Quotes About Roman

Western civilization is the most successful civilization the world has ever seen. And some of the reasons for that is it's borrowed from other cultures along the way, back to Mosaic law, the Greek age of reason, Roman law and the Roman order of government, and the Republican form of government, by the way that we're guaranteed in our constitution.

My day job is working on Roman history and ancient Roman history.

Part of their problem was Percy. He fought like a demon, whirling through the defender's ranks in a completely unorthodox style, rolling under their feet, slashing with his sword instead of stabbing like a Roman would, whacking campers with the flat of his blade, and generally causing mass panic.

Then came a volley of colorful abuse, delivered in such an imperious voice, at at such a volume, that Terentia's distant ancestor, who had commanded the Roman line against Hannibal at Cannae a century and a half before, must surely have sat bolt upright in his tomb.

We pressed on up the Flaminian Way, devoting a day to each of the decent-sized towns – Narnia, Carsulae, Mevania, Fulginiae, Nuceria, Tadinae and Cales – before finally reaching the Adriatic coast about two weeks after leaving Rome.

The Law of the Twelve Tables, a Roman legislation circa 450 BC, actually required a father to put to death any deformed child (Cito necatus insignis ad deformitatem puer esto). (Modern moral philosophers, like Joseph Fletcher and Princeton University's Peter Singer, advocate the same thing.)

It's called the Pyxis, " said Raven. "Don't let the fancy name intimidate you. It just means 'box' in one of those Old Earth languages, Roman or Spanish or Klingon…

Even the English Roman Catholics, at their college in Rheims and then Douai, had applied a small team of men to the job.

In the words of the great twentieth-century philosopher-historian R. G. Collingwood: 'Deep in the mind of every Roman, as in the mind of every Greek, was the unquestioned conviction which Aristotle put into words: that what raised man above the level of barbarism … to live well instead of merely living, was his membership of an actual, physical city.

Nietzsche could have arisen only from the soil of the German Reformation. Here, the contradiction between the natural and grace is starkly opposed to the reconciliation of nature with grace in the Roman heritage.

Mr. Prince, would you like to know the most significant event in the history of freedom?" "The American Revolution?" "A defensible choice, a close second even, but not mine. I would choose the moment when the Roman plebians required the patricians to write down the twelve tables of the law and put them where everyone could see them -- thereby proclaimed the law supreme over the politicians. The rule of law is the essence of freedom.

The Romans didn't base their laws on a morality derived from a Judeo-Christian ethic. Roman laws had more to do with what was beneficial for Rome and Romans.

If you look at the great Westerns, and at Greek, Roman, and Norse mythology, they all contain elements in common: a harsh landscape; demons or outlaws trying to stop or kill the protagonist; and there are mythical legends at their core, innate in all cultures.

Being born Roman and Romanisti is a privilege.

The Roman Catholic Church isn't going to change its theologies.

Posey remembered a story he had heard other soldiers telling about Patton's days commanding U.S. Seventh Army in Sicily in 1943. General Patton, upon seeing the Roman ruins at Agrigento, remarked to a local expert, "Seventh Army didn't cause that destruction, did it, sir?" The man replied, "No sir, that happened in the last war." "What war was that?" "The Second Punic War."5

Believe me, the statues brought from Syracuse into our city came as enemies. I hear all too many people deride the terracotta ornaments of Roman gods' (Cato, in Liv., 34, 4

Roman polytheism was opportunistic and thus open in advance to possible expansion. Like the English, who would rather make a new law than abolish an old one, the Romans adopted other gods without rejecting any from the old pantheon.

There was nothing more specifically Roman than domestic worship; it was what immediately distinguished Roman religion, for example on Delos, from the Greek environment, in the case of the colonists who lived on the island.

In any case, many of the rites that became public had in fact originated in the family. A Roman's house was like a temple, and the paterfamilias its hign priest.

On waking, the Roman's first act was to ponder over his dreams, in case the gods had sent him a warning: 'The human race, doomed to worry, averts the night's presages by a pious offering of flour and crackling salt' (Tib., 3, 4, 10).

The Lar was always greeted before crossing the threshold (right foot first), and upon returning home (redire ad Lar em suum). He was invoked before one left on a journey or on campaign

Salt was sacred, and sanctified the table. The patella and salinum were the two items that the Roman of the pioneering days held above everything to be the deorum causa (Liv., 26, 36, 6). They were the only two items of tableware that the generals of that time took with them on campaign (Plin., NH, 33, 153).

A 'fast of Ceres', decreed in 191 BC following prodigies, after consulting the Sibylline Books, was supposed to be repeated every five years (Liv., 36, 37, 4), but annually on 4 October in the time of Augustus, in the era and under the probable influence of the Athenian Thesmophoria, on the eve of a day when once again the mundus opened, sometimes known as that 'of Ceres' (Fest., p. 126, 4).