Josiah

“The state had the right to know everything, for the Romans believed that even “personal tastes and appetites should be subject to surveillance and review.”4 It was knowledge, intrusive knowledge, that provided the Republic with its surest foundations.”
― 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

“But this was an age when a lie was not a lie if a man had the audacity to keep asserting the lie was true.”
― Mike Duncan, The Storm Before the Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic

“At the heart of the crisis lay the simple fact that Caesar, if he were permitted to progress seamlessly from Gaul to a second consulship, would at no stage be a private citizen. This, to many, was intolerable—for only a private citizen could be brought to trial.”
― Tom Holland, Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic