Quotes About Rome

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

But Rome expanded into a world not of communities living at peace with one another but of endemic violence

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;

Whether people liked or loathed him, he [Octavian] was in many ways a puzzling and contradictory revolutionary. He was once of the most radical innovators Rome ever saw.

march toward Italian unification. The two stories were intertwined, for Napoleon III had for several years used French troops to defend the pope, who was determined to retain temporal power in Rome, the last remaining vestige of the once-mighty Papal States.

Before bedtime the children wanted to play at the fall of Rome, which was their new favorite game. They joined hands and spun and declined and fell until they were dizzy, and then they rose and did it again.

all hail to the Roman flounders

Lives where she was playing music, or lying in a warm lavender-scented bath, or having incredible third-date sex, or reading on a beach in Mexico, or eating in a Michelin-starred restaurant, or strolling the streets of Paris, or getting lost in Rome, or tranquilly gazing at a temple near Kyoto, or feeling the warm cocoon of a happy relationship.

Here in Rome, "men live for something else beside money and systems, the voice of noble sentiment is understood." She had found in Italy "a sphere much more natural to me than what the old puritans or the modern bankers have made" in America, the now stagnant and degraded "new" world.

Christianity challenged Rome's most basic set of values. The peculiar, mysterious religion forced a distinction - between what it meant to be a Roman and what it meant to be a Christian. The church fathers were quite aware that they were Roman citizens, but they also understood that their faith in Christ transcended the political and social values of their day.

The "Donation" further alleged that Constantine, for the first time, had declared the bishop of Rome to be "Vicar of Christ" and offered him the status of emperor.

in 1522 the Templars' Prussian progeny, the Teutonic Knights, secularized themselves, repudiated their allegiance to Rome, and threw their support behind an upstart rebel and heretic named Martin Luther.

The future of Judaism depended upon many other centres of the Jewish Dispersion even more than upon Rome. But archaeological evidence for all these centres remains sparse. There were catacombs at Venusia (Venosa) in south Italy. The Jewish necropolis

T]he beast is not merely "Rome" . . . It is the inhuman, anti-human arrogance of empire which has come to expression in Rome—but not only there . . . All who support the cultural religion, in or out of church, however Lamb-like they may appear, are agents of the beast. All propaganda that entices humanity to idolize human empire is an expression of this beastly power that wants to appear Lamb-like.16

The defensive posture is attributed to Rome's focus on the consolidation of the city around its seven hills, but it also reflects Rome's internal class warfare and confused structure of governance that relied on crisis management, versus proactive, governance.

Second, the age in which we live is one of transitions, an age which in some ways is unparalleled in history, but in other ways is strikingly similar to the successful transition of fledgling Rome from a monarchy to the longest lasting republic in the history of the word.

In a time when world agreement is so necessary and yet so hard to realize, Rome recalls the one period when it was almost realized, a period which (some) considered the happiest in human history."516 Robert Broughton

Tacitus informs us for example that after murdering his wife Poppaea in 65 AD, Nero used a year's supply of Rome's cinnamon to bury her.

and the bakers went south to Rome because Romans, it turned out, loved German bread.

In Rome, Matt had told her, 'I knew that if I kept up my playing, we would have a baby.' That was what music represented to him now: a bargain he had sought with fate. In a less anaemic age, he would have sacrificed virgins or immaculate lambs.

The three great goals of pilgrimage were Rome, Jerusalem, and Santiago de Compostela in northwestern Spain. Along the route to the shrine of Saint James at Santiago, the Cluniac monks had organized hostels, a day's journey apart, complete with barbers and cobblers.

Unlike those in Philippi (perhaps including some of the Christians) whose citizenship is in Rome, the true citizenship of Jesus' followers is in heaven. This does not mean that Paul is here talking about their 'going to heaven' one day, any more than the Roman citizens in Philippi would expect to go to live in Rome one day (as people sometimes mistakenly suppose). Rather, they are part of the extended empire of 'heaven'.

The point about Philippi being a colony of Rome was not that the citizens would go back to Rome one day, but that (so it was hoped) they would bring the benefits of Roman civilization to Philippi.

The victory achieved by Jesus didn't stop Paul from being shipwrecked, but it did mean that when he got to Rome to announce God as king and Jesus as Lord, he would know that he came with the scent of victory already in his nostrils. The God who defeated death through Jesus and rescued Paul from the depths of the sea would enable him to look worldly emperors in the face without flinching.