Theodor Mommsen

“ Along with his strategic ability he displayed no ordinary talent for organization, as indeed from the very outset the uprightness, with which he presided over his band and distributed the spoil, had directed the eyes of the multitude to him quite as much at least as his valour. To remedy the severely felt want of cavalry and of arms, he tried with the help of the herds of horses seized in Lower Italy to train and discipline a cavalry, and, so soon as he got the port of Thurii into his hands, to procure from that quarter iron and copper, doubtless through the medium of the pirates. ”

“ It was not individual genius that ruled in Rome and through Rome in Italy; it was the one immoveable idea of a policy—propagated from generation to generation in the senate—with the leading maxims of which the sons of the senators became already imbued, when in the company of their fathers they went to the council and there at the door of the hall listened to the wisdom of the men whose seats they were destined at some future time to fill. Immense successes were thus obtained at an immense price; for Nike too is followed by her Nemesis. ”

“ At this epoch of complete world–peace, when there was neither a Greek nor a barbarian war anywhere, when civic commands, civic treaties of peace and alliances belonged solely to history, the advice was very reasonable to leave Marathon and Plataeae to the schoolmasters, and not to heat the heads of the Ecclesia by such grand words, but rather to content themselves with the narrow circle of the free movement still allowed to them. The world, however, belongs not to reason but to passion. The Hellenic burgess could still even now do his duty towards his fatherland ”

“ On the invitation of Cinna those who had been banished in the previous year had landed at Telamon on the Etruscan coast. There were not more than some 500 armed men, for the most part slaves of the refugees and enlisted Numidian horsemen; but, as Gaius Marius had in the previous year been willing to fraternize with the rabble of the capital, so he now ordered the -ergastula- in which the landholders of this region shut up their field- labourers during the night to be broken open, and the arms which he offered to these for the purpose of achieving their freedom were not despised. ”

“ The long poems never were worth anything, the short ones seldom. Even in this literary age the poetry of the day had become a public nuisance; it sometimes happened that one's friend would send home to him by way of mockery as a festal present a pile of trashy verses fresh from the bookseller's shop, whose value was at once betrayed by the elegant binding and the smooth paper. A real public, in the sense in which national literature has a public, was wanting to the Roman Alexandrians as well as to the Hellenic ”

“ With a few men he crossed the Hellespont—his single bark encountered in it a fleet of the enemy destined for the Black Sea, and took the whole crews, struck as with stupefaction by the news of the battle of Pharsalus, prisoners—and as soon as the most necessary preparations were made, hastened in pursuit of Pompeius to the east. The latter had gone from the Pharsalian battlefield to Lesbos, whence he brought away his wife and his second son Sextus, and had sailed onward round Asia Minor to Cilicia and thence to Cyprus. He might have joined his partisans at Corcyra or Africa ”

“ Pyrrhus offered peace to the Romans. He was too sagacious a soldier not to recognize the precariousness of his footing, and too skilled a statesman not to profit opportunely by the moment which placed him in the most favourable position for the conclusion of peace. He now hoped that under the first impression made by the great battle on the Romans he should be able to secure the freedom of the Greek towns in Italy, and to call into existence between them and Rome a series of states of the second and third order as dependent allies of the new Greek power ”

“ He alone had the right of publicly addressing the burgesses, and it was he who kept the keys of the public treasury. He had the same right as a father had to exercise discipline and jurisdiction. He inflicted penalties for breaches of order, and, in particular, flogging for military offences. He sat in judgment in all private and in all criminal processes, and decided absolutely regarding life and death as well as regarding freedom; he might hand over one burgess to fill the place of a slave to another ”

“ Any one who understood the art, wrote without difficulty at a sitting his five hundred hexameters in which no schoolmaster found anything to censure, but no reader discovered anything to praise. The female world also took a lively part in these literary pursuits; the ladies did not confine themselves to dancing and music, but by their spirit and wit ruled conversation and talked excellently on Greek and Latin literature; and, when poetry laid siege to a maiden's heart, the beleaguered fortress not seldom surrendered likewise in graceful verses. ”

“ It was withal only natural that foreigners should have attained to an earlier and clearer consciousness of the fact that the Hellenic stocks belonged to one race than the latter themselves, and that hence the collective designation should have become more definitely fixed among the former than with the latter—not the less, that it was not taken directly from the well-known Hellenes who dwelt the nearest to them. It is difficult to see how we can reconcile with this fact the statement that a century before the foundation of Rome Italy was still quite unknown to the Greeks of Asia Minor. ”

“ At the beginning of 608 the Achaeans advanced into Thessaly to reduce to obedience Heraclea near to Oeta, which, in accordance with the decree of the senate, had detached itself from the Achaean league. The consul Lucius Mummius, whom the senate had resolved to send to Greece, had not yet arrived; accordingly Metellus undertook to protect Heraclea with the Macedonian legions. When the advance of the Romans was announced to the Achaeo-Theban army, there was no more talk of fighting; they deliberated only how they might best succeed in reaching once more the secure Peloponnesus ”

“ The old deeply-rooted faith in destiny has disappeared; fate governs as an outwardly despotic power, and the slaves gnash their teeth as they wear its fetters. That unbelief, which is despairing faith, speaks in this poet with superhuman power. Of necessity therefore the poet never attains a plastic conception overpowering himself, and never reaches a truly poetic effect on the whole ”

“ When a stranger was, by resolution of the community, adopted into the circle of the burgesses, he might surrender his previous citizenship, in which case he passed over wholly into the new community; but he might also combine his former citizenship with that which had just been granted to him. Such was the primitive custom, and such it always remained in Hellas, where in later ages the same person not unfrequently held the freedom of several communities at the same time. ”

“ The natural route of communication from the upper Lippe to the Weser leads over the low chain of heights of the Osning and of the Lippe Forest, which separates the valley of the Ems from that of the Weser, through the Dören defile into the valley of the Werra, which falls into the Weser at Rehme, not far from Minden. Here therefore, approximately, the legions of Varus at that time were encamped. As a matter of course this summer camp was connected with Aliso, the base of the Roman position on the right bank of the Rhine, by a road supplied with depots. ”

“ The Aetolians lost Amphipolis, and the Acarnanians Leucas, on account of their equivocal behaviour; whereas the Athenians, who continued to play the part of the begging poet in their own Aristophanes, not only obtained a gift of Delos and Lemnos, but were not ashamed even to petition for the deserted site of Haliartus, which was assigned to them accordingly. Thus something was done for the Muses; but more had to be done for justice. There was a Macedonian party in every city, and therefore trials for high treason began in all parts of Greece. ”

“ This was indeed a hopeful beginning; and the title of commander-in-chief with absolute power, which the Aetolians decreed to the great-king, seemed insult added to injury. There had been, just as usual, deception on both sides. Instead of the countless hordes of Asia, the king brought up a force scarcely half as strong as an ordinary consular army; and instead of the open arms with which all the Hellenes were to welcome their deliverer from the Roman yoke, one or two bands of klephts and some dissolute civic communities offered to the king brotherhood in arms. ”

“ The movement was believed to have died away when he suddenly reappeared at the head of the new "citizens of the city of the sun," (33) in other words, of the slaves whom he had called to freedom en masse, mastered the Lydian towns of Thyatira and Apollonis as well as a portion of the Attalic townships, and summoned bands of Thracian free-lances to join his standard. The struggle was serious. There were no Roman troops in Asia; the Asiatic free cities and the contingents of the client-princes of Bithynia, Paphlagonia, Cappadocia, Pontus, Armenia, could not withstand the pretender ”

“ In the whole detailed scheme we do not encounter a single feature suggestive of any destination of the centuries to other than purely military purposes; and this alone must, with every one accustomed to consider such matters, form a sufficient reason for pronouncing its application to political objects a later innovation. If, as is probable, in the earliest period every one who had passed his sixtieth year was excluded from the centuries, this has no meaning, so far as they were intended from the first to form a representation of the burgess-community similar to and parallel with the curies. ”

“ The household was provided by nature herself with a head in the person of the father with whom it originated, and with whom it perished. But in the community of the people, which was designed to be imperishable, there was no natural master; not at least in that of Rome, which was composed of free and equal husbandmen and could not boast of a nobility by the grace of God. Accordingly one from its own ranks became its "leader" (-rex-) and lord in the household of the Roman community ”

“ But, when a vessel is emptying itself by constant efflux, the evil is to be remedied not by pouring in even considerable quantities, but only by the establishment of a constant influx— a remedy which was on various occasions attempted, but not with success. In the provinces, not even the smallest effort was made to save the farmer class there from being bought out by the Roman speculators; the provincials, forsooth, were merely men, and not a party. The consequence was, that even the rents of the soil beyond Italy flowed more and more to Rome. ”

“ As the oldest and most important Etruscan towns lay far inland—in fact we find not a single Etruscan town of any note immediately on the coast except Populonia, which we know for certain was not one of the old twelve cities— and the movement of the Etruscans in historical times was from north to south, it seems probable that they migrated into the peninsula by land. Indeed the low stage of civilization, in which we find them at first, would ill accord with the hypothesis of immigration by sea. Nations even in the earliest times crossed a strait as they would a stream ”

“ What the patricians gained was gained at the expense not of the community, but of the magistrate's power. It is true that the community gained only a few narrowly restricted rights, which were far less practical and palpable than the acquisitions of the nobility, and which not one in a thousand probably had the wisdom to value; but they formed a pledge and earnest of the future. Hitherto the —metoeci— had been politically nothing, the old burgesses had been everything; now that the former were embraced in the community, the old burgesses were overcome ”

“ His conception of relations is everywhere dreadfully jejune and destitute of imagination: his contemptuous and over-wise mode of treating religious matters is altogether offensive. The narrative, preserving throughout an intentional contrast to the usual Greek historiography with its artistic style, is doubtless correct and clear, but flat and languid, digressing with undue frequency into polemical discussions or into biographical, not seldom very self- sufficient, description of his own experiences. A controversial vein pervades the whole work ”

“ That he was superstitious like a genuine soldier of fortune; that he was induced to become a candidate for his first consulship, not by the impulse of his talents, but primarily by the utterances of an Etruscan -haruspex-; and that in the campaign with the Teutones a Syrian prophetess Martha lent the aid of her oracles to the council of war,—these things were not, in the strict sense, unaristocratic: in such matters, then as at all times, the highest and lowest strata of society met. But the want of political culture was unpardonable ”

“ The main matter at any rate was that the communities hitherto Latin—not only the survivors of the old Latin confederacy, such as Tibur and Praeneste, but more especially the Latin colonies, with the exception of the few that passed over to the insurgents—were thereby admitted to Roman citizenship. Besides, the law was applied to the allied cities that remained faithful in Etruria and especially in Southern Italy, such as Nuceria and Neapolis. It was natural that individual communities, hitherto specially privileged, should hesitate as to the acceptance of the franchise ”