The Daughters of Palatine Hill Quotes

“You have to adapt to life as it comes, Selene, in order to live at all. Little in this world is just as it should be. You look at the choices the gods present to you, and then you choose.”
― Phyllis T. Smith, The Daughters of Palatine Hill

“I had learned some things in the years of our marriage. I knew how great power could work on you, and destroy everything human in you. Always separate and above other people, able to confer great benefits or do great harm with a word, fawned over, you started to believe the false praise. It was easy to imagine yourself as godlike, to regard the common run of humanity with contempt. In such circumstances it took strength not to become a monster. Add to this the responsibility for everything that happened in a vast empire, and one could easily lose one’s reason.”
― Phyllis T. Smith, The Daughters of Palatine Hill

“This was the politically useful portrait we sought to present to the world. “We painted a picture,” Maecenas went on, “and somehow Augustus took it for real and decided he ought to live in it. And to insist that everyone else live in it too. But I can’t even pretend I fit in that painting. So if he feels he must dispose of me, so be it.”
― Phyllis T. Smith, The Daughters of Palatine Hill

“A gladiatorial arena—that was how I saw my world.”
― Phyllis T. Smith, The Daughters of Palatine Hill

“Cleopatra’s daughter Scribonia, Julia’s mother, briefly married to Caesar Augustus, then divorced Tiberius, Livia’s older son by her first marriage Drusus, Livia’s younger son by her first marriage Marcus Agrippa, Rome’s foremost general, Caesar Augustus’s friend since boyhood Gaius Maecenas, another boyhood friend of Caesar Augustus, now a political advisor and patron of the”
― Phyllis T. Smith, The Daughters of Palatine Hill

“The past lives in us, and blood is blood. We cannot escape, though we may wish to.”
― Phyllis T. Smith, The Daughters of Palatine Hill

“Sometimes the most direct road is not the best one. Often men do not know this, but it is something girls learn young.”
― Phyllis T. Smith, The Daughters of Palatine Hill

“The world is unfair to women. Only fools do not know this. And only fools beat their fists against stone, expecting it to yield like clay. I”
― Phyllis T. Smith, The Daughters of Palatine Hill