Best 99 quotes in «ancient rome quotes» category

It was no wonder they thought us to be immortal––our nightly celebrations put Olympus to shame.

Julius waited stone-faced as the other centurions scattered to their centuries, eager to make sure their men were ready for a forced march, none of them wanting to suffer the embarrassment of causing the cohort any delay in their headlong charge to the west. The tribune watched them go for a moment, then turned back to the heavily built centurion with a grim smile. ‘So, Centurion, what, you are wondering, have you done to have your expected position as Uncle Sextus’s deputy usurped by your colleague Clodius?’ Julius shrugged, his heavyset face impassive. ‘The Badger’s a good man, Tribune, more than capable of leading the cohort down a road and deploying them to wipe out a few hundred bandits. I’ll admit I’m curious though. Was it something I’ve done?’ Scaurus smiled, putting a hand on the big man’s shoulder. ‘Yes, Julius, it was something you’ve done. It was every little bit of professionalism you’ve displayed since I took this cohort under my command, every order given and every enemy killed. In the absence of the first spear you’re my best individual officer, and I’ve got a job that needs doing here that I can’t entrust to anyone less than my best centurion. We’re forced to withdraw our force from Tungrorum to deal with this new threat, but there’s enough money being held in the headquarters’ safe room to attract every thief and gang leader in this whole city, what with the pay chests and the proceeds of the grain fraud. I’m leaving you here, Julius, you and your century, and depending on you to make sure that nobody gets their grubby fingers on that money. I want a double-strength guard on the vault, and the rest of your men, whether eating, resting or sleeping, no more than a dozen heartbeats away. You can also keep Centurion Corvus’s wife and the wounded safe from harm while you’re at it, and relieve me of the trouble of carting that jar of naphtha around. As of this moment you’re free to kill anyone and everyone you suspect to be a threat to the emperor’s gold, without hesitation or fear of any repercussion. If we return that gold to the throne we will be congratulated and possibly even rewarded, but if we lose it again, having exposed its original loss and recapture to the throne’s eyes, the outcome will be altogether darker for everyone concerned. Do we understand each other, Centurion?

It would have been easy to ask, then, ‘What of this Eagle?’, to have wheedled out of them all they knew: where it was kept, when and where paraded through the streets. I was halfway to asking when Pantera, swaying a little, trod on my foot and I bit the words back and glanced at Horgias, who had seen and gave the barest nod and continued to grin in the mindless manner of a man who only understands one word in every dozen that he hears. The Hebrews didn’t notice; they were too busy reminding each other of their victories, of the men killed, the stones dodged, the slingstones hurled.

Marcus woke again to find Sanga lying asleep on his bed, and he quietly climbed off his own mattress, standing still for a moment to allow the slight feeling of dizziness to pass. Walking quietly on bare feet, he made his way up the corridor to the latrine, then went in search of his wife. Felicia was delighted to see him on his feet, despite her immediate concern for his well-being, which were quickly dispelled when he waved her away and turned a full circle with his arms out. ‘Well, you seem to be spry enough that I think we can assume the effects of the mandrake have completely worn off. You won’t be able to speak or eat solid food for some time yet though.’ ‘And that’s why I brought this for him.’ They turned to find the tribune standing in the doorway with a smile on his face, a small iron pot dangling from one hand. ‘There’s a food shop at the end of the street whose proprietress was only too happy to lend me the pot in the likelihood of getting your business for the next few weeks. Pass me a cup and I’ll pour you some.’ Marcus found his glass drinking tube and took a sip at the soup, nodding his thanks to the tribune. Scaurus sat in silence until the cup was empty, watching as the hungry centurion consumed the soup as quickly as its temperature would allow. ‘That’s better, eh? There’s more in the pot for when I’m gone. I’d imagine you’ll be spending another night in here just to be sure you’re over the worst of it, but that ought to keep you going until morning. And now, Centurion, to business? First Spear Frontinius tells me that you passed a message requesting a conversation with me, although from the look of things most of the speaking will be done by me.’ Marcus nodded, reaching for his tablet and writing several lines of text. He handed the wooden case to Scaurus, who read the words and stared back at his centurion with his eyebrows raised in astonishment. ‘Really? You’re sure of this?’ After thinking for a moment, Marcus held out his hand and took the tablet back. He smoothed the wax and wrote another statement. Scaurus looked grimly at the text, shaking his head. ‘You got that close to him?’ Marcus wrote in the tablet again. Scaurus read the text aloud, a wry smile on his face. ‘“Take a tent party with you.” A tent party? I’ll need a damned century if he’s as dangerous as you say. And the nastiest, most bad-tempered officer in the First Cohort. Do any names spring to mind, Centurion?

Marcus turned his back to her. He feared that if he saw her face, it might weaken his resolve. Love was indeed a madness.

Maximus said, "They have no tombstones. Not one man in Treverorum wept for their passing." he looked at his audience in turn and smiled. "In the name of Mithras, my master, may the gods be kind to you on your journey.

no one tells you rome is ending until you're the last one standing alone in a coliseum where a city had been.

Nothing makes sense in Rome.

One encounters in the streets, late at night on the evenings of fetes, the most strange and bizarre passers-by. Do these nights of popular celebration cause ancient and forgotten avatars to stir in the depths of the human soul? This evening, in the movement of the sweaty and excited crowd, I am certain that I passed between the masks of the liberated Bythinians and encountered the courtesans of the Roman decadence. There emerged, this evening, from that swarming esplanade of Des Invalides - amid the crackle of fireworks, the shooting stars, the stink of frying, the hiccuping of drunkards and the reeking atmosphere of menageries - the wild effusions of one of Nero's festivals. It was like the odour of a May evening on the Basso-Porto of Naples. It was easy to believe that the faces in that crowd were Sicilian.

Remember these Romans, Hannibal. For the time being, we must ally with them. But the day will come when we will have our vengeance upon them, as we will upon the demons of Harappa. Never forget that.” The boy's voice was grave. “I'll remember.

Silvanus, the camp prefect, took a step forward. I heard his voice every morning after parade, but had never listened to the tones of it as I did now. He was not afraid, that much was clear; he was angry. "Pathetic. I should cashier you all now and destroy your Eagles." Silvanus spoke quietly; we had to strain to hear his voice. You could have heard the stars slide across the sky, we were so still and so silent. "If General Corbulo were here, he would destroy you. He dismissed half of the Fifth and the Tenth and sent them home. The rest are billeted in tents in the Armenian highlands with barley meal for fodder. He intends to make an army of them, to meet Vologases when he comes. I intend the same and therefore you will be treated the same as your betters in better legions. You will be proficient by the spring, or you will be dead." His gaze raked us, and we wondered which of us might die that night for the crime of being ineffectual. His voice rocked us. "To that end, you will spend the next three months in tents in the Mountains of the Hawk that lie between us and the sea. One hundred paces above the snow line, each century will determine an area suitable for three months’ stay and build its own base camp. You will alternate along the mountains’ length so that each century of the Fourth has a century of the Twelfth to either side, and vice versa. Each century will defend and maintain its own stocks against the men of the opposing legion; you are encouraged to avail yourselves of what you can. You may not remove stocks from camps belonging to other centuries of your own legion, and equally you may not aid in defending them against raiding parties from the opposing men. So that you may tell each other apart, the Twelfth legion will wear" – did I hear a note of distaste there? – "red cloth tied about their left arms at all times. The Fourth will wear blue. You will be provided with raw fleece with which to wrap your weapons that they might strike but not bite. A man who is careless enough to be captured by the other side will be flogged and returned to his unit. Any man who kills another will be flogged until dead and any man who wounds another will be staked out beyond the boundary of his camp for two days and nights; if he lives, he will be returned to his unit. Any man who dies of hunger, cold or fright, or who falls off the mountain, will be deemed to have died by his own hand. You have until the next watch to make ready. You are dismissed.

