Tom Shales Quotes

Ancient Rome was as confident of the immutability of its world and the continual expansion and improvement of the human lot as we are today.

Eternal Rome

Rome was great in arms, in government, in law.

Roman civilization had achieved, within the bounds of its technology, relatively as great a mastery of time and space as we have achieved today.

I had always thought, for 'Roman Empire,' I would love to do the death of Marcus Aurelius in the snow. One morning I woke up, and it was really snowing.

Rome was a poem pressed into service as a city.

I remember seeing the Colosseum for the first time when I was a young boy. It left a lasting impression on me.

Ancient Rome was a violent place.

The thing I love about Rome is that is has so many layers. In it, you can follow anything that interests you: town planning, architecture, churches or culture. It's a city rich in antiquity and early Christian treasures, and just endlessly fascinating. There's nowhere else like it.

The Roman jurisprudence has the longest known history of any set of human institutions.

That Rome was comparatively great and wealthy is certain.

For the first time, the weird and the stupid and the coarse are becoming our cultural norms, even our cultural ideal.

My play is the ultimate expression of my feeling of the twilight of Western civilization.

It is evident that in the period designated as that of the kings, when Rome commenced her career of conquest, she was, for that time and country, a great and wealthy city.

Rome - the city of visible history, where the past of a whole hemisphere seems moving in funeral procession with strange ancestral images and trophies gathered from afar.

We are fascinated with our own history, and we are fascinated with the Romans because they were millennia ago, and yet they still capture our imagination because they were actually so similar to us. They were very civilized. They had a very similar political system.

We were all Romans once, I guess.

Of the territory which the Romans won in war from their neighbors, a part they sold, and a part they made common land, and assigned it for occupation to the poor and indignant among the citizens…

Augustus

I love Rome and the way that you can wander around and find something interesting around every street corner. You can smell the history.

I've been obsessed with Romans since I was a child.

I know not why any one but a school boy in his declamation would whine over the Commonwealth of Rome, which grew great only by the misery of the rest of mankind. The Romans, like others, as soon as they were rich, grew corrupt; and in their corruption sold the lives and freedoms of themselves and of one another.

Humiliating events have a way of capturing the public's imagination. So it has been since antiquity, when gladiators were pitted against each other and the legions of Spartacus were crucified in endless rows on the way to Rome.

Any Roman citizen may join the Army.

By the will of the people of the Romans, that the Jews shall use their own customs in accordance with their ancestral law …. anyone is detected stealing their sacred books or their sacred monies, either from a synagogue or from a [Jewish] mans' apartment, he shall be considered sacrilegious and his property shall be brought into the public treasury of the Romans.