Quotes About Roman

Roman military expansion drove Roman sophistication.

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

All those stories of Roman valour, heroism and self-sacrifice that he must have heard – told and retold around military campfires or at dinner tables – were not simply for amusement, he concluded. Their function was to encourage the young to imitate the gallant deeds of their ancestors; they were one aspect of the spirit of emulation, ambition and competition that he saw running right through Roman elite society.

It was, Polybius argued, such balances across the political system that produced the internal stability on which Roman external success was built.

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 simple shorthand 'Roman conquest' can obscure a wide range of perspectives, motivations and aspirations on every side of the encounter.

by referring to the conspirators as enemies of the state, he was implying that they did not deserve the protection of Roman law; they had lost their civic rights (including the right to trial).

Most Roman rulers spent longer at their desks than at the dinner table. They were expected to work at the job, to be seen to exercise practical power

the success (or failure) of armies serving overseas had direct consequences on the home front; the political ambitions of men like Pompey and Caesar lay behind some of the wars of conquest; there was never any clear divide between the military and political roles of the Roman elite.

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.

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

SPQR takes its title from another famous Roman catchphrase, Senatus PopulusQue Romanus, 'The Senate and People of Rome'.

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

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.

Roman lawyers were expressly forbidden to receive fees for their service, and it is often rightly said that what Cicero gained by pleading in high-profile cases was public prominence.

this period, they alone could elect the political officials of the Roman state; no matter how blue-blooded you were, you could only hold office as, say, consul if the Roman people elected you. And they alone, unlike the senate, could make law.

In some cases, even learned Roman lawyers misunderstood what they read in the Twelve Tables. The idea that a defaulting debtor who had several creditors could be put to death and his body divided between them, in appropriately sized pieces, according to the amount owed, looks like one such misunderstanding (or so many modern critics have hoped).

Mine ends with a culminating moment in 212 CE, when the emperor Caracalla took the step of making every single free inhabitant of the Roman Empire a full Roman citizen, eroding the difference between conqueror and conquered and completing a process of expanding the rights and privileges of Roman citizenship that had started almost a thousand years earlier. SPQR

Roman writers tended to take it for granted that the origins of the senate went back to Romulus, as a council of 'old men' (senes)

How far is it useful to see Roman history in terms of imperial biographies or to divide the story of the empire into emperor-sized (or dynasty-sized) chunks?

Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. [Roman 13:9]

I'm charming and handsome. They take my pen. I buy the poem from the garden of bees for one euro. A touch on the arm. A mystery word. The sky has two faces. For reasons unaccountable my hand trembles. In Roman times if they were horrified of bees they kept it secret

From those pedestals which intersperse the railing of the Sheldonian, the high grim busts of the Roman Emperors stared down at the fair stranger in the equipage. Zuleika returned their stare with but a casual glance. The inanimate had little charm for her.