"Roman Empire" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... work of Gibbon is indispensable to the student of history. The literature of Europe offers no substitute for "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire." It has obtained undisputed possession, as rightful occupant, of the vast period which it comprehends. However some subjects, which it embraces, may have undergone more complete investigation, on the general view of the ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... They deal chiefly with Roman history, and especially with points suggested by the author's profound study of Sallust. Gibbon pays De Brosses the compliment of quoting two of his works, and commends his "SINGULAR diligence," with emphasis on the adjective. (See Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Bury's edition 4 37 and 7 168.) He was also Voltaire's landlord at Tournay, and had a quarrel with him about a matter of firewood; but De Brosses was a lawyer, whilst Voltaire was only a philosopher and a poet, so that of course the result was "qu'il enrage d'avoir enfin a ...
— Terre Napoleon - A history of French explorations and projects in Australia • Ernest Scott
... women are the salt of the earth, who keep society from rotting; that by such men and women, and by their example and influence, direct and indirect, has Christendom been raised up out of the accursed slough into which Europe and, indeed, the whole known world, had fallen during the early Roman Empire; and that to this influence, and therefore to the Holy Spirit of God alone, and not to any prudential calculations, combined experiences, or so-called philosophies of men, is owing all which keeps Europe from being a hell on earth. And ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley
... perversity would seem hardly credible if it were not attested by overwhelming evidence. The Government remedy is first to create unemployment and then to endow it—the shortest and maddest road to ruin since the downfall of the Roman Empire. ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... Black Sea, I shall make no opposition to the extension of your empire to the shores of the Mediterranean. Italy, like Germany, is a prey to petty princes. Rescue the Italians from their national insignificance, sire, and throw the aegis of your protection over the site of the old Roman empire. Do you not bear the title of King of Rome? Give to that title, meaning and substance. Yours is the south and west, mine is the east, and together we ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... empire fell in pieces; and as Carlovingian had succeeded Merovingian, so in 987 Capetian displaced the weak descendants of the mighty head of the "Holy Roman Empire." The map changed with bewildering frequency; and in these changes, the nobles—more stable than their kings—grew to be the real lords of their several domains. History speaks of France from Clovis to the Revolution as a kingdom; ...
— Cathedrals and Cloisters of the South of France, Volume 1 • Elise Whitlock Rose
... squire approached, who pale with dread, Scarce drew his breath, and cried: "Oh, well away! Alas! alas!" (and thus he often said, Ere he could utter aught beside). "To-day, To-day, sire, is the Roman empire sped, And Christ to the heathen makes his flock a prey. A fiend from air to-day has dropt, that none Henceforth may in ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... me, more suitable to my views, as being less connected with the Government. My first attempts at writing, particularly my Critical Notes on Gibbon's 'History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,' and the 'Annals of Education,' a periodical miscellany in which I had touched upon some leading questions of public and private instruction, obtained for me the notice of literary men.[2] With gratuitous kindness, M. de Fontanes, Grand Master of the University, appointed ...
— Memoirs To Illustrate The History Of My Time - Volume 1 • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... the cloistered past is compatible with leadership in the practical application of modern science to the arts of life; from the island whose language and literature have found a new field and a vigorous growth in this region; from the last seat of the holy Roman Empire; from the country which, remembering a monarch who made an astronomical observation at the Greenwich Observatory, has enthroned science in one of the highest places in its government; from the peninsula so learned that we ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb
... the fall of the Babylonian Empire, the fall of the Egyptian Empire, of the Grecian Empire, and the Roman Empire, were all due to the development of pride and immorality among those peoples; whereas, we believe that civilization tends rather toward peace, security, and higher citizenship. Is not the chief explanation for the ultimate and successive fall of those great empires ...
— The Story of the Soil • Cyril G. Hopkins
... in former days," replied Sallenauve, "especially during the Roman occupation of Gaul. After the fall of the Roman Empire, the work was abandoned; but the lords of the soil and the clergy renewed it in the middle ages; after that, during the struggle of feudality against the royal power and the long civil wars which devastated ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... been space—the pressure of population upon the extent of ground. Pastoral and nomad hordes, like the "Barbarians" and Tartars, have had that object, but, as a rule, it has ended in their own absorption. The motives of the Roman Empire were strangely mixed. Plunder certainly came in; trade came in; in later times the slave-trade and the supply of corn to Rome were great incentives. The personal advantage and ambition of prominent statesmen like Sulla ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... great Irish foundation, due to Deicolus (Desle, Dichuill), a brother of St. Gall and a disciple of St. Columbanus. So important was this house considered in later times that its abbot was numbered among the princes of the Holy Roman Empire. ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... precede changes of civilisations such as the fall of the Roman Empire and the foundation of the Arabian Empire, seem at first sight determined more especially by political transformations, foreign invasion, or the overthrow of dynasties. But a more attentive study of these events shows that behind their apparent causes the real cause is generally seen to ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... born in Bethlehem, the Jews were under the iron rule of the Roman Empire, of which they formed a part, for although the Jewish family of the Herods reigned over Judea, they only held their throne under the Roman Emperor. This the Jews could not endure. They longed to be a free ...
