Josiah

“The final victory over Carthage in the Punic Wars led to rising economic inequality, dislocation of traditional ways of life, increasing political polarization, the breakdown of unspoken rules of political conduct, the privatization of the military, rampant corruption, endemic social and ethnic prejudice, battles over access to citizenship and voting rights, ongoing military quagmires, the introduction of violence as a political tool, and a set of elites so obsessed with their own privileges that they refused to reform the system in time to save it.”
― Mike Duncan, The Storm Before the Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic

“The Romans themselves had always dreaded that this might be their destiny. As Sallust, their first great historian, put it, “There can be no doubting that Fortune is the mistress of all she surveys, the creature of her own caprices, choosing to broadcast the fame of one man while leaving that of another in darkness, without any regard for the scale of what they might both have achieved.”
― Tom Holland, Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic

“One day perhaps, when the records of the twentieth century AD have grown as fragmentary as those of ancient Rome, a history of the Second World War will be written that relies solely upon the broadcasts of Hitler and the memoirs of Churchill. It will be one cut off from whole dimensions of experience: no letters from the front, no combatants’ diaries.”
― Tom Holland, Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic

“Human nature is universally imbued with a desire for liberty, and a hatred for servitude. Caesar, Gallic Wars
Only a few prefer liberty—the majority seek nothing more than fair masters. Sallust, Histories”
― Tom Holland, Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic