Dynasty Quotes

“We always want what we’re not allowed.”
― Tom Holland, Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar

“So highly did the Roman people prize this ideal of the common good that their name for it – res publica – served as shorthand for their entire system of government.”
― Tom Holland, Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar

“The oath of duty spoken by a legionary, the sacramentum, was of a peculiarly fearsome order, and to break it a terrible thing. The men who swore it, although granted by its terms a licence denied civilians to fight and kill, were simultaneously deprived of rights that were the essence of citizenship.”
― Tom Holland, Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar

“Geography could not be bucked. Their bogs and trees shrouded in a perpetual drizzle, Germans were the spawn of their environment. The gods, who had considerately endowed Rome with a climate ideally suited to the growth of a mighty city, had doomed the inhabitants of the chilly North to a backwardness that was at once torpid and ferocious, dull and intemperate. Landscape, weather, people: Germany was unredeemably savage.”
― Tom Holland, Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar

“When the Senate met for the first time a week after the funeral, on 17 September, it was to confirm that the dead Princeps was indeed to be worshipped as a god. His wife was appointed his priest. This, in a city where all the priesthoods except for those of Vesta were monopolised by men, was unprecedented. Astonishingly, Livia was even given a lictor.”
― Tom Holland, Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar

“A Roman penis was potent, masterful, prodigious. In a city where the phallus was everywhere to be seen, protecting doorways as a symbol of good luck, guarding crossroads or scaring off birds in gardens, ramrod size was much admired.”
― Tom Holland, Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar

“Coloured marble, pompous avenues, urban planning: what were these, if not the prerogatives of kings? No one, in a free republic, could be permitted such sinister grandstanding. This was why, in the last feverish decade before the crossing of the Rubicon, the sudden appearance in Rome of a rash of grandiose monuments had served as portents of the Republic’s ruin.”
― Tom Holland, Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar

“Augustus, who in almost everything save his ambition was deeply conservative, had far too much respect for tradition ever to think of having such a venerable memorial removed from the Forum. Nevertheless, the statue of Marsyas was troubling to him on a number of levels. At Philippi, where his own watchword had been ‘Apollo’, that of his opponents had been ‘liberty’. Not only that, but Marsyas was believed by his devotees to have been sprung from his would-be flayer’s clutches by a rival god named Liber, an anarchic deity who had taught humanity to enjoy wine and sexual abandon, whose very name meant ‘Freedom’, and who – capping it all – had been worshipped by Antony as his particular patron. The clash between the erstwhile Triumvirs had been patterned in the heavens. Antony, riding in procession through Cleopatra’s capital, had done so dressed as Liber, ‘his head wreathed in ivy, his body draped in a robe of saffron gold’.89 Visiting Asia Minor, where in ancient times the contest between Apollo and Marsyas had been staged, he had been greeted by revellers dressed as satyrs. The night before his suicide, ghostly sounds of music and laughter had filled the Egyptian air; ‘and men said that the god to whom Antony had always compared himself, and been most devoted, was abandoning him at last’.”
― Tom Holland, Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar

“The people of Rome had particular reason to associate a god more commonly worshipped as the patron of prophecy and self-discipline with vicious cruelty. In the Forum, next to the sacred fig tree, there stood the statue of a pot-bellied man with a wine-sack on his shoulder. This was Marsyas, a satyr who had once challenged Apollo to a musical contest, been cheated of the victory that was rightfully his, and then been flayed alive for his presumption. Such, at any rate, was the version of the story told by the Greeks – but in Italy an altogether happier ending was reported. Marsyas, they claimed, had escaped the irate Apollo and fled to the Apennines, where he had taught the arts of augury to the natives and fathered the snake-charming Marsians. Rome was not the only city to commemorate him. Statues of Marsyas were to be found in public squares across Italy.”
― Tom Holland, Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar

“Now, speaking as men no longer dared to speak, his daughter had fearlessly arraigned the Triumvirs themselves. ‘Why should we women pay taxes,’ Hortensia had demanded, ‘when we have no part in the honours, the commands, the rule of the state?’23 To this question, the Triumvirs had responded by having the women driven from the Forum; but such was their embarrassment that they did eventually, with much bad grace, agree to a tax cut.”
― Tom Holland, Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar

“The shadow cast by Scipio over his fellow citizens was one that could not help but provoke resentment. The guiding principle of the Republic remained what it had always been: that no one man should rule supreme in Rome. To the Roman people, the very appearance of a magistrate served as a reminder of the seductions and dangers of monarchy. The purple that lined the border of his toga had originally been the colour of kingship. ‘Lictors’ – bodyguards whose duty it was to clear a path for him through the crowds of his fellow citizens – had once similarly escorted Tarquin the Proud. The rods and single axe borne by each lictor on his shoulder – the fasces, as they were known – symbolised authority of an intimidatingly regal scope: the right to inflict both corporal and capital punishment.*2 Power of this order was an awesome and treacherous thing. Only with the most extreme precautions in place could anyone in a free republic be trusted to wield it. This was why, in the wake of the monarchy’s downfall, the powers of the banished king had been allocated, not to a single magistrate, but to two: the consuls.”
― Tom Holland, Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar

