#romans

The ancient Romans built their greatest masterpieces of architecture, their amphitheaters, for wild beasts to fight in. ↗

— Voltaire

#architecture #beasts #built #fight #greatest

What happened? It took Gibbon six volumes to describe the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, so I shan’t embark on that. But thinking about this almost incredible episode does tell one something about the nature of civilisation. It shows that however complex and solid it seems, it is actually quite fragile. It can be destroyed. 

What are its enemies?
 
Well, first of all fear — fear of war, fear of invasion, fear of plague and famine, that make it simply not worthwhile constructing things, or planting trees or even planning next year’s crops. And fear of the supernatural, which means that you daren’t question anything or change anything. The late antique world was full of meaningless rituals, mystery religions, that destroyed self-confidence. And then exhaustion, the feeling of hopelessness which can overtake people even with a high degree of material prosperity. 

There is a poem by the modern Greek poet, Cavafy, in which he imagines the people of an antique town like Alexandria waiting every day for the barbarians to come and sack the city. Finally the barbarians move off somewhere else and the city is saved; but the people are disappointed — it would have been better than nothing. Of course, civilisation requires a modicum of material prosperity—

What civilization needs:

confidence in the society in which one lives, belief in its philosophy, belief in its laws, and confidence in one’s own mental powers. The way in which the stones of the Pont du Gard are laid is not only a triumph of technical skill, but shows a vigorous belief in law and discipline. Vigour, energy, vitality: all the civilisations—or civilising epochs—have had a weight of energy behind them. People sometimes think that civilisation consists in fine sensibilities and good conversations and all that. These can be among the agreeable results of civilisation, but they are not what make a civilisation, and a society can have these amenities and yet be dead and rigid. ↗

— Kenneth Clark

#romans #rome #societies #society #change

When their city was occupied by the Gauls, and the Romans, who were besieged in the Capitol, had made military engines from the hair of the women, they dedicated a temple to the Bald Venus. ↗

— Lactantius

#capitol #city #dedicated #engines #had

We find that the Romans owed the conquest of the world to no other cause than continual military training, exact observance of discipline in their camps, and unwearied cultivation of the other arts of war. ↗

— Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus

#camps #cause #conquest #continual #cultivation

The Christians tried to separate themselves from the Jewish crowd so they wouldn't be the recipients of the persecution of the Romans. And the way they did it was to say, the Jews killed our hero too. And so Christians began to define themselves over against the orthodox party of the Jews as a way of surviving against the Roman onslaught. ↗

— John Shelby Spong

#began #christians #crowd #define #did

The Romans, we are told, were by nature a peculiarly warlike race. ↗

— Goldwin Smith

#peculiarly #race #romans #told #warlike

We were all Romans once, I guess. ↗

— Omar Epps

#i #once #romans #were

Apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system, and public health ... what have the Romans ever done for us? Brought peace! ↗

— Graham Chapman

#romans #education

It's not the Jews that killed Christ. It was a political situation, and it was the Romans who killed Jesus. They put Jesus on the cross, not the Jews. ↗

— Monica Bellucci

#cross #jesus #jews #killed #political

There hasn't been this much excitement since the Romans fed the Christians to the Lions. ↗

— Sid Waddell

#christians #excitement #fed #hasn #lions