Quotes About Rome

A]nything might be purchased at Rome.

Pliny the Elder, who when Rome was burning requested Nero to play You Picked a Fine Time to Leave Me, Lucille. Never got a dinner!

More sensitive to Rome's prejudices than I was aware, I recalled that although they grant sensuality a rôle they see only shameful folly in love;

S'enrhumer est à Rome un privilège d'empereur

The government in Rome with its legal forms demanded the truth. The priest in the confessional box commanded the truth under pain of everlasting hell. But truth was a source of power, a lever of control, why should anyone give it away?

When I got back to Rome I discovered that the Italian army considered me dead—in Gruensee, in the observation post, and on the Cima Bianca. That I was reported killed three times seemed not to affect their trust in the reports except to strengthen it. Being the army, they must have thought that anyone who was killed three times was most certainly deader than if he had been killed only once.

Rome was not meant to move, but to be beautiful. The wind was supposed to be the fastest thing here, and the trees, bending and swaying, to slow it down. Now

The Roman historian Plutarch estimated that the civilized Romans under Julius Caesar, in his decade-long campaign in Gaul, destroyed 800 towns and villages and enslaved 3 million people.

AFTER THE FALL of Rome in the fifth century, garum was often thought of as just one of the unpleasant hedonistic excesses for which Rome was remembered. Leaving fish organs in the sun to rot was not an idea that endured in less extravagant cultures. Of course when garum was made properly, the salt prevented rotting until the fermentation took hold. But it became increasingly difficult to convince people of this.

the new oath which was the prelude to taking his seat; the hateful declarations against Transubstantiation, adoration of the Virgin Mary and the 'superstitious and idolatrous' Mass of the Church of Rome were no longer demanded.

Heliogabalus enters Rome one morning in March 218, at dawn, to coincide almost exactly with the Ides of March. And he enters it backwards. In front of him is the [ten ton] Phallus, drawn by three hundred bare-breasted girls who precede three hundred bulls, torpid and tranquil after being given a very powerful soporific during the hours before dawn.

Once arrived in Rome, Heliogabalus banishes men from the Senate and replaces them with women. To the Romans, this is anarchy, but for the religion of the menses, which originated the Tyrian Purple, and for Heliogabalus who administers it, it's only a simple restoration of balance.

gradual and diplomatic path to asserting Rome's supremacy.

Hanukkah, officially instituted by the Hasmoneans, was, like Tabernacles, eight days, and it was also the eight-day period corresponding to the pagan winter solstice festivities celebrating the return of light, lustily celebrated in Greece and Rome. Triumphal days in the Greek style – like the Day of Nicanor commemorating the defeat of that general – were added to the calendar.

I went to Europe to live in 1961. I'd never have written Julian if it hadn't been for the sequestered life that I led in Rome and the classical library at the America Academy.

The struggle between Liberty and Authority is the most conspicuous feature in the portions of history with which we are earliest familiar, particularly in that of Greece, Rome, and England.

During the winter of 1499 Bramante came to Rome in search of patronage. He at once took advantage of his unemployment to immerse himself in the monuments, even dashing off a four-page pamphlet for classically-minded tourists.

By the time Michelangelo arrived in Rome, the Belvedere hill was inclined in a massive building site that would eventually yield gardens, courtyards, porticos, and an open-air sculpture loggia fit for a Christian emperor.

The myth of Rome's everlastingness had been given relentless voice in Virgil's Aeneid, only to shatter with the sack of Rome in 410.

The Divine Comedy brings together the whole sprawling welter of medieval contradictions about Rome and declares them pages in a single story: the Rome of the Aeneid is the Rome of Acts; the Rome of Caesars, the Rome of martyrs, the Rome of Minerva, the Rome of Mary; Rome, the Great Whore of Babylon (in Revelation), and Rome, the triumphant New Jerusalem.

The Roman emperor, Augustus famously boasted that he had inherited a city of brick and was leaving one of marble.

Rome is not eternal; it does not matter. Rome will fall; it does not matter. The barbarian will conquer; it does not matter. There was a moment of Rome, and it will not wholly die; the barbarian will become the Rome he conquers; the language will smooth his rough tongue; the vision of what he destroys will flow in his blood. And in time that is ceaseless as this salt sea upon which I am so frailly suspended, the cost is nothing, is less than nothing.

I am the son of Julius Caesar, and I am consul of Rome. You will not call me boy again.

The possibility has occurred to me that the proper condition of man, which is to say that condition in which he is most admirable, may not be that prosperity, peace, and harmony which I labored to give to Rome." He has founded his empire, in other words, on a misconception.