“Five kings followed Romulus on the throne of Rome; and when the sixth, Tarquin the Proud, proved himself a vicious tyrant more than deserving of his nickname, his subjects put their lives on the line and rose in rebellion. In 509 BC, the monarchy was ended for good. The man who had led the uprising, a cousin of Tarquin’s named Brutus, obliged the Roman people to swear a collective oath, ‘that they would never again allow a single man to reign in Rome’. From that moment on, the word ‘king’ was the dirtiest in their political vocabulary. No longer subjects, they ranked instead as cives, ‘citizens’.”
― Tom Holland, Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar

“Time erodes both steel and stone.’ So Ovid had written in the months before his death.”
― Tom Holland, Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar

“JULIA: Oldest daughter of Julia and Agrippa. Owner of the smallest dwarf in Rome. Exiled in AD 8.”
― Tom Holland, Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar

“While he may forget that he is Caesar, I never forget that I am Caesar’s daughter.”
― Tom Holland, Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar

“Harmony enables small things to flourish – while the lack of it destroys the great.”
― Tom Holland, Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar

“Rome, over the years, had measurably benefited from the influx of foreign talent.”
― Tom Holland, Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar

“In the gloomy forests which covered vast reaches of Germany, giant bull-like creatures roamed, and mysterious entities named elks, without ankles or knees; in the icy waters of the Ocean, which would retreat and then advance twice a day, tearing loose oak trees and engulfing entire plains beneath their flood-tides, there shimmered ‘the outline of enigmatic beings – half-men, half-beast’.86 Just as Ovid, peering askance at the Tomitans, had fingered them as lycanthropes, so in the savage reaches of Germany were the borders between animal and human even more unsettlingly blurred.”
― Tom Holland, Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar

“Tiberius was badly prone to spots. Tall, muscular and well proportioned, with piercing eyes that could supposedly see in the dark, and sporting the mullet that had long marked the Claudians as tonsorial trendsetters, he was by any reckoning handsome – except for the pimples. They would suddenly erupt all over his cheeks in a violent rash. Good-looking though he was, he never could stop the acne.”
― Tom Holland, Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar

“The laurel was no ordinary tree. Lightning was powerless to strike it; its leaves served to fumigate spilt blood; it was sacred to Apollo. All of which made it a perfect emblem of Augustus”
― Tom Holland, Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar

“Of one thing, at any rate, the Roman people could be confident. Mars was not the kind to depilate himself.”
― Tom Holland, Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar

“When Ovid strolled up to Apollo’s temple on the Palatine, or haunted the shady colonnades raised on the site of Vedius’s palace, or visited the arches of Pompey’s theatre, it was not to admire the architecture. He was scoping out girls.”
― Tom Holland, Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar

“The Senate itself, like a battered wife frantic to forestall a beating, had made sure, in the first days of Caligula’s reign, to deny him nothing.”
― Tom Holland, Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar

“two years into Tiberius’s reign, the Senate had ordered all astrologers out of Italy. Particularly prominent ones risked being thrown off a cliff.”
― Tom Holland, Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar

“Meanwhile, with Sejanus’s eldest son already put to death, orders were given for his two youngest children to be taken to the city prison. One, a boy, was old enough to understand what lay ahead; but his little sister, bewildered and not knowing what she had done wrong, kept asking why she could not be punished like any other child – with a beating? Since it would naturally have been an offence against the most sacred traditions of the Roman people to put a virgin to death, the executioner made sure to rape her first. The bodies of the two children, once they had been strangled, were dumped on the Gemonian Steps.”
― Tom Holland, Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar

“At a time when Maecenas, that celebrated arbiter of taste, was busy introducing the heated swimming pool to Rome, the Princeps’s house struck those familiar with top-end properties as ‘notable neither for scale nor style’.”
― Tom Holland, Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar

“Raised on a massive marble pediment, adorned with doors of ivory, and crowned by a four-horse chariot made of bronze, ‘the snow-white temple of brilliant Apollo’91 made a literally dazzling addition to the Roman skyline. On one side of the Palatine it loomed over the Forum; on the other over the charred remains of an ancient temple of Liber.92 That this had burned down in the same year as Antony’s defeat at Actium only rammed the message home. Augustus, triumphant in all his enterprises, had backed a heavenly winner.”
― Tom Holland, Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar

“Meanwhile, back in Rome, the victory of Antony’s conqueror had been Apollo’s triumph as well. The patching-up of Jupiter’s ancient temple on the Capitol had been as nothing compared to the stupefying redevelopment of the hill on the facing side of the Forum. In 36 BC, shortly after the defeat of Sextus Pompey, lightning had struck the Palatine. A god had spoken – but which god? Augurers sponsored by Rome’s most eminent devotee of Apollo had dutifully served up the answer. For almost a decade, in obedience to their ruling, cranes and scaffolding had crowded the summit of the Palatine. Only by October 28 had the work finally been completed.”
― Tom Holland, Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar

“Whether cheering on boxers in back streets, sporting a battered sunhat or roaring with laughter at the sight of a hunchback, Imperator Caesar Augustus retained just a hint of the provincial.”
― Tom Holland, Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar

“While Antony had gazed in sorrow at his fallen adversary on the battlefield of Philippi, his youthful colleague had shed no tears. Instead, ordering Brutus’s corpse decapitated, he had packed the head off to Rome. There, with pointed symbolism, it had been placed at the foot of the statue where Caesar had died.”
― Tom Holland, Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar