9 Quotes by Adrian Goldsworthy

...if the Greeks joined together in the Panhellenic cause and attacked Persia to take land and wealth. Once conquered, Asian barbarians would work the field and tend the cattle as slaves or helot-like serfs, leaving their Greek overlords to live in comfort and harmony, at last capable of elevation to all that was finest about Hellenic civilization.

The Macedonians and Greek has been raised to despise Persians and all Asians as barbarians, fit only to be slaves, and the defeat of Darius and his great armies can only have reinforced their immense sense of superiority. They were master over subjects whose language and culture held no interest or value for them, apart from its luxury, wealth, and famously beautiful women.

That something is not impossible does not mean that it happened.

Personal hatreds and rivalry loomed larger in most senator's minds than the good of the Republic. [A big problem then and now]

For what is the life of a man, if it is not interwoven with the life of former generations by as sense of history. [Cicero, quoted by Goldsworthy in his Augustus]

The story of the fifth century was one of the exploitation of imperial weakness. Thus the Western Empire died.

At Rome there were nothing even vaguely resembling modern political parties - although given the stifling impact of these, this may well have made it more rather than less democratic than many countries today - and each candidate for office competed as an individual. Only rarely did they advocate specific policies, although commenting on issues of current importance was more common. In the main voters looked more for a capable individual who once elected could do whatever the State required.

In his fifty-six years he was at times many things, including a fugitive, prisoner, rising politician, army leader, legal advocate, rebel, dictator – perhaps even a god – as well as a husband, father, lover and adulterer. Few fictional heroes have ever done as much as Caius Julius Caesar.

By pagans the Jews (and later Christians) were seen as perverse, almost indeed as atheists, for they denied the very existence of other gods.