Daniel Gill

“Philosophers have always loved mathematics. It’s not hard to see why: one of the things philosophers are most interested in is knowledge. We just saw one of the earliest Greek philosophers, Xenophanes, making a contrast between really having knowledge of the truth and having mere beliefs. And if you’re looking for a nice, solid example of knowledge, mathematics is just about the best example there is. You don’t merely believe that 2 + 2 = 4, you actually know it. Or at least, this is what most people think: that mathematics is a kind of gold standard against which other supposed examples of knowledge can be measured.”
― Peter Adamson, Classical Philosophy

“Autocracy represented, in a sense, an end of history. Of course there were all kind of events, battles, assassinations, political stand-offs, new initiatives and inventions; and the participants would have had all kinds of exciting stories to tell and disputes to argue. But unlike the story of the development of the Republic and the growth of imperial power, which revolutionised almost every aspect of the world of Rome, there was no fundamental change in the structure of Roman politics, empire or society between the end of the first century BCE and the end of the second century CE.”
― Mary Beard, SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome

“Another aspect of this – one that he makes into an extended, if slightly ghoulish, case study – was to be found in the funerals of ‘distinguished men’. Again, Polybius must have witnessed enough of these to draw out their deeper significance. The body, he explains, was carried into the Forum and placed on the rostra, normally propped up somehow in an upright position, so it was visible to a large audience. In the procession that followed, family members wore masks made in the likeness of the dead man’s ancestors and dressed in the costume appropriate to the offices each had held (purple-bordered togas and so on), as if they were all present ‘living and breathing’. The funeral address, delivered by a family member, started with the achievements of the corpse on the rostra but then went through the careers of all the other characters, who by this time were sitting on ivory, or at least ivory-veneered, chairs lined up next to the dead man. ‘The most important upshot of this,’ Polybius concludes, ‘is that the younger generation is inspired to endure all suffering for the common good, in the hope of winning the glory that belongs to the brave.”
― Mary Beard, SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome

“The truth is that Cato’s version of old-fashioned, no-nonsense Roman values was as much an invention of his own day as a defence of long-standing Roman traditions. Cultural identity is always a slippery notion, and we have no idea how early Romans thought about their particular character and what distinguished them from their neighbours. But the distinctive, hard-edged sense of tough Roman austerity – which later Romans eagerly projected back on to their founding fathers and which has remained a powerful vision of Romanness into the modern world – was the product of a powerful cultural clash, in this period of expansion abroad, over what it was to be Roman in this new, wider imperial world, and in the context of such an array of alternatives. To put it another way, ‘Greeknesss’ and ‘Romanness’ were as inseparably bound up as they were polar opposites.”
― Mary Beard, SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome