Empire Quotes

“Reading Suetonius had given him the idea. The details were all a jumble in his head, but Marcus had been left with a vague impression that the world had progressed since the days of Augustus. In the rush of daily life, one tended to forget what a special place Roma was. One tended to forget, too, how strange was the past, and how much better, in every way, was the world of the present moment. Thinking of the outlandish tales in Suetonius, remembering the stories his father had told him, and reflecting on his own memories of a life that had begun in slavery but delivered him into the company of emperors and the care of the Divine Youth, it seemed to Marcus that the world had passed through a series of terrible trials to arrive at something resembling a perfect state, or as perfect as mortals could make it.”
― Steven Saylor, Empire

“Marcus could see why the biographies were so popular. The stories told by Suetonius were brutal, funny, and shocking. The people he described were, for the most part, appalling. Had Caligula really given his horse Incitatus a stall of marble, a manger of ivory, purple blankets, and a collar of precious stones, all in preparation for making him a consul? Had Nero really tried to kill his mother by putting her on a collapsing boat? Had Domitian invited guests to a black room where he treated them like men already dead, and then released them, making a joke of their despair? What amazing and terrible times Marcus’s father and grandfather and great-grandfather had lived through—and how very little Marcus knew about their lives!”
― Steven Saylor, Empire

“Marcus could see why the biographies were so popular. The stories told by Suetonius were brutal, funny, and shocking. The people he described were, for the most part, appalling. Had Caligula really given his horse Incitatus a stall of marble, a manger of ivory, purple blankets, and a collar of precious stones, all in preparation for making him a consul? Had Nero really tried to kill his mother by putting her on a collapsing boat? Had Domitian invited guests to a black room where he treated them like men already dead, and then released them, making a joke of their despair? What amazing and terrible times Marcus’s father and grandfather and great-grandfather had lived through—and how very”
― Steven Saylor, Empire

“Marcus located the other volumes and piled them on the table, then began to skim through the text. From the sternly moralistic Augustus, power had passed to the dour Tiberius, who had ended in utter debauchery and left the world at the mercy of the monstrous Caligula, whose bloody death had led to the reign of the hapless Claudius, cuckolded by one wife, Messalina, and probably murdered by another, Agrippina, who had put her son Nero on the throne and been rewarded with death. After Nero had come four emperors in quick succession: Galba, Otho, Vitellius, and then Vespasian, the bland but competent general who had left the empire to his sons, first the popular Titus, then the suspicious and cruel Domitian. There Suetonius’s account ended, but Marcus needed no historian to tell him about the reigns of Nerva, Trajan, and Hadrian.”
― Steven Saylor, Empire

“had rather save the life of one innocent citizen than take the lives of a thousand enemies,” Antoninus had remarked. He had none of Hadrian’s restlessness or brooding nature; he was known for a placid temperament and a gentle sense of humor. Under his benevolent rule, the bitterness that had marked the end of Hadrian’s reign had almost faded from memory.”
― Steven Saylor, Empire

“What would Apollonius of Tyana have made of Hadrian? Certainly he was infinitely better than Domitian, and more knowledgeable of philosophy than Trajan, but if philosophy reconciled a man to life and prepared him to face death, then in Hadrian all the lessons of philosophy came to naught. As death approached, he was more tied to the material world than ever, craving a monument larger than anyone else’s and determined to decide who would rule after him even to the second generation. Life obsessed him; death to him was unacceptable—his own death no less than the death of his beloved Antinous, whom Hadrian had sought to keep alive by populating the whole world with his image.”
― Steven Saylor, Empire

“Then Hadrian laughed. “Listen to me! Did you hear that accent? Thicker than Trajan’s! When I think of all those hours I spent with my elocution teachers, reading Cicero aloud until I was hoarse. Numa’s balls, I haven’t sounded so much like a Spaniard since I was a boy. That was so long ago. . . .” He closed his eyes and drifted off.”
― Steven Saylor, Empire

“We are disturbed not by events, but by the views which we take of them.’ Is that not true, even of the death of loved ones?”
― Steven Saylor, Empire

“Still, Marcus was acutely aware that he served at Hadrian’s pleasure. In a state ruled absolutely by one man, no matter how enlightened that man might be, every other man was at his mercy.”
― Steven Saylor, Empire

“What would Apollonius of Tyana do?”—always his test for making a difficult decision—”
― Steven Saylor, Empire

“Plotina laughed. “I don’t intend to. The way I go into this house is the way I hope to be carried out of it.”
― Steven Saylor, Empire

“Lucius recalled an ancient Etruscan proverb: “Sit too near the flame and your cloak will catch fire.”
― Steven Saylor, Empire

