Quotes About Roman Empire

Pompeii is taught at schools in England, and, for a young boy, the combination of the Roman Empire and a volcano was irresistible.

As we all know from the Roman empire, big empires go down if the borders are not well-protected.

He became an obedient human person, and because of his passion for God's will for him, he collided with the will and purpose of the Roman Empire and with the Jews who colluded with the empire. He is not crucified because of some theory of the atonement. He is crucified because the empire cannot tolerate such a transformative, subversive force set loose in the world.

The United States is now relearning an ancient lesson, dating back to the Roman Empire. Brutalizing an enemy only serves to brutalize the army ordered to do it. Torture corrodes the mind of the torturer.

So commonplace was crucifixion in the Roman Empire that Cicero referred to it as "that plague." Among the citizenry, the word "cross" (crux) became a popular and particularly vulgar taunt, akin to "go hang yourself.

Greek, the lingua franca of the Roman Empire (ironically, Latin was the language least used in the lands occupied by Rome), enough perhaps to negotiate contracts and deal with customers, but certainly not enough to preach. The only Jews who could communicate comfortably in Greek were the Hellenized Herodian elite, the priestly aristocracy in Judea, and the more educated Diaspora Jews, not the peasants and day laborers of Galilee.

Scattered across the Roman Empire, it was only natural for the gospel writers to distance themselves from the Jewish independence movement by erasing, as much as possible, any hint of radicalism or violence, revolution or zealotry, from the story of Jesus, and to adapt Jesus's words and actions to the new political situation in which they found themselves.

What most puzzled Rome about the Jews was not their unfamiliar rites or their strict devotion to their laws, but rather what the Romans considered to be their unfathomable sense of superiority. The notion that an insignificant Semitic tribe residing in a distant corner of the mighty Roman Empire demanded, and indeed received, special treatment from the emperor was, for many Romans, simply incomprehensible.

The Roman Senate determined that the most effective way to retake Jerusalem from Parthian control was to make Herod its client-king and let him accomplish the task on Rome's behalf. The naming of client-kings was standard practice during the early years of the Roman Empire, allowing Rome to expand its borders without expending valuable resources administering conquered provinces directly.

is possible that Jesus had some basic knowledge of Greek, the lingua franca of the Roman Empire (ironically, Latin was the language least used in the lands occupied by Rome), enough perhaps to negotiate contracts and deal with customers, but certainly not enough to preach. The only Jews who could communicate comfortably in Greek were the Hellenized Herodian elite, the priestly aristocracy in Judea, and the more educated Diaspora Jews, not the peasants and day laborers of Galilee.

Since September 11, 2001, however, we can no longer rest comfortably with such domesticated pictures of Jesus. We can no longer ignore the impact of Western imperialism on subordinated peoples and the ways in which peoples whose lives have been invaded sometimes react. The coincidental historical analogy is too disquieting, that is, that the Roman Empire had come to control the ancient Middle East, including Galilee and Judea, where Jesus operated.

No doubt this works well enough for The Tale of Benjamin Bunny or The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, but I can readily see that 'The Selfish Gene' on its own, without the large footnote of the book itself, might give an inadequate impression of its contents.

Up till now it has been thought that the growth of the Christian myths during the Roman Empire was possible only because printing was not yet invented. Precisely the contrary. The daily press and the telegraph, which in a moment spreads inventions over the whole earth, fabricate more myths (and the bourgeois cattle believe and enlarge upon them) in one day than could have formerly been done in a century.

Orosius was a disciple of Saint Augustine. It was the purpose of the seven books to provide a defense of Christianity against the common pagan charge that Christianity accelerated, if it did not cause, the decline of the Roman Empire. Orosius met this dubious challenge by reversing its polarity. If things were in the fifth century bad, he argued, once they were worse.

Rhino-mounted Bantu shock troops could have overthrown the Roman Empire. It never happened.

Five times was Athanasius expelled from his throne; twenty years he passed as an exile or a fugitive; and almost every province of the Roman empire was successively witness to his merit, and his sufferings in the cause of the Homoousion, which he considered as the sole pleasure and business, as the duty, and as the glory, of his life. Amidst the storms of persecution, the archbishop of Alexandria was patient of labour, jealous of fame, careless of safety; and

In the second century of the Christian Æra, the empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the earth, and the most civilized portion of mankind.

Edward Gibbon

Joseph. de Bell. Judaico, l. ii. c. 16. The oration of Agrippa, or rather of the historian, is a fine picture of the Roman empire.]

The great work of Gibbon is indispensable to the student of history. The literature of Europe offers no substitute for "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

I lull them into a false sense of security by watching me pitch... If overconfidence can cause the Roman Empire to fall, I ought to be able to get a ground ball.

When the Roman Empire declined, Britain went backward. As the Roman villas crumbled, the people built one-room wooden dwellings without chimneys. The technology of Roman pottery—important for storing food—was mostly lost. Literacy declined. This period is sometimes called the Dark Ages, and progress was painfully slow for five hundred years. Then, at last, things started to change

That intersection between dream and reality is what I am attempting to capture here, akin though it is to trying to pinpoint the origin of the Iliad, or what would later become the Roman Empire, or Michelangelo's Moses, or the theory of gravitation. Nonetheless,

If you look at great human civilizations, from the Roman Empire to the Soviet Union, you will see that most do not fail simply due to external threats but because of internal weakness, corruption, or a failure to manifest the values and ideals they espouse.