So we left the spear in the wagon and I dressed and still was not sick and together we walked to the head of the century. Tears had been ready to lead them. Macer was there, holding his horn. I saw them both shrug and get ready to swap Tears’ shield for the horn. ‘No, stay as you are,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t hurt to have someone else learning the signals. Tears can stay as Macer’s shield-man. Taurus, stay with Horgias.’ ‘And you?’ someone asked. ‘Don’t worry about me.’ I grinned, careless of the listening gods. ‘I’m indestructible. I’ll outlive you all.

Surely the greatest mercy granted us by Providence is our ignorance of the future. Imagine if we knew the outcome of our hopes and plans, or could see the manner in which we are doomed to die - how ruined our lives would be! Instead we live on dumbly from day to day as happily as animals. But all things must come to dust eventually. No human being, no system, no age is impervious to this law; everything beneath the stars will perish; the hardest rock will be worn away. Nothing endures but words.

The camp offices stood in the centre, adjoining the shrine to Jupiter that held the legion’s Eagle. In the camps of the Vth Macedonica and the VIth Ferrata, these buildings were of grey stone, dressed by Gaulish masons to such smoothness that a man could run his hand down them and not feel the joins. The legions’ respective signs of the bull and the eagle had been carved thereon with such pride and perfection that men copied them on their shields and carved them on the bedheads in the barracks. At Raphana, the camp office of the XIIth Fulminata and IVth Scythians before which we dismounted was built of the local baked mud, and some drunkard with a poor eye for detail had etched the Scythians’ sign of the goat and the Fulminata’s crossed thunderbolts together, so that it seemed as if the goat were thunderstruck, or else that lightning grew from its anus. Both applied equally; each was unthinkable in a legion which had any pride in itself.

the emperor had chewed off his balls and stuffed a one-way ticket to the Black Sea up his rectum [Marcus Corvinus explains what happened to Ovid]

The enemy came towards us thick as mercury poured into a channel; a simmering tide oozing from the furnace of the risen sun into the pass below us. I felt Syrion tighten his grip on the banner haft, we were that close, that closely knit. On my left, I felt Tears... I felt him breathe, I felt his heartbeat, I felt when he smiled, and when he did my soul sang in joy and glory and my only regret – I swear this to you now as the perfect truth – my sole regret was that the night could not have lasted longer. I did not crave another night, only that the one we had might have been stretched a little, giving us time to learn more of each other, and perhaps with more privacy than a hollow in the woods where we could hear that other men were trying to sleep as easily as they could hear that we were not.

The fervor and single-mindedness of this deification probably have no precedent in history. It's not like Duvalier or Assad passing the torch to the son and heir. It surpasses anything I have read about the Roman or Babylonian or even Pharaonic excesses. An estimated $2.68 billion was spent on ceremonies and monuments in the aftermath of Kim Il Sung's death. The concept is not that his son is his successor, but that his son is his reincarnation. North Korea has an equivalent of Mount Fuji—a mountain sacred to all Koreans. It's called Mount Paekdu, a beautiful peak with a deep blue lake, on the Chinese border. Here, according to the new mythology, Kim Jong Il was born on February 16, 1942. His birth was attended by a double rainbow and by songs of praise (in human voice) uttered by the local birds. In fact, in February 1942 his father and mother were hiding under Stalin's protection in the dank Russian city of Khabarovsk, but as with all miraculous births it's considered best not to allow the facts to get in the way of a good story.

It was as if all my life had been spent fighting, killing and running. I wanted peace but I knew it was unattainable. I had to return and rule my people...

Men like Caesar and Pompey--they're not heroes, Meto. They're monsters. They call their greed and ambition "honour," and to satisfy their so-called honour they'll tear the world apart. But who am I to judge them? Every man does what he must, to protect his share of the world. What's the difference between killing whole villages and armies, and killing a single man? Caesar's reasons and mine are different only in degree. The consequences and the suffering still spread to the innocent (Gordianus the Finder to his son Meto)

Most women run from danger like mice from a cat. You turn into a lion and take whatever comes. [Aurelia as seen by her brother.]

My tongue tasted like a gladiator's jockstrap [Marcus Corvinus after a night out]

Personally, I thought it chancy to rely on only one god. It struck me as akin to placing all your drachars on one chariot at the races...It didn't seem logical that one god could ensure the proper working of the world.

Secundus might lie rotting in his grave, but his relatives and followers yet lived. They believed the lies that held Gwenwhyfar responsible for the death of their relative. For the sake of his own family’s safety, Marcus had not sought to correct that error.

Seeking more information, I walked through the market listening to the gossip and discovered that our new general, the man sent to quell the unrest in the east, was the second son of a provincial tax collector whose only claims to recognition were that he had commanded some legions in Britain in the heady, early days of the invasion, that his brother had once stood for consul, and that he had been a governor in some African province, where the locals had thrown turnips at him. Despairing, I returned to the house, and that despair deepened later when Horgias came home with the news that our new paragon of martial virtue had until recently been hiding in Greece, in disgrace for having fallen asleep during one of Nero’s recitals in the theatre.

Selene’s life is a lesson to us that the trajectory of women’s equality hasn’t always been a forward march. In some ways the ancients were more advanced than we are today; there have been setbacks before and may be more in the future.

She did not approach Caesar wrapped in a carpet, she was not a seductress, she did not use her charm to persuade the men in her life to lose their judgement, and she did not die by the bite of an asp…Yet other important elements of her career have been bypassed in the post-antique recension: she was a Skilled naval commander, a published medical authority, and an expert royal administrator who was met with adulation throughout the eastern Mediterranean, perhaps seen by some as a messianic figure, the hope for a future Eastern Mediterranean free of Roman domination.

She ran. Deeper, deeper into the mysterious Broceliande forest...

Tell me we’re not going to be stoking up the cook fires to build palisades through the night by their light.’ I stood, turning as I spoke. Gravely, he said, ‘You’re not going to be stoking the cook fires and building palisades through the night by their light.’ Something was wrong with Lupus. He had never in his life made a joke, and his eyes were not laughing; quite the reverse.

The failure of the roman system to furnish decent minimal standards for the mass of people was a fundamental cause of instability, both political and economic.

The gilded wreaths and crowns that the Legion had won in the days of its honour were gone from the crimson-bound staff; the furious talons still clutched the crossed thunderbolts, but where the great silver wings should have arched back in savage pride, were only empty socket-holes in the flanks of gilded bronze.

The Greeks believed that it was a citizen's duty to watch a play. It was a kind of work in that it required attention, judgement, patience, all the social virtues." "And the Greek were conquered by the more practical Romans, Arthur." "Indeed, the Romans built their bridges, but they also spent many centuries wishing they were Greeks. And they, after all, were conquered by the barbarians, or by their own corrupt and small spirits.

The Petriana’s tribune dismounted a dozen paces short of the gate and stalked up to the palisade wall with a grim smile, squinting up at Scaurus and his officers and then glancing back at the men building the pyre on the plain below the fortress. He called up to them, shielding his eyes with a raised hand. ‘Well now, colleague, I see you’ve accomplished your orders with the usual efficiency. Perhaps you ought to come down here and join me, though. I’ve something to tell you that will give you some pause for thought.’ Scaurus climbed down from the wall after instructing Julius to keep the men inside the Dinpaladyr at their tasks. ‘You’d better come with me, Centurion Corvus, I suspect I’m going to need someone to take notes of whatever it is my brother tribune has to tell me. I may well be too busy banging my head on the palisade in frustration.

[The Solon]...was a showman, a braggart, and this appealed to certain people who saw only the bravado and not where this irresponsibility might take Osteria.

The strands (the gods) weave out of our mortal lives are like a pattern visible only from the heavens; we here on earth can only guess at their designs

The story of women in antiquity should be told now, not only because it is a legitimate aspect of social history, but because the past illuminates contemporary problems in relationships between men and women. ... It is most significant to note the consistency with which some attitudes toward women and the roles women play in Western society have endured through the centuries.

