Daniel Gill

“One unfortunate Greek ambassador at about the same time is known to have fallen into an open Roman sewer and broken his leg – and made the most of his convalescence by giving introductory lectures on literary theory to a curious audience.”
― 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

“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

“There is a distinct difference between "suspense" and "surprise," and yet many pictures continually confuse the two. I'll explain what I mean.

We are now having a very innocent little chat. Let's suppose that there is a bomb underneath this table between us. Nothing happens, and then all of a sudden, "Boom!" There is an explosion. The public is surprised, but prior to this surprise, it has seen an absolutely ordinary scene, of no special consequence. Now, let us take a suspense situation. The bomb is underneath the table and the public knows it, probably because they have seen the anarchist place it there. The public is aware the bomb is going to explode at one o'clock and there is a clock in the decor. The public can see that it is a quarter to one. In these conditions, the same innocuous conversation becomes fascinating because the public is participating in the scene. The audience is longing to warn the characters on the screen: "You shouldn't be talking about such trivial matters. There is a bomb beneath you and it is about to explode!"

In the first case we have given the public fifteen seconds of surprise at the moment of the explosion. In the second we have provided them with fifteen minutes of suspense. The conclusion is that whenever possible the public must be informed. Except when the surprise is a twist, that is, when the unexpected ending is, in itself, the highlight of the story.”
― Alfred Hitchcock