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“Augustine, looking about him at the great cities of the world, at Rome, and Carthage, and Milan, had imagined the City of God as a pilgrim, unshackled by worldly cares. ‘There, instead of victory, is truth; instead of high rank, holiness; instead of peace, felicity; instead of life, eternity.”

Excerpt From
Dominion
Tom Holland

“In Columbanus’ own lifetime, a dying brother had told him of seeing an angel waiting by his sickbed, and begged him to cease his prayers, which were only serving to keep the angel at bay; in a nunnery founded by one of his disciples, a sister on the point of death had ordered the candle in her cell snuffed out. ‘For do you not see what splendour approaches? Do you not hear the choirs singing?”

“Augustine, looking about him at the great cities of the world, at Rome, and Carthage, and Milan, had imagined the City of God as a pilgrim, unshackled by worldly cares. ‘There, instead of victory, is truth; instead of high rank, holiness; instead of peace, felicity; instead of life, eternity.”

Excerpt From
Dominion
Tom Holland

Genesis 3:19 – “By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are, and to dust you will return.”

“When Hera, the queen of the gods, demanded of her husband that he surrender Troy, which he loved above all other cities, to her quenchless hatred, and Zeus demurred, she refused to cede the field.

The three cities that I love
best of all
are Argos and Sparta,
Mycenae with streets
as broad as Troy’s.
Raze them—whenever
they stir the hatred in your heart.”

Excerpt From
Dominion
Tom Holland

“…he brought a lethal and merciless precision to the art of mocking them. Aspirations that for centuries had steeled the nobility in the service of the Republic were made the object of corrosive jokes. When Caligula declared his intention of appointing Incitatus, his favourite horse, to the consulship, so cruel was the satire that it seemed to the aristocracy almost a form of madness.”

“The sight of her uncle standing before a statue of her grandfather…drove Agrippina into a paroxysm of fury. ‘A man who offers up victims to the god Augustus,’ she spat, ‘ought not to be persecuting his descendants! You think that his divine spirit has been interfused into mute stone? No, if you want his true semblance, then look for it in me – a woman with his heavenly blood in her veins!’”

“But one thing was certain. As Augustus breathed his last, it was his wife to whom he turned. A kiss – and then his final words. ‘Remember our union, Livia, for as long as you live – and so farewell.”

Excerpt From
Dynasty
Tom Holland

“Gossip was part of the air that citizens breathed. Wherever people gathered, they would pause and swap the rumours that passed for news. A story had only to be heard in the Forum for it to spread with remorseless inevitability out through the maze of the city’s back-alleys, into workshops and narrow cul-de-sacs, and tiny, hidden squares where pigs rooted for garbage and fullers hung their washing out to dry.”

“You are the greatest ever Princeps.’ So Horace had written shortly before his death. This verdict had not been flattery – merely a statement of obvious fact. Augustus had given peace to his fellow citizens, reconciled them to the gods, and restored to them their hope.
Surely now nothing could go wrong?”

Excerpt From
Dynasty
Tom Holland

“Just as Julius Caesar had funded his own forum, complete with marble temple and statue of his horse, so had Pompey the Great put his name to the city’s first theatre built of stone. These rival developments, set as they were against the squalor and decay general in the rest of the city, had glittered like gold fillings amid a mouthful of bleeding gums.”

Excerpt From
Dynasty
Tom Holland

“Ever since the age of nineteen, when he had declared himself the avenging son of a god, the one-time Gaius Octavius had known that the surest reality lay in the eye of the beholder. What people could be persuaded not to see was quite as important as what they could.”

Excerpt From
Dynasty
Tom Holland

“Long-forgotten figures of scandal gained a lurid new prominence. Set against the ruggedly pious builder of the Appian Way, for instance, was his grandson, who, informed on the brink of a naval battle that the sacred chickens would not eat, had ordered them dumped into the sea. ‘If they won’t eat, let them drink, he had sneered – and promptly lost his fleet.”

Excerpt From
Dynasty
Tom Holland

“Not even his effrontery, though, could compare with that of his younger brother. Blending hauteur and demagoguery to ground-breaking effect, Publius Clodius brought gangsterism to the very heart of Rome.”

