SPQR: A History Of Ancient Rome Quotes
"The sorrowing Romans soon concluded that [Romulus] had been snatched from them to become a god – crossing the boundary between human and divine in a way that Rome’s polytheistic religious system sometimes allowed."
"The story of Romulus and Remus is by turns intriguing, puzzling and hugely revealing of big Roman concerns, at least among the elite."
"After leading his son by the hand and carrying his elderly father from the burning ruins, [Aeneas] eventually made his way to Italy, where his destiny was to refound his native city on Italian soil."
"The central claim of the story of Aeneas is one that echoes, or rather exaggerates, the underlying theme of Romulus’ asylum."
"It shows just how ingrained the idea was that ‘Rome’ had always been an ethnically fluid concept, that the ‘Romans’ had always been on the move."
"Rome was no more conservative than nineteenth-century Britain. In both places, radical innovation thrived in dialogue with all kinds of ostensibly conservative traditions and rhetoric."
"The dead and buried are often much more prominent than the living in the archaeological record."
"The regal period is caught in that intriguing territory that straddles the boundary dividing myth from history."
"Rome had once been some kind of monarchy."
"The rape of Lucretia by one of the king’s sons [...] symbolically mark[s] the beginning and the end of the regal period."
"The end of the monarchy was also the birth of liberty and of the free Roman Republic."
"The consuls embodied several key, and decidedly unmonarchical, principles of the new political regime."
"The Republic was not just a political system. It was a complex set of interrelationships between politics, time, geography, and the Roman cityscape."
"Underpinning the whole thing was one single, overriding principle: namely, freedom, or libertas."
"Fifth-century BCE Athens bequeathed the idea of democracy to the modern world."
"Republican Rome bequeathed the equally important idea of liberty."
"The first word of the second book of Livy’s History, which begins the story of Rome after the monarchy, is ‘free’."
"All, or most, Romans would have counted themselves as upholders of libertas, just as today most of us uphold ‘democracy’."
"The Romans envisaged a fairly bloodless regime change."
"The ‘Republic’ was born slowly, over a period of decades, if not centuries."
"Rome’s relations with the outside world were entirely unremarkable, so far as we can tell, until around 400 BCE."
"The Twelve Tables are the best antidote to those later heroising narratives."
"The Twelve Tables are much on that pattern. They are a long way from being a comprehensive legal code."
"There is still a big question mark over when exactly the defining office of the Republic was invented."
"Probably no war has been refought so often in so many studies and lecture rooms or been scrutinised so intently by the military men of the modern world."
"Its causes remain as clouded in speculation and second-guessing as they ever were."
"In reality, it is hard to fathom either the Roman or the Carthaginian aims."
"The eventual victory of the Romans highlights a much more down-to-earth clash of strategy and military style."
"One man alone restored the state to us by delaying."
"Retrospective generalship can be misleading, however, especially when it comes to re-creating what happened in any individual battle."
"Aemilius Paullus may have had this in mind when he remarked: ‘A man who knows how to conquer in battle also knows how to give a banquet and organize games.’"
"Cannae was indeed a crucial turning point in the Second Punic War, and in the longer history of Roman military expansion."
"Polybius, who knew Rome as both an enemy and a friend, was uniquely well placed to reflect on the rise of the city and on its institutions."
"Never come back from the Forum until you have made at least one new friend."
"The secret, Polybius suggested, lay in a delicate relationship of checks and balances between consuls, the senate, and the people."
"Yet there was another side to it. As well as the formal prerogatives of the people that Polybius stresses, there are clear traces of a wider political culture in which the popular voice was a key element."
"The balance between the different interests was certainly not as equitable as Polybius makes it seem."
"The rich had to learn the lesson that they depended on the people as a whole."
"But he had experienced the sharp end of Roman warfare, and he also saw Rome as an aggressive power, with imperialist aims to take over the whole world."
"It was not an empire of annexation in the sense that later Romans would understand it."
"The division between Romans and outsiders was increasingly blurred."
"The transformation involved movements of people, into and out of Rome, on a scale never before seen in the ancient world."
"Cultural identity is always a slippery notion."
"The period between 146 BCE and the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 BCE marked a high point of Roman literature, art, and culture."
"Yet many Roman commentators focused on no such glittering achievements but on progressive political and moral decline."
"For the first time, they confronted the question of how an empire should be administered and governed."
"The story of how the Great Mother goddess was brought into Rome with tremendous fanfare from Asia Minor in 204 BCE."
"The clash in 133 BCE revealed dramatically different views of the power of the people."
"Some of the most outspoken voices of the third and second centuries BCE became famous for attacking the corrupting influence on traditional Roman behaviour and morals of foreign culture in general, and Greek culture in particular."
"These mostly came down to displaying a popular touch: talking with anyone he met, giving presents to ordinary people and making the rounds of craftsmen’s shops."
"The truth is that Cato’s version of old-fashioned, no-nonsense Roman values was as much an invention of his own day as a defence of long-standing Roman traditions."
