Rubicon Quotes

“It was an article of faith to the Romans that they were the most morally upright people in the world. How else was the size of their empire to be explained? Yet they also knew that the Republic's greatness carried its own risks. To abuse it would be to court divine anger. Hence the Roman's concern to refute all charges of bullying, and to insist they had won their empire purely in self-defense.”
― Tom Holland, Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic

“Gain cannot be made without loss to someone else.”
― Tom Holland, Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic

“Achievement was worthy of praise and honor, but excessive achievement was pernicious and a threat to the state. However great a citizen might become, however great he might wish to become, the truest greatness of all still belonged to the Roman Republic itself”
― Tom Holland, Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic

“Just like any electorate, they delighted in making candidates for their favors sweat.”
― Tom Holland, Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic

“Honour, in the Republic, had never been a goal in itself, only a means to an infinite end. And what was true of her citizens, naturally, was also true of Rome herself. For the generation that had lived through the civil wars, this was the consolation history gave them. Out of calamity could come greatness. Out of dispossession could come the renewal of a civilised order.”
― Tom Holland, Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic

“This [for opposition leaders to claim royal lineage], in a world ruled by a republic, was what revolution had come to mean.”
― Tom Holland, Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic

“Only a few prefer liberty—the majority seek nothing more than fair masters. Sallust, Histories”
― Tom Holland, Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic

“One day perhaps, when the records of the twentieth century AD have grown as fragmentary as those of ancient Rome, a history of the Second World War will be written that relies solely upon the broadcasts of Hitler and the memoirs of Churchill. It will be one cut off from whole dimensions of experience: no letters from the front, no combatants’ diaries.”
― Tom Holland, Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic

“Enthusiasts for empire argued that Rome had a civilizing mission; that because her values and institutions were self-evidently superior to those of barbarians, she had a duty to propagate them; that only once the whole globe had been subjected to her rule could there be a universal peace.”
― Tom Holland, Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic

“It was as though the problems of the Republic bored the man appointed to solve them, as though Rome herself were now too small a stage for his ambitions”
― Tom Holland, Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic

“The Roman people too, in the end, grew tired of antique virtues, preferring the comforts of easy slavery and peace. Rather bread and circuses than endless internecine wars. As the Romans themselves recognized, their freedom had contained the seeds of its own ruin, a reflection sufficient to inspire much gloomy moralizing under the rule of a Nero or a Domitian.”
― Tom Holland, Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic

“The state had the right to know everything, for the Romans believed that even “personal tastes and appetites should be subject to surveillance and review.”4 It was knowledge, intrusive knowledge, that provided the Republic with its surest foundations.”
― Tom Holland, Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic

“The dictator himself cast his reforms as a restoration, the sweeping away of clutter. Yet clutter was the essence of the Republic”
― Tom Holland, Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic

“Like unmixed wine, the dictatorship had a taste that was intoxicating and perilous.”
― Tom Holland, Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic

“The news, when it leaked out, caused outrage and horror in Rome. The Republic was never so dangerous as when it believed that its security was at stake. The Romans rarely went to war, not even against the most negligible foe, without somehow first convincing themselves that their preemptive strikes were defensive in nature.”
― Tom Holland, Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic

“Achievement was worthy of praise and honor, but excessive achievement was pernicious and a threat to the state.”
― Tom Holland, Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic

“More people worship the rising than the setting sun,”
― Tom Holland, Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic

“The Roman character had a strong streak of snobbery: effectively, citizens preferred to vote for families with strong brand recognition, electing son after father after grandfather to the great magistracies of state, indulging the nobility’s dynastic pretensions with a numbing regularity.”
― Tom Holland, Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic

“Of all Rome’s seven hills, however, the Palatine was the most exclusive by far.”
― Tom Holland, Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic

“The Romans recognized no difference between moral excellence and reputation, having the same word, honestas, for both.”
― Tom Holland, Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic

“Republic was repeatedly racked by further social convulsions, by demands from the mass of citizens for expanded civic rights, and by continued constitutional reforms—and yet throughout this turbulent period of upheaval, the Roman people never ceased to affect a stern distaste for change.”
― Tom Holland, Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic

“no shame in embracing a life of secluded ease.”
― Tom Holland, Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic

“and yet throughout this turbulent period of upheaval, the Roman people never ceased to affect a stern distaste for change.”
― Tom Holland, Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic

“As a result, a thousand years of civic self-government were brought to an end, and not for another thousand, and more, would it become a living reality again.”
― Tom Holland, Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic

“We have been liberated, as John Updike once put it, “from all those oppressive old Roman values.”
― Tom Holland, Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic

“For all the trauma of Sulla’s march on Rome, no one could imagine that the Republic itself might be overthrown, because no one could conceive what might possibly replace it.”
― Tom Holland, Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic

“Here, then, was one final paradox. A system that encouraged a gnawing hunger for prestige in its citizens, that seethed with their vaunting rivalries, that generated a dynamism so aggressive that it had overwhelmed all who came against it, also bred paralysis.”
― Tom Holland, Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic

“January 10, the seven-hundred-and-fifth year since the foundation of Rome, the forty-ninth before the birth of Christ.”
― Tom Holland, Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic

“When two of his legions, in direct contradiction of his orders, engaged with Spartacus and suffered yet another defeat, Crassus’s response was to resurrect the ancient and terrible punishment of decimation. Every tenth man was beaten to death, the obedient along with the disobedient, the brave along with the cowardly, while their fellows were forced to watch.”
― Tom Holland, Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic

“pathetic”
― Tom Holland, Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic