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my hope is that you, my eventual readers of a hundred generations ahead, or more, will feel yourselves directly spoken to,
...will feel that i speak directly to you...
Herodotus and Thucydides, long dead, seem to speak to me.
With riches came sloth, greed, cruelty, dishonesty, cowardice, effeminacy and every other un-Roman vice.
Now, it must have been plain to Augustus that the first of the hairy ones, that is, the Cæsars (for Cæsar means a head of hair), was his grand-uncle Julius, who adopted him. Julius was bald and he was renowned for his debaucheries with either sex; and his war-charger, as is a matter of public record, was a monster which had toes instead of hooves. Julius escaped alive from many hard-fought battles only to be murdered at last, in the Senate House, by Brutus. And Brutus, though fathered on another, was believed to be Julius’s natural son: “Thou too, child!” said Julius, as Brutus came at him
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He divorced Scribonia,
his daughter, Julia;
This was the last of the Civil Wars, a duel to the death between the only two men left on their feet—if I may use the metaphor—after an all-against-all sword-fight in the universal amphitheatre.
Antony was totally defeated in the sea-battle off Actium, in Greece. He fled to Alexandria, and there took his own life—as did Cleopatra, too.
as the proverb says, “truth helps the story on”.
Thus he had the command of the armies, the control of the laws—for his influence on the Senate was such that they voted whatever he suggested to them—the control of public finances, the control of social behavior, and inviolacy of person.
The Senate were anxious to vote him whatever title he would accept, short of King: they were afraid to vote him the kingship for fear of the people.
he therefore signified to the Senate that the title Augustus would be agreeable to him. So they voted him that. “Augustus” had a semi-divine connotation, and the common title of King was nothing by comparison.
Most women are inclined to set a modest limit to their ambitions; a few rare ones set a bold limit. But Livia was unique in setting no limit at all to hers,
(Divine honours had been offered to Julius, in the East, while he was still alive; that he had not refused them was one of the reasons for his assassination.)
I prefer the thorough Roman method, which misses nothing, to that of Homer and the Greeks generally, who love to jump into the middle of things and then work backwards or forwards as they feel inclined.
the famous sham-debate staged in the Senate, after the overthrow of Antony, between Augustus and his two friends, Agrippa and Mæcenas,
Drusus
Punic Curse
strange how long the word “king” has survived with schoolboys
King of the hill
I was forced to admit that I had told both too little and too much, and had also put my facts in the wrong order. The passage describing the lamentations of the mothers and sweethearts of the young soldiers, and how the crowd rushed to the bridgehead for a final cheer of the departing column, should have come last, not first. And I need not have mentioned that the cavalry had horses: people took that for granted.
How to write
he never let any careless, irrelevant, or inexact phrase of mine pass
Livy’s history of Rome, which he gave me to read as an example of lucid and agreeable writing.
he had begun publishing his work, at the rate of five volumes a year, and he had now reached the date at which Julius Cæsar was born.
Livy said that writing was the historian’s last task: first he had to gather his materials and sharpen his pen.
Julia grew careless, and all Rome soon came to know of her infidelities.
Augustus’s blind love for Julia was a by-word and nobody dared to say anything to him.
“Let her be banished for life, but do not tell me where.”
every man and woman of rank should marry young and breed as large a family as possible. The steady decrease in the number of births and marriages in the governing classes became an obsession with Augustus.
We must console the mortal part of our nature with an endless succession of generations,
It was for this reason chiefly that the first and greatest God who created us divided the human race in two: he made one half of it male and the other half female and implanted in these halves mutual desire for each other, making their intercourse fruitful so that by continual procreation he might, in a sense, make even mortality immortal.
it was not the men who were shirking, as he called it, but the women?
any good-looking woman nowadays could have any man to sleep with whom she chose.
if the thing had not gone too far—they could rid any lady of an unwanted child in two or three days, and nobody be any the worse or wiser.
the cleverest leader is one who chooses clever people to think for him.”
he had a love of literal truth, amounting to pedantry, which he could not square with the conventions of these other literary forms.
my grandmother Octavia;
(he’s supposed to be the last man who can read Etruscan inscriptions)
there are two different ways of writing history: one is to persuade men to virtue and the other is to compel men to truth.
mere truthtellers—‘undertakers who lay out the corpse of history’
As usual, famine brought rioting,
a really good commander has no time for writing letters home to his family, his entire time between campaigns being spent in getting to know his men and officers, in studying their comfort, in increasing their military efficiency, and in gathering information about the disposition and plans of his enemy.
it often happened that Augustus would unintentionally put the tax at too high a rate, discounting the distress caused by a bad harvest or a cattle plague or an earthquake; and rather than complain to him that the assessment was too high the governors would collect it to the last penny, even at the risk of revolt.
one of the few plausible arguments that I ever heard advanced against republican government;
Germanicus’s way was always to refuse to think evil of any person until positive proof of such evil should be forced on him, and, on the contrary, to credit everyone with the highest motives. This extreme simplicity was generally of service to him.
if any man had any good in him Germanicus always seemed to bring it out.
I was in high spirits and not nervous at all. Germanicus had suggested that I should fortify myself with a cup of wine beforehand and I thought this good advice.
So Livia now only had to find out the whereabouts of Postumus, whom she assumed to be hidden somewhere under the name of Clement. She thought that Augustus was planning to restore him to favour and might even pass over Tiberius and appoint him his immediate successor in the monarchy,
Augustus, who had accompanied him as far as Naples, cruising easily along the coast, now fell sick: his stomach was disordered.
Nothing in his manner to Livia seemed altered, nor was hers altered towards him, but each read the other’s mind.
the legend was that Hercules died of poison administered by his wife.
