CaesarAndChrist

• Very good. Slow in places. Overly brief in others. Good foundation.
• The method of these volumes is synthetic history, which studies all the major phases of a peoples life's, work, and culture in their simultaneous operation.
• We shall learn more of the nature of man by watching his behavior through sixty centuries than by reading Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, and Kant.

History Philosophy

• The study of antiquity is properly accounted worthless except as it may be made living drama or illuminate our contemporary life. The rise of Rome from a crossroads town to world mastery, its achievement of two centuries of security and peace from the Crimea to Gibraltar, and from the Euphrates to Hadrian's Wall, its spread of classic civilization over the Mediterranean and western European world, its struggle to preserve its ordered realm from a surrounding sea of barbarism, its long, slow crumbling and final catastrophic collapse into darkness and chaos – this is surely the greatest drama ever played by man; unless it be that other drama which began when Caesar and Christ stood face to face in Pilate's court and continued until a handful of hunted Christians had grown by time and patience, and through persecution and terror, to be first the allies, then the masters, and at last the heirs, of the greatest empire in history.
• No other country has been so long the hub of history – at first in government, then in religion, then in art. For seventeen hundred years, from Cato Censor to Michelangelo, Rome was the center of the Western world.
• The Etruscans are among the irritating obscurities of history. They ruled Rome for a hundred years or more, and left upon Roman ways so varied an influence that Rome can hardly be understood without them; yet Roman literature is as mute concerning them as a matron anxious to forget, publicly, the surrenders of her youth.
• Contentment is a rare among men as it is natural among animals, and no form of government has ever satisfied its subjects.

Politics Happiness

• By a pleasant custom the members of the Senate brought their sons with them to attend in silence, and to learn statesmanship and chicanery at first hand.
• The Senate was at its worst in victory, at its best in defeat. It could carry forward policies that spanned generations and centuries; it could begin a war in 264 and end it in 146 BC.
• All dictators but two obeyed these restrictions (honoring how Cininnatus called from the plow to save the state (456 BC) returned to his farm as soon as the task was done. When this precedent was violated by Sulla and Caesar, the Republic passed back into the monarchy out of which it came.
• The Roman army conquered the world on a vegetarian diet. The army of the republic lost battles, but it never lost a war.
• What astonishes us is that such a government could last so long (508 to 49 BC) and achieve so much. Perhaps it endured because of its muddling adaptability to change, and the proud patriotism formed in the home, the school, the temple, the army, the Assembly, and the Senate. Rome remained as great as long as she had enemies who forced her to unity, vision, and heroism. When she had overcome them all she flourished for a moment and then began to die.
• The Second Punic War changed the face of the western Mediterranean. It gave Spain and all its wealth to Rome, providing the funds for the Roman conquest of Greece. It reunited Italy under Rome’s unquestioned mastery and threw open all routes and markets to Roman ships and goods. But it was the most costly of all ancient wars. It ravaged or injured half the farms of Italy, destroyed 400 towns, killed 300,000 men; southern Italy has never quite recovered from it to this day. It weakened democracy by showing that a popular assembly cannot wisely choose generals or direct a war. It began the transformation of Roman life and morals by hurting agriculture and helping trade; by taking men from the countryside and teaching them the violence of battle and the promiscuity of the camp; by bringing the precious metals of Spain to finance new luxuries and imperialistic expansion; and by enabling Italy to live on the extorted wheat of Spain, Sicily, and Africa. It was a pivotal event for almost every phase of Roman history. To Carthage it was the beginning of the end.

History

• What increases with civilization is not so much immorality of intent as opportunity of expression.
• On the farm, children, like wives, were economic assets, not biological toys.
• Man placed an iron ring upon the fourth finger of the girls left hand, because it was believed that a nerve ran thence to her heart.

