WHAT DID THE ROMANS CALL 44 BC?
Which death is preferable to every other? The unexpected.
— Julius Caesar
HAPPY NEW YEAR, PLEBS!
The common folk come, and scattered here and there over the green grass they drink, every lad reclining beside his lass … they grow warm with sun and wine, and they pray for as many years as they take cups, and they count the cups they drink.
— Ovid
SHOULD YOU EAT BABIES DURING SATURNALIA?
It is the month of December, and yet the city is at this very moment in a sweat. Licence is given to the general merrymaking. Everything resounds with mighty preparations, – as if the Saturnalia differed at all from the usual business day! So true it is that the difference is nil, that I regard as correct the remark of the man who said: “Once December was a month; now it is a year.”
—Seneca
THE FIVE GOOD EMPERORS
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.
— Edward Gibbon
THE ARCH OF JANUS, OSTIA ANTICA, THEN HOME
It is a curious emotion, this certain homesickness I have in mind. It is no simple longing for the home town or country of our birth. The emotion is Janus-faced: we are torn between a nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known.
— Carson McCullers
TIBERIUS GRACCHUS - PART III
When Gracchus wanted to be reelected as tribune, he was killed on the Capitol by the optimates, led by Publius Cornelius Nasica. Gracchus was first hit by a piece of a chair, and with those who perished in this fight, he was thrown in the river, without funeral.
— Livy
TIBERIUS GRACCHUS - PART II
For now there sprang up in the palace of the kings of Rome a monstrous growth of wickedness, to the end, it may well be believed, that the people might, for hatred of kingship and its way, come the earlier to love liberty.
— Livy