144 Quotes by Tom Holland

Their delight in posing as aliens, as transients, made a boast out of what should properly have been a cause of shame. ‘To them, a homeland is a foreign country, and a foreign country a homeland.

We always want what we’re not allowed.

Venerable the scorn of the Jews for the Ishmaelites may have been; but it was nothing like so savage as their loathing for the Romans.

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.

As one Saudi professor sternly tells his co-religionists, “Only the writings of a practising Muslim are worthy of our attention.

The dictator himself cast his reforms as a restoration, the sweeping away of clutter. Yet clutter was the essence of the 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.

The heroes of the Iliad, favourites of the gods, golden and predatory, had scorned the weak and downtrodden. So too, for all the honour that Julian paid them, had philosophers. The starving deserved no sympathy. Beggars were best rounded up and deported. Pity risked undermining a wise man’s self-control. Only fellow citizens of good character who, through no fault of their own, had fallen on evil days might conceivably merit assistance.

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.