Mary Beard
SPQR
bequeathed (Location 87)
Tags: pink
Edward Gibbon wrote The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, (Location 92)
Tags: orange
antiquity (Location 97)
Tags: pink
monastery (Location 99)
Tags: pink
SPQR takes its title from another famous Roman catchphrase, Senatus PopulusQue Romanus, ‘The Senate and People of Rome’. (Location 106)
Tags: orange, pink
SPQR takes its title from another famous Roman catchphrase, Senatus PopulusQue Romanus, ‘The Senate and People of Rome’. (Location 106)
Tags: pink
Mine ends with a culminating moment in 212 CE, when the emperor Caracalla took the step of making every single free inhabitant of the Roman Empire a full Roman citizen, eroding the difference between conqueror and conquered (Location 112)
Tags: pink
‘They create desolation and call it peace’ is a slogan that has often summed up the consequences of military conquest. It was written in the second century CE by the Roman historian Tacitus, referring to Roman power in Britain. (Location 131)
Tags: pink
Marcus Licinius Crassus, the Roman plutocrat who notoriously remarked that you could count no one rich if he did not have the cash to raise his own private army, (Location 218)
Tags: pink
Electioneering at Rome could be a costly business. By the first century BCE it required the kind of lavish generosity that is not always easy to distinguish from bribery. The stakes were high. The men who were successful in the elections had the chance to recoup their outlay, legally or illegally, with some of the perks of office. (Location 245)
Tags: pink
no one in his family before him had ever been prominent on the Roman political scene. (Location 258)
Tags: pink
Cicero relied on his native talents, on the high-level connections he assiduously cultivated – and on speaking his way to the top. (Location 258)
Tags: pink
his main claim to fame was as a star advocate in the Roman courts; and the celebrity status and prominent supporters that this gave him meant that he was easily elected to each of the required series of junior offices in turn, just like Catiline. (Location 259)
Tags: pink
By the summer of 63 BCE, Cicero appears to have got wind of definite danger from Catiline, who was trying his luck as a candidate again. Using his authority as consul, Cicero postponed the next round of elections, and when he finally did let them go ahead, he turned up at the poll with an armed guard and wearing a military breastplate clearly visible under his toga. It was a histrionic display, and the combination of civilian and military kit was alarmingly incongruous, rather as if a modern politician were to enter the legislature in a business suit with a machine gun slung over his shoulder. But it worked. These scare tactics, combined with Catiline’s vociferously populist programme, made sure that he was once more defeated. (Location 269)
Tags: pink
Romans could define themselves as the gens togata, ‘the race that wears the toga’, (Location 298)
Tags: pink
In fact, the modern word ‘candidate’ derives from the Latin candidatus, which means ‘whitened’ and refers to the specially whitened togas that Romans wore during election campaigns, to impress the voters. (Location 300)
Tags: pink
It was such a breeding ground of disease that a later Roman doctor wrote that you didn’t need to read textbooks to research malaria – it was all around you in the city of Rome. (Location 323)
Tags: pink
with a significant but often forgotten contribution from medieval Islamic scholars who translated into Arabic some of the philosophy and scientific material. (Location 385)
Tags: pink
we have access to more Roman literature – and more Roman writing in general – than any one person could now thoroughly master in the course of a lifetime. (Location 389)
Tags: pink
All the time Saturninus spoke, he was wearing his usual signet ring, which loyally featured the head of Gaius. One observer, spotting the inconsistency between the words and the jewellery, went up and tore it off his finger. (Location 5253)
Tags: pink
The philosophical Thoughts of the emperor Marcus Aurelius, cliché as much of it is (‘Do not act as if you were going to live 10,000 years. Death hangs over you’), still finds many admirers, buyers and advocates today, from self-help gurus to former US president Bill Clinton. The (Location 5331)
Tags: pink
‘Pecunia non olet’ (‘Money doesn’t smell’), (Location 5336)
Tags: pink
Before broaching the main theme of his title, Gibbon briefly reflects on the earlier period of one-man rule between Tiberius and Commodus, and he singles out for praise the emperors in the second century CE. His memorable aphorism, crafted with typical eighteenth-century self-confidence, is still much quoted: ‘If a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world, during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus’ – that is, what many since have called the period of the ‘good emperors’: Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus. These were rulers, Gibbon goes on, whose characters and authority ‘commanded involuntary respect’ and who ‘delighted in the image of liberty’. Their only regret, he concludes, must have been the knowledge that some unworthy successor (‘some licentious youth or some jealous tyrant’) would soon appear to ruin everything, as their predecessors had almost all done in the past: ‘the dark unrelenting Tiberius, the furious Caligula, the feeble Claudius, the profligate and cruel Nero … and the timid inhuman Domitian’. (Location 5362)
Tags: pink
After all, no horse was ever really made consul. (Location 5422)
Tags: pink