Quotes About Rome

SPQR is still plastered over the city of Rome, on everything from manhole covers to rubbish bins. It can be traced back to the lifetime of Cicero, making it one of the most enduring acronyms in history. It has predictably prompted parody. 'Sono Pazzi Questi Romani' is an Italian favourite: 'These Romans are mad'.

Democracy' (demokratia) was rooted politically and linguistically in the Greek world. It was never a rallying cry at Rome, even in its limited ancient sense or even for the most radical of Roman popular politicians. In most of the conservative writing that survives, the word means something close to 'mob rule'. There is little point in asking how 'democratic' the politics of Republican Rome were: Romans fought for, and about, liberty, not democracy.

As Carthage went up in flames in 146 BCE, one eyewitness spotted him shedding a tear and heard him quoting from memory an apposite line on the fall of Troy from Homer's Iliad. He was reflecting that one day the same fate might afflict Rome. Crocodile tears or not, they made their point.

Rome had been under the rule of a mad sadist somewhere between a clinical psychopath and a Stalin.

Rome had projected its obsessions with the apparently unending cycle of civil conflict back onto its founder. There

That raised an issue still familiar in modern electoral systems. Are Members of Parliament, for example, to be seen as delegates of the voters, bound to follow the will of their electorate? Or are they representatives, elected to exercise their own judgement in the changing circumstances of government? This was the first time, so far as we know, that this question had been explicitly raised in Rome, and it was no more easily answered then than it is now.

if they are bearded, they are after 117 CE. This

For several Roman observers, senatorial weakness for bribery was one major factor lying behind their failure: 'Rome's a city for sale and bound to fall as soon as it finds a buyer', as Jugurtha was supposed to have quipped when he left the city. The general incompetence of the governing class was another.

His supporters dubbed him pater patriae, or 'father of the fatherland', one of the most splendid and satisfying titles you could have in a highly patriarchal society.

SPQR is still plastered over the city of Rome, on everything from manhole covers to rubbish bins. It can be traced back to the lifetime of Cicero, making it one of the most enduring acronyms in history.

When you are about to hand control of the senate and people of Rome, the armies, the provinces, the allies to one man alone, would you look to the belly of a wife to produce him or search for an heir to supreme power only within the walls of your own home? … If he is to rule over all, he must be chosen from all.' Tacitus

some historians reckon that, by the second century CE, the majority of the free citizen population of the city of Rome had slaves somewhere in their ancestry.

In Rome there was no doctrine as such, no holy book and hardly even what we would call a belief system. Romans knew the gods existed; they did not believe in them in the internalised sense familiar from most modern world religions.

At the same time, in Rome, fears about outsiders flooding into the city were whipped up in a way familiar from many modern campaigns of xenophobia.

In 63 BCE the city of Rome was a vast metropolis of more than a million inhabitants, larger than any other in Europe before the nineteenth century; and, although as yet it had no emperors, it ruled over an empire stretching from Spain to Syria, from the South of France to the Sahara. It was a sprawling mixture of luxury and filth, liberty and

Augusto convirtió explícitamente la conquista global —y una visión territorial « compacta» de un imperio centrado en Roma, en vez del viejo mosaico de Estados obedientes— en la razón de su gobierno.

Livy tells how in 214 BCE individual Romans were called upon to pay directly to man the fleet: a nice indication of the patriotism that surrounded the war effort, of the emptiness of the public treasury, but also of the cash that there still was in private hands, despite the crisis.

Cicero may even have convinced himself, whatever the evidence, that Catiline was a serious threat to the safety of Rome. That, as we know from many more recent examples, is how political paranoia and self-interest often work.

The implications, however, were again revolutionary. In extending citizenship to people who had no direct territorial connections with the city of Rome, they broke the link, which most people in the classical world took for granted, between citizenship and a single city. In a systematic way that was then unparalleled, they made it possible not just to become Roman but also to be a citizen of two places at once:

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

For the origin of literature at Rome was closely connected with Roman overseas expansion: 'The Muse imposed herself in warlike fashion on the fierce inhabitants of Rome,' as one second-century BCE author described it.

the city of Rome, the best indication of the changed world is the arch erected in 315 CE in honour of the emperor Constantine's victory over one of his internal rivals. It still stands, preserved because it was once built into a Renaissance fortress, between the old Roman

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

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