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“Most plans of reformation are at first embraced with ardor; but soon the novelty ceases, and the scheme ends in nothing.”
In the end, he thinks, character is more important than government; what makes a people great is not its laws but its men.
Above all he sees intensely, sometimes deeply, always vividly.
Tacitus composes speeches for his varied personages, all in his own fashion and majestic prose;
Sometimes the condensation is extreme to the point of affectation or obscurity; every second word then requires a sentence to translate it; verbs and conjunctions are disdained as crutches for crippled minds.
The color is dark, the mood is gloomy, the sarcasm stings, and the tone of the whole is that of a Dante without tenderness; but the cumulative effect is overwhelming.
Unfortunately, Juvenal corroborates Tacitus. What the one writes in mordant prose about princes and senators, the other chants in bitter verse about women and men.
Juvenal takes everything for his subject, and has no trouble in finding in everything some aspect that can bear condemning.
Put ambition behind you; the goal is not worth the striving, so long is labor and so brief is fame.
But only a fool will pray for a long life.
We can understand such a mood; it is pleasant to contemplate the imperfections of our neighbors and the despicable inferiority of the world as compared with our dreams.
Juvenal is the greatest of Roman satirists, as Tacitus is the greatest of Roman historians; but we should err as much in taking their picture as accurate as we should were we to accept without scrutiny the pleasant and civilized scene that rises before us as we read the letters of Pliny.
Pliny reveals himself with half the candor and all the felicity of Montaigne.
There his chief enterprises are reading and doing nothing.
He had a hundred friends, some great, many good.
Tacitus lifted Pliny to heaven by reporting that the literary world was pairing them as the leading writers of the age.
Reason had made its great effort from Ennius to Tacitus and had spent itself.
Nothing reaches maturity except through the fulfillment of its own nature.
We cannot be sure that the Ta eis heauton—“to himself”—was intended for the public eye; probably so, for even saints are vain, and the greatest man of action has moments of weakness in which he aspires to write a book.
The book is precious only for its contents—its tenderness and candor, its half-conscious revelations of a pagan-Christian, ancient-medieval soul.
He reluctantly concedes that there are bad men in this world. The way to deal with them is to remember that they, too, are men, the helpless victims of their own faults by the determinism of circumstance.
Does this seem an impracticable philosophy? On the contrary, nothing is so invincible as a good disposition, if it be sincere.
Nevertheless, amid the prosperity that made Rome brilliant in this second century, all the seeds were germinating of the crisis that would ruin Italy in the third.
The process of conquest was finished and was to be reversed; henceforth the conquered would absorb the conquerors.
Stoicism, which had begun by preaching strength, was ending by preaching resignation.
The decisions of Augustus and Tiberius not to attempt the conquest of Germany were among the pivotal events of European history.
It is silly to suppose that when God, like a cook, brings the fire, the rest of mankind will be roasted, and only the Christians will remain—
Constantine was wiser than Celsus, and knew that a dead faith could not salvage Rome.
We know matter only through idea—through sensation, perception, thought; what we call matter is (as Hume would say) only a bundle of ideas;
Plotinus is the last of the great pagan philosophers; and like Epictetus and Aurelius, he is a Christian without Christ.
Through Philo, John, Plotinus, and Augustine, Plato conquered Aristotle, and entered into the profoundest theology of the Church. The gap between philosophy and religion was closing, and reason for a thousand years consented to be the handmaiden of theology.
“God’s son died: it is believable precisely because it is absurd [ineptum].
He fasted much, slept little and on bare ground, wore no shoes, and subjected himself to cold and nakedness; finally, in rigorous interpretation of Matthew XIX, 12, he emasculated himself.IV
As Origen proceeds it becomes apparent that he is a Stoic, a Neo-Pythagorean, a Platonist, and a Gnostic, who is nonetheless resolved to be a Christian. It would have been too much to ask of a man that he should abandon the faith for which he had edited a thousand volumes and flung away his manhood.
With him Christianity ceased to be only a comforting faith; it became a full-fledged philosophy, buttressed with Scripture but proudly resting on reason.
He conversed with wit, judged with penetration, lied without scruple, loved money more than honor, and governed with cruelty and competence.3
She was too beautiful to be monogamous, but Septimius was too busy to be jealous.
“I have been everything,” he said, “and it is worth nothing.”
“Make your soldiers rich, and do not bother about anything else.”
a man’s quota of energy seldom allows him to be great in both his life and his seed.
The men of Syria were women, and the women were men.
He loved music, sang well, played the pipes, the organ, and the horn. Being too young to rule the Empire, he only asked permission to enjoy it. Pleasure, not Baal, was his god, and he was resolved to worship it in all its genders and forms.
He was a man of gold, without the alloy required to withstand the rough usage of this world.
generals replaced philosophers on the throne,
Within a decade three ignominious tragedies had overtaken Rome: a Roman emperor had for the first time fallen in defeat, another had been captured by the enemy, and the unity of the Empire had been sacrificed to the necessity of meeting simultaneous attacks on many fronts.
The subtle “Queen of the East” pretended that she was proceeding as the agent of the Roman power; but all the world knew that her victories were an act in the spacious drama of Rome’s collapse.
The Empire had begun with urbanization and civilization; it was ending in reruralization and barbarism.
the accident of time has preserved him;
it was “easier to commit fratricide than to justify it.”
A winding stairway led to the top of the walls; perched there Shelley wrote Prometheus Unbound.