— The Bible in its Making - The most Wonderful Book in the World • Mildred Duff
... that he must make all circumstances indifferent. Every true man is a cause, a country, and an age; requires infinite spaces and numbers and time fully to accomplish his design;—and posterity seem to follow his steps as a train of clients. A man Caesar[200] is born, and for ages after we have a Roman Empire. Christ is born, and millions of minds so grow and cleave to his genius, that he is confounded with virtue and the possible of man. An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man; as Monachism, of the hermit Antony;[201] the Reformation, of Luther; Quakerism, of Fox;[202] Methodism, ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... and Rome had been buried in the ruins of the Roman Empire, the literature of Israel was preserved by the pious care of the Christian Church. The light of Athens went out, and the light of Jerusalem alone illumined the dark ages. The only books known to the mass of men through long centuries were these writings of the Hebrews ...
— The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible • R. Heber Newton
... induce a tribe of North American Indians to submit to the restraints of a regular and civilized government. The same might have been said, though somewhat less absolutely, of the barbarians who overran the Roman Empire. It required centuries of time, and an entire change of circumstances, to discipline them into regular obedience even to their own leaders, when not actually serving under their banner. There are nations ...
— Considerations on Representative Government • John Stuart Mill
... spot. Around, over the Continent and the British Isles, had swept successive conquests with their grim train of sufferings for the conquered; but these storm-clouds had not burst over the island. The shocks which preceded the fall of the Roman Empire had not been felt, nor had the throes which inaugurated the birth of Frankish rule in Gaul and Saxon supremacy in Britain, disturbed the prevailing tranquillity. Occasional descents of pirates, Northmen from Scandinavian homes or Southmen from the Iberian peninsula, ...
— The Forest of Vazon - A Guernsey Legend Of The Eighth Century • Anonymous
... the west of Malaga is purpled by the light of the setting sun, and the houses and Castle of Carlama hang on its side, in full view. Further to the right, I see the smoke of Monda, where one of the greatest battles of antiquity was fought—that which overthrew the sons of Pompey, and gave the Roman Empire to Caesar. The mozo of the venta is busy, preparing my kid and rice, and Jose is at his elbow, gently suggesting ingredients which may give the dish a richer flavor. The landscape is softened by the hush of coming evening; a few birds are still twittering among ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... through the air; showers of milk, of blood, of stones, of ashes, of frogs, beasts with two heads, or infants who had some feature resembling those of the brute creation. These were all dreadful prodigies, which filled the people with inexpressible astonishment, and the Roman Empire with an extreme perplexity; and whatever unhappy circumstance followed upon these, was sure to be either caused ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... consequently their God. An action, I say, not only heathenish, but prodigious also; for the Lord Jesus, paraphrasing upon this fact of his, teacheth the Jews, that without repentance 'they should all likewise perish.' 'Likewise,' that is by the hand and rage of the Roman empire. Neither should they be more able to avoid the stroke, than were those eighteen upon whom the tower of Siloam fell, and slew them (Luke 13:1-5). The fulfilling of which prophecy, for their hardness of heart, and impenitency, was in the days ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... the Treaties of Vienna (1814-15) the centre of Europe was more solidly organised than ever before. In place of the effete institution known as the Holy Roman Empire, which Napoleon swept away in 1806, the Central States were reorganised in the German Confederation—a cumbrous and ineffective league in which Austria held the presidency. Austria also gained Venetia ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... remote from modern life, requiring much training and study for its appreciation, and confined at the best to a limited circle. But Ciceronian prose is practically the prose of the human race; not only of the Roman empire of the first and second centuries, but of Lactantius and Augustine, of the mediaeval Church, of the earlier and later Renaissance, and even now, when the Renaissance is a piece of past history, of the modern world to which ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... the fall of the Roman Empire, it is impossible to overlook the evil that the Christians, so admirable when in the desert, did to the State when they were in power. "When I think," said Montesquieu, "of the profound ignorance into ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset
... necessarily every woman's sphere and neither is motherhood nor is it her congenital duty to make herself attractive to men—Unreasonableness of gratuitous advice to women and none to men—What we don't know—Fallacy of the argument that the fall of the Roman Empire was due to the liberty given to woman—Official organs ...
— A Short History of Women's Rights • Eugene A. Hecker
... I applied myself closely to study and reading, mainly of history. I read Hume, Smollett and Miller's histories of England, Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," and such histories of the United States as I could procure. It was at this time that the memorable "Log Cabin and Hard Cider Campaign" of 1840 commenced. General Harrison had been nominated in December, 1839, at Harrisburg, by the Whig party. He was a distinguished general ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... Lamar, the gifted orator and highest type of Southern chivalry were there. Garland, and Morgan, and Harris, and Coke, were there; and Beck with his sledge-hammer intellect. It was an arena of opposing gladiators more magnificent and majestic than was ever witnessed in the palmiest days of the Roman Empire. There were giants in the Senate in those days, and when they clashed shields and measured swords in debate, the capitol trembled and the ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor
... be removed on a sledge for fifty leagues in the open air. After having destroyed the Prussian monarchy, we are making war against the remnants of Prussia, against the Russians, the Calmucs, the Cossacks, and the peoples of the north who formerly invaded the Roman Empire; we are making war in all its energy and all its horror." Such vigorous language was not permitted to all. "The gloomy pictures that have been drawn of our situation," wrote Napoleon to Fouche on April 13th, ...
