A Pillar of Iron: A Novel of Ancient Rome

by Taylor Caldwell

He suffered fearfully from the natural irresolution and confusions present in a temperate man of much moderation, who thought that other men should be reasonably civilized, and rational. He never recovered from being a rational man in a most irrational world, and this too is the fate of all moderates.

The truly civilized man is immune to passing exclamations, novelties and fashions in thought, deed, or the written or spoken word, and emotional storms.

“Man lives in an awful isolation, imprisoned by his flesh, unable to stir his tongue of flesh to pronounce the words in his heart, unable to show that heart of flesh to anyone, neither father nor child nor brother nor wife. That is man’s tragedy, that he lives alone from the moment of his birth until the hour he lies upon his funeral pyre.”

Love of country is often confused in simple minds with love of one’s government. They are rarely one; they are not synonymous.

stain oil his soul be cleared instantly.

“No. He has been prophesying the death of Rome for a long time my son would kill me. Do I have a son? No.” time. Is she dead? Have we been murdered? No. He said.

Beyond the curtains of the litter the mighty city was awakening and the thunder of traffic and feet and voices had begun. It was an old and familiar sound, and no longer exciting. That is the trouble with growing older, thought Marcus gloomily. There is no more newness in the world, no more surmise. No more wonder. What can console one for the loss of these? Life for me now is only a retreat, and what is a sunrise for the young is a sunset for me. As for adventure, I can no longer expect it, if indeed it ever came to me at all. After forty, a man is hardly alive.

“Dictators, my dear Clodius,” replied Julius, “cannot afford compunctions.”

He took refuge in his library, and in his writings. “At the last a man must return to himself and confront himself, and never can he escape that last confrontation,” he wrote. “The world cannot hide him; the love of his family cannot help him flee. Affairs of state cannot deafen the voice he must finally hear, which is his own. Books, music, sculpture, arts, science, philosophy: these are lovely delays, but they are only delays.”