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Ancient Rome
Seneca would have seen King Charles’s reaction as an admirable act of mercy
They swore like us. They were obsessed with sex, like us. And they wrote their rudest thoughts on walls — in a much more obscene way than we do
We are living posthumous lives amid the shells of the institutions that once animated our political life
‘If there is a guiding thread through most of my books, it is an aversion to certainty and a fondness for those who doubt’
Augustus ruled the Roman empire from 27 BC to AD 14 and was the longest serving of the roughly seventy emperors of the Western empire
I wonder whether the moment hasn’t come to begin thinking of Washington the way the later emperors thought of Rome
Gladiatorial games and chariot-races provided opportunities for the plebs to display their feelings
Tacitus made the Caledonian leader Calgacus remark that Romans ‘make a desert and call it peace’
The lines that now smudge my map look more like the flight of a woozy bluebottle than the traces of a man with a plan
For Romans, in contrast to Greeks, likeness was of the highest importance