— Worlds Best Histories - France Vol 7 • M. Guizot and Madame Guizot De Witt
... the American reports on the right and duty of the state to regulate railroad companies. He declared, in proposing this new system, that these laws had been adopted by the most enlightened governments of the world. "From the days of the Roman Empire down to the present time," said Toombs, "it has never been denied that the state has power ...
— Robert Toombs - Statesman, Speaker, Soldier, Sage • Pleasant A. Stovall
... did?' said Zenobia. 'Do I not stand upon the records of the Senate, Augusta of the Roman empire! Was not the late renowned Odenatus, Augustus by the decree of that same Senate? And was I not then right to call my own sons by their rightful title of Caesar?—and invest them with the appropriate ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware
... civilized world, in which the light of learning burned low, flickering almost to extinction. How came it possible that the gifts of Athens and of Alexandria were deliberately thrown away? For three causes. The barbarians shattered the Roman Empire to its foundations. When Alaric entered Rome in 410 A. D., ghastly was the impression made on the contemporaries; the Roman world shuddered in a titanic spasm (Lindner). The land was a garden of Eden before them, behind a howling wilderness, as is so graphically told in Gibbon's great history. Many ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... poisoned by "Diavolo Cardinale" Cossa, who then became Pope John XXIII. Now there were three popes and a three-cornered fight. To make the good old times still more interesting, three rivals struggled for the crown of the Holy Roman Empire. ...
— John Hus - A brief story of the life of a martyr • William Dallmann
... of Greece." Altho several histories of Greece have been written since Grote's, his work "still remains in some respects the greatest," says A. D. Lindsay, his latest editor. Grote, in a sense, stands to Greece as Gibbon to the Roman Empire. He depended mainly on the literary sources, archaeology in his day having done little to widen knowledge. His work is therefore defective in its earlier parts, but from the sixth century down, when the literary sources begin, he is "still almost as ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... The Roman empire, after having reigned as mistress of the world for upward of five centuries, commenced to show signs of decay. Its people had gradually lost the sturdy spirit of independence, endurance, and courage which had characterized their forefathers, and had degenerated into a race of effeminate slaves ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 598, June 18, 1887 • Various
... how England became England, how France came to be France, and Germany Germany. And yet you cannot know one of these things unless you know about the Roman Empire too, which like an old dead root underlies the greater ...
— The Great Round World And What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 22, April 8, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... are more races represented in the Balkans than in any similar sized territory in Europe. Most of the Balkan states lie along what was the northeastern fringe of the Roman Empire. So we find inhabiting them not only ancient races like the Greeks and Albanians, but also descendants of Roman colonists like the Roumanians, and other racial groups like the Serbs and Bulgars, which represent the survivals of the barbarian invasions of the ...
— A School History of the Great War • Albert E. McKinley, Charles A. Coulomb, and Armand J. Gerson
... the form of the constitution, and the power conferred by an appearance of justice. Caesar was contending for the maintenance of his position, honor, and safety; and, since the power of his opponents included the sovereignty over the provinces of the Roman Empire, his victory secured for him the conquest of that entire Empire; and he thus became—though leaving the form of the constitution—the autocrat of the State. What secured for him the execution of a design, which in the first instance was of negative import—the autocracy of ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... individual experience and of the world's history, can no more be annihilated out of them than the sum of what we learned during a certain number of years of our childhood, from the one, or the effects of any notable occurrence, such as the fall of the Roman Empire, or the Norman invasion, from the other;—Christianity on every view, whether of its truth or falsity, and consequently of its good or bad effect, has undoubtedly contributed to make us what we are; ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... Julius Caesar himself is not before our minds, since we are not acquainted with him. We have in mind some description of Julius Caesar: 'the man who was assassinated on the Ides of March', 'the founder of the Roman Empire', or, perhaps, merely 'the man whose name was Julius Caesar'. (In this last description, Julius Caesar is a noise or shape with which we are acquainted.) Thus our statement does not mean quite what it seems to mean, but means something involving, instead of Julius ...
— The Problems of Philosophy • Bertrand Russell
... and nobles bent before a power which was nearer to God than their own. Over prince and subject, chieftain and serf, a body of unarmed defenceless men reigned supreme by the magic of sanctity. They tamed the fiery northern warriors who had broken in pieces the Roman Empire. They taught them—they brought them really and truly to believe—that they had immortal souls, and that they would one day stand at the awful judgment bar and give account for their lives there. With the brave, the honest, and the good—with those who had not oppressed the poor nor removed ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... it. The scientific discoveries which the genius of Modern Europe had already effected under that stimulus, without waiting for the New Organum, had all originated on the continent. The criticism on the institutions which the decaying Roman Empire had given to its Northern conquerors,—that criticism which necessarily accompanied the revival of learning began there. Not yet recovered from the disastrous wars of the fifteenth century, suffering from the diabolical tyranny that had overtaken her at that fatal crisis, England could make ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... recording. It so admirably illustrates the character of two distinguished men, as to bear internal evidence of its truthfulness. At one of the inns, at which Franklin stopped, he was informed that Mr. Gibbon, the illustrious author of the "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," was ...