Excerpt From
Dynasty
Tom Holland

“The annals of the Claudians were filled with the deeds of women. One, a virgin consecrated to the service of Vesta, and therefore sacrosanct, had fearlessly ridden in her father’s chariot to protect him from enemies who were looking to drag him down;”

Excerpt From
Dynasty
Tom Holland

“The fruit of too much liberty is slavery” had been the mournful judgment of Cicero—and who was to say that his own generation, the last of a free Republic, had not proved it true? But the fruit of slavery? That was for a new generation, and a new age, to prove.”

Excerpt From
Rubicon
Tom Holland

“Having found the time, between his Egyptian escapade with Cleopatra and his victory in Africa, to thrash King Pharnaces, Caesar had boasted of the speed of his victory in a celebrated phrase: “I came, I saw, I conquered.”

Excerpt From
Rubicon
Tom Holland

“A century later, fleets weighed down with ravening exotica would be seen as the perfect symbol of the Republic’s new global reach. “The padding tiger, shipped in a golden cage, lapping at human blood, applauded by the crowds. So wrote Petronius, Nero’s master of ceremonies, summing up an age.”

Excerpt From
Rubicon
Tom Holland

“His wealth was beyond the dreams of avarice—even of Crassus himself. His glory was so dazzling as to blot out every rival. Could a Roman become the new Alexander while also remaining a citizen? In the last resort only Pompey himself could answer this question—but there were plenty, as they waited for him, prepared to fear the worst.”

Excerpt From
Rubicon
Tom Holland

“After tying him to an ass and parading him through jeering crowds, Mithridates next ordered some treasure melted down. When all had been prepared, Aquillius’s head was jerked back, his mouth forced open, and the molten metal poured down his throat. “Warmongers against every nation, people and king under the sun, the Romans have only one abiding motive—greed, deep-seated, for empire and riches.”

“One superpower would rule supreme. But this would bring no dawning of a universal peace. Far from it. Instead, it would be the Romans’ fate to surfeit on their own greatness. “They will sink into a swamp of decadence: men will sleep with men, and boys will be pimped in brothels; civil tumults will engulf them, and everything will fall into confusion and disorder. The world will be filled with evils.”

“Travelers approaching Rome by this route would see bones littering the sides of the road. It was a cursed and dreadful spot, the haunt of witches, who were said to strip flesh from the corpses and summon the naked specters of the dead from their mass graves. In Rome the indignities of failure could outlive life itself.”

Excerpt From
Rubicon
Tom Holland

“I have always thought it strange,” Cherrie said quietly, “since I had the opportunity to know him and know him intimately—because I feel that I did know him very intimately—how any man could be brought in close personal contact with Colonel Roosevelt without loving the man.”

Excerpt From
The River of Doubt
Candice Millard

“…he continued to fight, refusing to bow to the sorrow and grief that he had outrun his entire life. “When the young die at the crest of life, in their golden morning, the degrees of difference are merely degrees in bitterness,” he had written to his sister Corinne. “Yet there is nothing more foolish and cowardly than to be beaten down by sorrow which nothing we can do will change.”

“The forest of the Amazons is not merely trees and shrubs. It is not land. It is another element,” he wrote. “Its inhabitants are arborean; they have been fashioned for life in that medium as fishes to the sea and birds to the air. Its green apparition is persistent, as the sky is and the ocean. In months of travel it is the horizon which the traveler cannot reach.”

H. M. Tomlinson

“after he and his companions had spent months in the Amazon rain forest, ”something began to go wrong in us. Coming daily into such close contact with the virgin forest we found, as so many other white men had found before us, that its grotesque forms and brilliant colours got on our nerves like a nightmare. It was stifling us; the whole exotic jungle became one gigantic cauldron of hatred and brutality.”

“In fact, he claimed that 90 percent of the Indian attacks that took place in Brazil were nothing more than acts of self-defense and retaliation. The idea that Indians might attack the expedition for reasons of fear or self-defense offered little comfort to Roosevelt, who noted wryly, “If you are shot by a man because he is afraid of you it is almost as unpleasant as if he shot you because he disliked you.”

“Although he rarely devoted more than a single sentence in his journal to the death of one of his men, Rondon penned heartfelt eulogies to his dogs. After his dog Vulcão died, for instance, he wrote, “Travel companion who guarded my tent…Poor companion! How I feel your death….You who served me so well, without my being able to pay you back for half of your dedication.”

Excerpt From
The River of Doubt