"Rome was the only place in the ancient Mediterranean where the state took responsibility for the regular basic food supplies of its citizens."
"To Gaius’ opponents, that smacked dangerously of a bid for personal power."
"Rome’s a city for sale and bound to fall as soon as it finds a buyer." - Jugurtha
"No one did me wrong whom I did not pay back in full." - Sulla's words for his tomb
"I’m not a Roman either. I travel throughout Italy searching for favours by making people laugh and giving pleasure. So spare the swallow, which the gods allow to nest safely in all your houses!" - A comedian during the outbreak of the Social War at Asculum
"The easiest solution to the puzzle is to imagine that the allies were a loose coalition with many different aims, some determined to resist the Romans to the death, others much more prepared to make a deal."
"But the system was almost guaranteed to intensify political competition and produce disgruntled failures, just like Catiline a couple of decades later."
"Pompey’s vast building scheme of theatre, gardens, porticoes and meeting rooms, all lined with famous works of sculpture, was a decidedly imperial innovation."
"‘They were seeking citizenship of the state whose power they were used to defending with their arms,’ insists one, whose great-grandfather was an Italian who fought on the Roman side."
"The political situation alarms me more each day." - Cicero
"The defeat of austerity and the triumph of luxury." - Pliny the Elder on Pompey
"The business bores me." - Cicero on governing Cilicia
"The whole of Gaul is divided into three parts." - Julius Caesar
"Egnatius Metellus took a cudgel and beat his wife to death because she had drunk some wine."
"Who has tied my son-in-law to his sword?" - Cicero
"I’ve given you a good thrashing, or at least a silent ticking off in my head." - Quintus Cicero to Tiro
"Let’s live, my Lesbia, and let’s love / And the mutterings of stern old men / Let’s value them at a single penny ... / Give me a thousand kisses." - Catullus
"Here is the unlovely grave of a lovely woman. She loved her husband with her heart. She bore two sons. One of these she leaves on earth, the other under the earth. She was graceful in her speech and elegant in her step. She kept the home. She made wool." - Epitaph of Claudia
"It’s not a big thing, but it’s a weight on my mind." - Cicero on a runaway slave
"I jumped for joy when I read your letter. Thank you." - Quintus Cicero to Cicero on Tiro's freedom
"My little doll, my dear Mania, lies buried here. For just a few years was I able to give my love to her. Her father now weeps constantly for her." - Epitaph
"If there is no basin in the bathhouse, have one installed." - Cicero to Terentia
"He talks as if he were in the Republic of Plato, when in fact he is in the crap of Romulus." - Cicero on Cato
"I am really pleased with what you have done about Tiro and that you decided that his status was below what he deserved and that you would rather have him as a friend than a slave." - Quintus Cicero to Cicero
"I found the city built of brick and left it built of marble."
"I extended the territory of all the provinces of the Roman people, which had neighbours not obedient to our rule."
"I liberated the state oppressed by the power of a faction."
"If I have played my part well, then give me applause."
"It was as if she was there with the other prisoners."
"I have given them empire without limit."
"His vanity building projects have been placed somewhere on the spectrum between an affront to the laws of nature and ludicrous display."
"His valiant soldiers were disgracefully humiliated by being made to hunt for seashells on a French beach."
"Just the thought that I would only have to nod and your throats would be cut on the spot."
"The confusion and violence that followed the assassination not only shows how easy it was for a peaceful morning of theatrical performance to turn into a bloodbath but also points to all kinds of different political views between senate, soldiers and ordinary people."
"It was a hundred years, they calculated, since freedom had been lost."
"Weakened by the pleasure of peace we learned to live like slaves."
"The first emperor to use bribery to secure the loyalty of the soldiers."
"Maybe that was true, but a parade of reluctance has often provided a useful cover for ruthless ambition."
"Those differences of opinion challenge orthodoxies and raise some bigger historical questions."
"It is hard to resist the conclusion that, whatever kernel of truth they might have, the stories told about him are an inextricable mixture of fact, exaggeration, wilful misinterpretation and outright invention."
"It would be naive to imagine that Gaius was an innocent and benevolent ruler, horribly misunderstood or consistently misrepresented."
"For all the excitement generated by the murder of Gaius, the suspense, the uncertainty of the moment and the flirtation with Republicanism, as brief as it was unrealistic, the end result was another emperor on the throne who was not all that unlike the one he had replaced."
"The whole performance was in any case too late."
"But scratch the surface, and he too has a grim record of cruelty and criminality."
"The basic rule of Roman history is that those who were assassinated were, like Gaius, demonised."
"How far it is useful to see Roman history in terms of imperial biographies or to divide the story of the empire into emperor-sized chunks?"
"If he is to rule over all, he must be chosen from all."
"It is those that we need to understand in order to make sense of imperial rule, not the individual idiosyncrasies of the rulers."
"After all, no horse was ever really made consul."