— Benjamin Franklin, A Picture of the Struggles of Our Infant Nation One Hundred Years Ago - American Pioneers and Patriots Series • John S. C. Abbott
... is urged with the much more important object of pointing out the proper attitude towards such myths.. The proper attitude is one of doubt and hope and of a kind of light mystery. The tale is certainly not impossible; as it is certainly not certain. And through all the ages since the Roman Empire men have fed their healthy fancies and their historical imagination upon the very twilight condition of such tales. But to-day real agnosticism has declined along with real theology. People cannot ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... he is the middle-aged, younger brother of Count Macomer, with a very slender fortune of his own and a position no better than the rest of us. If he marries you, he becomes Prince of Acireale, a Prince of the Holy Roman Empire, a Grandee of Spain of the First Class—and many times a millionnaire. For you have all that to give the man you marry. Grant that he is the best of men. Is his brother wholly disinterested? I speak plainly. It is rumoured that Count Macomer has lost most of his fortune in speculations. ...
— Taquisara • F. Marion Crawford
... me a single look? And now that you hear this noble personage sees that in me which you did not, you come and would pay me back in my own coin. But see, here is gold; for which you would barter the Holy Roman Empire, provided you could find fools gross enough to buy the huge, monstrous carcass, without head, ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
... Renaissance; many some stately and simple period of Grecian life; and still more elect to pass a few years wandering among the villages of Palestine with an inspired conductor. For some of our quaintly vicious contemporaries, we have the decline of the Roman Empire and the reign of Henry III. of France. But there are others not quite so vicious, who yet cannot look upon the world with perfect gravity, who have never taken the categorical imperative to wife, and have more ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the man indignantly. Who was this that dared to bid against Domitian, the third dignitary in all the Roman empire, Caesar's son, Caesar's brother, who might himself be Caesar? Still he answered with ...
— Pearl-Maiden • H. Rider Haggard
... of the "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" with me. I had not read the famous 15th and 16th chapters for ages, and I lay on the sands and enjoyed them properly. A lady came and spoke to me as I returned, who knew L. at Oxford very well—can't recollect her name—and her father and mother are here, and I have just ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... skilful historic novelist. A romancer of insight and imaginative power, who studied his period, would be quite as likely to make a lucky selection of real incidents, motives, and characters, in a story of the Roman Empire or of England under the Plantagenets, as an erudite writer of history. Perhaps the best measure available to us of what we may believe in regard to far-off times is afforded by observation of what now happens in rough societies or remote places; ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... Judgment Hall, Where Nero with indifferent air Remarked the pleading of St. Paul, Nor dreamed the man before him there Would soon be read and reverenced where The Roman empire had no share! ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... intrigue presented in the form of long and elaborate songs, thinly accompanied, and separated by stretches of dreary recitative. But in those days persons of culture, in England as well as in Italy, were perhaps more interested in ancient history and in the history of the later Roman Empire than they are now; it is significant that Gibbon's Decline and Fall made its appearance just when the fashion for operas on subjects which might have been taken from its pages ...
— Handel • Edward J. Dent
... produce. The policy of some nations has given extraordinary encouragement to the industry of the country; that of others to the industry of towns. Scarce any nation has dealt equally and impartially with every sort of industry. Since the down-fall of the Roman empire, the policy of Europe has been more favourable to arts, manufactures, and commerce, the industry of towns, than to agriculture, the Industry of the country. The circumstances which seem to have introduced and established this policy are explained in ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... written in French. In 1770 his father died; he came into a fortune, entered Parliament, where he sat for eight years, but never spoke; and, in 1776, he began his history of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. This, by far the greatest of his works, was not completed till 1787, and was published in 1788, on his fifty-first birthday. His account of the completion of the work— it was finished at Lausanne, where he had lived for six years— is full of beauty: "It was on the ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... the social life of the later Roman Empire speak of a certain young man of Ariminum, who would jump into rivers and swim in 'em. When his friends said, 'You fish!' he would answer, 'Oh, pish! Fish can't swim like me, they've no ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... equally weak and fertile, he sought to conquer the poor Scythians, who conquered him. The Romans organized robbery, and had a wonderful skill in selecting peoples for enemies who were worth robbing. "The Brood of Winter," who overthrew the Roman Empire, poured down upon lands where grew the grape and the rose. The Saracens, who were carried forward, in the first instance, by fanaticism, had the streams of their conquests lengthened and broadened and deepened by the wealth and weakness of Greeks and Persians and Goths and Africans. Had those ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... his action by saying that a mistake in the fiscal policy of a country should not prevent a real Democrat from siding with the party which opposed monopoly, especially in land. He saw in "LATIFUNDIA"—huge estates—the ruin of the Roman Empire, and its prevalence in the United Kingdom was the greatest danger ahead of it. In these young countries the tendency to build up large holdings was naturally fostered by what was the earliest of our industries. Sheepfarming is not greatly pursued ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... refined age; whereas, in a simple state of society, the feelings require a more powerful stimulus; as we see the vulgar crowd round an object of real horror, with the same pleasure we reap from seeing it represented on a theatre. Besides, in ancient times, in those of the Roman empire at least, such abominations really occurred, as sanctioned the story of OEdipus. But the change of manners has introduced not only greater purity of moral feeling, but a sensibility, which retreats with abhorrence even ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... and policy dies and alters with them. The [1148]Gentiles' gods, he saith, were expelled by Constantine, and together with them. Imperii Romani majestas, et fortuna interiit, et profligata est; The fortune and majesty of the Roman Empire decayed and vanished, as that heathen in [1149]Minutius formerly bragged, when the Jews were overcome by the Romans, the Jew's God was likewise captivated by that of Rome; and Rabsakeh to the Israelites, no God should deliver them out of the hands of the ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... nature. They had a certain god named Janus (our month January is named after him) and his temple was open only when they were engaged in war. It is a matter of history that during the twelve hundred years from the first building of Rome to the end of the Roman Empire, the temple of Janus was closed on but three occasions and then only ...