Used To Believe

• Roman men became brave by proxy; they crowded the amphitheater to see bloody games, and hired gladiators to fight before them at their banquets.
• The principle of democracy is freedom, the principle of war is discipline; each requires the absence of the other. War demands superior intelligence and courage, quick decisions, united action, immediate obedience; the frequency of war doomed democracy.
• Till Sulla, Roman history is a record of families rather than individuals.
• Greek culture triumphed in the rise of Constantinople as first the rival and then the successor of Rome; and when Constantinople fell, Greek literature, philosophy, and art reconquered Italy and Europe in the Renaissance. This is the central stream in the history of European civilization; all other currents are tributaries.
• Cato fought corruption recklessly, and seldom let the sun set without having made new enemies. Cato was the first great writer of Latin prose.
• The destruction of Carthage and Corinth in 146 BC must rank among the most brutal conquests in history.
• Rome had won every war but the class war; and the destruction of Carthage removed the last check to civil division and strife. Now through a hundred bitter years of revolution Rome would pay the penalty of gaining the world.
• The causes of revolution were many, the results were endless, the personalities thrown up by the crises, from the Gracchi to Augustus, were among the most powerful in history. Never before, and never again, until our time (WWII), were such stakes fought for, never was the world drama more intense.
• A distribution of land among the poorer citizens seemed the obvious and necessary solution of three problems: rural slavery, urban congestion and corruption, and military decay.
• The Gracchi: More realistic than Tiberius, Ciaus understood that no reform can endure which is opposed by the balance of economical or political power in the state.
• The city mob that Ciaus had befriended made no protest when his corpse, and those of his followers, were flung into the river; it was busy plundering his house.
• Rome already recognized in Caesar's uncle (Giaus Marius) the uses of Caesar-ism; the dictatorship of a popular leader backed by a devoted army seemed to many weary Romans the only alternative to the oligarchic abuses of liberty.
• Marius resorted to a new form or military enrollment, which revolutionized first the army and then the state. He invited enlistment of any citizen, property owner or not; offered attractive pay, and promised to release volunteers, and give them lands, after a completed campaign.
• The Revolt of Italy: Marius emerged from his solitude, took command, and won victory after victory while all other Roman generals but Sulla met defeat. In three years of war 300k men fell, and central Italy was devastated.
• Sulla was unique in his origins, character and fate. Born poor, he became the defender of the aristocracy, as the aristocratic Gcacchi, Drusi, and Caesar became leaders of the poor.
• Had his patience and insight equaled his ruthlessness and courage, Sulla might have saved Rome a half century of chaos and given her in 80 BC the peace and security, order and prosperity, that Augustus would bring back from Actium. He restored the old when he should have created the new. Under Sulla, antiquity had never known so rich, so and so corrupt a government.
• Virtue lies not in the fear of the gods, nor in the timid shunning of pleasure; it lies in the harmonious operation of the senses and faculties guided by reason. Some men wear out their lives for the sake of a statue and fame, but the real wealth of man is to live simply with a mind at peace" - Lucretius
• For it is a nobler thing to enlarge the boundaries of human intelligence than those of the Roman Empire. – Cicero
• Cicero: Not since Plato had wisdom worn such prose.
• Age as well as youth has its glories – a tolerant wisdom, the respectful attention of children, desire and ambition's fever cooled. Age may fear death, but not if the mind has been formed by philosophy. Beyond the grave there will be, at the best, a new and happier life; and at the worst there will be peace.

Happiness

• When Cato, suspecting Caesar's complicity with Catiline, challenged him in the Senate to read aloud a note just brought to him, Caesar passed it to Cato without comment; it was a love letter from Cato's half sister.
• Caesars conquest of Gaul decided the character of French civilization. It added to the Roman Empire a country twice the size of Italy and opened the purses and markets of 5M people to Roman trade. It saved Italy and the Mediterranean world for four centuries from barbarian invasion.
• Cleopatra was a Macedonian Greek by origin, and more probably blonde than brunette.
• Caesar's transformation: The miracle whereby the youthful spendthrift and roisterer had become one of the ablest, bravest, fairest, and most enlightened men in all the sorry annals of politics.
• The assassination of Caesar was one of the major tragedies of history.
• Antony was one half of what Caesar had been, as Augustus would be the other half; Antony was a good general, Augustus a superlative statesman.
• Caesar's adopted son. Caius Octavius (later known as Augustus) was to make himself the greatest statesman in Roman history.
• Caesar's heir had conquered those of Alexander, and absorbed Alexander's realm; the West again, as at Marathon and Magnesia, had triumphed over the East.
• Augustus succeeded where Caesar had failed, because he was more patient and devious, because he understood the strategy of words and forms, because he was willing to move cautiously and slowly where his great-uncle had been forced by the brevity of time to wound living traditions and crowd a generation of changes into half a year of life.
• Augustus persuaded most of the kings of client states to send their sons to live in his palace and receive a Roman education; by this generous arrangement the youths served as hostages until their accession, and then as unwitting vehicles of Romanization.
• At his death the Empire covered over 3 million square miles, more than the mainland of the United States, and over a hundred times the area of Rome before the Punic Wars. Augustus advised his successor to be content with this, the greatest empire yet seen; to seek rather to unite and strengthen it within than to extend it without. He expressed his surprise "that Alexander did not regard it as a greater task to set in order the empire that he had won than to win it". The Pax Romana had begun.
• "if some god where for taking you back to those days in the past you would refuse every time" the chief charm of the past is that we know we need not live it again.

