Fines, exile and death made up the usual repertoire of Roman punishment. If Caesar really did advocate life imprisonment in 63 BCE, then it was probably the first time in Western history that this was mooted as an alternative to the death penalty, without success.

To ignore the Romans is not just to turn a blind eye to the distant past. Rome still helps to define the way we understand our world and think about ourselves, from high theory to low comedy. After 2,000 years, it continues to underpin Western culture and politics, what we write and how we see the world, and our place in it. The

shorthand slogan for the legitimate power of the Roman state, a slogan that lasted throughout Roman history and continues to be used in Italy in the twenty-first century CE. More widely still, the senate

But Rome expanded into a world not of communities living at peace with one another but of endemic violence

They called it, in their ignorance, "civilisation", but it was really part of their enslavement

years that is exactly what he did, before resigning the office, retiring to his country house on the Bay of Naples and dying in his bed in 78 BCE. It was a surprisingly peaceful

few ancient libraries ever unearthed, in Taormina in Sicily, a combination of advertisement and library catalogue.

Autocracy represented, in a sense, an end of history.

Suetonius, in his series of biographies The Twelve Caesars

The basic rule of Roman history is that those who were assassinated were, like Gaius, demonised. Those who died in their beds, succeeded by a son and heir, natural or adopted, were praised as generous and avuncular characters, devoted to the success of Rome, who did not take themselves too seriously.