— The World War and What was Behind It - The Story of the Map of Europe • Louis P. Benezet
... are sisters, children of the Holy Roman Empire. In the formation of strong nationalities with differences in language, religion, and institutions the relationship was almost forgotten, and in the intensity of later rivalry is not always even ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... Terence, quotes from Sallust quo accidam? 'whither shall I turn myself for assistance?' but none of the manuscripts has that reading in this passage. [101] He alludes to the nations and kings who were still independent and had not yet been incorporated with the Roman empire, especially the kings of Syria and Egypt, and perhaps also the king of Mauritania. [102] Sallust might have said hujus imperii, but he prefers the dative, which is a dativus incommodi. [103] Secundus, 'favourable,' according to its derivation from sequor, is especially ...
— De Bello Catilinario et Jugurthino • Caius Sallustii Crispi (Sallustius)
... race into one mould, and had brought them under the unity of a single will, entered by inheritance upon all that its predecessors in that career had appropriated, but in a condition of far ampler development. Estimated merely by longitude and latitude, the territory of the Roman empire was the finest by much that has ever fallen under a single sceptre. Amongst modern empires, doubtless, the Spanish of the sixteenth century, and the British of the present, cannot but be admired as prodigious growths out of so small a stem. In that view they will be endless monuments in ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... about the great empire which the Romans established. Now we come to a time when the power of Rome was broken and tribes of barbarians who lived north of the Danube and the Rhine took possession of lands that had been part of the Roman Empire. These tribes were the Goths, Vandals, Huns, Franks and Anglo-Saxons. From them have come the greatest nations of modern times. All except the Huns belonged to the same race and are known as Teutons. They were war-like, savage and cruel. ...
— Famous Men of the Middle Ages • John H. Haaren
... "The Roman Empire," says Professor Seely, "perished for want of men." Even Julius Caesar notes the dire scarcity of men, while at the same time there were people enough. The population steadily grew; Rome was filling up like an overflowing marsh. Men of a certain type were plenty, but self-reliant ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... war is very marked in Anglo-Saxon poetry. This characteristic might have been expected in the songs of a race that had withstood the well-nigh all-conquering arm of the vast Roman Empire. ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... contributions towards the rebuilding of the capital. So heavy was the drain, and so continuous the exactions to raise the enormous sums required to pay for the rebuilding of the city and the superb palaces for the emperor, that the wealth of the known world scarce sufficed for it, and the Roman Empire was for many years impoverished by the tremendous drain upon ...
— Beric the Briton - A Story of the Roman Invasion • G. A. Henty
... revival of Justinianean law, entitles him to the designation of a second Justinian (the Basilica, a collection of laws in sixty books; and the manuals known as the Prochiron and Epanagog[e]. For this legislation see BASILICA and ROMAN EMPIRE, LATER). His financial administration was prudent. His ecclesiastical policy was marked by a wish to keep on good terms with Rome. One of his first acts was to exile the patriarch Photius and restore his rival Ignatius, whose claims were supported by the pope. Yet he had no intention ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... Santa Fe trail. It is State-making that is begun here. The East doesn't understand it yet, outside of New England. And these Missourians, Lord pity them! they think they can kill human freedom with a bullet, like thrusting daggers into the body of Julius Caesar to destroy the Roman Empire. What do they know of the old Puritan blood, and the strength of the grip of a Massachusetts man? Heaven knows where they came from, these Missouri ruffians; but," he added, "the devil has it arranged where ...
— The Price of the Prairie - A Story of Kansas • Margaret Hill McCarter
... (although about this matter there is some dispute) by Seleucus Nicanor, the first king of the country after Alexander the Great, in memory of his father Antiochus, and became immediately the residence of the Syrian monarchy. In the flourishing times of the Roman Empire, it was the ordinary station of the prefect of the eastern provinces; and many of the emperors of the queen city (among whom may be mentioned, especially, Verus and Valens) spent here the greater part of their ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... political and social aspects the doctrine of the brotherhood of man was virtually forgotten. But the Christian Church had embodied that doctrine in its sacred writing, and was bound to maintain it. In its ambition of a universal dominion it was the direct successor of the Roman Empire. All the races of Europe were to meet as brothers under the one God of the new world and under the direction of his representatives on earth. It was this change in the features of the world which gave a certain air of insincerity to the Christian gospel. In the older days ...