History

• Sanity, like government, needs checks and balances; no mortal can be omnipotent and sane.
• Vespasian recognized the problem of technological unemployment, and decided against an industrial revolution. When and inventor showed him plans for a hoisting machine that would greatly reduce the need for human labor in clearing away debris left by way, he refused to use it saying "I must feed my poor".
• The Emperors of "the age of despots" indulged their appetites because they know how brief was their omnipotence; they lived in the daily horror of men condemned to an early and sudden death.
• "I persist in praising not the life that I lead, but that which I ought to lead. I follow it at a mighty distance, crawling." - Seneca
• Philosophy is the science of wisdom, and wisdom is the art of living. Happiness is the goal, but virtue, not pleasure, is the road. The old ridiculed maxims are correct and are perpetually verified by experience; in the long run honesty, justice, forbearance, kindliness, bring us more happiness than ever comes from the pursuit of pleasure.

Happiness

Advice

Ethics

Protocols

• But how does one acquire wisdom? By practicing it daily, in however modest degree; by examining your conduct each day at its close; by being harsh on your faults and lenient to those of others; by associating with those who excel you in wisdom and virtue; by taking some acknowledged sage as your invisible counselor and judge.

Advice SystemsNotGoals

Ethics

Protocols

• In philosophy all truth is old, and only error is original.
• When we compare the chief legacy of Roman natural science to the Middle Ages to the corresponding works and temper of the Greeks four hundred years earlier, we begin to feel the slow tragedy of a dying culture. The Romans had conquered the Greek world, but they had already lost the most precious part of its heritage.
• Clearness is the first essential, then brevity, beauty, and vigor. Correct repeatedly and stoically. -Quintilian

Advice

• We must consider the Roman fiscal system one of the most successful and stable in history. For two centuries a single monetary standard was honored throughout the Empire.
• Exploitation of the weak by the strong is as natural as eating and differs from it only in rapidity; we must expect to find it in every age and under every form of society and government; but rarely has it been so thorough and unsentimental as in ancient Rome.
• A proposal that slaves should be required to wear a distinctive dress was voted down in the Senate lest they should realize their numerical strength.
• Originality is, like parentage, a novel combination of pre-existing elements.

AdjacentPossible

• Law was the most characteristic and lasting expression of the Roman spirit. As Greece stands in history for freedom, so Rome stands for order; and as Greece bequeathed democracy and philosophy as the foundations of individual liberty, so Rome left us its laws, and its traditions of administration, as the bases of social order.
• Law tends to lag behind moral development, not because law cannot learn, but because experience has shown the wisdom of testing new ways in practice before congealing them into law.

Politics

• Greek science and philosophy, Judeo-Greek Christianity, Greco-Roman demacracy, Roman law - these our are supreme inheritance from the ancient world.
• The Roman army was never in better condition than in Hadrian's reign.
• When Hadrian left Athens it was a cleaner, more prosperous, and more beautiful city than ever before in its history.
• Under Hadrian: Never had monarchy left man so free, or so respected the rights of its subjects. The world's ideal seemed to have been attained. Wisdom reigned, and for 23 years the world was governed by a father.
• If a man were called upon to fix the period in 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 accession of Nerva to the death of Aurelius.
• It is easy for indignation to be eloquent but hard for it to be fair; no moralist should write history.
• The execution of senators and the assassination of emperors (in the 2nd century) were incidents in a long contest between vicious, cruel, and competent monarchs and a decadent, cruel, and incompetent aristocracy.
• Seneca: "Our forefathers complained, we complain, and our descendants will complain, that morals are corrupt, that wickedness holds sway, that men are sinking deeper and deeper into sinfulness, that the condition of mankind is going from bad to worse."
• Around the immoral hub of any society is a spreading wheel of wholesome life, in which the threads of tradition, the moral imperatives of religion, the economic compulsions of the family, the instinctive love and care of children, the watchfulness of women and policemen, suffice to keep us publicly decent and moderately sane.
• one may be sure a man has many virtues if he admires those of others.

