It was said that after the Persian Wars Sparta slept. ibid.
The Peloponnesian war lasted longer than the Trojan conflict. ibid.
Alexander the Great would carry the Greek Thing forward. ibid.
None of them came close to the horsemanship of this man: Alexander of Macedon. Known simply as The Great. In the 4th century BC in the small kingdom of Macedon on the fringes of the civilised world, this charismatic warrior king forged an empire that stretched all the way to India in just a dozen years. But in the civilisation stakes what did it all amount to? Professor Richard Miles, The Ancient World IV: Return of the King
The League of Corinth as it was called was a coalition of the unwilling. ibid.
This was conquest by blitzkrieg. ibid.
Alexander was soon revealed as a charismatic volatile romantic adventurer. ibid.
The Hellenistic kings were heirs to an incredibly rich and cultural tradition. ibid.
They say when in Rome do as the Romans do. But in the history of the ancient world what exactly did the Romans do? Professor Richard Miles, The Ancient World V: Republic of Virtue
What Rome managed to achieve had never been done before: it created a civilisation for export. ibid.
Rome didn’t merely conquer the world: it transformed it. ibid.
The legend of Romulus and Remus is revelatory. Romans clearly liked to see themselves from the School of Hard Knocks. ibid.
In 485 B.C. the Senate and the people had a falling out. ibid.
Law was one of the great building blocks of the Roman civilisation. ibid.
In this fluid social world everything is possible. ibid.
The Romans were armed lawyers whose instinct was to get and to hold territory. ibid.
Nothing could save Carthage; it took three years of brutal siege and in the end the city fell to Scipio. ibid.
The Romans were now the master of their universe. ibid.
The murder of the Gracchi [brothers] was the original sin of the Roman Republic. ibid.
The burglars who came after – the ones we know so well – Pompey the Great, Julius Caesar – these would be the Republic’s undertakers. ibid.
Rome was now far more than just a Republic – it also had a huge empire. The complex system that was SPQR was as out of date as Cicero’s coalition of good men. The problem was the Roman Republic simply wasn’t designed to manage the great empire. ibid.
Julius Caesar was the one who saw most clearly what Rome needed – a benign autocrat aided and abetted by a tame Senate. But he famously crossed the Rubicon. ibid.
There was another solution: autocracy hidden beneath the thin veneer of a restored Republic. But to convince Roman people to give up many of their political freedoms in exchange for peace was going to take every ounce of Octavian’s political genius. With the help of a change of name the Emperor Augustus, formally known as Octavian, would transform Rome from a republic into the greatest empire the world had ever known. It would dominate the Western World for another five hundred years, only to be challenged by a new religious cult: Christianity. ibid.
The Roman Empire was the most successful the world had ever know. With its peak in the Second Century A.D. it covered five million square miles. From Hadrian’s Wall in the north to ancient Mesopotamia in the east. All of it run by a system of remarkable efficiency and stability. They called it Pax Romana – the Roman Peace. And its benefits were enjoyed by sixty million people. Professor Richard Miles, The Ancient World VI, City of Man, City of God
This mighty Empire would endure some mad, bad, dangerous emperors. ibid.
Emperors: and as you can see they come in various shapes and sizes. One of the interesting things about the Empire is that it often didn’t seem to matter what the man at the top was like – he could be mad, bad and dangerous – the Empire just carried on regardless. ibid.
The system was remarkably efficient and streamlined. The whole of the Empire was administered by just ten thousand of these bureaucrats. Modern Britain has half a million. ibid.
When it came to Religion the Romans were not fundamentalists ... In spiritual matters the Empire was like a sponge, absorbing foreign gods as readily as it had gobbled up foreign territory. ibid.
This weakness would be exposed and exploited by an obscure Jewish sect that began in the Roman province of Judea, and the execution of an unorthodox religious leader ... Christianity would go on to become the official religion of Rome and a major contributor to its downfall. The cult’s extraordinary growth began after the Jewish revolt of 66 A.D. and the destruction of the High Temple in Jerusalem by Titus, the son of the Roman emperor. ibid.
Constantine – always ready to give God the benefit of the doubt – showed his gratitude a year later by passing an edict of toleration granting Christians freedom of worship throughout the Empire. A decade later when Constantine emerged as sole Emperor the obscure messianic cult from Judea really came in from the cold. Constantine demonstrated his commitment to Christianity with hard cash. ibid.
In many ways the Roman Empire represents the zenith of ancient civilisation. It’s values had taken route throughout its far-flung territories. ibid.
Despite all the calamities, the crises and dead ends, we have returned again and again to the possibilities offered by the City of Man. Hoping to get it right next time. There is no going back to the comfortable securities of family, kin and tribe. Civilisation has transformed us into a species which for better or worse chooses to live with strangers ... I’m optimistic ... We must keep the faith and try to make it work. ibid.
I love fashion, beauty, glamour. It’s the mark of civilisation. David LaChapelle
Civilization has given us enormous successes: going to the moon, technology. But then this is the civilisation that took us to debt, environmental crisis, every single crisis. We need a civilization where we say goodbye to these things. Muhammad Yunus
I think it’s important to understand that in the big historical context of things, there has been land degradation from civilisation since the beginning of history. I mean, the Rajputana desert in India is a manmade desert caused by overgrazing. Joel Salatin
No civilisation can claim to have a monopoly on universal values and no one can claim to be always faithful to his own values. Tariq Ramadan
The European talks of progress because by the aid of a few scientific discoveries he has established a society which has mistaken comfort for civilisation. Benjamin Disraeli
Civilisation is the distance that man has placed between himself and his own excreta. Brian W Aldiss, The Dark Light Years
Our civilisation being what it is, you've got to spent eight hours out of every twenty-four as a mixture between an imbecile and a sewing machine. It’s very disagreeable, I know. It’s humiliating and disgusting. But there you are. You’ve got to do it, otherwise the whole fabric of our world will fall to bits and we’ll starve. Do the job then, idiotically and mechanically; and spend your leisure hours in being a real complete man or woman. Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point
The increase of knowledge has forced the thinker to specialise, with the result that there is nobody capable to deal with civilisation as a whole. We are playing a game of chess in which nobody can see more than two or three squares at once, and so it has become impossible to form a coherent plan. Aleister Crowley, Diary of a Drug Fiend
Civilization comes at a cost of manliness. It comes at a cost of wildness, of risk, of strife. It comes at a cost of strength, of courage, of mastery. It comes at a cost of honor. Increased civilization exacts a toll of virility, forcing manliness into further redoubts of vicariousness and abstraction. Jack Donovan
In its broad sense, civilization means not only comfort in daily necessities but also the refining of knowledge and the cultivation of virtue so as to elevate human life to a higher plane. Yukichi Fukuzawa
I have a feeling that we’ve seen the dismantling of civilisation, brick by brick, and now we’re looking into the void. We thought that we were liberating people from oppressive cultural circumstances, but we were, in fact, taking something away from them. We were killing off civility and concern. We were undermining all those little ties of loyalty and consideration and affection that are necessary for human flourishing. We thought that tradition was bad, that it created hidebound societies, that it held people down. But, in fact, what tradition was doing all along was affirming community and the sense that we are members of one another. Do we really love and respect one another more in the absence of tradition and manners and all the rest? Or have we merely converted one another into moral strangers – making our countries nothing more than hotels for the convenience of guests who are required only to avoid stepping on the toes of other guests? Alexander McCall Smith, Espresso Tales