— The War and the Churches • Joseph McCabe
... not yet settled upon the causes which some two thousand years ago drove whole nations from Asia into Europe and resulted in the great migrations of barbarians which put an end to the West Roman Empire. One cause, however, is naturally suggested to the geographer as he contemplates the ruins of populous cities in the deserts of Central Asia, or follows the old beds of rivers now disappeared and the wide outlines of lakes now ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin
... the day and year, are Caesar's: For him the self-devoted Decii died, The Fabii fell, and the great Scipios conquer'd: Ev'n Pompey fought for Caesar. Oh, my friends, How is the toil of fate, the work of ages, The Roman empire, fall'n! Oh, cursed ambition! Fall'n into Caesar's hands! Our great forefathers Had left him nought to conquer but ...
— Cato - A Tragedy, in Five Acts • Joseph Addison
... Nero, the Druids had come forth from the retreats where they had remained concealed since their proscription by Claudius, and proclaimed that "the Roman Empire was at an end, and that the Gallic Empire was come to its birth." Insurgents rose on every side, and Julius Sabinus assumed the title of Caesar. War broke out; confusion, hesitation, and actual desertion extended through the Colonies, and reached the legions. Several towns submitted to the insurgents. ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... Historia de Portugal, vol. II. ch. i., the account of the Embassy sent to Pope Leo IX. by Dom Manoel in 1514. No such procession had been seen since the days of the Roman Empire. There were besides endless wealth, leopards from India, also an elephant which, on reaching the Castle of S. Angelo, filled its trunk with scented water and 'asperged' first the Pope and then the people. These with a horse from Ormuz represented ...
— Portuguese Architecture • Walter Crum Watson
... Egyptians used bricks, and the Greeks and Romans made more or less use of stone and bronze, for writing. If the race were destroyed to-day and the earth should be visited, say, from Mars, five hundred years later or even less, our books would have perished, and the Roman Empire be accounted the latest and highest stage of ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... which run directly counter to Irish instincts. It is truly wonderful how distinctly the present descendants of this race preserve the leading features of their primitive character. In France and England the Celtic character was moulded by the power and discipline of the Roman Empire. To Ireland this modifying influence never extended; and we find the Ulster chiefs who fought for their territories with English viceroys 280 years ago very little different from the men who followed Brennus to the sack of Home, and encountered the legions of Julius ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... frontier and the barbarian territory into a desert, and by founding new towns in the northern provinces. In short he took step by step the same course in Macedonia, as Augustus afterwards took when he laid afresh the foundations of the Roman empire. The army was numerous—30,000 men without reckoning contingents and hired troops—and the younger men were well exercised in the constant border warfare with the Thracian barbarians. It is strange that Philip did not try, like Hannibal, ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... very easy in so wide a circle as had not been within reach in Europe since the fall of the Roman Empire. Henceforth it was no longer the clergy alone, and an occasional literate, but a numerous multitude of sons of burghers and nobles, qualifying for some magisterial office, who passed through a grammar-school and found Erasmus ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... or hunter state shortly reviewed—The shepherd state, or the tribes of barbarians that overran the Roman Empire—The superiority of the power of population to the means of subsistence—the cause of the great ...
— An Essay on the Principle of Population • Thomas Malthus
... well-known text-books, "The Founders of Islam," and "The Rise and Fall of the Turkish Empire." This latter work, in five volumes, had been not unfavorably compared to Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire." The original newspaper comment, dated some thirty years back, the doctor had preserved, and would produce it, now somewhat frayed and worn, and read it to visitors. He knew it by heart, but to him it always possessed a contemporary and ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... has discovered, seen, and conversed with the lawful head of his race, who, by the blessing of heaven and the assistance of the courts, will before long turn him out of house and home, and reign in his stead in all the glories of the Palazzo Saracinesca, Prince of Rome, of the Holy Roman Empire, grandee of Spain of the first class, and all the rest of it. Do you wonder I rejoice, now that I am sure of putting an innkeeper over my enemy's head? Fancy the humiliation of old Saracinesca, of ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford
... nothing, but set everything on fire." Jesus took the religion of Israel, and lived its life with God, and after Him it possessed a kindling flame it had never shown before. The faith of a small people in a corner of the Roman Empire, with a few thousands of proselytes here and there in the larger towns about the Mediterranean, became in a generation a force which entirely supplanted the Jewish missionary movement and ...
— Some Christian Convictions - A Practical Restatement in Terms of Present-Day Thinking • Henry Sloane Coffin
... Lombard crown in Monza, he brutally replied that he was not wont to run after crowns, but to have crowns running after him. He trampled no less on that still more venerable religio loci which attached imperial rights to Rome. Together with this ancient piety, he swept the Holy Roman Empire into the dust-heap of archaic curiosities. By declaring his will to be crowned where he chose, he emphasized the modern state motto of L'etat, c'est moi, and prepared the way for a Pope's closing of ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... of opinion as to whether the lottery was of later Italian invention, or dated back to the Roman Empire,—some even contending that it was in existence in Egypt long before that period; and several ingenious discussions may be found on this subject in the journals and annals of the French savans. A strong claim has been put forward ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... efforts of a passion at odds with natural decay. Hulot was now one of those stalwart ruins in which virile force asserts itself by tufts of hair in the ears and nostrils and on the fingers, as moss grows on the almost eternal monuments of the Roman Empire. ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... the Fine Arts were cast by the overthrow of the Roman Empire, they were long in waking: all that was learned or lofty was extinguished: of Painting, there remained but the memory, and of Sculpture, some broken stones, yet smothered in the ruins of temples and cities the rules which gave art its science were lost; ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art, (Vol. 2 of 3) • Shearjashub Spooner
... Law,' because these city States formed a Community fostered by the same language, the same civilisation, the same religion, the same general ideas, and by constant commercial and other intercourse. On the other hand, the Roman Empire was a world empire, it gradually absorbed all the independent nations in the West. And when the Roman Empire fell to pieces in consequence of the migration of the peoples, the old civilisation came to an end, international commerce and ...
— The League of Nations and its Problems - Three Lectures • Lassa Oppenheim
... subdued between the years 70 and 80 A.D. by Patilius Cerealis and Agricola. The Romans called the city by the name of Eburacum. The derivation is not known. It has been suggested that it was taken from the river Ure, a tributary of the Ouse, but variations of the word are common in the Roman Empire, as, for example, Eburobriga, Eburodunum, and the Eburovices. These are probably all derived from some common Celtic word. In process of time, perhaps in the reign of the Emperor Severus—that is to say, ...
— The Cathedral Church of York - Bell's Cathedrals: A Description of Its Fabric and A Brief - History of the Archi-Episcopal See • A. Clutton-Brock
... arises naturally in this way amongst ancient authors, locally remote from each other; but more especially in the post-christian periods, when reporting any aspects of change, or any results from a revolution variable and advancing under the vast varieties of the Roman empire. Having no newspapers to effect a level amongst the inequalities and anomalies of their public experience in regard to the Christian revolution, when collected from innumerable tribes so widely differing ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... of those who will only be taught by Nature and Law are killed, poor creatures, before they have learnt their lesson; as many a savage tribe is destroyed, ay and great and mighty nations too—the old Roman Empire ...
— Madam How and Lady Why - or, First Lessons in Earth Lore for Children • Charles Kingsley
... books of Livy were being written about the same time as the Aeneid; both Vergil and Livy had the same patriotic purpose, 'to celebrate the growth, in accordance with a divine dispensation, of the Roman Empire and Roman civilisation.' —Nettleship. Livy, however, brought into greater prominence the moral causes which contributed to the growth of the Empire. In his preface to Book I, 9, he asks his readers to consider ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce
... them 'Carpet Bag' days my pappy stuck to de white folks, and went 'long wid de Ku Kluxes. His young mistress, Miss Harriet Cameron, marry de Grand Titan of all de Holy invisible Roman Empire. Him name was Col. Leroy McAfee. Pappy tell me all 'bout it. Marse Col. McAfee come down from North Ca'lina, and see Marse Feaster Cameron at old Marse Gregg Cameron's home and want Marse Feaster to take charge ...
— Slave Narratives Vol. XIV. South Carolina, Part 1 • Various
... crossed the Alleghanies, reached the Mississippi Valley, and had even penetrated to the Pacific coast; thus in a thousand years or so the United States might conceivably have become a far-reaching, straggling, loosely jointed Roman Empire, depending entirely upon its oceans, internal watercourses, and imperial highways for such economic and political integrity as it might achieve. But the great miracle of the nineteenth century—the building of a new nation, reaching more than three thousand miles from sea to sea, ...
— The Railroad Builders - A Chronicle of the Welding of the States, Volume 38 in The - Chronicles of America Series • John Moody
... The third alternative was contained in the British proposal, which was to summon these people to Paris to appear before those present, somewhat in the way that the Roman Empire summoned chiefs of outlying tributary states to render an account ...
— The Bullitt Mission to Russia • William C. Bullitt
... with the close of the Roman Empire was repeated. A great, struggling, churning, sprawling, desperate efflux from east to west began; once more the Golden Horde was on the march. They did not come, as had their ancestors, on wildly charging horses, threatening with lances and deadly scimitars, but on foot, wretched and begging. Even ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... our Turks on the scene. They first ravished Asia Minor from the weak grasp of the later Roman Empire, and established their capital and worship—the abomination of desolation—where the first great Christian council had drawn up the Nicene Creed, that ...