“Lucius, what do you fear? That we shall be tortured and killed? Every living thing must die, and there are things far worse than the suffering of physical pain. How much more terrible if we should comport ourselves disgracefully and lose our self-respect; then we should truly be damaged, and the harm would have been inflicted by ourselves.”
― Steven Saylor, Empire

“That’s the problem with Domitian, isn’t it?” said Lucius. “We never know what’s real and what’s not. All the city is a stage. Everything that happens is a spectacle put on by the emperor. One wonders if he himself knows any longer what’s real.”
― Steven Saylor, Empire

“home?” “Epictetus would say that even an affront to one’s body, like illness or torture, is an external event, outside our true selves. The self of a man is not his body, but the intelligence that inhabits his body. That self is the one thing no one else can touch, the only thing we truly possess. The operation of our own will is the one thing in all the universe over which we have control. The man who learns to accept this is content, no matter what his physical circumstances, while the man who imagines he can control the world around him is invariably confused and embittered. So you see men who are oppressed by the worst sort of misfortunes, yet who are happy nonetheless, and you see men who are surrounded by luxury and have slaves to carry out their every wish, yet who are miserable.”
― Steven Saylor, Empire

“Or at least that’s what the emperor wants us to think. It’s an old Roman ploy, pretending that an enemy is responsible for the start of a war we greatly desire to wage.”
― Steven Saylor, Empire

“How cynical you are, Lucius. Do you not accept the notion that Roma has a special role given to her by the gods, to bring Roman religion and Roman law to the rest of the world, one province at a time?”
― Steven Saylor, Empire

“My old friend Pliny, not long before Vesuvius put an end to him, wrote that the ostrich hides its head in a bush when attacked and thinks its whole body is concealed,” said Martial. “See how the attendants have placed bits of shrubbery all around the arena, so that the bird may demonstrate its foolish behavior?”
― Steven Saylor, Empire

“Epictetus was a living example of the Stoic philosophy he embraced, which placed great value on the dignity of the self and a graceful acquiescence to those things over which the self had no control.”
― Steven Saylor, Empire

“Lucius laughed. “No one serves in the military to defend Roma: Roma is not under attack. Men join the legions to head for the outskirts of the empire and look for fresh lands to plunder. It’s all about looting, isn’t it? All the successful emperors looted something and brought the booty back to Roma.”
― Steven Saylor, Empire

“If Vespasian had a vice, it was greed. The emperor and his favorites had shamelessly exploited their positions to accrue enormous wealth, treating the Roman state as a moneymaking scheme for insiders. Vespasian famously put a tax on the city’s latrinae, claiming a share of the money made by the sale of urine to fullers, who used it to clean wool. Thus the saying, “Even when you piss, the emperor takes a percentage.”
― Steven Saylor, Empire

“How old did you say you were, Lucius? Thirty-two?” Epaphroditus shook his head. “A dangerous age for a man—old enough to feel that he should be in charge of his destiny and to chafe against the constraints of living under an absolute ruler, but perhaps not yet old enough to discern the fine line that a man must tread if he’s to survive the whims of Fortune.”
― Steven Saylor, Empire

“The state is the emperor; the emperor is the state. The rest of us are like grains of sand on a beach: interchangeable, indistinguishable, inconsequential. A Roman citizen has no importance whatsoever, no matter how much some of us would like to pretend otherwise.”
― Steven Saylor, Empire

“Because, Lucius, without the discipline of philosophy to give rigour to their thinking, people can and will believe anything, no matter how absurd.”
― Steven Saylor, Empire

“There were a great many other such tableaux. As Martial had predicted, bears featured prominently in most of them. A temple thief was made to reenact the role of the robber Laureolus, made famous by the ancient plays of Ennius and Naevius; he was nailed to a cross and then subjected to the attack of the bears. A freedman who had killed his former master was made to put on a Greek chlamys and go walking though a stage forest populated by cavorting satyrs and nymphs, like Orpheus lost in the woods; when one of the satyrs played a shrill tune on his pipes, the trees dispersed and the man was subject to an attack by bears. An arsonist was made to strap on wings in imitation of Daedalus, ascend a high platform, and then leap off; the wings actually carried him aloft for a short distance, a remarkable sight, until he plunged into an enclosure full of bears and was torn to pieces.”
― Steven Saylor, Empire

“Bears?” Epaphroditus wrinkled his nose. “Everyone knows Prometheus was tormented by vultures. Every day they tore out his entrails, and every night he was miraculously healed, so that the ordeal was endlessly repeated.”
Martial laughed. “The trainer who can induce vultures to attack on command will be able to name any price! I suspect we’ll see a lot of bears today.”
― Steven Saylor, Empire