Ethics Protocols

• For 400 years Stoicism has been to the upper classes a substitute for religion; now the substitute was put aside, and the ruling orders turned back from the books of the philosophers to the altars of the gods.
• The ruins of Roman forums, temples, aqueducts, and theaters on now arid wastes reveal the reach and wealth of Roman Africa. Those fields decayed and became dead sand not through a change in climate but through a change in government.
• Spain became to Italy what Mexico and Peru would be to Spain.
• The Rhine was the frontier between classic and primitive civilization. Gaul could not defend that frontier; Rome did; and that fact determined the history of Europe to this day.
• The decisions of Augustus and Tiberius not to attempt the conquest of Germany were among the pivotal events of European history. Had Germany been conquered and Romanized like Gaul, nearly all Europe west of Russia would have had one organization, one government, one classic culture, perhaps one tongue; and central Europe might have served as a buffer against those eastern hordes whose pressure upon the Germans caused the Germanic invasions of Italy.
• It was a magnificent and precious achievement that the West, if not the North, had been won for the classical heritage.
• Plutarch's Lives: Greece has not left us a more precious book.
• In Plutarch, it is refreshing to find a philosopher who is wise enough to be happy.
• Philosophy does not mean reading books about wisdom, it means training oneself in the practice of wisdom.

Stoicism

• "Seek not that the things which happen to you should happen as you wish, but wish that the things that happen to be as they are, and you will find tranquility" - Epictetus

Stoicism

• What is the best life? Lucian answers:

  The life of the ordinary man is the best and most prudent choice. Cease from the folly of metaphysical speculation and inquire into origins and ends; count all this clever logic as idle talk, and pursue one end alone - how you may do what you hand finds to do, and go your way with never a passion and always a smile.

Advice

• If we sum up Greek thought in the first two centuries of our era, we find it, despite Lucian, overwhelmingly religious. Men had once lost faith in faith and taken to logic; now they were losing faith in logic and were flocking back to faith.
• Ptolemy's industrious tables of latitude and longitude for the major cities of the globe were vitiated by accepting Poseidonius' modest estimate of the earth; but to this encouraging mistake, as transmitted by Ptolemy, Columbus owed his belief in the possibility of reaching the Indies in a practical time by sailing west.
• Ptolemy gave us our definitions of minutes and seconds.
• The last create age of Greek science ended with Ptolemy and Galen.
• The desire to return to the mother is stronger than the impulse to depend on the father.
• The aristocrats, as in all ages, preferred the art of life to the life of art.
• When asked to explain the bible in as little time as he could, standing on one foot, Hillel summed it up as "What is hateful to thyself do not do to another"
• No people in history has fought so tenaciously for liberty as the Jews, nor any people against such odds.
• That a few simple men should in one generation have invented so powerful and appealing a personality, so lofty an ethic and so inspiring a vision of human brotherhood, would be a miracle far more incredible than any recorded in the Gospels.
• Jesus resembled Caesar only in taking his stand with the lower classes, and in the quality of mercy; otherwise what a world of outlook, character, and interests separated them! Caesar hoped to reform men by changing institutions and laws; Christ wished to remake institutions, and lessen laws, by changing men. Caesar too was capable of anger, but his emotions were always under the control of his clear-eyes intellect.
• The psychological nature of the miracles is indicated by two features: Christ himself attributed his cures to the "faith" of those whom he healed; and he could not perform miracles in Nazareth, apparently because there the people looked upon him as "the carpenter's son" and refused to believe in his unusual powers.
• Jesus' sayings are nearly all models of brevity, clarity, and force.
• "to him who has, more will be given, and from him who has nothing, even that which he has will be taken away" an excellent summary of market operations, if not world history.
• Christ was in the spiritual sense the greatest revolutionist in history. His achievement lay not in ushering in a new state, but in outlining an ideal morality.
• His ethical code was predicated on the early coming of the Kingdom. "be as little children, the indifference to economic provision, property, government; the preference of celibacy to marriage; the command to abandon all family ties; these were not rules for ordinary life.
• Christianity derived its impetus from the personality and vision of Christ; it gained strength from the belief in his resurrection, and the promise of eternal life; it received doctrinal form in the theology of Paul; it grew by the absorption of pagan faith and ritual; it became a triumphant Church by inheriting the organizing patterns and genius of Rome.
• In Christ and Peter Christianity was Jewish; in Paul it became half Greek; in Catholicism it became half Roman. In Protestantism the Judaic element and emphasis were restored.
• The great adjustment that saved Christianity was the transformation of the belief in Christ's earthly return into the hope of union with him in heaven after death.
• Protestantism was the triumph of Paul over Peter; Fundamentalism is the triumph of Paul over Christ.
• All in all, no more attractive religion has ever been presented to mankind. It offered itself without restriction to all individuals, classes and nations; it was not limited to one people, like Judaism, nor to the freeman of one state, like the official cults of Greece and Rome. Christianity announced the basic equality of men.