— The Rival Heirs being the Third and Last Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... attendance upon Lord Chesterfield, could hardly have felt his humiliation more keenly than did the historian Gibbon when his grace the Duke of Cumberland met him bringing the third volume of his "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" to the ducal mansion. This history was originally printed in quarto; Gibbon was carrying the volume and anticipating the joy of the duke upon its arrival. What did the duke say? "What?" he cried. "Ah, another —— big square ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... Roman Empire, Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Brazen Crown, Perpetual Arch-Master of the Rosicrucian Masons of Mesopotamia; Attached (in Honorary Capacities) to Societies Musical, Societies Medical, Societies ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... of modern English literature at the Renaissance because the discovery of the New World, and the widening of human experience and knowledge, which that and the revival of classical learning implied, mark a definite break from a way of thought which had been continuous since the break up of the Roman Empire. The men of the Renaissance felt themselves to be modern. They started afresh, owing nothing to their immediate forbears, and when they talked, say, of Chaucer, they did so in very much the same ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... sin of most uneducated prose writers, not only of the ladies of the nineteenth century, but of the Middle Age monks, who, having in general no poetry on which to form their taste, except the effeminate and bombastic productions of the dying Roman empire, fell into a certain washy prolixity, which has made monk Latin a byword, and puts one sadly in mind of what is too truly called "young ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... the Catholic mind is more at home among the phenomena and problems of history than other minds for whom the ages of faith are only vaults of superstition, or periods of mental servitude, or at best, ages of high romance. Without the Church what are the ideals of the Crusades, of the Holy Roman Empire, of the religious spirit of chivalry, or the struggle concerning Investitures, the temporal power of the Popes and their temporal sovereignty, the misery of the "Babylonian Captivity," the development ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... that those lips needed but to whistle et la Prusse n'existait plus—those lips needed but to whistle and the entire clergy would have stopped their ringing and singing—those lips needed but to whistle, and the entire Holy Roman Empire would have danced. And these lips smiled, and the eye too smiled. It was an eye clear as heaven; it could read the hearts of men; it saw at a glance all things in the world at once, while we ordinary mortals see them only one ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... one not be able to maintain Christian faith though one accept the fact that the volume of expired air is one-fifth less than inspired air; that plant substance is composed of cells; that Halley's comet returns to our system every seventy five years; that Sicily was part of the Roman Empire in the time of Augustus? These physiological, botanical, astronomical, and historical facts are not in conflict with the religious beliefs based on Scripture. The same holds good with reference to the so-called laws of nature. These "laws" are ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... suggestions are similar, notwithstanding their diversity of views regarding the ultimate object of the training. I shall venture, however, to elaborate the subject from the present view-point, even though the principles of Marcus Aurelius are as applicable now as they were in the days of the Roman Empire. ...
— Why Worry? • George Lincoln Walton, M.D.
... the grave answer, "Christianity has failed—utterly, absolutely, glaringly failed. At this moment, the world, I am convinced, holds more potential barbarism than did the Roman Empire under the Antonines. Wherever I look, I see a monstrous contrast between the professions and the practice, between the assumed and the actual aims, of so-called Christian peoples. Christianity has failed to conquer the ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... On Neroes stinking fortunes; and to sit Securely looking on were to receive An Emperor from Spaine: which how disgracefull It were to us who, if we waigh our selves, The most materiall accessions are Of all the Roman Empire. Which disgrace To cover we must ioyne ourselves betimes, And therefore seeme to have created Galba. Therefore He straight proclaime a Donative Of thirty ...
— Old English Plays, Vol. I - A Collection of Old English Plays • Various
... people. In the year 44 A.D., just ninety years after Caesar's campaigns, the conquest of Britain was resumed by the Roman armies and completed within the next thirty years. Britain now became an integral part of the great, well-ordered, civilized, and wealthy Roman Empire. During the greater part of that long period, Britain enjoyed profound peace, internal and external trade were safe, and much of the culture and refinement of Italy and Gaul must have made their way even to this distant province. A part of the inhabitants adopted the Roman language, ...
— An Introduction to the Industrial and Social History of England • Edward Potts Cheyney
... at once clear their minds of heathen ritual and heathen observances, which they inconsistently laboured to unite with the more simple and majestic faith that disdained such impure union. If this was the case, even in the Roman empire, where the converts to the Christian faith must have found, among the earlier members of the church, the readiest and the soundest instruction, how much more imperfectly could those foreign and barbarous tribes receive the necessary religious information ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... testimony of all European antiquity is to the effect that, before and since the period in question, there lay beyond the Danube, the Rhine, and the Seine, a vast and dangerous yellow or red haired, fair-skinned, blue-eyed population. Whether the disturbers of the marches of the Roman Empire were called Gauls or Germans, Goths, Alans, or Scythians, one thing seems certain, that until the invasion of the Huns, they ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... Roman Empire engulfed and comprehended the great empires of the past—the Persian, the Carthaginian, the Greek. It fell, and kingdoms such as the Gothic (A.D. 493-554), the Lombardic (A.D. 568-774) rose out of its ashes, and in their turn decayed and ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... Lord Jesus came on earth; our forefathers did not live here in England, but in countries across the sea, in Germany, Denmark, and Sweden, which did not belong to the Roman Empire; for the Romans, who had conquered all the world beside, could never conquer our forefathers. It was God's will, that whenever they tried they were beaten back with shame and slaughter; and our forefathers, almost alone of ...
— Town and Country Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... dialect spoken by the Saxons after their settlement in England. These Saxons were a fierce, warlike, unlettered people from Germany; whom the ancient Britons had invited to their assistance against the Picts and Scots. Cruel and ignorant, like their Gothic kindred, who had but lately overrun the Roman empire, they came, not for the good of others, but to accommodate themselves. They accordingly seized the country; destroyed or enslaved the ancient inhabitants; or, more probably, drove the remnant of them into the mountains of Wales. Of Welsh or ancient British words, Charles ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown |
