31 Quotes by Anthony Everitt

Victories in the field,” he commented, “count for little if the right decisions are not taken at home.

He told an amusing story against himself about an incident on his journey home, a reminder that his thirst for recognition was redeemed by an endearing sense of the ridiculous.

The general was sufficiently impressed by the young man to ask him to go back to Italy with him. His back to the wall, Atticus for once in his life refused to do a powerful man’s bidding. “No, please, I beg you,” he replied. “I left Italy to avoid fighting you alongside those you want to lead me against.” Sulla liked his candor and let the matter drop.

In his early twenties Cicero wrote the first two volumes of a work on “invention” – that is to say, the technique of finding ideas and arguments for a speech; in it he noted that the most important thing was “that we do not recklessly and presumptuously assume something to be true.” This resolute uncertainty was to be a permanent feature of his thought.

Slavery was endemic in the classical world and huge numbers of men, women and children, the captives of Rome’s ceaseless wars, flooded into Italy. Slaves provided a cheap workforce, contributing significantly to unemployment among free-born citizens.

Like Caesar, he was loyal but with this difference: he liked to do good by stealth, behind the scenes.

Cicero was nothing if not a genius at character assassination.

His biographer, Cornelius Nepos, a younger contemporary whom he knew personally, wrote that Atticus “behaved so as to seem at one with the poorest and on a level with the powerful.

Cicero had lived through terrible times and his fundamental aim was to make sure that they never returned. He stood for the rule of law and the maintenance of a constitution in which all social groups could play a part, but where the Senate took the lead according to ancestral tradition.