The wheel of Rome spins constantly. Gods rise and fall, mortals live and die, and round and round we go. We all play a part in that wheel... And I make sure the wheel never stops spinning. You see, if the wheel stops, balance is lost.

They knew of the Vth, my legion, of their skill in battle, of how they had won Antium for Octavian, and then fought against Parthia for Tiberius; they were glad the Vth was not yet on their borders, although concerned that it was camped so close in Moesia. I may have loathed the Vth on principle when I was forced to march in its company, but here it was my legion; the men were my brothers. I caught myself smiling broadly once, or rather, Pantera caught me, and threw me a look that ensured I didn’t smile again for the rest of the meal.

They say the eyes are the apertures to the soul. If that is so, I feared Locusta's soul was far darker than even Nero's.

They think they are invincible. But, the truth is, Nova––gods fall just as hard as mortals. The only difference is... gods do not see the fall coming until it is too late.

Though they love people, the Christians are enemies of our life, our gods and our crimes; hence she fled from me, as from a man who belongs to our [Roman] society, and with whom she would have to share a life counted criminal by Christians...I should not have stopped her from believing in her Christ, and would myself have reared an altar to Him in the atrium. What harm could one more god do me? Why might I not believe in Him, - I who do not believe over much in the old gods? ...It would not be difficult for me even to renounce other gods, for no reasoning mind believes in them at present. But it seems that all this is not enough yet for the Christians. It is not enough to honor Christ, one must also live according to His teachings; and here thou art on the shore of a sea which they command thee to wade through. Quo Vadis

Three old men with moon-silver hair and slow, ponderous movement took him in their arms and laid him on a marble slab and set silver coins on his eyes and swung incense over him, murmuring as priests do to fill what might otherwise be a god-sent silence.

Triumphantly, he announced their deaths to the cheering crowd in a famous one-word euphemism: vixere, 'they have lived' – that is, 'they're dead'.

Ut haec ipsa qui non sentiat deorum vim habere is nihil omnino sensurus esse videatur." If any man cannot feel the power of God when he looks upon the stars, then I doubt whether he is capable of any feeling at all.

We broke camp together and set off in our opposite directions: we of the XIIth and our allies marched east, towards the rising sun, combat and honour; the IVth went west, to the setting sun, to ignominy and a wealth of digging. We sang as we marched. They did not.

What you seem so unwilling to accept, even now, is this: that the ideals which supported the old Republic had no correspondence to the fact of the old Republic; that the glorious word concealed the deed of horror; that the appearance of tradition and order cloaked the reality of corruption and chaos; that the call to liberty and freedom closed the minds, even of those who called, to the facts of privation, suppression, and sanctioned murder.

Why not now?’ Horgias said. ‘We could go back in now and take it.’ ‘You can certainly try.’ Pantera rolled his tongue around his teeth and then said something in the native tongue that neither of us understood. When we made no response, he repeated it, more slowly, louder. We looked at each other, and at him. He smiled tightly. ‘I said, “You are Roman and we of Eleazir’s party take great pleasure in slaughtering your countrymen. We took five days to skin alive a man who tried to join you. Imagine what we can do now, when we have all winter.”’ ‘Very funny.’ I wasn’t smiling. Nor was Pantera. ‘If you want to go, I won’t stop you. But without fluency in both Aramaic and Hebrew, you will die.

These pastoral-poet guys with their bleating goats and oaten pipes can stuff their phalaecean hendecasyllabics where the sun don't shine.

The sun edged up until it caught the first heights of our standards. I saw the raised fist of Jupiter reach for the first rays, folding the light into its majesty so that it blazed with a life all its own. I raised my hand to join it and the cheer that broke along the line was deeper than the enemy drumbeats, lasted longer, grew louder, and harder. It reached the oncoming cavalry and I saw them check in their advance, saw the horses pitch and stumble as they took the first rise of the hill.

This time the senators met in the temple of the goddess Concord, or Harmony, a sure sign that affairs of state were anything but harmonious.

To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?" Cicero, Orator, 46 BC By way of 'Dictator' by Robert Harris, 2015