Religion

• To men and women imprisoned in the prose of poverty and toil it brought the poetry of the sacraments and the Mass, a ritual that made every major event of life a vital scene in the moving drama of God and man. Into the moral vacuum of a dying paganism, into the coldness of Stoicism and the corruption of Epicureanism, into a world sick of brutality, cruelty, oppression, and sexual chaos, into a pacified empire that seemed no longer to need the masculine virtues or the gods of war, it brought a new morality of brotherhood, kindliness, decency, and peace.

Religion

• We should misjudge the function of history – which is to illuminate the present through the past – were we to detail the varieties of religious belief that sought and failed to capture the growing Church.
• Historically the belief in heaven and the belief in utopia on earth are like compensatory buckets in a well: when one goes down the other comes up. When the classic religions decayed, communistic agitation rose in Athens (430 BC) and revolution began in Rome (133 BC); when these movement filed, resurrection faiths succeeded, culminating in Christianity; when in our eighteenth century, belief weakened, communism reappeared. In this perspective the future of religion is secure.
• Of minor heresies there was no end. The Church overcame them by its superior organization, its doctrinal tenacity, and its better understanding of the ways and needs of men.
• The gap between philosophy and religion was closing, and reason for a thousand years consented to be the handmaiden of theology.
• The Roman Church followed in the footsteps of the Roman state; it conquered the provinces, beautified the capital, and established discipline and unity from frontier to frontier. Rome died in giving birth to the Church; the Church matured by inheriting and accepting the responsibilities of Rome.
• This adoption of Oriental despotism by the son of a slave, this identification of god and king, meant the final failure of republican institutions in antiquity, the surrender of the fruits of Marathon; it was a reversion, like Alexander's, to the forms and theories of Achaemenid and Egyptian courts, of Ptolemaic, Parthian, and Sassanid kings. From this Orientalized monarchy came the structure of Byzantine and European kingdoms till the French Revolution. Byzantinism began with Diocletian.
• There is no greater drama in human record than the sight of a few Christians, scorned or oppressed by a succession of emperors, bearing all trials with a fierce tenacity, multiplying quietly, building order while their enemies generated chaos, fighting the sword with the word, brutality with hope, and at last defeating the strongest state that history has known. Caesar and Christ had met in the area, and Christ had won.

History

• A real believer would have been a Christian first and a statesman afterword; with Constantine it was the reverse. Christianity was to him a means, not an end.
• Constantine have new life to an aging Empire by associating it with a your religion, a vigorous organization, a fresh mortality. By his aid Christianity became a state as well as a church, and the mold, for fourteen centuries, of European life and thought. Perhaps, if we except Augustus, the grateful Church was right in naming him the greatest of the emperors.
• The fall of Rome, like her rise, had not one cause but many, and was not an event but a process spread over 300 years. Some nations have not lasted as long as Rome fell.
• The growth of Christianity was more an effect than a cause of Rome's decay.
• The Roman Empire in the East would go on until 1453, in the West it had come to an end in 472.
• It is easier to explain Rome's fall than to account for her long survival. This is the essential accomplishment of Rome – that having won the Mediterranean world she adopted its culture, gave it order, prosperity, and peace for 200 years, held back the tide of barbarism for two centuries more, and transmitted the classic heritage to the West before she died.
• Rome achieved democracy of freeman, and then destroyed it with corruption and violence.